How C.S. Lewis Predicted our Culture Today

Hello and welcome back to this special episode of the Ben Shapiro show. Today's show features a portion of my last book club where I went through the screw tape letters by C.S. Lewis, a fantastic investigation of the nature of evil and good human frailty and the power of God. Listen now as we chronicle the handful of different ways that C.S. Lewis predicted the vices and predations of our modern culture. There are a bunch of large scale arguments that that that Lewis makes in screw tape letters. The first one is that Satan's best weapon is the quote unquote real world. And this is right. I mean, if you if you talk to people who are secular, they'll always say that the spiritual world, the spiritual world, God is unreal. The real world is the material world. And then when you ask them about what's important to them, they'll talk about their feelings, which, of course, are inherently unreal in the same way. The spiritual world is unreal. And this is a point that Lewis makes is that the definition of real is capacious and changing on a regular basis from secularists. So Lewis believes that man's draw to the divine can be rooted in reason and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guards you. It guides you toward the transcendent. That's an idea that I obviously agree with. I believe that the notion of free will, free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea of there must be something beyond us, that there's a logic to the universe that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician who made the rules, for example. Lewis makes the same point. And then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing. It's to get you to focus on the thing in itself. That's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell, famous atheist. And so Lewis says this, even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, this is as screw tape, as screw tape, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don't let him ask what he means by real. So just keep him focused on the immediate, him focused on the now. There's nothing that's done this more than the internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas. If you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society. So what exactly does reality mean? Well, according to screw tape, people ought to be taught that in all experiences, which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective. And in all experiences, which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality. And to ignore them is to be an escapist, right? So the idea is that when you're thinking about death, that the only thing that is real is the death, right? You're, you're not supposed to look to the, the, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death. Or if you look at something that makes you very happy, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing. And the, the goal is to enmesh mankind in the world. And this is something that Catholic theologians talk about a lot. The idea that, that the spiritual world, if you can enmesh it in reality too much, then you can bring people away from the reality of something higher. This means, for example, that you have to get people to stop thinking about death. It says, screw tape says, how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death with which war enforces one of our best weapons, contented worldliness is rendered useless. In wartime, not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. Material world then is the chief ally of screw tape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties. Screw tape says human beings hate every idea that suggests him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook. Passbook meaning like a checkbook. So the idea is that, that if you're not thinking about duty and then you're forced to think about duty, you don't like it very much. The other thing that screw tape tries to get you to focus in on is the future at all times. If you can focus in on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the president. So says screw tape, it's far better to make them live in the future. The future is of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time for the past is frozen. It no longer flows. The present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought, like creative evolution, scientific humanism or communism, which fix men's affections on the future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future. So the idea is if you're thinking about the future, then you're not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You're thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now, and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a quote unquote, better future. Screw tape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality and this drives them away from God. On the other hand, screw tape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly. If you can be narcissistically checking yourself all the time, you're going to end up without God. So if you feel wildly enthusiastic about becoming religious, then Wormwood ought to encourage people to wait for the anti-climax, right? Because you get enthusiastic about a thing, then you become less enthusiastic about the thing, and then you pounce. Quote, work hard then on the disappointment or anti-climax, which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. In every department of life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The enemy takes this risk because he has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what he calls his free lovers and servants. Sons is the word he uses. So in other words, very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks. And once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the in the spiritual aspect of what they're doing and instead focus in on the fact that it's just sheer drudgery. So, for example, when it comes to prayer, human beings should be encouraged to seek a feeling of inspiration specifically because it's very hard to find. I mean, I pray three times a day. I've talked about this before. Finding a feeling of inspiration while you're praying can be really, really difficult. And so if you're constantly searching your feelings, I'm not inspired enough, I'm not inspired enough. Eventually, like I'm never getting inspired and you stop doing it. And that's the goal. Whereas the reality is that when you're praying, you should stop searching inside your own feelings all the time. You should focus on the doing of the prayer. And then when eventually you stumble onto the feeling, it's an incredible thing. But at least you won't stop doing the thing when you when you lose the feeling. So you focus in on the feeling. When the feeling goes short, you stop doing the duty. If you focus in on the duty, then eventually you come to feeling is the case that Lewis is actually making. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, it's no secret that the holiday season is the best time to buy a car. Dealers are motivated to hit end of month and end of year sales quotas. And with used car prices coming down, we can expect to see even more amazing deals this year. But before you set foot into a dealership, you have to check out Carzing. Carzing is completely changing the way you buy a car online. By partnering with credit agencies, lenders and over 25,000 dealers nationwide, Carzing provides you with everything you need before setting foot into a dealership. You can instantly pre-qualify online without affecting your credit score and get instant financing details, including what your down payment would be, your monthly payment, term and APR, putting you several steps ahead of other buyers. 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Should engage in full on festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy. I don't want to be judgmental. I'll make you feel ashamed. I don't want to make you feel bad about the fact that I go to synagogue on a routine basis. I don't want my I know my yarmulke makes you feel uncomfortable as a Jew because it might make you think that you're not being religious enough. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable. We can be the boys when we're talking about our sins. Other roads to hell include depression and anxiety, Screwtape says. When people are depressed, they are more likely to despair that their actions and thoughts even matter. And so they sort of sink into a malaise. This this leads you to to what C.S. Lewis calls grayness. Right. If you're passionate about things, then very often you can find spirituality. But if you're gray about things, it's very hard to find spirituality. He says the Christians describe the enemy as one without whom nothing is strong and nothing is very strong, strong enough to steal away a man's best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why in the gratification of curiosity, so feeble that man is only half aware of them. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing. I mean, is this a great description of the Internet age or is this a great description of the Internet age? You spend all day on social media consuming your time with absolute stupidities. You don't feel anything good about it. It just feels like that. And then when you go outside in the sun, you still feel unenthusiastic. The goal of modern society is almost solely, apparently, to do the work of Wormwood here. The point that Lewis makes is that you're able to get at people through art, through popular culture. He says we've engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude in art and its exhibition on the stage of the bathing beach. It's all a fake, of course. The figures in the popular art are falsely drawn. The real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being frank and healthy and getting back to nature. As a result, we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist, making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows, you can easily forecast. That is the greatest description of Internet porn that has ever been written. And C.S. Lewis is writing this in 1942. Right, that you are setting up increasing expectations for what women are supposed to look like, what sex is supposed to be, what it's supposed to look like, and then people are engaging in it less and less. You're making the demands nearly impossible, and yet you are satisfying those demands with the virtual. And again, C.S. Lewis is a man ahead of his time because here's the thing. Sin is always the same. This is the thing that people always say about the Bible, and it's so stupid. They'll say, oh, the Bible, it's archaic. The Bible is talking about things that things have changed. You know, it has never changed human nature. C.S. Lewis could have written this 4,000 years ago, it would not have mattered. Human nature does not change. Human nature is the same as it was thousands of years ago. The only thing that has changed is that we believe that we have been able to overcome human nature, which, of course, is extraordinary arrogance and silliness. It turns out that all of the systems that we built to hem in human nature, all the systems that we built in order to channel human nature to its best available pursuits, we've exploded all of those in the in the belief that we have created a new human already. Now, there are a lot of ideologies that say that you can create a new human. Marxism says you can create a new human, change the economic conditions, change the man. Secular humanism says the same thing, that if you just get rid of God, then magically a new human being will flourish. Religion says no. Human beings are exactly the same as they were when Adam ate the apple with Eve in the garden. They're exactly the same and nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that we've built institutions and systems in order to channel us toward our better selves. And when you blow up all those institutions, what you end up with is something very, very bad, which is precisely what has happened. Screwtape also talks about how human relationships can undermine faith as well because human beings have a really tough time living with each other. And so most sin is not between man and God. Most sin is between man and man. When he talks about the relations in marriage, for example, Lewis is right on the money. He says in civilized life, domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper. The words are not offensive, but in such a voice or such a moment that they're not far short of a blow on the face. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. This is true in virtually all human relationships, right? You say something and you say it in kind of a nasty way. And then when somebody gets offended, you're like, hey, what did I say? What did I do? I didn't. Did I say? No, I just look and I'll read back the words that I said. Well, no, the tone mattered an awful lot right there. By the way, this is one of the reasons why just a piece of Shapiro advice here. Try to have as many conversations via voice as you can and not via text. Text is open to misinterpretation. Voice really, really is not. But we do have a double standard. We insist that everybody interpret us in the best light and then we interpret everybody else in the worst possible light. And then his descriptions of men and women are also extraordinarily accurate. This is one of my favorite sections of the book. He says a woman means by unselfishness, chiefly taking trouble for others. A man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the enemy service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man, except those whom our father has dominated completely. And conversely, a man will live long in the enemy's camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. In other words, women tend to be very helpful. And if Satan can get a hold of them, then intrusive and invasive. And men tend to be very blase, which means that they allow people their space. But also, if Satan can get a hold of them, then they are completely disconnected from other human beings and selfish. A sensible human once said, quote, If people knew how much ill feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit. And again, she's the sort of woman who lives for others. You can always tell the others by their hunted expression. Screwtape also talks to Wormwood about the the misinterpretation of the word love, how love has come to mean sexual desire, and how we have moved away from marriage as a duty based relationship to the voluntarization of marriage. Screwtape says, quote, In humans, the enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it, thus producing the family, which is like the organism only worse for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in love. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them, which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured from the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce. And if obediently entered into too often will produce affection in the family. Humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear and desire, which they call being in love, is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. So in other words, family is a relation that is created by nature. But if we can reduce it, if the devil can reduce that down to the subjective feeling of love, then the minute that you lose the love, you lose the duty. So obviously, this is what's happened with regard to marriage. This is how the slogan love is love has ended up being a definition of marriage. And it has no boundaries. Love is love could include bigamy. Love is love could include polygamy. Love is love can include two brothers getting married. Love is love has no definition because obviously love is not in fact, love. Love in the traditional sense meant duty. Love in the traditional sense meant familial relations between man, woman and children. If you redefine love is that subjective feeling within you, then love is love, I suppose is true. The problem is that is a complete redefinition. It is a robbing marriage of its identity and then wearing it around as a skin suit. Screw tape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of mankind writ large. This obviously is the project of the left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a better world for everybody else. Screw tape says the great thing is to direct the malice of his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he doesn't know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. It's something I say about people, you know, I always say that I'm sort of a not people person, but that's actually not particularly true. My thoughts about mankind at large are not particularly generous. I don't think that human beings are saints. I don't think that human beings are devils. I think that we are somewhere in between. When it comes to interpersonal, like day on day relations, I get along with, I love individual human beings. Individual human beings are great. It's the species that's a problem. And when you start to think that the human species is filled with joy and wonder, but the individuals who live next door to you are the worst people in the entire world, you can do some pretty terrible things to your neighbors. One of screw tapes other tools, one of the tools that he likes to use as well, is the human incapacity to understand the divine. So God obviously has to limit his power in our lives in terms of being right in our face all the time in order for us to have free will. This means a sort of unbridgeable gap between the human beings and the divine. And so we have a picture in our head of what God is and that picture is not real. And then when God doesn't manifest in the way that we think the picture ought to manifest, we get angry at God or we say that he doesn't exist. I think he's an old man in the sky who's a gumball machine and you pray to him and he gives you what you want. That's not how God works. So one of the big questions that you are, you're supposed to not ask is really the nature of God because you're not really able to comprehend God. There are certain things you can comprehend about God. The idea that God is generous in creating humanity. The idea that God has bound himself to a particular logic of the world. And these are things that Aquinas talks about or Maimonides. But the idea that you can know God at the most intimate level, obviously the Bible itself says that this is not the case, right? Moses in the book of Exodus specifically asked God whether he can see his glory. And God says, if you can't see my glory and live, you can see my back. The idea being you can identify what I am by sort of my actions in the world, but you can't actually see my face. You're not capable of understanding who God totally is. Attempts to delve too deeply into what God is, end up in what Screwtape calls materialist magic. If we can produce our perfect work, the materialist magician, the man not using but veritably worshiping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits, then the end of the war will be in sight. So the materialist magician in this world is the person who believes in larger forces like physics or global warming or evolution or disease as controlling our fates while denying that God has any say in the matter whatsoever. It is sort of the notion that the environment is taking revenge on us. The world is taking revenge on us. It's sort of an animistic philosophy that separates us off from God. Screwtape also says that the notion of complete human autonomy apart from God is ridiculous. Screwtape laughs, much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they own their bodies, those vast and perilous estates pulsating with the energy that made the world in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of another. Again, this is a pretty good point. We tend to think of our bodies as our own. Did you ask to be born? Were you asked about when you wish to die? Do you have permission? Does your body take your permission every time you get sick or when you get cancer? The notion of complete bodily autonomy that may be true from other human beings is not true in terms of godly duty. I hope you enjoyed this preview of my book club if you want to hear the full episode on the Screwtape letters by C.S. Lewis or my thoughts on other classics including 1984, Huck Finn, Moby Dick and many more, go to dailywireplus.com search for Ben Shapiro's book club.