It’s all in the mindset, Wormwood

I often wonder what C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters would have looked like if he wrote it today. Yes, there’s the E-mail from Hell by Jim Forest, and Peter Kreeft’s Snakebite Letters, but the devil has so far kept me blissfully unaware of them until I had to write this editorial.

The spiritual classic is a series of letters from senior demon Screwtape to his initiate nephew Wormwood. It’s a great example of mentorship – of the damnable sort. He sets out to give advice and admonish on how best to cause “the Patient,” a run-of-the-mill young person, to merit the blessing of “Our Father Below” in the form of abject misery otherwise known as hell.

As an infernal bureaucrat, the clinical insight of Screwtape most often involves slight-of-hand deception – the kind that happens to people who are pleasantly unaware, who know the “magician” isn’t real, but still want to be entertained and perhaps even believe in magic. Screwtape says, “Don’t let the patient know he has to make a choice between good and evil! Don’t let him be conscious of his minute everyday actions – the gentle, sliding slope of habitual small sins is better.”

Above all, the best trick of those infernal bureaucrats is to keep us unconscious. A Coca-Cola billboard I once saw sums it up – “Stop thinking! Feel it!” Unfortunately for me, I started thinking about it, and it sounded suspiciously like an alliance between postmodernism and capitalism.

In a letter to Wormwood on materialism, Screwtape describes the descent of modern human beings into the clutches of irrational technology:

It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical,’ ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary,’ ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous – that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

That was C.S. Lewis ranting about the press. I wonder what he would’ve said about TV?

Today’s television ads – that staple of relentless logical fallacies – woo us into a courageous attitude towards falsehood. Yes, why wouldn’t I buy an SUV that’s shown driving through a pristine forest, as a wolf, sparrow, and deer jump into the sunroof looking for the perfect harmony of climate controlled leather seats?

Perhaps C.S. Lewis is wrong – we still connect our thinking with doing, only the arguments don’t make sense, but we act on them anyway. Screwtape and Wormwood, now retired demons, no doubt smile at their poker game in hell: awash with consumer ads, “argument” has become just another word for forcing my product, my opinion, on someone else. Why should we change the way we live because of an argument? Aren’t there many versions of rationality? Why not stop thinking and just feel it?

But C.S. Lewis had a much higher view of reason – based on Scripture and the spiritual consciousness of “principalities and powers.” The Apostle Paul calls us to metanoia – to a renewal of our minds. That’s why Screwtape said evil ideas have more power than any sharp-toothed dragon. It’s our minds he wants to convert. Father bureaucrat wants to re-route the river of nature into one big pleasant diversion.

We live in a time of unprecedented choice. That’s how Jonathan Janzen and Ryan Dueck start their feature in this issue on consumerism. Their feature serves as an introduction to a column series we’re starting at the Herald called “Consume this” on consumerism and individualism. We’d like to shed some light on Screwtape’s creed: that individual benefit and greed are the highest good.

What are the tiny habits we’ve formed that keep us blind to the gentle sliding slopes of a capitalist liberal democracy? We’ll have to use our reason, and we’ll have to be alive to the possibility that thinking is connected with acting – that we must change the way we live based on reason instead of just choice. Luckily, it only has to be one small habit at a time.

Your ravenously affectionate assistant editor,

Andrew Siebert