Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

View in Browser   Key insights from Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays By C.S. Lewis

What you’ll learn In a conversation at his home on the outskirts of Oxford, England, Lewis told his  long-time friend and editor Walter Hooper that he didn’t read newspapers anymore. He considered them among the most meager forms of historical record. For anyone who “absolutely must” read the paper, Lewis good-humoredly recommended an accompanying “mouthwash,” like The Lord of Rings or other great books. Despite Lewis’ personal aversion to newspapers, he never condemned those who chose to read the news, and he wrote short essays for many magazines and newspapers himself. Present Concerns is a collection of such articles on a range of subjects. Even without being immersed in the endless minutiae of daily news (or perhaps because of it), Lewis offers a depth of insight in his journalistic essays that remains prescient many decades later.   Read on for key insights from Present Concerns.

1. The ideal of chivalry has become horribly deformed and deserves revisiting. Chivalry’s connotations have varied over the centuries—everything from charging courageously into battle to giving up a seat for a lady. In our own time, it is often dismissed as an archaic notion that should continue to wither away. In the Medieval times in which the concept was born, it was the highest ideal for a knight that brought together sternness, ferocity, and courage on the battlefield—even in the face of death and dismemberment—with a gentleness, meekness, and humility in the courts. In Medieval literature, Lancelot was the paragon of chivalry. He was not a “happy medium” between fierce and meek, with just a dash of ferocity and a bit of meekness. He was both extremely fierce and extremely modest, simultaneously. Legend has it that he wept like a child when hailed the greatest knight in the world. Of course, most people in the Middle Ages failed to uphold the chivalrous ideal, and today that ideal has lost its luster. But this kind of chivalry matters for us a great deal. Our culture needs it as badly as a man in the desert needs water. It’s practical and important. We grow up hearing that bullies are cowards and that true bravery is gentleness. But bullies don’t seem so cowardly when they have us shoved up against the wall in grade school, and a toothless bravery that has neither bark nor bite hardly seems like bravery at all. These are the cultural ruins of an abandoned tradition of chivalry. It is a work of art to bring together great ferocity and great modesty. It doesn’t happen naturally. What does happen naturally is veering toward either brutality or softness. We either become strong in battle, but without gentleness, or very gentle, but incompetent in the fight. The “enlightened” “liberal” of today vehemently condemns humanity’s competitive, combative aspect, while others resurrect the hero tradition that abhors gentleness and sentimentality. The latter tends to idealize those pre-Christian heroes like Achilles who are fierce but merciless and brutal. Without cultivating both ferocity and meekness, we become unthinking wolves or defenseless lambs. It is only with great effort that any of us achieves the chivalrous ideal. Herein lies our escape from the fate of a useless softness or merciless barbarism.

2. We don’t need democracy because people are good; we need it because people are fallen. Many people are democrats because they believe, along with the likes of Rousseau, in the goodness of people: that humanity is plenty wise and kind and creative, and each person, therefore, should get a piece of the government. (“Democrat” here denotes something more general than the narrower American usage and refers to a democratic or representative system of government, rather than a political party.) The author is a democrat because he believes just the opposite: that the effects of the Fall of Man have been severe, and he needs only look at his own life to be reminded of our thoroughly fallen state. Democracy is important not because we are good but because none of us—so prone to fall for advertisements and gossip, so quick to understand our lives through clichés—should be given unchecked power over a chicken coop, let alone a country. Aristotle might not have been wrong when he said that some people are fit only to be slaves, but slavery should be spurned because no one is suited to be their master. Another way of thinking about this is that equality is often presented as an ideal when, in fact, it is not something that is good in and of itself, as, say, wisdom is. It is narrowly good in the same way that medicine is good for someone who is sick, or clothes are good because we’ve lost that Edenic innocence. But neither equality nor medicine is good in the sense that it sustains and nourishes the human spirit. It’s for this reason that propaganda elevating equality to the place of ideal invariably falls flat. When we insist on making it an ideal that will nourish us, we end up with a mindset that is petty and immature, that hates any and all superiority. This is the disease most likely to afflict democratic societies, just as more hierarchical, aristocratic societies tend toward severity and servility.   If we defend democracy for reasons that simply are not true, we increase our risk of losing it.

3. There are three kinds of people in the world: the unsurrendered, the partially surrendered, and the fully surrendered. The idea of dividing up the world into categories of “good” and “bad” is dangerous. It is far more helpful to see the world in three classes. First are those who live for themselves and gratify their impulses, fashioning and refashioning humanity and nature into the form that best suits them. Then there are those who recognize they have some duty to others, and they will discharge it as long as it doesn’t become horribly inconvenient to do so. They are divided within themselves, much like a schoolboy who is either in school or on holiday. Then there’s a third group of people who echo with their lives the Apostle Paul’s words that “to live is Christ.” They begin to live an undivided existence instead of vacillating between the commands of Self and of God. They have died to the claims of Self, and in doing so have become a new and undivided thing. Jesus’ will is no longer at odds with theirs because his has become theirs. Most of us fall into the second category, which means we have just enough Christianity to be very unhappy. Our conscience demands a heavy tax to exculpate us from guilt, but it also leaves us scant funds to do what we would really like to be doing. This is a  taxing ordeal, one that is levied daily. We know we cannot go on like this. The price of surrender is far less than trying to continue paying this existential tax through continued moral effort.

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4. Just because we learn of one more way that we could die doesn’t mean we have to fall to pieces over it. When people wonder aloud, “How should we live in an atomic age?” one could reply that we live now as we would in any other age: as Londoners did 500 years ago when the plague ravaged the city annually, or as northern Europeans might have during the Viking Age when your village was ripe for pillaging and plundering. Let’s not be so myopic as to assume our own time is the only that has lived in the shadow of death, or that we would all escape premature or painful deaths if atomic weapons were suddenly eliminated.  Lest we forget, the atomic age in which we live is also the age of cancer, paralysis, train wrecks, and car accidents. Many of us will die untimely, uncomfortable deaths. So as we learn of yet another way in which we could die, it would be silly to allow it to depress us so severely, and to remain fearfully huddled in a corner. We must live life as we always have, as best we can. Should a bomb fall on us, let’s hope it falls upon people doing things people have always done: praying, cooking, enjoying music, reading a book, playing with the kids, catching up with friends at the pub—not frantically obsessing over bombs. “It is not the death of individuals that we fear most,” one might offer in rebuttal, “but the annihilation of an entire civilization.” But what, one wonders, was such a person’s understanding of civilization before atomic weapons? What was the purpose of preserving humanity? Whether or not a bomb wipes out civilization is a far less important question than the reasons why one would want to preserve it. If we believe, as a growing number of people do, that Nature is all there is, and that the universe itself is an accident—a random arrangement of atoms constantly smashing into one another—then it matters very little whether civilizations rise or fall, whether humanity survives or is utterly obliterated. Our attempts at saving civilization are thwarted by the ultimate meaninglessness of the universe. In response to this state of affairs, you have a few options at your disposal: You could kill yourself, you could grab for what pleasures you can, or you could rebel against the meaninglessness of life by living as if your life does have meaning and that your decisions do matter. Most of us resign ourselves to a series of uncomfortable vacillations between the second option of indulging pleasures and the third option of rebelling against a blind, impersonal universe by being as good and rational as we know how. The third option is far better than the second (and the first), but ultimately both strategies are shattered by the incongruity between our hearts and Nature. We are using our standards of judgment and imposing them on a universe that doesn’t care. If our standards are from a meaningless universe, then they are just as meaningless. But what if our standards are somehow pulling from another source—a source beyond the material universe? Naturalism will never repair the disconnect between heart and Nature. Our sense that kindness, love, beauty, and rationality matter, that we do exercise free will, and that we are capable of saying true things is so strong that it is jarring to resign ourselves to ultimate meaninglessness. If it is truly meaningless, then we certainly don’t act like it. If Nature is our mother, then she is a cruel one. But if there is a Creator, then Nature is our sister, and we have a sibling rivalry with her: she is rough-and-tumble, and there is darkness to her, but that is because she is alienated from her Creator just like us. But that means that in her, as in us, are glimmers of an ancient, transcendent beauty. We don’t worship them, but we certainly revel in them. Suddenly, we preserve not out of a desperation to survive, but because it is good, merciful, and honorable to do so. Paradoxically, nothing hinders our humanity’s chances of survival like a desire to preserve the species at all costs. We serve earth and people best when the Creator is the reason that we do so.

5. We have only just begun to understand life’s truest pleasures. There are those moments in life when a thought is so lovely or a vista so beautiful that one feels absolutely transported. Maybe you can relate to this sense: gentle and unassuming, yet poignant and joyful. We can think of these experiences as invitations back to Eden, to pure, unadulterated, childlike joy. These invitations are often present, never coercive, and rarely accepted. They’re something akin to a beautiful but distant song, or a smooth breeze caressing your face: so gentle that you can easily miss it, yet blissful and refreshing if you attend to it. But then there is something in us that seems hell-bent on disrupting such moments. Constantly interfering with these invitations is a kind of inner critic, a spiritual Jailer who forbids our accepting these moments of Edenic bliss. He has plenty of stratagems for keeping us out. One of his favorite tactics is to convince you that if there’s any conceivable danger that could be fretted over, you should fret over it, and that doing so will help you avoid potential dangers in that situation. He does this even if you had not fretted about the situation at all and even though the worries he brings up are unlikely. If we really think about what the Jailer is telling us, we realize it’s almost always absurd. In other moments, he becomes a priggish, supercilious moralizer, and he takes it upon himself to label you self-centered or lazy—often at the precise time you are discharging your obligations and services the best you know how. He finds your weaknesses, reminds you of them, and tells you you’re being juvenile, that you need to be more sensible. Maybe the best response to this is that he’s becoming horribly middle-aged and crotchety. He can often be asinine and cynical. Say you’re on a train, looking out the window at all the homes you pass, admiring the gardens and the stonework. Maybe you find joy in pondering the domestic activities that go on there, even if you will never know anything that happens there. The inner Jailer rejoices to remind you that there’s not one home in the whole row of houses without skeletons in its closets. But the fact that every home has its troubles in no way diminishes the joy that seeing the outside of those homes evokes. It’s like trying to say that a lovely blue haze that hangs over distant mountains is not real because it disappears once you get closer. His attempts at realism are farcical. He’s hardly realistic because he doesn’t offer the full picture. He dismisses perfectly good things as illusory, simply because bad things might also exist in proximity. To accept and revel in those things he dismisses does not make you childish or naïve, but far more realistic than he will ever be. Hedonism (organizing one’s life around the pursuit of pleasure) is a demonstrably depressing philosophy. Hedonics, however (the theory of pleasure), remains surprisingly unexplored. The initial step toward better understanding Hedonics will involve pushing the Jailer down, taking his keys, and refusing to give them back. He has dominated our minds for far too long.

Endnotes These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Present Concerns here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.   Neutral news is hard to find. The Pour Over provides concise, politically neutral, and entertaining summaries of the world’s biggest news paired with reminders to stay focused on eternity, and delivers it straight to your inbox. It's free, too. Check it out. * This is sponsored content

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