The Demonization of Authority

My dear Wumpick,

So. The patient is questioning her attitude towards authority, and you are not sure what to do with it? I can almost hear your tremulous stutters as you pour out your concern. Never fear, Wumpick. Change is always dangerous for us—we prefer the slow, steady, stable road to the depths of Our Father Below. But changes present opportunities for us as well as for the Enemy, and with a little finesse you can make good use of this one.

The first thing is to get your facts straight. You must remember that authority, like so many other things, is neither here nor there for us demons: it is what the human beings make of it. This great rule, dubbed by its discoverer Screwtape the “Principle of Relativity,” is simply a practical extension of one of the first doctrines promulgated by Our Father Below, that all things are subjective, meaning subject to him (or else they soon will be).

You, it appears, have forgotten this fact, being misled by the human beings’ endless debates on the topic of authority, and how much of it is good for them, especially in the political arena. Monarchy, democracy, republic, anarchy—can you not see, Wumpick, it is none of our business? The point is to get the patient to make it her business. See if you cannot drive her into some extreme on the matter. Extremes are always to be desired.

Past ages had a tendency to valorize authority. The current age by and large decries it. Only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would anyone dare, as the anarcho-libertarians have done, to commend the absence of all authority! (Of course, even while the Left and the Right are in various ways demonizing “authority,” there is plenty of good old authoritarianism going around, in the Church and in government and the universities. But don’t allow them to notice that.)

One of the most useful things about this demonization of authority is that we can get people to blame all sorts of sins on it. Where past ages might have recognized lust or greed or pride at work, this age looks rather at the station of the lusty, greedy, and proud man and concludes that everything would be solved if only there were enough oversight to prevent “that kind of person” from doing any harm. Of course, the real answer would be to make sure that no child grows up to be “that kind of person” in the first place. But by having Authority to blame rather than the vices really at fault, we evade ever having to face such a surplus of virtuous people.

Read the rest at the Register.

Wumpick and the Angels of the Simple Life

y dear Wumpick,

Yes, the simple life is an excellent opportunity—like Gnosticism in the Ancient World and Manicheism in the Dark Ages—to practice that time-honored bait-and-switch in which we teach men to think of themselves as angels, only to reveal the truth to them too late.  You may recall some of Screwtape’s classic advice on using human chastity: let them think they’re above it all, develop sense of pride about where they stand as opposed to ordinary people, and then, when they’ve become just complacent enough to imagine that they’ve developed some kind of virtue in the area, shoot off a volley of your best imagery and watch the fireworks go.  Certainly, you can approach the matter of simple living in the same way.

But the appetite for possessions, unlike the reproductive drive and the desire for nourishment, does not provoke the same level of visceral disgust in human beings as gluttony and promiscuity.  Because it is more closely connected to their rational than their animal natures, it is difficult for even the most excessive manifestations of the appetite to become so obviously subhuman.  Exceptions exist, of course—the extremes of hoarding reported by American TV, or the excesses of certain public personalities in the matter of statuary and gold leafing may, perhaps, trigger something like the instinctive revulsion that the refined man feels at seeing another man “pig out”; but by and large it is far easier to tempt a person to despair after an impulse towards gluttony or unchastity than after an impulse buy.

On the whole then, I do not think the sudden attack is helpful against those who practice Simple Living—in which group I include everyone from the strictest minimalist to the casual recycler.  Anyone who sees good in using or wasting little is a potential target: one has only to take the good of frugality and make it contrastive.  From Mrs. DeForest wanting to leave her grandchildren a healthy planet to Mrs. DeForest looking down on Mrs. Frimp for putting bottles in the wrong receptacle is one short step for mankind, one great leap for Our Father Below.  This is the kind of thing that the virtue Simple Living most naturally lends itself too: the minor sins of vanity and uncharitability which, taken to their natural conclusion, can eat up a lifetime of good works like a carpet of ivy on a crumbling brick wall.

It is also possible, of course, to simultaneously make the obvert choice of Simple(r) Living a shield under which the native human condition of greed can take cover.  Is it possible, you ask, for someone who owns only fifty items in his Spartan apartment to be greedy?  Oh, Wumpick, it is.  Do you recall a certain man, known for his singularly uninteresting clothing and his habit of emblazoning every product his company produced with a faux-humble lowercase “i”, whose once-bare apartment was adorned by a Tiffany lamp?  A single necessary item can become an object of great indulgence for those who live simply.  And of course, this kind of hypocrisy is not limited to secular people: one recalls the nun whose vow of poverty forbade her to use more than one pin, but who confessed guiltily to her superior that she had been keeping a second one.  Her conscience was bothered.  But there is no reason that the ordinary Simple Liver’s should be.

An additional use of Simple Living is of course as an incentive to pride.  Vanity, and uncharitable comparisons to one’s neighbors, I have already mentioned.  But pride—not the desire to be seen as better, but the deep-seated belief, needing no assurance, that one is better than, indeed on a whole different level from other people—that should be the real goal of a tempter whose patient shows an inclination to the Simple Life.  Comparisons will be necessary; fortunately, as I suggested in my last letter, many are already beginning to be culturally established.  A previous generation, for example, would simply have thought Gothic Cathedrals in bad taste, or (if they belonged to the stricter sort of Puritanism) said that it was a wicked thing that the money wasn’t rather given to the poor.  But our simple secularists see the very act of living well as being something to be ashamed of.  Take care that they compare that living well to their well-living, and do not notice the similarities.  Like Mrs. DeForest, let them begin by imagining that they are doing this for others, but do not let them think about it too much.  They know intellectually that no amount of abstemiousness on their part will—in and of itself—guarantee a bowl of rice for one more child; do not let them ask what would.  If the question crosses their mind, let the little well of warm emotions radiate briefly—they are thinking of others, after all!—before dissipating it quickly with a question about whether Uber or Zipcars are less extravagant.  And of course, make sure that they determine the answer through extensive calculations leading to an arbitrary and contingent conclusion which no amount of argument with their friends can shake.  Let them think that they have mastered the art of simplicity; purified their nature to the point of an almost angelic abstemiousness.

For they do aspire to be like angels, Wumpick—make no mistake about that.  That is what lies at the root of this attraction to simplicity after all, just as it lies at the root of the love of mammon.  Both the outrageously wealthy and the unbearably simple are after one thing: autonomy.  No human being, of course, can ever really be autonomous.  But we can tease them with the prospect, encouraging them as they divest (or increase) themselves one good at a time to think with each object that they are becoming more and more independent from the world and the flesh.  What a surprise it will be to learn, finally, that all the time their “autonomy” was a mere pale and impotent emulation of the autonomy of that third and greatest enemy against whom the old monks, those earlier and more dangerous Simple Livers, so carefully guarded themselves.

Then, if you like, there will be despair—not the despair of having sinned through weakness against the god Simplicity that they worshiped, but the despair of knowing that, in the end, no human being is worthy or capable of measuring up to the glorious self-sufficiency of Our Father Below.

Your affectionate uncle,

Slangrine

Wumpick and the Simple Christmas

 

y dear Wumpick,

Your patient is preparing for Christmas.  Ah, Christmas!  The season of joy.  The season of giving.  The season of soul-rotting pop music and holiday specials which inculcate principles leading to a whole generation of failed marriages and overly-indulged children.  If the humans (and especially the American humans) had not created Christmas, we would have had to invent it.

Your patient is unfortunately already too well-educated in what the Enemy’s servants call “the True Meaning of Christmas” to fall into the usual consumerist traps.  Indeed, of late even certain branches of the secular world have taken to deriding the spectacle of economic excess which the two months from Our Hallows Eve to year’s end have become.  Regifting was a fad, and green gifts and minimalist Christmases will be as well, but they are fads which effectively (if temporarily) inoculate a small but significant portion of our pupils against one of our most useful variations on the old temptation to gluttony.

If we were not careful to stay on top of affairs, this kind of impulse to “simple living” would quickly become a scourge: in the poverty of three gifts to a person, parents, children, friends, and siblings would discover the real supremacy of familial love over material indulgence, and our power over their expending selves (which we teach them to consider equivalent to expanding selves) would be permanently reduced.  And once the family is rediscovered, the jig is up for us: church-going soon follows, along with increased appreciation for a variety of damaging good habits and, in general, commitment (a weak and ugly word that we have given them to use instead “vow” or “oath”, which they regard as being too, too old-fashioned for daily use, if vaguely attractive in the cinema).

Because this tendency to the “simple life” can take so pernicious a direction, it is therefore important, as much as possible, to take preemptive steps to ensure that those living “simple lives” associate religion with the very sort of excess which they are fleeing.  Let them forget that the Child himself had only three gifts, all of which arrived late (no postal service in those days, even a bad one); and was delivered in a stable—really, as if he had been born in the back room of a bakery in a modern grocery store: not the most romantic of places, though the Enemy’s humans have made rather a pretty story of it since.  Let the Simple Livers, then, remember not the real story, but the pictures they have seen (the more schematized and less realistic, the better) in which the Child looks less like an infant than a plastic doll, the shepherds have all been freshly coiffed a lá Sassoon, and the three kings look like tinsel-covered trees from Emma’s Christmas pageant two years ago.

Make Christmas, in other words, look wasteful.  It is not difficult to do, when the Simple Livers have already turned their hearts against waste, and the manufacturers are encouraging Christmas sales.  And because Christmas is still, despite those sales and our own best efforts, associated with religion, it will also not be difficult to make the Simple Livers associate religion with waste.

Some forays in this direction have already been made.  (You will recall the Hollywood blockbuster, The Shoes of the Fisherman?  Under the guise of anti-communism, we were able to introduce so many more subtle forms of disaffection to the West.)  Unfortunately, the current pope—despite the many excellent things which we have been able to persuade people of his having said—has not actually said anything that can be construed to help us in this area (yet).  In fact, the one time he was directly asked about the goods of the Church, he came out with some nonsense about the poor appreciating beauty.  I admit, I staggered.  For a moment it seemed as if nothing had changed in the Chair for the past three generations!

He has been no help on this matter.  So focus the Simple Livers on the collage cards and the cheap, heavy decorations, on the endless piping of music over-saturated with emotion and the fact that everything must now be reissued in two new colors; and make sure that they also remember—without really thinking about—what some fool of an Evangelical once called “The Reason for the Season.”  Nothing could be more perfectly calibrated than the sight of a mall at Christmas to ensure that no investigation whatsoever of that Reason occurs. 

Your ever affectionate uncle,

Slangrine

Wumpick and the Wimpy Apostolate

[On occasion, when I produce some fictional missive or dialogue for this blog, I feel it necessary to remind my readers that the persons represented bear no resemblance to other persons, real.  (Their resemblance to other fictional persons is a matter of course.)  In the present instance I think it prudent to reiterate for the sake of my friends that the patient is NOT me, nor her state of mind mine.  What relation my habits of thought bear to those of the other characters in this drama, it should—even to those who know me well—be wholly unnecessary to state. ~Saturday.]

My dear Wumpick,

Wumpick and the Opposite Job

My Dear Wumpick,

So, your patient is dissatisfied with her current situation?  Certain duties attendant upon her state in life, or at any rate, upon her present occupations, she finds annoying?  More damnably yet, she finds them—boring?  Boredom, you know, is the ultimate torture conceivable by the mind of modern Western man.  This only goes to show that modern Western man has a very deficient concept of torture.  Of course, in this as in all errors the humans make, there is an inkling of truth.  There are from the human standpoint many and far more painful tortures than boredom; but from our standpoint there are few more effective.  You have heard the American phrase, “The idle brain is the devil's playground.”  There is a great deal of truth in that.  Certain men’s vices can tempt them to certain sins; boredom can tempt almost anyone to almost anything.

Wumpick and the Trough

My Dear Wumpick,

So, your patient is going through one of those troughs that the man from Belfast described in his scurrilous, indecent, and, I need hardly add, inaccurate scrawl concerning the tactics we employ for the cause of Our Father Below? I hope she does not know about the troughs, Wumpick? that she has not read that book? Or at least, if she had read it (I seem to recall your predecessor mentioning it in his dossier) I hope that it was some time ago. Of course, she has heard of the book; but you will have taken care to associate it in her mind with what the humans call “interpersonal relations,” and managed to keep the more spiritual chapters out of, or at any rate, in the back of, her head. This is all well and good, especially if you can keep helping her see the faults of the fictitious patient, his fiancé, his mother, as well as the faults of the real, living people around her, but not those in herself. See that she applies the book’s lessons very well, very personally; and she will—apply them, well, personally—to every person but herself! See that it never enters her mind to do that.

Wumpick and the Right Kind of Vanity

My dear Wumpick,

So, your patient has embarrassed herself, and you are enjoying her humiliation.  I have nothing against that, of course—though [expurgated] knows why you should be enjoying yourself at all.  Your attitude in this is highly suggestive of an unhealthy absorption of human fantasies about spying.  It is clear that you consider it to be an extremely romantic activity, one more likely to be pleasurable to the practitioner than not—Bondism, if you will.  You had better not be becoming a Bondist, Wumpick.  Even the silliest humans, in their heart of hearts, know better than to romanticize undercover work.  War is war, and war is hell, as one of their generals said; and he meant no compliment to us.  If you will pick a few crumbs of pleasure while you are at it, see that you don't gorge yourself.  Even the humans know that a little hunger sharpens the brain.

Wumpick and Safety

My Dear Wumpick,

I find it rather ironic, all this talk of yours about making your patient "safe."  Of course you would like your patient to be "safe"—safely ensconced in her little tomb, shelved among the myriads of others who have already found their way to Our Father Below.  That is the sort of safety to which all tempter aspire on behalf of their patients.  But "safe" among the humans is the same as dead. 

Wumpick and the Resolutions

My dear Wumpick,
So, has your patient made any New Year’s resolutions this time round? And how are they going? Please inform me at your earliest convenience. The new year is a time ripe with possibilities for us—more so than Lent, which is the closest religious equivalent to the secular world’s annual attempts at self-reform.

The Most Jealous God

My Dear Wumpick,

Of course, you must expect your patient to be excited about—that day. She is a Christian, and it is only natural that her Christianity should provide her with a reason for excitement.

Wumpick and the Abovitists

My dear Wumpick,

I do wish you would stick to your time table. The fact is that none of my advice will do you any good if you do not send in your reports promptly. You complain in your most recent report that my advice on the Slews "didn't apply" to your patient, because your patient was "an intellectual"!

Wumpick and the Slews

My dear Wumpick,

I closed my last letter with a promise, you may recall, to look at the temptations your woman faces in living within the modern world—more precisely, those temptations that regard her femininity or, as the modern humans would put it, her "self-image." I said, and it is fortunately unquestionably true, that her perception of herself as a woman will be affected by the images of femininity around her, even if—mark you—even if she disapproves of, dislikes, or actually despises those images of femininity which the culture upholds.

Wumpick and Woman

My dear Wumpick,

The one thing you must on no account forget is that your patient is a Woman. You must never assume that merely because a temptation or technique works well upon a man (I understand that your previous patients have all been men? It shows, Wumpick; it shows ...) that it can be applied with equal success to the opposite sex.

My Dear Wumpick ...

In an admittedly dubious and belated homage to Labor Day, with respect to those who've done this sort of thing far better (including Mary Eberstadt, Peter Kreeft, the forgotten Joseph A. Breig, and the master of them all, C.S. Lewis):

My dear Wumpick,

I am a little perplexed by your statement that you patient is lazy. In what do you suppose laziness among humans consists? Surely you do not think that mere dissatisfaction with their labors is enough to make them lazy or, in the Enemy’s eyes, guilty of the capital sin of Sloth?