In Letter 21, Screwtape gives advise on how to make the "patient" irritable. What makes him short-tempered more than anything else is having a tract of time he thought he ad at his disposal taken from him. As examples, Screwtape offers an unexpected visitor when the "patient" had looked forward to a quiet evening, or looking forward to time with a friend and having the friend's talkative wife show up. These are small things, Screwtape says. The best way to aggravate them into real anger is to encourage a sense of ownership of time:
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him fee as a grievous tax that portion of his property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright. . . . [I]f the Enemy [God] appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that the total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder that listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said 'Now go and amuse yourself'. Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day.
Well, yes, listening to the conversation of a foolish woman is hardly comparable to, say, Christians being fed to lions. But then again, most Christians will never be in that situation and most people spend most of their time dealing with much more petty annoyances. But then again, Lewis manages to discuss some of those other small things, such as dealing with another person's annoying habits (Letter 3) or having food not prepared quite the way you want (Letter 17) without taking it to such melodramatic extremes.
And note the unstated assumption in that passage. After all, there are two people here, the interrupter and the person being interrupted. Lewis appears to be aligning God unequivocally on the side of the interrupter against the interruptee. This outraged statement that you have no right to any of your time, and that God sides with the interrupter is also somewhat at odds with Letter 26, which addresses the "generous illusion conflict." The basic concept here is of people ostentatiously yielding to the other person's wishes mostly in the interest of point-scoring, and the resentments that it can provoke. Lewis concludes from all this that maybe a little selfishness isn't so bad by comparison. But apparently the Generous Illusion Conflict does not apply to an unexpected visitor. In that case, the visitor in unequivocally right and the person looking forward to a quiet evening must be the one to yield.
Allow me to propose an alternative explanation for what is going on. Most of us do not resent the truly unavoidable or emergency interruption such as (say) a fire or a car accident or a medical emergency. We resent the person doing the interrupting because that person is being -- by the standards of our society -- impolite. According to our society's standards, if you plan to show up at somebody's house, you should call ahead and ask what is a convenient time. Likewise, when the friends were planning a get-together, the one should have asked if he could bring his wife along. It may be that standards of politeness to not allow you to say no even if that is what you really want to do. But at least the advance warning gives the opportunity to prepare and, perhaps, to adjust one's schedule accordingly. And this, in turn, is consistent with another point raised in Letter 26 -- unselfishness as taking trouble for others, or unselfishness as not giving trouble to others. Screwtape emphasizes that women focus on taking trouble and men on not giving trouble, but does acknowledge that a good Christian should practice both. The unexpected visitor is breaking that rule.
Admittedly, not all societies share this viewpoint. In many societies, visitors drop in on each other at all hours and no advance announcement is needed. Indeed, I recall a high school teacher describing a foreign visitor as saying he found nothing so astonishing about our society as that even social visits had to be scheduled in advance. That, in turn, is a reflection of how our wider society treats time. We had a rigidity about time that is mostly a product of the Industrial Revolution and does stand out as unusual, all things considered. The Industrial Revolution has freed us, to a considerable extent, of the tyranny of circumstances, but in return it has subjected us to the tyranny of the clock. Time is set in specific block -- a time to get up, a time to make preparations for work, a time to commute, work time rigidly set. Even leisure activities are often pre-scheduled, and even the recreation of radio and television shows were set at specific, inflexible times. Is it any wonder, under these circumstances, that people have come to view time as a scarce commodity to be jealously guarded?*
So that raises an obvious question. Lewis identifies courtesy as one of the Christian virtues. But courtesy appears to be something like propriety -- arbitrary and culture bound. Lewis's view on propriety seems straightforward and reasonable. It is more important to have a firm standard than what the standard is. Setting a standard may be considered morally neutral in the sense that many different standards work in different societies. But it nonetheless is a moral issue in the sense that people must respect the standard of propriety because to break it will cause either lust or embarrassment.
So, it would seem that the same thing applies to courtesy (and, indeed, that propriety is just a sub-category of courtesy). What is courteous in one society may be discourteous in another. One society's standard of politeness may mean scheduling social visits in advance and not showing up without notice. Another may mean always being open to visitors. So I suppose the real question is whether Lewis considers this essentially a morally neutral question, such that either standard of courtesy will work? Or would he consider the idea of ownership of time to be so noxious that a Christian society must adopt the pre-industrial view that visitors are always welcome? And, if so, would that be part of a larger project toward abandoning our society's general rigidity about time?**
I see only one hint in Mere Christianity -- the comment that committed Christians "will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. "
**Another interesting point. Our society is becoming less rigid about time in may ways. Employers are instituting flexible hours. Work from home is becoming an option. Netflix and the like allows us to watch shows at the time of our choosing. And so forth. Will this make people more flexible with their private time as well?
No comments:
Post a Comment