C.S. Lewis is the most effective Christian apologist in the modern era, and by that I mean the last 200 years or so. Perhaps his most effective work is The Screwtape Letters, which was written from the perspective of an imaginary demon (Screwtape) instructing his nephew (Wormwood) on how to seal the eternal fate of his “patient.” Lewis found no joy in writing it. He confessed, “The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before it was done.”
He was resolved never to write “another letter,” but he felt the pull (and The Saturday Evening Post invitation encouraged him) to write, using the same perspective, upon the subject of modern culture and education writ large. The result was “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” which is included in later editions of The Screwtape Letters.
In this toast, Screwtape laments the increasing scarcity of “tasty” personages such as “Farinata (from Dante’s Inferno) a Henry VIII or even Hitler! There was a real crackling there!” Although the quality of damned souls was decreasing, the quantity was increasing. They were getting a multitude of “…vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin is possible.” What a complete indictment of the leveling of modern man!
On the bright side for the demons, “every dictator or even demagogue – almost every film star or crooner – can now draw tens of thousands of human sheep with him.” But most importantly, “‘Democracy’ is the word with which you must lead them by the nose.” The enlightenment principle, derived from Locke and found in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, meaning that all men should be equally treated, should be, by “stealthy transition in their minds,” converted to a belief “that all men ARE equal.” This, of course, is absurd on its face, but bear in mind that our Puritan forebears called Satan “the Great Deluder.”
The falsehood that all men are, in fact, equal finds fertile ground in the minds of those who “feel themselves in some way inferior,” as a defense mechanism. Thoughts run through their minds like “I’m as good as you,” and “If they were the right sort of chaps they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.” Young ladies who seek to fit in with modern culture don’t realize that their prayers amount to “make me a minx, a moron and a parasite.”
The demons are to work towards an education system where “dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’… At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks.” C.S. Lewis wrote this in 1959! Look and see, today, how much progress dark forces have made with this since. At places like Harvard, the grading system is a bitter inside joke. Emeriti like Harvey Mansfield are at least fighting back.
In elementary schools, the demons should seek to emphasize “parity of esteem” where the brighter students are held back from higher pursuits, because “others would get a ‘trauma’ – Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind… and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.” Today, school districts throughout the country are eliminating gifted & talented programs in the name of “equity.”
Lewis warned that a nation whose children are raised to be subliterate and “soft from life-long pampering” (i.e., a false sense of self-esteem) will ultimately fall to another whose children were made to work at school, no matter how brutal the conqueror otherwise may be. Say goodbye to Lincoln’s “last, best hope of earth.”
Individualism and liberty itself are an anathema to the demons, for it is not groups, governments, or nations that are saved; “only individuals can be saved or damned.” It is often said that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” but ignorance and relativism are the devil’s fertile fields.
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