Not surprisingly, C.S. Lewis has said better the point I have so often tried to make here in my blog of Live Well. Whether talking about how to succeed in college or life, making a good business deal or having a good relationship with others, there is an order to a successful life. This is true for both individuals and nations….not surprisingly nations too because a nation is merely an artificial construct to describe “all those individuals living in that specific geographic space.”
Over the past few years, as we inch closer to the major Great Crisis that is coming, I have been trying to point to the fact that we, as a nation, having abandoned key core principles and values, are moving into a direction that bodes ill. Looking then at this “bird’s eye view” of the nation, admitting at the same time that there are cracks and fissures even back to the start of the country, then I continue to argue that we are making a poor choice in moving away from those founding values.
I get it that perhaps you don’t see the founding of the nation as a good. I get it that those people in that time did things or allowed things that we, today, do not do or allow. I’m glad we made that change. However, I would still argue that in its time and space, set whether in 1776 or 1876, the nation was very successful. We were attempting concepts in government and culture that were not in the majority around the globe. And, by most measures, the people of the globe looked at our attempts and the opportunity found in this country as laudable. For sure those many peoples, so often stuck in places of limitation, of poverty and of political isolation, moved here.
There were, then, key ingredients in our make up, our recipe for success. Even as it is easy for us in 2016 to look back and see the failures, the limitations for various citizens within our own nation, it is also EASY to see that within the framework of the globe, we were a successful place to live and form a life. You didn’t see then (or now) millions fleeing our shores.
But I have argued that we have, since the 1970s, abandoned those founding principles. Within government we have certainly lost touch with the founders. And I would argue in personal morality, in the privacy of the mores and values of living well, individuals have also lost touch.
Why is that so bad? Here’s where Lewis said it so much better than I.
The longer I looked into it the more I came to suspect that I was perceiving a universal law….every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.
Earlier he gives this simple example: “The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoin the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication.”
Then he nails the point here: You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first. 
This fact is true for individuals. It is true for nations. Lewis, writing this essay “First and Second Things” in June 1942, speaks to England on this point about the nation.
It is impossible, in this context, not to inquire what our own civilization has been putting first for the past thirty years. And the answer is plain. It has been putting itself first. To preserve civilization has been the great aim….Peace, a high standard of living,hygiene, transport, science and amusement–all of these, which are what we usually mean by civilization is very natural and very necessary at a time when civilization is imperiled. But how if the shoe is on the other foot?–how if civilization has been imperiled precisely by the fact that we have all made civilization our summon bonum. Perhaps it can’t be preserved in that way. Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.
Lewis provides the angst and pursuit of peace as one evidence for his point. He notes that he feels it now understood that “a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war.” In our own time, I believe that to be true, and as President Eisenhower predicted, the military-industrial complex alongside our global system of American military bases and the never-ending “need” for more weapons to “keep us safe” has done nothing but prolong a now 71 year state of war since 1945.
Lewis ends his essay open, declining to offer what the first thing is that should be pursued. Maybe he really would not have said anything about Christianity in that moment or “old British values.” Maybe it is larger than that. All I know is that here in the USA, we’ve abandoned our old values, the very core concepts that allowed us to be the global success that would lead millions to move here or to look to our nation for moral guidance. And today it does not take a long look around to see people using violence in the name of achieving “tolerance” or many seeking to shut down free speech in the name of “peace” or “equality.” We see the family, long the historical foundation of every society in world history, constantly under attack or simply abandoned, again in the name of supposedly providing more equality or freedom or a better society.
I remain convinced that our problems are deep, spiritual issues. But we won’t solve them by laws, by violent protest or by hoping naively that people will simply do better. Those are, I submit, focusing on second things. I would offer that the “First Thing” to be focused on is the same thing the Jewish prophet Micah said—to “walk humbly with your God.” Make your life a life of peace…and not be oppressing others who disagree with you or who believe what you think to be hateful. Rather than seeking justice for wrongs done, instead be a person lives with mercy toward all.
“What can we bring to the LORD? What kind of offerings [or worship] should we give Him?…Should we sacrifice our firstborn children to pay for our sins? No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”