The Daily Show host is leaving.

My reaction to the news that Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show is to quote, again, Screwtape.  Because this is what I always hear on the rare occasions that I'm unable to avoid listening to  Stewart¹...

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it...

That sums up Jon Stewart for me.  "The joke is always assumed to have been made.  No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it."   And, of course, his audience, and his fans, are convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority.  The cloud of smug emanating from every frame is intense. 

The downside is that he'll no doubt be replaced by someone just as bad, doing the same sort of schtick.  And no doubt he'll pop up somewhere else, doing the same thing.

But I'll manage to continue not watching...




¹ - I don't ever watch his show, but there are enough people who do, and enough commentary about it, and enough viral videos demonstrating his awesomeness in interviews with relevant political figures, that I've seen quite enough of him, I believe, to comment. So I shall.

How Government Wrecked the Gas Can

I haven't bought a gas can in the last three years, so I was unaware that apparently, you can't, anymore. At least, not one that works...

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

Of course, this is a logical result of the utopian mindset that believes that we can establish a legislative framework that will bring about heaven on earth. And a statist mindset that believes that people should be protected from themselves by preventing their being allowed to do anything whatsoever that might possibly involve risk, no matter how small.

And I'm sure that no one set out to make gas cans unusable. Just like no one set out to destroy the private health care system. Or the family. Or the educational system. Or the banking system. No, it's just one little tweak at a time, one thing that, in someone's opinion, could be - should be - a little bit better, if only Uncle Sam can step in with his mighty power and stop all of the people doing it wrong from doing it wrong.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-- C.S. Lewis

Haven't bought a gas can for three years, and skeptical?  Click over to Home Depot's website and look at the cans.  And the reviews.  Preposterous, of course.  And apparently true...

Public policy, private virtue

A followup to the earlier post about conflating public policy and private behavior in determining one's self worth.  This quote is relevant...

The kind of people we are is more important than what we can do to improve the world; indeed being the kind of people we should and can be is the best, and sometimes the only way to improve the world.

- C.S. Lewis

Eugenics Rising...

A couple of different, and very disturbing, recent news stories.

Decision blasts judge’s order to force abortion

In a December hearing, the Department of Mental Health applied for temporary guardianship for the parents of the 32-year-old woman — referred to as “Mary Moe” — to let them consent to an abortion for their daughter, who already had one child currently in their care.

Harms approved guardianship, ruling Moe could be “ ‘coaxed, bribed, or even enticed ... by ruse’ into a hospital where she would be sedated and an abortion performed,” the appellate ruling states. “Additionally ... and without notice, the judge directed that any medical facility that performed the abortion also sterilize Moe at the same time to avoid this painful situation from recurring.”

The decision was overturned by the appeals court, but what if the Judges on that court had agreed?

Three-year old with kidney disease kept off transplant waiting list.

I begin to shake. My whole body trembles and he begins to tell me how she will never be able to get on the waiting list because she is mentally retarded.

A bit of hope. I sit up and get excited.

“Oh, that’s ok! We plan on donating. If we aren’t a match, we come from a large family and someone will donate. We don’t want to be on the list. We will find our own donor.”

“Noooo. She—is—not—eligible –because—of—her—quality– of –life—Because—of—her—mental—delays”

...

“So you mean to tell me that as a doctor, you are not recommending the transplant, and when her kidneys fail in six months to a year, you want me to let her die because she is mentally retarded? There is no other medical reason for her not to have this transplant other than she is MENTALLY RETARDED!”

“Yes.”

Ask yourself this question: If more authority to make medical decisions is transferred from parents to Government officials, does the occurrence of this scenario, or scenarios like it, get more common or less common?

I think we all know the answer¹ to that...

What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man²

¹ - In a world of scarcity, there is always going to be conflict over allocation of scarce resources. A donor kidney is obviously a scarce commodity. There are many ways to look at this particular issue, and a long discussion that I don't have the time for at the moment. But there's a surface callousness here that, in conjunction with the Massachusetts story, makes the Lewis take fresh and relevant. Again.

² - And no, I do not scan the internet everyday desperately looking for a story which can, however tenuously, justify quoting The Abolition of Man, or Lewis in general. It was a brilliant and prescient work, clearly articulating the road that society was traveling, and, having read it several times, I'm struck by its foresight frequently...

Reaping what has been sown...

This passage about the Italian cruise ship accident has generated some commentary. (For example, here and here.) Rightfully so...

Fights broke out to get into the lifeboats, men refused to prioritise women, expectant mothers and children as they pushed themselves forward to escape. Crew ignored their passengers – leaving ‘chefs and waiters’ to help out.

In heart-rending footage, recorded on mobile phones, British children could be heard shouting ‘Daddy’ and ‘Mummy’ in the melee.

As she waited for a flight home from Rome, grandmother Sandra Rogers, 62, told the Daily Mail: ‘There was no “women and children first” policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting.’

It's not, obviously, a laughing matter. On the other hand, in a world in which men have been belittled and ridiculed for any and all characteristics that are stereotypically (that is to say, fundamentally, "male"), where we are constantly harangued and hectored to believe that any differences between men and women are just "societally imposed gender constructs," a world in which fathers are considered irrelevant and marriage is simply about tax breaks for sexual partners, what reason is there for a man to step aside and let the women and children have the lifeboats? The "women and children first" mentality is part of a moral code that has been relentlessly attacked in by the post-modern intelligentsia of the last half century. It's connected to traditional gender roles and traditional marriage, and the post-modern world in which we live has decided that we have no need of those things; that those things are archaic constructs with no utility in our new societies.

Unintended. Consequences.

Again, I go back to C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man. The first lecture, Men Without Chests, ends with this passage:

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

London riots

I don't know all the details of what's going on over in London right now, but suffice it to say, the situation is bad. This may or may not accurately represent the situation, but I think it's an interesting commentary, so I offer it to you.

This is what happens when multiculturalists turn a blind eye to gang culture

The roots of these appalling events are many and tangled, but for the moment let’s just focus on one: the way Britain’s educational establishment has cringed helplessly in the face of a gang culture that rejects every tenet of liberal society. It’s violent, it’s sexist, it’s homophobic and it’s racist. But it is broadly tolerated by many people in the black community, which has lost control of its teenage youths. Those youths scare the wits out of teachers and social workers – and some police officers, too. The threat of physical violence is ever present in many schools, and one can hardly blame individual teachers for recoiling from it. But we should and must blame those schools and education authorities that have made extra space for gang culture in children’s lives because they believe it is an authentic expression of Afro-Caribbean and Asian identity. We are seeing a lot of black faces on our screens tonight; it’s a shame that the spotlight can’t also fall on those white multiculturalists who made this outrage possible.

There's certainly nothing facially nonsensical there.

And, if you've been reading me for any length of time at all, you know what quote is coming next...

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

The England produced by the changes of the last fifty years, the welfare state and the multicultural cult in the educational system, no longer produces a Sir Charles Napier. I don't see that as a change for the better...

"[Sir Charles Napier] also," says Sir William Napier, "put down the practice of Suttee, which, however was rare in Scinde, by a process extremely characteristic. For judging the real cause of these immolations to be the profits derived by the priests, and hearing of an intended burning, he made it known that he would stop the sacrifice. The priests said it was a religious rite which must not be meddled with, that all nations had customs which should be respected and this was a very sacred one. The general, affecting to be struck with the argument, replied, 'Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom. Prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." "No Suttee," adds the historian, "took place then or afterwards."

Quote of the day

Because I'm thinking of Lewis at the moment, and because I saw The Abolition of Man on two different lists of important 20th century works yesterday, here's a quote that I love. It's actually the conclusion of The Abolition of Man...

There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis—incommensurable with the others—and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on `explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on `seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to `see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through' all things is the same as not to see.

- C.S. Lewis

John A. Murray: C.S. Lewis and the Devil

There's a good piece in the Wall Street Journal today about CS Lewis and the Devil:

When asked about "his belief in the Devil," Lewis addressed the question in a thought-provoking way in his preface to a revised edition of "Screwtape" in 1960: "Now, if by 'the Devil' you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No."

That is, Lewis did not believe in the false theology and caricatures of the devil that have developed over the centuries—whether through art, literature or even today's sports mascots (think Duke and Arizona State).

As Lewis explained, "There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. . . . The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God. . . . Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael."

Read it all...

"...the destruction of the society which accepts it..."

I've written before about C.S. Lewis' brilliant book The Abolition of Man and his prescient observation therein that

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

The evidence continues to pile up that he was absolutely correct:

Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured.

Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded 'criminals' for protecting their property.

Locals had reinforced their windows with wire mesh after a series of shed thefts but were told by community police officers that the wire was 'dangerous' and could lead to criminals claiming compensation if they 'hurt themselves'.
...
Crime reduction officer for Tandridge PC John Lee commented: 'We are constantly advising homeowners to protect their property and the contents of their shed or garage, however, a commonsense approach needs to be taken.

'To properly secure your sheds, Surrey Police strongly advises people to invest in items such as good-quality locks and bolts, and not to resort to homemade devices, as this could cause injury.'

A police source added: 'Homemade devices can cause injury and there have been cases where criminals have sued for injuries they have suffered while committing a criminal act.

'We are advising people to do whatever they can to protect their property, but wire mesh is not one of the suggestions we would make.'

20 or 30 years ago, that would have read as parody. Sadly, no longer...

"Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made..."

I just posted Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address, which came thirty years ago today. And it is a marvelous, moving, inspirational speech. At one point, told a story of one young American who had gone off to fight - and die - in the first World War, and he had trouble getting through it.

Martin Treptow ... left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, "My Pledge," he had written these words: "America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone."

I had trouble getting through it too, in part because it recalls to me one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books, and I'm reminded that C. S. Lewis also fought in the trenches during the first world war:

Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Horatius stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river.

The first and third books of Lewis' space trilogy are wonderful, but Perelandra, the middle one, is the one that stands out for me.

In defense of children's books...

A nice piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about C.S. Lewis (and his place on Sarah Palin's reading list...

Lewis would likely have appreciated making Mrs. Palin's reading list. But he probably would have appreciated the questions about it even more. For Lewis, one of the best ways to know a person was to know what they read. He was convinced that books defined us and shaped our character. He realized that books did more than prepare people for interesting conversations with journalists—they prepare us to respond to the crises we encounter in our own lives.

Read it all...

"The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader"

"The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader" is the fourth book in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and the third of the books recently filmed¹. And it's a beautiful film. While it doesn't contain everything from the book, and has added a thing or two, and changed the sequence of some events, it has been faithful to both the story and the ideas behind it.

I'm not going to do a full review, but there is one thing that I wanted to mention, and praise the filmmakers² for. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia in order to, in his words, "smuggle in theology" to children. There are many places in the stories where this is clear, and the ending of "Dawn Treader" is one of them, with some of the most explicit symbolic christology in the whole series.

As the Pevensies, Eustace and Reepicheep reach the shore at the end of the world, a lamb greets them. There is fish cooking over an open fire. And the lamb then turns into Aslan. Reepicheep goes on to Aslan's country, while the others are returned to earth. But there is a conversation between them in which Lucy laments that she won't return to Narnia, not for Narnia itself, but because she won't see Aslan again. And he explains to her that he will always be with her in her own world. "In your world," he tells her, "you must learn to know me by a different name."

And they filmed it. Not all of it, not exactly the way it's written, but the important parts, they included. They didn't include the lamb. Caspian was with them. There was sand instead of grass. But the key, the important idea of the scene was there. They made a big, mainstream film, and Aslan told Lucy, "in your world, you must learn to know me by a different name."

There must have been pressure from someone, somewhere, not to include it. But they included it anyway. Even if the rest of the film had been terrible (it wasn't), I'd have forgiven them almost anything for including it.






¹ - Which makes it sound like they've skipped something, but what they've done makes sense. The second book, "The Horse And His Boy," actually fits, chronologically, within the boundaries of the first book, and the only major characters from elsewhere in the Chronicles (with the obvious exception of Aslan) are the adult versions of the Pevensies, High Kings and Queens over Narnia. So there's no urgency to film it before the actors "age out" of the parts...

² - A large part of the reason that the movies have been true to the spirit of Lewis' books is the presence of Executive Producer Douglas Gresham, Lewis' step-son, who, I believe, holds the rights at this point, and is determined that the films be faithful to Lewis' beliefs.

Happy Birthday, C.S. Lewis!

Of course, he's been gone for almost 50 years now, but certainly not forgotten.  To celebrate, here are the closing paragraphs of Men Without Chests, the first of the three essays (originally lectures) that make up The Abolition of Man.

Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. 

It is to their credit that Gaius and Titius embrace the first alternative. Propaganda is their abomination: not because their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning it (or anything else) but because they are better than their principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil on what they would call 'rational' or 'biological' or 'modern' grounds, if it should ever become necessary. In the meantime, they leave the matter alone and get on with the business of debunking. But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. 

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. 

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Idle thought

It is easy to mock that which we understand well. It is also easy to mock that which we do not understand. Many times people who believe they are doing the former are actually engaged in the latter.

And a quote, on a similar theme...

Only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.

- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The death of Britain continues apace...

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Evidence of his prescience continues to mount. The only questions which remain are, is it possible to arrest the decay? Or has British society already been destroyed? These may just be the death throes of a historical remnant...

The Death of England and the Abolition of Man

It's been said that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I'd like not to think that C.S. Lewis is a hammer that I need to go to for any discussion of public policy. But he was a brilliant writer and moral philosopher, and there is much of what he had to say that was relevant, sometimes in startling ways, to the world in which we live.

Over in the Corner, Jay Nordlinger and Mark Steyn are lamenting, again, the death of England. This time, the context is a fire in the town of Doncaster in which a family perished, plausibly because the police on the scene felt that their duty was to prevent neighbors from trying to help, rather than to help themselves. The inimitable Steyn went on to decry the way that

the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you - because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity. In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless (at least when it comes to traditional activities such as solving crime) into what John O'Sullivan calls "the paramilitary wing of The Guardian" - the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.

And finishes by noting that

New Hampshire's great motto, "Live free or die", is not just a bit of bloodcurdling stemwinding but a real choice that Britons, Canadians and, alas, Americans ought to ponder: You can live as free men, with all the rights and responsibilities and vicissitudes of fate that that entails. Or you can watch your society decay and die before your eyes - as England, once the crucible of freedom, dies a little with every day.

In 1942, Alec King and Martin Ketley published "The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing." This was a text book, "intended for 'boys and girls in the upper forms of schools'." One of the people to whom publishers sent a copy was C.S. Lewis. Lewis took issue with the book. "I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them." He used the contents of the book as the jumping-off point for a series of three lectures, the Riddell Memorial Lectures, which he delivered at the University of Durham in February of 1943. The content was later published as The Abolition of Man.

In the lectures, Lewis addresses the ways in which the textbook, which he refers to as "The Green Book," teaches not so much literary analysis as moral philosophy. He gives the authors the benefit of the doubt on their intentions ("I doubt whether Gaius and Titius have really planned, under cover of teaching English, to propagate their philosophy") but not on the impact:

I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we 'appear to be saying something very important' when in reality we are 'only saying something about our own feelings'. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.
...
They may be perfectly ready to admit that a good education should build some sentiments while destroying others. They may endeavour to do so. But it is impossible that they should succeed. Do what they will, it is the 'debunking' side of their work, and this side alone, which will really tell.

The lectures then move into moral philosophy, and a discussion of whether or not there are objective truths, objective values in the universe. The authors of the book, whether intentionally or not, are in the business of "debunking" traditional values. But "their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough." They are "found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars."¹ He sums up their values in the notes by saying that

It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.

With that as background, I can now get back to where I started. When Steyn and Nordlinger (and others) lament the "death of England," they aren't talking in geographical terms, or even (yet) in political or National terms. They are speaking in spiritual terms. They are speaking of a society that has reached a point where the attributes which made it a great society have withered or been bred away. Is this England the one upon which the sun never set? Is this the society that produced Shakespeare or Wellington or Shackleton? Which colonized the new world and Australia and India? The answer, obviously, is "no." A society may last for a while even if unwilling to respond to all assaults upon it; it cannot survive if unwilling to respond to any assaults upon it. And if "peace" is the highest moral value, one must accommodate rather than respond.

And now, to quote C.S. Lewis, from the first line of the second of the Riddell Lectures that make up The Abolition of Man, demonstrating prescience and foresight of the highest order:

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

Is there any question that facts have proven Lewis correct?

And, unfortunately, I see the same things happening around me in the United States. And that train is rolling a lot faster than I'd dreamed possible two years ago...

¹ - If that sounds familiar, consider all of the people who look upon traditional marriage as a bigoted or outdated institution, but have no conception or understanding of any reason that one might oppose government recognition of homosexual marriages. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Synchronicity

One of the ideas on the list of books that I want to write (but probably never will) deals with the intersection of ideas between Christianity and Eastern philosophy, as I have noted significant similarities as I’ve studied the martial arts. I mention this today because of the interesting juxtaposition of two brief readings this morning. I have various books on my shelf that I pull down, on occasion, or read through in pieces. I read a section from Grandmaster Dominick Giacobbe’s Secrets for a Powerful Life, and a page from A Year with C.S. Lewis. (Not the page for July 18 – I just opened the book at random and read the page for March 16.)

There was an old master and his young pupil walking on a path in the woods. When they came upon a fork in the road they had two choices. They could take a road to the left or the one to the right. The young boy said to the old master, “Let’s take the trail on the left…there is a quail on this path and he is walking in that direction…” As they walked the trail was becoming smaller and smaller. When they came to a curve the trail ended at a cliff. As they approached the cliff the quail flew away. The boy was so upset with himself he apologized to the old master for his foolish decision to follow the quail. The master told the boy to sit down and relax. He told the boy to accept his decision and told the boy, “We must return to the fork in the road and take the road to the right.” The boy then jumped up and said to the master, “Master, Master, if we go this way off the trail we can catch the other trail.” The master told the boy, “There is no easy way. We must return to the fork in the road and take the other trail. If we go off the trail we will have more problems and we will not accomplish anything.” The boy was very upset. The Master told the boy not to be upset and told the boy, “Just change your direction and continue on your journey.”

- Grandmaster Dominick Giacobbe, Secrets for a Powerful Life

After reading a chapter from Grandmaster Giacobbe, I pulled the Lewis book off the shelf. I opened it, as I said, at random, and this was on the page that I read.

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road…

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Bozell on Caspian and Lewis

Brent Bozell has piece on Prince Caspian in which he makes some comparisons and points that I've made before, particularly on the relative success of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Golden Compass.

Before any of the “Caspian” box office figures came in, [Richard] Corliss asked in Time magazine: “Can God make one movie franchise a hit and another a flop?” It’s quite clear that “The Golden Compass” flopped badly. It debuted last December to a seriously disappointing first-weekend gross of $25 million, and finished its sorry American run with only $70 million. No sequel is expected for that God-killing trilogy. Meanwhile, “The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe” grossed $291 million in the U.S., and “Prince Caspian” is off to a soaring launch, and the third Narnia installment, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” is already slated for release in May 2010.

As I said at the time, "it should not surprise anyone that a work whose fundamental premise demonstrates contempt for the deeply held beliefs of a large portion of its target audience fails to achieve financial success."

I agree with Bozell on this, obviously. But then he goes into the content of the Narnia books, and Lewis' intentions, and I think makes some serious mistakes.

Was “Caspian” toned down from the book? Yes, perhaps because there are bureaucrats in Hollywood who still presume that explicit faith is a commercial problem. When the first Narnia film came out late in 2005, Disney publicity executive Dennis Rice rushed to distance the film from Christianity. “We believe we have not made a religious movie,” he told the Washington Times. “It's just a great piece of cinema that is true to a great piece of literature.”

That statement surely would have horrified the author.

First, if Prince Caspian was toned down, I confess that I missed it. There is no explicit theology in the book, only the presence of Aslan. Once one associates Aslan with Christ, one sees some theology in the book, but it's all there in the movie as well. The explicit Christian doctrine from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is, of course, the sacrifice and resurrection of Aslan. Does someone want to argue that that was toned down? I don't think so.

As to the quote from the executive, far from horrifying Lewis, I think he would have agreed with it happily. Lewis did not think of the Narnia books as being, as they are frequently called, "Christian allegory." They were children's stories, written to entertain. He wasn't writing explicit Christian stories, he was preparing a "mission field" as it were, so that children might be more receptive to the Christian message when they were later exposed to it. In 1938, he noted that the response of the critics to Out of the Silent Planet demonstrated ignorance of its Christian themes and subtexts. He later wrote to a friend that "I think that this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England; any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance without their knowing it¹."

As longtime Lewis friend and biographer George Sayer wrote about the Narnia stories (emphasis mine),

the main theme of the stories is the conflict between good and evil; characters such as the white witch represent the forces of evil. The stories are not meant to teach Christian doctrine. They are written first as stories that children could wholeheartedly enjoy, and secondly as stories in which some of the imaginary episodes rather resemble the true events of the Christian faith. He did not want the resemblances to be pointed out by adults, nor even did he expect them to be noticed by more than a few children. His hope was that when, at an older age, the child came into contact with the real truths of Christianity, he or she would find these truths easier to accept because of reading with pleasure and accepting stories with similar themes years before.

Bozell goes on to say that

Religious people will sense a strong religious undercurrent in “Caspian.” Even toned down, the plot echoes the Acts of the Apostles, and how those early believers could have faith in Jesus after His ascension to Heaven. The religious themes are re-organized so that only the little girl Lucy sees Aslan and trusts he will eventually aid the children. That’s unlike the book, where all four of the Pevensie children, those kings and queens of Narnia – Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy – each meet with Aslan in their walk of faith.

That's just wrong. The storyline of the movie did not exactly follow the storyline of the book, but these two things are true of both: Lucy saw Aslan and the others did not believe her, and they all saw, and walked with, Aslan before the story ended. If you begin without the preconceived notion that Aslan represents Christ, you see substantially the same story and themes from the book and the movie. And if you begin with the preconceived notion that Aslan represents Christ, you see substantially the same story and themes from the book and the movie. While the movie-makers padded the story, they were faithful to the themes and "feel" of the book².



1 - Letter to Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V, July 9, 1939

2 - Faithfulness to the "feel" of the book is, I think, debatable. The books are more "intimate" than the movies so far, but it's difficult to portray the battle in the book, short though it is on the printed page, and maintain that intimacy. Faithfulness to the themes is less debatable.

Human history

"What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could...invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I said that I'd be mentioning The Abolition of Man again, and I will. But I'm not ready yet. For today, I'll just mention that the first of the three Riddell Memorial Lectures, later collected in The Abolition of Man as Men Without Chests, was delivered 65 years ago yesterday, February 24, 1943.

Monday morning odds and ends...

• Dan Shaughnessy had a piece in the Globe yesterday arguing that the various Red Sox debacles (1978, 1986, 2003) were bigger disasters than Super Bowl XLII. The wounds are still too fresh for me to go into this fully, which I expect I'll do some day (probably in therapy) but let me briefly address Dan's point.
  
  Hogwash.
  
  There has never been a "collapse"/"choke"/"disaster"/"disappointment" to match it. Certainly not in Boston pro sports. Never. Not no way, not no how. Not when the stakes are considered. No comparison.



• An absolutely fantastic win for the Celtics yesterday, beating San Antonio without their starting power forward, starting center and backup center. I'd been looking forward to San Antonio as a measuring stick game, which it wasn't - there were too many important pieces missing on both sides - but it was a great win for the team anyway.



• Does Nancy Pelosi even realize how foolish she sounds?



• Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to put together a brief essay on Lewis' The Abolition Of Man and the apparently rapidly approaching end of Western Civilization in Great Britain. Here's a comment from The Way (which is the second of the three essays which makes up The Abolition of Man.):
  

  The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.
  

  C.S. Lewis

  
  Lewis was a brilliant man, a great writer, a deep thinker, and something of a prophet...



• I'm torn on the Clinton campaign. There's part of me that thinks that the sooner she's gone, the better. The rest of me is pretty sure that McCain can beat her in November, while Obama is a) likely to be just as bad a President and b) far likelier to win. I think that the best case, for Republicans and people concerned about National security, is for Hillary to win at the convention on the basis of superdelegates, alienating the members of the Obama cult of personality.
  
  I certainly could be wrong (and I usually am) but that would, I think, make for quite an entertaining spectacle, and a fatally wounded candidate.



• Chris Lynch thinks that Curt Schilling's done. I wouldn't be surprised if he is, I wouldn't be surprised if made 10-12 starts after the All Star Game. If we've seen him for the last time, well, we saw great things from him.
  
  My concern is not that it leaves a big hole in the rotation, because I don't believe it does. But it leaves something of a hole, as I'm certain that they want to limit the innings of both Buccholz and Lester this year, and with Schilling gone, that will require more management. They remain, in my opinion, the best team in baseball, with or without him.