The Most Disturbing Aspect of Lewis -- Life Expectancy

 

So, turning from what CS Lewis puts in the devil's mouth in the Screwtape Letters and what he says in earnest in Mere Christianity, we can make some attempt to understand some of his more potentially disturbing thoughts about Christian living and a Christian society.  He endorses social activism as a means to Christianity and rejects Christianity as a means to social activism.*  He endorses individual hobbies and does not address clubs addressed to hobbies.  He is not opposed to novelty in people's individual lives, only to endlessly chasing after new thrills and never seeing anything through, but does not address novelty in the larger society.  And he appears to endorse flexibility toward time, although this is not well addressed.

But there is an even more disturbing current seen repeatedly in the Screwtape Letters, which he does not address at all in Mere Christianity.  In the section on novelty I said, "[I]f 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 . . . and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work."  The obvious response to that is that if we still everything the same way we did in Constantine's day, doctors would still put leaches on their patients and there would be no vaccines against childhood illness.

Then again, Lewis -- or at least Screwtape -- might very well see that as altogether a good thing.  At least, that is the impression I get from Letter 5, Letter 28, and Letter 31, all of which distinctly seem to see longevity as a bad thing, and the shorter the life expectancy the better.  Letter 5, at the beginning of WWII, laments that war leads to many people dying young and makes people come face to face with their mortality.  Letter 31, the final one, laments the "patient" being killed by a bomb and going to Heaven, "No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation."  

But Letter 28 is the really creepy one.  Screwtape warns Wormwood not to let the "patient" be killed in the latest air raid or his soul will be lost.  He says that the majority of the human race dies in infancy (presumably before the devil had the opportunity to tempt) and a good many die young.  He also says that the young instinctively crave Heaven and lack attachment to this world.  The best chance of winning a soul, he says, is to keep the "patient" alive as long as possible to wear him down through disappointment and disillusionment -- or, alternately, to tempt him to worldliness by success.  He even says "[Humans], of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good.  But that is because we have taught them to do so."  

So apparently Lewis does not see the self-preservation instinct as our deepest seated instinct, but as a temptation by the devil that corrupts our natures.  And, indeed, he sees it as something that grows over time, while young people have no real attachment to staying alive at all.  If one takes Lewis at his word here, he sees the shorter the life expectancy the better and dying as young as possible as optimal.  Nor does he address this issue in Mere Christianity.  

He does say that since societies rise and fall but individuals have immortal souls, the individual is more important than the society, and that this is the difference between democracy and totalitarianism as well as between Christianity and atheism.  Presumably he would make an exception here, and say that it is important for some people to live long enough for the species to reproduce itself.  And by reproduce itself, I mean not just give birth to the new generation, but to raise them to adulthood -- at least the minority who live that long.

Still, if one takes Screwtape at his word, it would appear that Lewis's ideal is a society is a return to the good old days when women routinely had ten or twelve babies and saw half of them die in infancy and maybe a quarter die young.  Once the two or three who survive marry and start families of their own, the older generation has done its duty and the sooner it dies off, the better their chances of Heaven.  And yes, I know, the devil should not be taken at his word.  But if that is not Lewis's view, then he really should have clarified it in his more serious work.