Another Disturbing Aspect -- Must a Christian Society Reject Novelty?

 

Another disturbing aspect of what a Christian society might look like comes from Letter 25 of the Screwtape Letters.  In a number of places the Letters mock the idea of making the future better than the present and seem to suggest that you should be happy with what you have now.  Admittedly, this was written in the time of Communism, which showed a willingness to commit the most ghastly crimes in the present in the name of a better future, so it was a legitimate thing to worry about.  But Lewis seems to take this fear to extremes, perhaps even to the extent of rejecting anything new as the devil's work.

To be clear, Lewis is not opposed to all change.  To live in time, after all, is to experience a change. Something so simple as walking across the room is, after all a change. But there is good change and bad change.  And Lewis appears to define good changes as cyclical change -- the alternating of day and night, and of the seasons.  Bad change is non-cyclical change -- anything genuinely new.  

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship. . . . Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

Well, now, if the desire for anything genuinely new is the devil's work, that has some rather disturbing implications. It would suggest that imagination, creativity and innovation are the devil's instruments as well, and that the godly think to do is copy and never create.  In Letter 2, Screwtape mocks the "patient" for subconsciously thinking of Christians as something out of Roman times and finding it unsettling to see them wear modern clothes and seem so ordinary.  But if we are to take Letter 25 at its word, really Christians should look and act exactly the same as they did back in Constantine's day (Constantine legalizing Christianity is presumably at least one novelty we can accept) and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work.

So is Lewis's ideal of a Christian society one that makes an ideal of absolute stasis and rejects all things new as the devil's work?  I am not suggesting that such a thing would be possible, you understand.  If it is hopelessly utopian to expect a Christian society to have zero divorce and zero crime, it is even more absurd to expect it to have zero novelty.  But will it regard stasis as at least the hypothetical ideal and anything new as innately evil?

In reading Letter 25, I must admit I had never heard of conkers, so I looked it up in the Wikipedia.  Apparently conkers is a game in which two boys each put a horse chestnut on the end of a string attached to a stick and try to break each other's chestnuts.  Clearly it is an autumn game -- that is when the chestnuts come ripe.  One might object to it as a bit violent, but Lewis does not, so I will set that aside. More significantly, Wikipedia gives a history of the game, saying that the earliest reference to it is from 1821, at which time it was played with snail shells or hazelnuts.  Chestnuts came into vogue around 1848.  All of which raises an obvious problem.  Everything that is now traditional was once new, after all.  When conkers first came out, should all Christian parents have forbidden it simply because it was new?  And, if so, at what point did it become old enough to be acceptable.  If Christian parents catch their child with a new toy, should they take it away?  Or even destroy it?  And how is the spirit of tolerance toward individual tastes and interests to be maintained if any new taste or interest must be summarily rejected?

And, of course, people necessarily experience novelty in their lives.  The routine life cycle of growing up, getting married, finding a career, setting up a household, having children, etc., after all, calls for doing new things with one's own life, even if they are very old in the total scheme of things.  Which raises another question.  Assuming when at least hypothetically rejects all novelty on a society-wide basis, how far must individuals take it in their own lives?  No divorce, Lewis makes clear.  No shopping for a new church except (perhaps) under extreme circumstances (Letter 16).  So how far does one take that in other areas of life.  Once one finds employment, is finding a new job forbidden.  Once one sets up a household, is moving out of the question.  And must one reject any new hobby, new vacation spot and any new experience as the devil's work?  Buying new clothes or furniture will no doubt sometimes be necessary when old ones wear out.  Must they be exact replicas in order to avoid the temptation of novelty?  That will, presumably, be easily done in a society that never lets styles in clothing, furniture, etc. change.

So, am I caricaturing here?  Yes, I will admit I probably am.  Lewis really does address the issue of novelty more realistically in Mere Christianity.  He warns, reasonably enough, that the thrill of novelty invariably wears off, and that it a character fault to drop things when the novelty wears off and never see anything through:

[T]hrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there.

Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and becomes a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening. . . .  But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.

So apparently new things are not bad after all.  What is bad is chasing after novelty and only novelty and never committing to anything.  Settling down and making a long-term commitment does not preclude delighting in something new later on.  So maybe the desire for novelty is not actually the devil's work after all.

In fact, Lewis seems to see the endless desire for novelty as something else -- a corruption of the desire for Heaven.  Lewis does not pretend to know what Heaven means, and acknowledges that most of us are quite content in this world and are not aware of a longing for Heaven.  But, he argues, all of us really do yearn for Heaven without knowing it.  All novelty wears off.  Nothing of this world ever truly satisfies in the long run. Trying to satisfy this longing with worldly things can never lead to happiness:

He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is "the Real Thing" at last, and always disappointed.

Again, I agree, this is a character flaw.  It is also out of most people's price range, regardless.  Alternately, one can acknowledge that these yearnings will never be fulfilled and stop pursuing them. Lewis, instead, recommends recognizing that no earthly thing will ever fulfill these yearnings and see them as really a longing for Heaven.  "I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage."  Such an outlook is compatible with trying something new and enjoying it.  It just rejects making novelty an idol.

And really, if Lewis's true objection is not to doing anything new, but merely to making novelty an idol, one would think he could say so  more clearly, even when speaking through the devil.