Deep political wisdom can be found in a writer who
took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar who achieved his
greatest fame as a popular Christian writer.
Lewis was sometimes laughably ignorant of current
events. His friends were once amused to discover that he was under the
impression that Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, was the king of
Greece. But the very distance he kept from politics enabled him to see large
outlines invisible to those preoccupied with the daily news.
During World War II, Lewis realized that both the
Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian
West and indeed of all sane civilizations. The great principle of this morality
is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among
gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used amorally on all
sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When peace came, the victorious
states would feel released from moral restraints.
Lewis cited an old theological question:
“It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker [Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian], and against Dr. [Samuel] Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion ... that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it – that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right.”It was dangerous to believe that sheer will, even God’s will, can be the ultimate source of right and wrong.
Lewis saw a parallel danger in “the modern theory of
sovereignty,” which holds that the state can make right and wrong by sheer act
of will:
“On this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority to law because it is the source of law, is the characteristic of every state; of democratic states no less than of monarchical. That doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged in legislation.”As a result of the theory of sovereignty, Lewis observed, “Rulers have become owners.” He added:
“We are less their subject 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.” As the state offers us less and less protection, “at the same time it demands from us more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more burdens: and we get less security in return. While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away.”Lewis was alarmed by another development we now take for granted: state control of education. He wrote:
“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the free-born 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?”The “new society” was creating:
“membership in a debased modern sense – a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters.”It was:
“trying to drag the featureless repetition of the collective into the fuller and more concrete world of the family.”More clearly than even Huxley and Orwell, Lewis saw that politics without morality could only end in tyranny.
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