My regular readers know that I both love C. S. Lewis and dislike (should I say loathe….probably not, not quite, but still have strong negative feelings about) Democracy. I think the biggest frustration I have is how many have so little concept that our Founders were AGAINST the concept. Today, most, including our political leaders, simply cannot grasp that Democracy and Republic are TWO DIFFERENT FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.
Anyway, I’ve written about the failure of the form of government known as Democracy many times, so you can imagine my pleasure of finding the following quote from Lewis:
A hundred years ago we all thought that Democracy was it. Neither you nor I probably think so now. It neither allows the ordinary man to control legislation nor qualifies him to do so. The real questions are imaginary issues. And this is all the easier because democracy always in the end destroys education. It did so for you sometime ago and is now doing so for us (see a speech of Screwtape’s which will soon appear in the Sat. Evening Post). I am, you see, at my wit’s end on such matters. Only a power higher than man’s can really find a way out. Odd to compare humanity’s political inefficiency with its wonderful success in the arts. — C.S. Lewis, December 8, 1959
I can’t claim credit for the find…HarperOne has this wonderful blog on Lewis’ life and writings, and they posted the previous around July 4. Yet, the quote has deep power, especially in the realm of understanding how relativist thinking takes hold. Lewis’ correct point that in a Democracy, whoever has the most people wins, is so often lost on those who believe some form of good morals will always win out. Those same people will of course deny and reject any claim to the proper Higher Power to which we should turn. Thus, they would leave us in a situation where we want to claim the supposed better value of “Democracy” yet fail to claim the moral foundation necessary to maintain some semblance of propriety. Lewis hints at this dilemma when he wrote “Only a power higher than man’s can really find a way out.”
If we allow that the majority should triumph, as every Democracy must, then whatever the majority believes in, including communism or anarchy or killing children, must be allowed. Yet, how can any good society wish to see such a thing triumph? Can you not see the path to destruction in such a way? Well, we may already be on that path, as I have written about at length in my last book, Tracking the Storm. Lewis believed we were when he wrote the following, from The Screwtape Letters:
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement toward the discrediting, and finally elimination, of every kind of human excellence–moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy is now doing for us the work that once was done by the ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? … Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own.
As we continue to celebrate the birthday of the USA, let us quickly realize that Democracy is NOT the way forward.