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C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism, Part 2
August 17, 2010
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By David J. Theroux
David J. Theroux, Founder and President of The Independent Institute, and President of the C. S. Lewis Society of California, explained C. S. Lewis' fundamental views on Individual Liberty and Natural Law in Part 1 of this series. In the present installment he addresses Lewis' thoughts on Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism, Liberty and Equality, and the follies of Collectivism and Statism. Check back at the Evangelical Portal on Thursday, August 18th, for the concluding section.
Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism
Of central importance in Lewis's discussion of natural law is his critique of the moral relativism of utilitarianism ("the end justifies the means") as a theory of ethics and guide to behavior. Lewis claimed that the precepts of moral ethics cannot just be innovated or improvised as we go along. Picking and choosing among the code of the Tao is inherently foolish and harmful. He noted, for example, that attempts to define moral ethics as the product of a physicalism of survival and instinct create a profound dilemma. On the one hand, the utilitarian (or "Innovator," as Lewis called him) tries to make judgments of the value of human choices by claiming that one decision is good or not. But on what basis is this valuation made if the only standard that exists is instinct? Lewis shows that all such valuations necessarily must use an objective standard of the Tao to do so, even if only partially. As he stated,
The Innovator . . . rates high the claims of posterity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out of instinct or (in the modern sense) reason. He is really deriving our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? . . . [T]he Innovator may place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end, and in pursuit of it, scruples about justice and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a jingoist, a racialist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object to which all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation and no appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this opinion. Once more, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers (The Abolition of Man, p. 43, bold italicized in original).
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Lewis hence described the natural law as a cohesive and interconnected objective standard of right behavior:
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all values are rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) "ideologies," all consist of fragments from the Tao itself. Arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity (The Abolition of Man, p. 44, bold italicized in original).
Lewis then asked, if no new system of value judgment aside from natural law can be developed, does that mean "no progress in our perceptions of value can ever take place? That we are bound down for ever to an unchanging code given once and for all? . . . If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities?" His simple response: "I admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real developments, is required. . . . But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. . . . From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao" (The Abolition of Man, p. 50).
Liberty and Equality
As a proponent of natural law, Lewis was a supporter of the "law of equal liberty" but a firm critic of imposed egalitarianism for any reason. He further understood that egalitarianism is too often a cloak for envy (the sin of coveting) and that such appeals for regimentation are tyrannical:
The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. . . . Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death. A truly democratic education -- one which will preserve democracy -- must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly "high-brow" (Present Concerns, p. 34).
Lewis also recognized innate individual human differentiation and how each individual soul's uniqueness is divinely ordained: "It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense -- if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining -- then this is nonsense. . . . If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us. . . . In this way then, the Christian life defends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical Body" (The Weight of Glory and Other Essays, pp. 170-71).
In an earlier paper (Economic Science and the Poverty of Naturalism: C. S. Lewis's "Argument from Reason"), I discussed Lewis's rejection of the determinism of both genetic and environmental causality for mankind. In the so-called modernist perspective, man is not viewed as a moral agent but as an entity that is conditioned solely by nonrational causes, and all that counts is not "What is just?" but the utilitarian "What works?" If man has free will and is considered accountable for his actions, there are limits on the state's power. But if individuals act out of necessity, they are not moral agents. In the place of punishment for "wrong" doing, preemption becomes the means of social control. As championed by authoritarians of both left and right, the state simply eliminates the individual's choice or, more exactly, makes the choice for him or her. And this elimination is the basis for the "progressive" precautionary principle and government measures of "prior restraint" based on it. Lewis discussed this problem at length in The Abolition of Man as well as in various essays, including "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."
Collectivism and Statism
Lewis consequently drew a clear distinction between the reality of the importance for individual liberty and the tendencies to fall prey to the absurdities and dangers of collectivism:
The first of these tendencies is the growing exaltation of the collective and the growing indifference to persons. . . . if one were inventing a language for "sinless beings who loved their neighbours as themselves" it would be appropriate to have no words for "my", "I", and "other personal pronouns and inflexions". In other words . . . no difference between two opposite solutions of the problem of selfishness: between love (which is a relation between persons) and the abolition of persons. Nothing but a Thou can love and a Thou can exist only for an I. A society in which no one was conscious of himself as a person over against other persons, where none could say "I love you", would, indeed, be free from selfishness, but not through love. It would be "unselfish" as a bucket of water is unselfish. . . . [In such a case] the individual does not matter. And therefore when we really get going . . . it will not matter what you do to an individual.
Secondly, we have the emergence of "the Party" in the modern sense -- the Fascists, Nazis, or Communists. What distinguishes this from the political parties of the nineteenth century is the belief of its members that they are not merely trying to carry out a programme, but are obeying an important force: that Nature, or Evolution, or the Dialectic, or the Race, is carrying them on. This tends to be accompanied by two beliefs . . . the belief that the process which the Party embodies is inevitable, and the belief that the forwarding of this process is the supreme duty and abrogates all ordinary moral laws. In this state of mind men can become devil-worshippers in the sense that they can now honour, as well as obey, their own vices. All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust of power appear as the commands of a great superpersonal force that they can be exercised with self-approval (On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 78-79, bold italicized in original).
Lewis understood that without the necessary natural-law framing of social, legal, and political culture, mankind would no longer be recognized as worthy of rights or even common decency, but instead would be left defenseless to any and all forms of oppression:
Our courts, I agree, "have traditionally represented the common man and the common's view of morality." It is true that we must extend the term "common man" to cover Locke, Grotius, Hooker, Pynet, Aquinas, Justinian, the Stoics, and Aristotle, but I have no objection to that; in one most important, and to me glorious, sense they were all common men. But that whole tradition is tied up with ideas of free-will, responsibility, rights, and the rule of nature. Can it survive in Courts whose penal practice daily subordinates "desert" to therapy and the protection of society? . . . For if I am not deceived, we are all at this moment helping to decide whether humanity shall retain all that has hitherto made humanity worth preserving, or whether we must slide down into sub-humanity imagined by Mr. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and partially realized in Hitler's Germany ("The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," 299-300).
We hence have the basis for the scientistic "brave new world" in which the citizen and government become slave and master, exactly what Lewis critiqued in his essay "Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State." And, of course, what all of this means is the elimination of what makes mankind human in the first place. As Lewis explained the problem, "The question has become 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? Let us make no mistake about the sting. . . . To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man" (p. 316).
This theme recurs throughout Lewis's work, including in both his fiction and his nonfiction. For example, in the third volume of his "Space Trilogy," That Hideous Strength, he describes a disturbing world in which a scientific elite creates a totalitarian system in order coercively to engineer a new mankind via the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (or N.I.C.E. for short). The bureaucrats and planners of N.I.C.E. are exactly what he earlier attacked in his masterly book, The Abolition of Man.
And in Lewis's novel The Screwtape Letters, the demonic Screwtape instructs his pupil Wormwood to mislead his human "patient" by using the convoluted "progressive" concept of "social justice" in order to twist what appears to be Good into Evil and seduce the person into sin:
On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything -- even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy [God] demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience (pp. 108-9).
Copyright © 2010 by David J. Theroux
Check back at the Evangelical Portal on Thursday, August 19th, to read the concluding Part 3 of this series on C. S. Lewis' political philosophy.
David J. Theroux is Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of The Independent Institute and Publisher of The Independent Review. He received his B.S., A.B., and M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Books produced by Mr. Theroux have received two Mencken Awards for Best Book, seven Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Awards for Best Book, two Benjamin Franklin Awards, two Independent Publisher Book Awards, and three Choice Magazine Awards for Outstanding Book. He is Founder and President of the C.S. Lewis Society of California, and he was founding Vice President and Director of Academic Affairs for the Cato Institute and founding President of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. Mr. Theroux has directed and published over seventy scholarly books, as well as articles and reviews that have appeared in USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dallas Morning News, Insight, other publications, and he has appeared on ABC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, Voice of America, and other local, national, and international TV and radio networks and programs.
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