Lewis on Good Work and Good Works

I'm still reading C. S. Lewis! I have wondered many times in recent years what Lewis would have said on simplicity and social issues, not remembering that, in fact, he had written about them in an essay called "Good Work and Good Works."

In this essay, Lewis starts out with a description of consumerism, the emphasis on trade for its own sake that has replaced the fine workmanship of past ages (which he calls Good Work). But then he segues into a broader discussion of his age and its economy, which though earlier and somewhat different from ours, still has more in common than not.

These first three quotes don't really form a coherent argument. I've just included them because they're insightful:

At every stage of the process, work is being done whose sole value lies in the money it brings.

The more important trade is, the more people are condemned to--and worse still, learn to prefer--[jobs that require them to produce useless and ugly goods].

Within my lifetime in England money was (very properly) collected to buy shirts for some men who were out of work. The work they were out of was the manufacture of shirts.

But then he starts to discuss how one might make a principled reaction to this insanity:

The main practical task for most of us is not to give the Big Men advice about how to end our fatal economy--we have none to give and they wouldn't listen--but to consider how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as possible...It is something even to recognize that it is fatal and insane...We may have to earn our living by taking part in the production of objects which are rotten in quality and which, even if they were good in quality, would not be worth producing--the demand or "market" for them having been simply engineered by advertisement. Beside the waters of Babylon--or the assembly belt--we shall still say inwardly, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning." (It will.)

And of course we shall keep our eyes skinned for any chance of escape. If we have any "choice of a career" (but has one man in a thousand any such thing?) we shall be after the sane jobs like greyhounds and stick there like limpets. We shall try, if we get the chance, to earn our living by doing well what would be worth doing even if we had not our living to earn. A considerable mortification of our avarice may be necessary. It is usually the insane jobs that lead to big money; they are often also the least laborious.

Great works (of art) and "good works" (of charity) had better also be Good Work. Let choirs sing well or not at all. Otherwise we merely confirm the majority in their conviction that the world of Business, which does with such efficiency so much that never really needed doing, is the real, the adult, and the practical world; and that all this "culture" and all this "religion" (horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateurish, and rather effeminate activities.

I've copied a hodgepodge here, but it's heartening to hear Lewis say these things. I don't take offense either to his request that choirs sing well (knowing that he's not talking about people who are just learning), to his criticisms of abstract commerce (even though I am, like most of us, fed by it), or to his pejorative use of the word "effeminate."

I have often wondered how Lewis, a professor, would react to today's tenure system, at least in the form I'm familiar with here in the U.S. For much the same disease has infected academics that had infected industry in his day: Publish or perish often that means writing things no one really enjoys in language that no one can really read. Something tells me he would not approve.

But also, I wonder how Lewis would react to the sort of information business that has largely replaced manufacture in the Western world. I'm not sure that it really changes the equation that much, except that we are even farther removed from what we really need, and that the products of our labor seem to require even less that they be "sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated." (Including, no doubt, my own blogging.) On the contrary, they seem to make up for this lack old-fashioned quality by painting on a veneer of "pastoral narrative," or worse, one of hipness, irony and sarcasm.

What shall we then do? I suppose that the only answer I have is to, like Lewis, to keep human dignity in mind, to keep my eyes peeled for any chance of escape, and be willing to mortify my avarice. But I don't really have an answer. I was just heartened that Lewis saw the problem, too.

Screwtape on education

More C.S. Lewis from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night and Other Essays. I promise I didn't copy this idea from Cindy, as I've been meaning to post it for two days, but it certainly is a striking coincidence, and if you read it, really does remind me of the current attitude towards education:

I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be--as Mine was--one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as a lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep!

After that welcoming introduction, which reminds me of the way we treat our high school juniors, Screwtape gets down to details about the reason why souls in Hell these days are of such poor quality:

It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...The difficulty lay in their very smallness and feebleness. Here were 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 becomes possible...They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur...

Of course, Lewis eventually gets around to explaining how these muddled souls finally became capable of making a choice worth damnation, but that's a much more serious subject that makes me instead want to quote his book The Great Divorce. My point in posting these was merely to point out some parallels with education.

On Obstinacy in Belief

When the going gets tough, the tough...read C.S. Lewis. I know some people prefer more emotional/devotional fare, but as for me, I love to parse an argument when feeling assailed:

Our opponents...have every right to dispute with us about the grounds of our original assent. But they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the assent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evidence. They cannot of course be expected to know on what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is always rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to see how the quality of the object which we think we are beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view that if this were a delusion then we should have to say that the universe had produced no real thing of comparable value and that all explanations of the delusion seemed somehow less important than the thing explained. That is knowledge we cannot communicate. But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative though into what might be called the logic of personal relations.

--From "Obstinacy in Belief," from The World's Last Night and Other Essays

Because arguments often uncover a reason for hope, and put it on a firm foundation so your mouthy mind will stop its constant yammering.