C.S. Lewis Saw Government as a Poor Substitute for God
That
means it contains all the flaws and foibles of mortals so a free people
must confine it, restrain it, and keep a wary eye on it.
“Friendship,”
wrote C. S. Lewis in a December 1935 letter, “is the greatest of
worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I
had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I
think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can
be near your friends.’”
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was just
the sort of person I would give an arm to have as a friend across the
street. I can only imagine the thrill of listening to him for hours on
end. This distinguished scholar and thinker was, of course, a prolific
author of works in Christian apologetics and of the seven-part
children’s fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia (which have sold more than
100 million copies and have been adapted into three major motion
pictures).
While teaching literature first at Oxford and then at
Cambridge, he cranked out more than a score of books, from the dense but
highly regarded Mere Christianity to the entertaining The Screwtape
Letters, plus hundreds of speeches, essays, letters, and radio
addresses. Some regard him as the greatest lay theologian of the 20th
Century. His influence, substantial while he was alive, may be even
greater in the world today. Visit the C. S. Lewis website and you’ll see
just how copious and wide-ranging this amazing Irishman’s interests
were. The Politics of C.S. Lewis
Personally, I believe Lewis might be perfectly happy to be labeled a Christian libertarian.
Stacked
against his literary and theological offerings, Lewis’s commentary on
political and economic matters is comparatively slim—mostly a few
paragraphs scattered here and there, not in a single volume. Lewis
scholars have examined those snippets to discern where he might be
appropriately placed on the spectrum. Was he a socialist, a classical
liberal, an anarchist, a minarchist, a theocrat, or something else?
Personally,
I believe Lewis might be perfectly happy to be labeled a Christian
libertarian. He embraced minimal government because he had no illusions
about the essentially corrupt nature of man and the inevitable
magnification of corruption when it’s mixed with political power. He
knew that virtuous character was indispensable to a happy life, personal
fulfillment, and progress for society at large—and that it must come
not by the commands of political elites but from the growth and
consciences of each individual, one at a time. He celebrated civil
society and peaceful cooperation and detested the presumptuous arrogance
of officialdom.
In these very pages, other writers have made the
case that Lewis was a lover of liberty. In a 2012 article titled "C. S.
Lewis: Free Market Advocate," Harold B. Jones Jr. argued that it was
Lewis’s belief in “the rules of logic” and “premises that are fixed
realities” that produced his embrace of markets and free exchange. I
think Lewis’s literal interpretation of Jesus’s words led him to the
same perspective I explained in my essay, "Rendering Unto Caesar: Was
Jesus a Socialist?"
It’s the primary source of Lewis’s own words, of course, that should clarify where his political and economic sympathies were.
Calvin
College’s David V. Urban answered the question “Was C. S. Lewis a
Libertarian?” with a resounding Yes! And thirty-five years earlier, in
“C. S. Lewis on Compelling People to Do Good,” Clarence Carson dissected
Lewis’s statements and arrived at a similar conclusion. More recently,
Marco den Ouden brilliantly drew out Lewis’s sobering insights into the
tyrannical potential of pure democracy in “Why the Devil Loves
Democracy.” All these essays are well worth your time even if your
interest in Lewis is minimal.
It’s the primary source of Lewis’s
own words, of course, that should clarify where his political and
economic sympathies were. Allow me to present the following selections
for you to consider. "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State"
Lewis’s
1958 essay, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (published that year
in The Observer and then later revised and included in his excellent
1970 anthology, God in the Dock) is a goldmine of insights about
government and its proper relationship to the individual. You can read
the whole essay here. One of my favorite passages is this:
To
live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy
the fruits of his own labor, to educate his children as his conscience
directs, to save for their prosperity after his death—these are wishes
deeply ingrained in civilized man. Their realization is almost as
necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total
frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might
follow.
While advocates for the interventionist welfare state
argue that government programs produce happiness and security, Lewis
suggests they are seriously mistaken. There is a far better way to
achieve those ends, namely, freedom:
I believe a man is
happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has "the freeborn mind." But I
doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the
new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an
education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man
who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts
and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice
of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and
turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State
is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?
Elsewhere in the essay,
Lewis is unequivocal in his disdain for the pretensions of government,
as much for its overblown claims of “rule by experts” in the modern day
as for its medieval insistence on rule by “divine right.” In every age,
he says, “the men who want us under their thumb” will advance the
particular myths and prejudices of the day so they can “cash in” on
hopes and fears.
That, he says, opens the door wide to tyranny in
one form or another. Such men are no more than self-exalting,
self-aggrandizing mortals. While they may proclaim to be “of the people
and for the people,” they inevitably establish self-serving oligarchies
at the people’s expense. The following three paragraphs from “Willing
Slaves of the Welfare State” (appearing at different points in the
essay) express profound skepticism toward the “planners of society”
among us:
"I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For
every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a
makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies,
and lies dangerously."
"The question about progress has
become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the
worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal
privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super
Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?"
"The modern
state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us
good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the
new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers.' We are less their
subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing
left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole
lives are their business."
The notion that the welfare state will
take good care of us is, to Lewis, delusional. Doing so is to sell
short one’s own capabilities and those of voluntary, social networks and
organizations. It also ensnares one in a fool’s errand that cannot end
well:
What assurance have we that our masters will or can
keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be
deceived by phrases about "Man taking charge of his own destiny." All
that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny
of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel
and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful
they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power
should not corrupt as it has done before?
"Equality"
Lewis
believed that men and women should be equal before the rule of law. He
disdained arbitrariness, caprice, racism, or classism in the law’s
application. Consistent with those principles, he believed just as
firmly that the law should not aim to make people equal in other ways,
such as in material wealth. That could only be done through ugly force.
In
a 1943 essay entitled “Equality,” he warned against applying economic
equalness as a “medicine” for society’s ills. When we do that, he said,
“we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all
superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty
and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will
kill us all if it grows unchecked.”
Though he found the
egalitarian impulses of democracy offensive, he wasn’t averse to using
the term “democrat” to describe his own feelings about government. It’s
important to note that he used the term in its broadest sense, namely,
to mean popular participation in decisions about who served in
government and what they could justifiably do. At the end of the day, he
readily acknowledged the danger of a pure democracy combining with
rotten character to ultimately produce its precise opposite,
dictatorship. In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), he wrote:
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes
of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place
except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure
of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and
the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think
any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions
with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organization will
have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I
think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological
pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of
the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me
damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the
committee of public safety.
The Screwtape Letters
The
Screwtape Letters (1942) remains one of Lewis’s most popular satirical
pieces. It was written as a series of missives from a senior demon,
named Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, who carries the official title
of Junior Tempter. Screwtape is training Wormwood in how to corrupt
mankind, to turn society into a Hell on Earth. It’s very revealing of
Lewis’s political thinking that the senior demon instructs his pupil to
“equalize” and “democratize” to achieve their nefarious objectives:
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement
toward the discrediting, and finally elimination, of every kind of human
excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not
pretty to notice how Democracy is now doing for us the work that once
was done by the ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? … Allow
no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or
better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them down
to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus
Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can
do the same work without any other tyranny than her own.
If
Lewis were a statist of any persuasion, I don’t see how he could write
any of the above. And if he were a statist, he would likely glorify the
ambitions of central planners, which he never did. He was just not
impressed by the pomposity of politicians. In his 1960 essay titled “The
World’s Last Night,” he wrote,
The higher the pretensions of
our rulers are, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is
likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be
defiled. . . . Let our masters . . . leave us some region where the
spontaneous, the unmarketable, the utterly private, can still exist.
"A Tyranny Sincerely Exercised"
If
I had to choose a favorite among Lewis’s pithy put-downs of big
government, it would be this clip from his 1949 essay “The Humanitarian
Theory of Punishment,” which also appeared later in his anthology, God
in the Dock:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely 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. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time
likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with
intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states
which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who
have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be
classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Lewis’s
worldview was internally consistent. He couldn’t bring himself to look
upon government as God, a substitute for God, or a reasonable facsimile
of God. Government was composed of imperfect mortals, period. That means
it contains all the flaws and foibles of mortals so a free people must
confine it, restrain it, and keep a wary eye on it.
He was humble
enough to admit what so many other mortals won’t, namely, that not even
his own good intentions could justify lording it over others. To him,
good intentions plus political power equals tyranny all too often. He
believed that bad consequences flow directly from bad ideas and bad
behavior. In The Abolition of Man, he says:
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
honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and
bid the geldings be fruitful.
Finally, I love his scathing
criticisms of the education establishment of his day—dominated as it was
(and is even more so today) by the centralizers, the faddists, and the
practitioners of pedagogical malpractice who are empowered by virtue of
government’s involvement. If education is to be saved, I think he would
see that salvation coming from private initiative, not from the costly,
mind-numbing conformity of bureaucrats in the Department of Education:
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of
what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent
obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children
for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
If
the world is no smarter today than it was when C. S. Lewis died in
1963, we certainly can’t blame him. He gifted us wisdom by the
bushels—wisdom we ignore or dismiss at our peril.