Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures 20240703

University this summer. Eight years ago, our family had to make a decision about the move, and we ended up deciding to come to grand rapids. In our pro and con list, this was a major plus. Im glad to be here. Im glad that we are here in person. It wasnt too long ago when we had to meet in a rather gnostic fashion. Now that we can meet is a very good thing. Im also does delighted to join you because we are discussing the intersection of cs lewis, liberty, and the law. Or jack lewis, as he was known by his family and friends. I probably dont have to sell you on why lewis, liberty, and law is a fun conversation. I hope you find the conversation eliminating, whether you are new to lewis, or a longtime admirer. Speaking of newcomers to lewis, we get one nice account of meeting lewis for the first time from george sayer, who was a student of lewis is at oxford and one of his first biographers. He writes, as i walked around oxford, around New Buildings completed in 1458, i found the man that lewis had called tullers, sitting in front of the steps in front of the arcade. How did you get on . Oh, i think rather well. I think he will be a most interesting tutor to have. Interesting. Yes, hes certainly that, said the man who i later learned was j. R. R. Tolkien. Youll never get to the bottom of him. We are not going to get to the bottom of him, either. We are going to try to make headway into lewiss views. I want to hit on four areas about lewis, law, and liberty in my opening remarks, as food for thought for our discussion afterwards. First, that contrary to the conventional wisdom that lewis disdained and ignored politics, his personal life was intertwined with politics and law. Sometimes, even policy. One event in particular spurred him to write a short essay in which he endorses a version of limited government theory in almost explicitly lockean terms. Second, we will talk about a particular justice issue that lewis was quite invested in. He did get a bit into the Public Policy weeds when it came to the criminal justice system. Lewis cared deeply about law on the human level. Third, we will move from that specific policy issue to the big political picture. Lewis wrestled with the purpose of government on a macro scale. Particularly, with his attitude about the welfare state. Lewis was by instinct and temperament very sympathetic to a more libertarian approach and limit, save, grow act five conservativism. Later on in life, he became more aware of the plight of the misfortunate. Fourth, we move from human made law and human politics toa law , with a capital l. This is the enduring law, from which any merely human law gets its legitimacy. As we will see, lewis is not so much a natural law theorist, but he is, it is safe to say, a natural law apologist. I will conclude by suggesting that all of lewiss musings about politics, law, both civil and natural, and liberty, are framed in a teleological context that is, his understanding of liberty, properly understood, is directional. It is heading somewhere. We, as human beings, are heading somewhere. To miss this aspect of lewiss teaching is to misunderstand Everything Else we might get from him. Claim number one, the personal and the political. The conventional wisdom on lewis was that he really didnt care much for politics, or for a law, and that he would not spend much time on those things, or liberty, either. And there is some truth to that, in some respects. The truth, also, is that he was surrounded by talk of law and politics from his Early Childhood come all the way through to his death on november 22nd, in 1963, also the same day that jfk goes down, and aldous huxley, author of brave new world, passes. We dont have time for the full case of lewiss politics today, or his views. He did remain interested in politics throughout his life. His father, albert lewis, was a lawyer, and apparently took his work home with him. Lewiss older brother described their childhood as dominated by a onesided torrent of grumble about irish politics. It is hard to avoid talk of law and politics if you grow up in ireland, as lewis did. His life as a young man was also dominated by political matters. After 1914, all young, british men, his age, knew that sooner or later they would be drafted to serve in the first world war. Lewis did serve in the indigent infantry. His father tried to get him into the artillery, but lewis was so bad at math, that was not an option. If you struggle with math, you are in good company with lewis. His wife, after the war, became much more scholarly. On his return, he wrote to his father that reconvening with his fellow students, most, now veterans, in the Junior Common Room of University College in oxford in 1919, and they read the minutes from their last meeting, some five years before, with nothing to record in the meantime. I dont know if any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly, lewis reflected, all the enlistments and training, the viscera, and trauma of the fighting men in the trenches, and the resulting physical and spiritual brokenness that came from political decisions, and counter decisions, made by european politicians, civil servants, and military leaders. The staggering waste and an coprincipal loss caused by the great war cast an immense shadow over the turn of the century generation of britons. It is no wonder that lewis would harbor a lifelong distrust of government. As with most of us, lewiss political views were intimately connected to his biography. And so biographical details shed some light on those views. I want to focus on one particular event from lewiss personal life that gives us an interesting insight into his view of life and liberty. Lewis married joy davidman gresham. This is the account depicted in the plate shadowlands. Joy recovered from her cancer, and they had four short but happy years together before the cancer returned and took her life at the age of 43 in july of 1960. What you may not know about joy lewis is that she is a former communist, a rather salty literary critic, an american of eastern jewish background. As any good american, she had a shotgun. She was known to be rather prolific with the shotgun in oxford. During this time, they had some trouble with some local young men. Hooligans who had trespassed on their property and would federalize, steal, cut down trees, all sorts of mischief. And on one occasion, when lewis was wheeling joy around for a walk in their backyard, they caught the young men in the act. Lewis chivalrous . Jumped in front of joyce wilcher, ostensibly to protect her. I cant repeat in this company exactly what joy said, but i will paraphrase. It was something to the effect of, gosh darn it, jack. Get out of my way. You are blocking my aim. One result of this encounter was lewiss peace, piece, delinquents in the snow. In this essay, lewis complains about how the Legal Process had failed miserably. The presiding judge had let them off with a fine. He encouraged them to stop such prints, as if planned robbery and vandalism are mere pranks. Lewis worried about what such leniency might mean for englands political future. He took this opportunity to describe how the social compact should work in theory, while warning of the consequences if the system broke down in practice. According to the classical lyrical theory of this country, lewis summarized, we surrender our rights of self protection to the state on the condition that the state would protect us. So a dilemma arises when the state does not live up to its end of the bargain. The states promise of protection is what morally grounds our obligation to civil obedience, according to lewis. If this sounds to you a little bit like john locke, i think you are onto something. The governments protection of natural rights, including the right to property, is why it is right for us to pay taxes, and wrong for us to use vigilante justice. Lewis argues that the state protects us less because it is unwilling to protect us from criminals at home, and it grows less and less able to protect us from foreign enemies. At the same time, it demands from us, more and more. We seldom have fewer rights and liberties, nor more burdens. We get less security in return. While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away. Lewis drew the same conclusion from the same state of affairs that locke did. Nature and the right of self protection reverts to the individual. I share this reflection of lewis is not only as an excuse to tell that story about joy lewis and her shotgun, but because it illustrates the libertarian leaning, literally , book tv side of lewiss personality. He was very careful not to appear too partisan one way or the other. He went so far as to turn down Winston Churchills proposal to honor lewis by making him a commander of the british empire. Lewis feared that i would be used by some critics to paint him as a political conservative. We do see here in this episode, and the peace that resulted from it a little bit of his views. He had a deep distrust of government power, whether it was misused, or not used properly enough to keep the domestic peace. This deep distrust was not merely theoretical, but personal and felt by lewis. So claim number two. Lewis on law and Public Policy. Lewiss interest in criminal justice extended beyond this case with the hooligans. In may of 1962, lewis wrote to the poet, t. S. Eliot, the following. We must have a talk. I wish you would write an essay on it, about punishment. The modern view, by excluding the retributive element, is hideously immoral. It is filed tyranny to submit them into compulsory cure, or sacrifice him to the deterrence of others, unless he deserves it. One might wonder why lewis didnt write the essay himself. Except that he did. 13 years earlier, lewis wrote that that the humanitarian theory of punishment which first appeared in an australian law journal in 1939 he sent it to an australian journal because he could get no hearing for it in england. Nevertheless, the piece did elicit responses from three law professors. The resulting back and forth was published. Can find side of the debate. In his essay about the hooligans, lewis was concerned about offenders being let off too easily, and what that means for the fundamental social compact. Here, he is concerned with the criminals being treated as less than human. He was worried about developments in european jurisprudence such that deterrence and rehabilitation become the chief goals of the criminal justice system. Rather than punishing a wrongdoer simply because he or she deserves it. It may sound paradoxical, but lewis believed that when we punish a human being for wrong, we acknowledge the dignity of that human being, and make possible restoration, because that human being should have, and could have, known better. He has dignity enough to know better. There is nothing wrong with the deterring crime or rehabilitating the criminal as the side effect of a prison term, lewis argued, but if those are the chief priorities, then there are serious problems. First, deterrence treats the criminal, who is still a human being made in gods image of intrinsic worth, as a mere means, rather than an end in himself. In that case, the more effective the punishment, that the state might put on for the public, the better for deterrence. Lewis was worried about the truth of whether the accused is actually guilty or not does not matter. It is the effect of the show. Rehabilitation has achieved priority, lewis worried. It meant that instead of criminals being sentenced by their peers to a decimated designated amount of time, being punished for what they have done, criminals will instead be treated as patients who are sick. It will be experts in psychology who will determine when, or if, they are ever cured. Only then will they be released. Unlike a prison sentence, there is no time limit on when that will happen. And yet, an individuals freedom will still be restricted and feel like a sentence. There is no limit to that restriction in principle, except what the expert doctors have to say. Who are we ordinary citizens to question the considerable expertise of the experts . Lewis insisted that only the concept of moral desserts can ground just punishments and limit the states abuse of power. We see in this essay how seriously lewis took human freedom and dignity, and that he applied it even to those people, criminals, whose interest in Dignity Society is most likely to ignore or overlook. We see also in the responses from the scholars of law that they took lewis seriously on this point, which is remarkable, given that his day job was as a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. We also see how important this policy issue was to lewis. 13 years later, near the end of his life, while convalescing from Serious Health issues, he tries to get t. S. Eliot to take up the case. Claim number three. Thus far, we have discussed lewis his personal connections to his thinking about politics. Now we move to it at a theoretical level. In particular, the welfare state , and both of the legitimate purpose of government, and the temptations that come with the use of power. Lewis was deeply concerned about the abuses of an overly ambitious government. After all, human depravity gives both of the rationale for government, as well as reason to fear its excess. In a short essay, lewis said, im a democrat because i believe in the fall of man. He says that many others endorse democracy for the wrong reasons. He mentions here russo. He thinks that human beings are naturally good in that everyone deserves a share in government. Lewis says that for myself, i dont deserve a share in ruling a hen roost, much less government. Lewis wrestled with attention between his desire for limited government, which respects a robust, private sphere, and massive social needs that seemingly only government can address. Government must exist, lewis acknowledged, but he also insisted that government existed for the good of individual groups, and individuals and their liberty. Consider what lewis wrote about the ultimate purpose of government. As long as we are thinking of natural values, we must say that the son looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone, reading a book that interests him. All economies, politics, laws, and institutions they, so far as they prolong such scenes, are a mere plow in the sand, a meaningless vexation of the spirit. Collective vanities are necessary. Lewis insisted that the state existed for individuals and households, and not the other way around. We see here, a break from some of his favorite teachers. Plato and aristotle. Both of those thinkers alike favor the collective over the individual. The public over the private. Aristotle in particular defines political activity as an intrinsically natural part of human flourishing. Lewis, on the other hand, saw political activity as only a means, and often, a distasteful one, at that, to genuine aspects of human flourishing. Not an intrinsic part of flourishing itself. Yet, even as only a means, collective activities are necessary. Lewis recognized the appeal of technocratic solutions to address our collective social problems. The temptation to invest government with more power, he noted, always works on a real need that has been neglected. Lewis feared that legitimate human problems that require social coordination and collective activity will give rise to solutions that are far worse than the original crisis. Something we may have witnessed in the last few years. In his book, that hideous strength, the conclusion to his Science Fiction trilogy, there is a conspiratorial organization, and this demonstrates his fear. Lewis writes, we have, on the one hand, a desperate need. Hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have on the other, the conception of something that might meet it. Omnicompetent global technocracy. Using that as a pretext to the Community Power is not a new temptation. The difference in the mid20th century, lewis warned, was that success looked more and more like a legitimate possibility. He writes, in the ancient world, individuals have sold themselves as slaves in order to eat. So, in society, here is a witch doctor who can save us from the sorceress. A warlord who can save us from the barbarians. The church that can save us from. Give them what they ask. Give ourselves to them, bound and blindfolded, if only they will. Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish for them not to. Yet, we can hardly bear that they should. The question about progress has become the question of whether we can discover any way of submitting to the world wide paternalism of technocracy without losing privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super welfare state honey and avoiding the sting . Whether we can get that welfare state honey without posting was perhaps the most pressing, practical political question for lewis. The stakes were, and remain, enormous. While acknowledging the great needs which technology and the government provides answers, lewis endorsed simple values that he feared were endangered by a know it all state. To live ones life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death. This is what liberty meant for lewis. This was the good life. He was skeptical that the modern state can deliver a cure worth of the cost. Lewis predicted that as always, some men will take charge of the destiny of others. They will be men, none perfect, some greedy, cruel, and dishonest. With an allusion to the namesake of our institutional post this week, he asked rhetorically about the welfare state, whether we have discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt, as it has done before. Claim number four. Lewis, as natural law apologist. We move now from lowercase law and liberty and politics to law and liberty with uppercase ls. We cant talk about lewis and law without discussing natural law. As i said, i believe lewis was a natural law apologist, rather than a theorist. We dont go to lewis for the nooks and crannies of how the natural law system delivers specific moral conclusions on this or that particular issue, but lewis does articulate the inescapable reality of the natural law. He defends natural law in positive terms, arguing for the reality of the moral law, but also, in negative terms, showcasing how stark the alternatives are, if we abandoned the natural law. He also delivers these apologies, these defenses, in a straightforward, logical work like mere christianity, and the abolition of man, this year being the 80th anniversary of the abolition of man. He also illustrates these ideas imaginatively in his fiction, most prominently in the scifi trilogy, but also in the chronicles of narnia, and other writings. In 1941, lewis delivered the first of his celebrated bbc broadcast talks, which would later be compiled and published as mere christianity. The bbc had invited lewis to give a series of talks explaining the foundation of beliefs of christianity to a war weary nation. In his first segment, lewis introduced, or reintroduced, to the british public, the idea of natural law. He began by directing our attention to everyday conversation, listening to others talk about how we are constantly appealing to moral standards and interacting with each other. I gave you a bit of my orange. You give me a bit of yours. Hey, dont cut in line. You promised you would do this. We are constantly appealing to some kind of standard. This doesnt make sense unless we believe that there is a standard out there that we can appeal to. A law of sorts. This law, lewis explains, is called the law of nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature, and did not need to be taught it. And, he added, i believe they are right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong, unless right is a real thing that the at bottom knew, and we did. If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then though we might have still had to fight them, we could no more blame them for that fan for the color of their hair. Lewis used the confrontation with the evils of nazism, and he gets a pass from godwins law because he actually fought. If youre moral ideas can be true, and those of the , less true, then there must be something, some real morality for them to be true about. The reality of basic moral principles, known, on some level, by everyone, was foundational to lewiss understanding of the christian message. The first basic point of his talk, therefore, was that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way and cannot really get rid of it. An essential second claim from lewis was that they do not, in fact, behave in that way. He maintained that these two claims, that there is a natural moral law, and we failed to keep it, are the foundation of all Clear Thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. Moreover, lewis did not think that a postchristian society could recover moral truth by first directly becoming christian. And to be clear, he believed that the britain of his day was postchristian, the same way that a divorce is to one who is married. Lewis thought the tree matter was reversed. The world must return to a belief in real, objective morality. Only then would it be open to returning to christianity. Christianity is addressed to penitence. Only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law. It offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help to keeping that law, and by so doing, reaffirms it. In other words, you have to admit you are sick before you will see the doctor. And jesus did not come for the healthy. In his essay, lewis posits that the main difference between the ancients and the moderns, the christians, the , the pagans, all believed that there was something wrong with them, and they were on trial. God was the judge. We moderns, lewis says, put god at the dock. He has to make his case as to why we should believe in him. We might agree, but the roles are reversed. One challenge faced by the modern world for the christian, for lewis, for morally serious people, is that many deny that morality as any objective basis at all. That doesnt mean that they are relativists, or mildmannered about their own moral claims, as we see in our civil or uncivil discourse today, or from it, but morality on various modern accounts, is merely a social construct that exists to serve the interests of its creators. That idea, lewis argued, was the disease that would certainly end our species, and in my view, our souls, if it is not crushed. Lewis did not so much argue to the conclusion that the natural law exists. That is a tricky proposition for reasons we will get to shortly, but he is trying to persuade his audience, and us, that we already believe in objective morality. Lewis didnt also just defend natural law. He played offense. He attacked alternatives, and nowhere more powerfully than in the three lectures that became his book, the abolition of man. This was originally delivered as three lectures at the university of durham 80 years ago this year. One of the most intriguing features of abolition is how lewis framed the debate. Many works of natural law theory takes something of a defensive position, where the author assumes that natural law is on trial, or in the dock, as lewis might say, and must be proved valid, or reasonable. Lewis does not take that tack. Instead, he turns the tables. Instead of assuming that it must be established or defended, he proposed to interrogate the alternatives. Critics aim to undermine the old values by teaching students to see through, or check the privilege of oldfashioned sentiments and moral judgments. But why think we should only defend our position . Why not ask what motivates them, what grounds their positions . What do they propose as a replacement to objective morality . One important clue to understanding what lewis is up to in the abolition of man is found near the conclusion to the last battle. Looses apocalyptic conclusion to the chronicles of narnia. In this scene, the forces of evil have been defeated. Goodness has prevailed. Aslan wins in the narnia chronicles. Yet one troubling plot point remains unresolved. The treacherous dwarfs are determined to defeat from the jaws of victory. They sit, huddled and miserable, in the dark confines of what they take to be a black hole. Queen lucy, always lewiss moral exemplar, tries to persuade the doors to see things as they are. They are not in a black hole, but in the midst of the open sky, the green grass and fragrant flowers. Ice awaits them, if only they have eyes to see and ears to hear. Lucy tearfully bakes aslan to help the dwarves. He provides them a feast, but to no avail. Not even aslan will force those who choose blindness to see what is. They will not let us help them, aslan says. They have chosen cunning instead of their belief. Their prison is in their own mind, yet, they are in the present, and so afraid of being taken in, that they cannot be taken out. The last chapter of the abolition of man is about the predicament of those people who do not merely misunderstand or misapply this teaching, but who reject root and branch, the very possibility of moral reality. It is about the predicament of nihilism. From lewiss perspective, writing a book of natural law theory, when many people question the very foundation of morality itself, would be something of a fools errand. You dont write chest manuals for those who think that games are a complete waste of time. You cannot persuade someone to take their medicine if they reject the good of health altogether. You dont review and opera for cultural philistines who despise music. One has the first right about the intrinsic good of play. The good of health. The good of art and music. Only if those premises are good or accepted can one have a conversation or even an argument about games, medicine, and music. So how does one argue about First Principles . Lewis believes we cannot argue to them point we argue from them. He says, the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We just see that there is no reason why my neighbors happiness should be sacrificed to my own. We see thatthings which e equal to the same thing, they equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom. That is not because they are irrational, but because they are so selfevident, and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. To not see that reasonableness is to be like the narnian dwarfs. Morally blind. Lewis does not try to prove the vadity of natural law, but rather, he appeals to our capacity to reason to illustrate the alternatives to fundamental principles. Lewis hopes to awaken a realization in his readers that they do, after all, belief in natural law. He does this differently in each of the three chapters, laying out a platonic and aristotelian image of the person, as was the high stakes for moral education. In the second chapter, the way lewis dissects any attempt to extract one isolated component of the natural law, and build a new ethic around that, well, getting rid of all the others. In the last chapter of the abolition of man, does not present the positive case for natural law, as it does reveal the horrific alternative. We have been through a brief survey of some of lewiss thoughts about law and liberty. We glanced quickly at his biography and his thinking about criminal justice and the welfare state. We have touched briefly on looses work defending natural law, and putting its alternatives to the test. I said earlier that i would conclude with a brief word on lewiss ultimate understanding of the party. In mere christianity, lewis uses a fleet of ships to illustrate morality. Morality consists of two parts, he writes. One, we might think of as external relations. Making sure each ship interacts well with all the other ships, not cutting them off, and not running into them. The other part of morality is internal, keeping ones own ship seaworthy by proper maintenance and discipline. But lewis notes the two parts are interconnected. If you let your own ship go to pot, youre not likely to long avoid mishaps with the other ships. If you are constantly running into other ships, your own wont remain seaworthy very long. But there is a third element, and that is where the ships are sailing too. Lewis took seriously law and politics and culture. Justice, literature, all sorts of earthly goods. Ultimately, true liberty is not the absence of restraint and the ambitious pursuit of whatever ones desires happen to be. It is not sailing however one likes to wherever one likes. Genuine liberty is the freedom to become what we ought to be. To go where we are called. Lewis was nothing, if not insistent that we were meant for more than this world. All of those goods that i mentioned, culture, justice, literature, music, family, our second things. They are vitally important. Wonderful, creation of goods, but they are not the first thing. Ultimately, one must understand lewis within the context of his christian faith. The practical problems of religion and law and political liberty are important. Lewis offers some resources with which to grapple with these problems. Understanding natural law and objective morality is crucial. Looses thought on the matter can be instructive. Our resistance individually and collectively to the moral law and rationality itself is discouraging. Lewiss rational arguments and fictional apologetics should inspire us to do better. But lewis, the mere christian, would have us remember that for christians, the success of our witness defense not even not only or primarily on these things. It depends on the people of god living out their faith with integrity, humility, and verve. We will not achieve the purpose on this side of eternity. Although this earthly life is important, it does take place in the shadowlands, and does not compare with the coming reality of heaven, where we will go further up and further in. The answers that lewis did leave behind, positive and negative arguments for the moral law, the rational christian apologetic, should inspire those who shared his vision, to continue in that tradition. As lewis observed, the great heroes of the faith all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since that christians have ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you will get neither. We would do well to do likewise. Thank you. This point, we havek of time for q a. Point, we havek we have mike here and a mic here. Spoke at this point, we have a chunk of time for q a. We have mike here. If you have any questions, challenges, diatribes, annunciations, come on up. Imh spoke i am fascinated with lewiss understanding of social order. I appreciate the weight this lecture has illustrated some of his concerns with not allowing the state to trump other kinds of orders. Friendships and whatnot. I do remember in one of lewiss essays, it mightve been membership, he talked about democracy being a necessary fiction. It was something this idea that fundamental equality is an illusion, but a necessary illusion. I would love to hear you comment on this concept of lewis, which is that democracy is a necessary fiction. I think there is the essay membership manager essay equality. I think he says that democracy rests on the fiction of our equality. He takes aim at equality there. As a good in itself, he does not take equality is a good in itself. He likens it to medicine and clothing, that is needed because of the fall. Actually, god created us to delight in unequal relationships. We help our children when they are younger and we look up to coaches or to saints. We dont claim to be equal to a saint. And so, hes not against equality. Some goods are mechanical goods, or goods we need because of the fall. Lewis thinks that legal equality is very good. He says, we need more economic equality. But he says that hes not against equality in those spheres. The chief liability of a democratic government could be a democratic culture in which everyone thinks im as good as you, to the next person. He thinks that leads to greed, which is spiritual poison. He says in that essay that we should work for more equality in the legal sphere and the economic sphere, but that in our relationships, we should not be so troubled by any quality. I will say one more thing. I have another talk on this subject. In the great divorce, that is lewis imagining himself visiting , and then riding a bus to heaven. In that book, he has a vision of a woman coming in who is in the procession. His guide says that is when you wouldnt have heard of, but during her life, she was saintly. She took in the poor and the kids and even animals. She lived an incredible life. Looses idea of greatness is someone who lives saintly and sanctified life, following gods commands. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for your talk. I was wondering if you could talk some more about looses concept of freedom. My understanding is that he believes that the law enhances our freedom so it is not freedom from law. Laws actually provide the basis of human flourishing. Is that correct . I think given the fall, we need human loss to direct us. Think about guardrails that limit us for our good so we can get to where we should go. I think there is a sense to say that he endorses of you that law restricts us for our good, but he is also, as a believer in the fall, he knows that there are fallen people. In terms of what he is worried about, he is more worried about intrusions than about articulating the need for it. For gods law, i think it is much more the law of what it means for us to flourish. That this is if im talking with my students, we talk about the prospective athlete who wants to be excellent. She will restrict aspects of her life. She will not sleep in. She will restrict her diet. She will turn down other opportunities to have the freedom to be a great athlete. I do think that lewiss deeper conception of gods love for us is that there are things we should say no to, because there is this deeper purpose of being that god calls us to be. You put it excellently. Okay. That are all heading into an inevitable eternal destiny to either heaven or hell and all inadvertently helping each other to one or the other. Any depicts this very greatly, of course, in the great divorce. So my question is in light of this fact of the eternal destiny, how does retributive punishment and justice recognize the including Capital Punishment, recognize the dignity of both the Capital Punishment, recognize the dignity of both the perpetrator and the victim . He thinks that it respects their dignity, because they are treated as someone who could have known better. When we think about an animal doing something wrong, we might scold it but we dont really blame it in the same way. From his point of view, this is something that comes up in his treatment of purgatory, which is controversial among some, basically saying, if i need to be cleansed or punished, i should want that, that i deserve it. You are exactly right about the expiration of Capital Punishment remains a live issue. He, nowhere, has a considered treatment of that but he did write a couple of letters to the newspaper. Lewis did not like newspapers, he said something important happens, someone would tell him. He did write a few newspapers, one on Capital Punishment, and he did argue, the understanding that he was necessarily wrong. I think it was not quite settled on it. s argument was he was not sure that anyone should spend 40 years or the rest of their life in prison would be any more likely than someone with two weeks until the gallows to come to find faith. So, i want to be careful, i dont want to say what i think that lewis said, but there is room in there for the sort of thinking that, when it comes to someones reception of truth, such that they might save, its not entirely clear that living the rest of ones life in prison would lead to that over Capital Punishment. That said, i dont want to say that lewis officially or publicly endorsed Capital Punishment, i think he was uneasy about it, as i think that anyone should be, but he did not argue that side of it. Thank you. Thank you, dr. Lawson, for your talk today. The first question, thinking about lewiss chapter on hierarchy, you can see that lewis does think there is room for equality, he deeply loves the sense of hierarchy. My question for you, based on your reading of lewis, and he wrote so much, and youve read i so much of what he wrote, lewis seems to be incredibly prophetic, in that he, writing in the late 30s through the 50s, not in particulars, but in very broad trends he accurately predicted several moves that modernity would make. Some of them that seem obvious to me at least are at the end of abolition of man, he is outlining the transhumanist movement, he projects that globalism is going to be the trend. He is almost talking about some of the big tech privacy invasions that are possible today without the Actual Technology in his day. He thought the government was going to continue to grow, and that would continue to be a danger to liberty. With that, what, in your view, what allowed lewis to be so prophetic . Why was he able to look at his world, and see the trends, and be more right than wrong, in this broad sweeping sense . Its a fun question. Just recently, ross doubt that had a piece i would recommend to you. If you also want to see a bit of lewis, that transhumanist subject you mentioned, google ray kurzweil, who was the chief engineer at google, and has been waiting for the singularity. He has collected every scrap of information about his father , in the hopes that once ai reaches singularity he will be effectively able to recreate his father and commune in the cloud. Some of these things sound outlandish to put it mildly, but also, google has an effect on our lives. So, when lewis so, sometimes people think he is ever done, and people talk about that a lot. My response is that Cambridge University created a chair in renaissance medieval literature to steal him from oxford. Cambridge does not steal people from oxford unless they are pretty good scholars. In his inaugural address, he talks about himself as a dinosaur, and he sees himself as being of an age that is passed, of the ancient medieval age and he feels out of touch with modernity. So, the dinosaur thing is, get a look at me while you can, there wont be many more of me left. Ke in terms of how, i do think he is remarkable. There are a number of remarkable thinkers and there have been talks about them this week, and father neuhaus said, you know, there are people who can start reading cs lewis and those who cant, and the latter are eventually thought to be lewis scholars. In my life i am just consistently impressed with insights here and there and everywhere. There are some things that i think you got wrong. Thats a different talk. But for the most part i think he is remarkable, and he lived through languages and books and in the different epoques and arrows, he was able to you know, he said he sometimes found himself thinking in greek. For those of you who know another language to the point where, if you are an american you wake up, you know, he was h just inhabited by those things. He lived a life that oxford that was kind of the modern version of a monastery but he wasnt married, every nights dinner was with other scholars. He was asked by oxford to write the Oxford University press century, they did a volume on each century of literature, the Oxford English history of the 16th century, lhel, he called it his own hell project. So, he was gifted, and he worked. Michael jordan was in could be gifted and worked his tail off and i think lewis in some ways, that mightve been the first time lewis was ever compared tot michael jordan, so i want to get that out there. I do think he was remarkable. Not perfect, but pretty remarkable. Yeah, no one among g us is perfect. Having come from the smug comfort of being an anarcho capitalist on the belief that government is essentially evil and the worst thing moving into the reality based on the foundations you have outlined which is that natural law is both selfevident and impossible for us to fulfill, there is that tension between, yes, we have to have a government, but as is in the case of hooligan, the government fails us. And i expect there is no answer to this from cs lewis, not from anyone else. What is the yardstick, then, by which we can measure particular government activities that they are just and in accordance with natural law . Thats a tough one. The one yardstick i think would be, one requirement of rule of law is that it applies to everybody. S or, should. That is never going to be perfectly applied, but some systems will get closer to it than others. We think about, the only teaching parable, i think that is right, in the Old Testament is nathans story about the rich man who steals, illustrating what david did with bathsheba. When davids ire is fueled against this rich man, he says surely this man must die and nathans response is, you are the man. Right . So, one test of a government that has some integrity, is, can those in charge, the rich and powerful, get in trouble. And we can all think of examples in the United States, and in other countries represented in this room, or that has not been the case. But it is also reason you know, i would take some comfort, hearing particular details about cases, i dont want to get into this but we have had a couple of president s in my lifetime have been impeached. Even if you dont agree with either impeachment or both, that the president has to worry about that, strikes me as a good sign about our system. That would be one test i would give, is, are those in charge worried about the law at all, and that continues to be an ongoing story we develop in our headlines. Having recently read sergei, and as to the discussion on equality brought up earlier, are you sure he did not read de tocqueville . Where do you think you got this idea of equality, the emperor that takes a sort out in the field and shuts off the heads of the wheat. Do right . What influences do you think is there, and why do you think he was so passionate about this idea of equality . Well, it is actually dangerous to say i know he didnt read de tocqueville. My trick for figuring out a shorthand lewis read somebody is, is a three volume set of his letters. If you are a lewis and they are wonderful to read through, and you see him reflect about what he would do with joys kids once she died. Roosevelt is in there a few times. It could be that he would have read de tocqueville, but i dont know that he did to you are exactly right, the concern about democratic culture. As regards his different influences, in some ways, both of them would have been had some of the same classical education. I dont know that i can give you at this. 5 books that he would have read that would have led him to that conclusion. He was enchanted by aristocracy, but aristocracies liability is cruelty. So, given his belief in the fall , he was not an aristocrat for government, but he was sympathetic to it, culturally. And so, similarly, tocqueville was an aristocrat. But, he saw the tide of democracy as aligned with gods will, and, how much he believed in god doing that in a personal basically is debatable, but inevitable. So, they both shared this yearning, or appreciation for the glories of past accomplishment. At the same time, both being horrified by how those systems treated. Is on punting a bit on sources, he was a platonist and an aristotelian. And plato was not a big fan of democracy. It killed his guy. So you. Hi. So, something i know about cs lewis and his conversion is that he was prompted to a large period of time and then ge eventually through divine revelation. He describes his conversion experience of getting into a cab and coming out a different person. And im paraphrasing there. Cs lewis is a really natural powerful force for natural law proponents because under that conversion xfinity can share truth through wellcrafted metaphors and story. I wonder how we can replicate that work today. What are some practical ways that this modern generation of truth seekers can copy lewiss persuasive work in the 21st century . Thank you. Great question. So, lewis, in the screwtape letters, that publication is what gets him famous in the United States. Hes on the cover of time magazine. He has a screwtape ge say if you havent read them, it is a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon. Virginia demon attending to steer a patient ndto hell. s advice on how to get somebody to hell. Lewis said it is his least favorite thing to write. In the first letter, he says, you are relying on reason to try to get your patient to hell and human beings dont really rely on that anymore. It used to be that they relied on reason, if they were persuaded something was true they would change their lives, but now they dont. Lewis, while still believing in the legitimacy of reason, and writing books that relied on reason, abolition of man, miracles, the problem of pain, mere christianity, to some extent. He shifts his approach to a more fictional, narrative approach. In one essay, he says that if you tell someone the right thing to do, the Immediate Response is resistance. But if you can illustrate something good through a story, then he says, you can sneak past the watchful dragons that resist being told what is right. And so, at the same time, he was very much opposed to the idea of christians and others of goodwill or other faiths thinking here is the moral i want to get out in society, what is the story that can do that . When he talked about how he wrote the lion, the witch, the wardrobe, he said i saw a fine carrying parcels for the snow. Right . And that is what started the story. Later, this lien came in. So, while he does think that we need a stories infection, music and culture, not for the sake of does have to be good. Right . Does have to be good stories and good literature themselves, in lewiss case the moral and the faith came naturally, because that is what he was all about but he said, i believe in christianity, the sun is risen, mentally because i see it, but by it i see Everything Else. We cannot be cs lewis. I think he was a oneoff. But, we can follow his lead to g some extent in providing and ve working on good things that can went over our neighbors who it dont share our faith. So, that is really good. Get past those watchful dragons into the water, into the culture. Particularly now that w,i think this is my own view, politically speaking, the time at which the protestant catholic and jewish consensus catholic and jewish consensus dont know if we are right to a take on that mantle in the first place but i think we will be more of a minority which gives us something of a freedom to let loose and to be ourselves and see what happens from within the different spheres of law and literature and music and art and all those things. That is a good book project there for somebody to write. I have more of a broad view about the relationship between tolkien and lewis. It appears to me that lewis was conservative about some things that tolkien is much more so skeptical about technology and democracy and so on . Do you think there is any record of them interacting about this . Or, other topics . Yeah. They certainly did share a distrust of technology. We see this in the lord of the rings, he sounds like a front porch person, you on these long walking tours with friends. Where tolkien would be more conservative than lewis, lewis had some problematic things to say about marriage, and his own magelittle controversial, with joy David Gresham in terms of how it started but he got married to keep her in the country, and then fell in love with her, and they were married in a real sense. Tolkien wrote a letter to lewis about his treatment of marriage in mere christianity, and never sent it. So we have the letter, and we can see that difference. So, not quite a falling out, but i think a good center around when joy came into the picture, after her passing away, there was a number of good works out there, certainly some of the most crucial. In other areas, tolkien could be not as conservative as one would think, in terms of his rewriting or reimagining some northern and norse literature works at this point, but its a fascinating area, and i think that two of the most interesting intellectuals who happen to be friends at the same time and place, it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall. Thank you. Greetings, you talk about lewis making a move from a more rotarian get off my lawn sense, to being more concerned for the poor and other things like that, but he starts to have factoring into his political thinking. As a pastor in the church i have people in the room who are morally fumbling. They struggle to tie their own moral laces, if you will. Looks the world and he sees nietzsche, call him the bungles in the botched. When he sees people that are kind how did when lewis look at the world broken, struggling, does he ever talk about that . About the element of society that does not have the benefits of his education and thinking . Yeah. He does. And you find that, more, in his letters. So, there are two ways to answer that. One is, once lewis became popular, he got a lot of letters and he wrote everybody back. Towards the end of his life, he felt it was his duty but he hated christmas because he felt this categorical imperative requirement to write everybody back with all these cards. So, he got to know people and their problems but they would write to him about their problems. They would also send him stuff. Americans in particular, lewis had a really funny relationship with the United States. He had married an american, but in some ways found the United States culturally problematic. He had about as privileged a life as one could have, without being a baron or something, but he also went through world war ii, and the rationing went on, i think in 1956. The rationing in britain was significant, even past the war. So people would send him stuff all the time and you would hear about their problems and write back. Thats one element. The other element is his marriage. Joys exhusband was abusive. Outlandish, and mistreated her and their boys. And he saw, through her experience, how hard it would be to try to raise two kids, just doing it on your own. His ideas of just doing it on your own kind of thing, but in her position, mistreated and abused by a husband, and so he writes a letter to an american and says, i have said many hard things about our British Health system. Is been critical of it. But, it is better than nothing. . Which is a bit of a view that its not the ideal but its better than no safety net at all. I think his experience in knowing joy and seeing what it was like to see her struggle for a while, that helped him appreciate a little bit more, but there has got to be something out there for those folks. Ideally, it would be the church. You know, family and charity, but if that is not there, there needs to be something else. You. Good morning. So, lewiss views on equality, you might say are provocative given todays atmosphere. Gender equality and gender relations. Could you contrast his view of the quality and hierarchy, i guess, including what he talks about, was todays climate . There were some things about lewis where he soft direction things were going. He has a letter called Democratic Education, and screwtape reposes a toast about American Education in particular but he basically predicts that Everybody Wins a trophy culture. So, i think that he would be he would be in danger of being canceled if you were around today. He also believed in, wifely obedience to husbands and things like that but he had a more traditional view of those things. He makes a paradoxically pro workingclass, proless educated case in that Democratic Education piece. He argues for a straightforward aristocracy, education should be aimed at the students who do best and he anticipates the objection, what about the parents of tommy . Tommy just sits in the back of the classroom, no offense to anyone in the back. In the back, he is whittling. And what youre going to do is come to him and say hey, that whittling is really great. We will give you a firstclass grade for that, lewis said, lisa malone. He doesnt want that. Right . He is the one who, on the playfield is beating up the eggheads and he will have a happy life doing something else. Lewis argues there, that one does not have to go to college, or to get a doctorate in order to be successful. That you can have a fulfilling, genuinely good, flourishing life in the trades. So, his argument is elitist in one respect, insofar as he wants education to be aimed at the kids who do well in calculus and greek and all that, but, he does not think that is the only way to have a good life. He says democracy needs folks like tommy to keep the eggheads in line. Because it is the eggheads to get us in the most trouble. So you know, it is fun to think about what someone would be like in a different era. I think that he would be to some of the egalitarianism that we have undertaken because he says, if you make it into an ideal, you are effectively going to be fostering envy. And i think a lot of our political discourse is fueled by envy. And, in gratitude is the opposite of that. I hate to interrupt, but we have time for one more question. Lucky me. He has a little discourse on the tyranny of the moral busybody. And i think that hes seen for a lot of his fiction, that often times, the attack on liberty or on what is truly good comes from the position of the moral high ground. Seeing how today that is really the case, that a lot of the attack on liberty comes from empathy, tolerance, these virtues, how can we learn from lewis to communicate the importance of liberty, over some of those rejected high grounds of moral good in our society . I will first affirm that you are right well think about how to answer the question. At one point, he says that theocracy is the most detested form of government, because those who are in charge of enforcing it will be motivated by their duty to god to make sure that we are all doing what we are supposed to be doing other folks might rest or sleep but the holy motivation to keep folks in line. So the moral busybody, he has some statement where he really doesnt care for that and a personal aspect, which biographic we dont have time to get into. So, how do we combat the overweening cruciblelike atmosphere that there is, particularly on social media, it can be exaggerated. I think it is going to be standing up to the bullies. I think it is going to be, it is going to take some people who are elite to do that, whatever you think of jk rowling as an author or the harry potter stuff for some of her other views, she has refused to shut up about her views about women being biologically women, and i think that has had an enormous impact and will continue. I think one of the things that we can do is to not give into the little requests we are asked to do. How that might be manifest, for me, as a professor, in some circles, i dont have pronouns. If you have to look at me and wonder what my pronouns are, it seems pretty obvious. So, there will be Little Things like that where we actually stand up and its going to take people, when they are pressured by companies, or societies, or even families to say listen, we live in a free country, you can little you like but im not going to support that or buy into it. And i think at some point we have to pay some penalties on that, but there is i am not a classist, but horse has this line i want to say in latin, but some thing to the effect of, if you drive out natured she will come back with a pitchfork. And i think a lot of these debates and twominute hates that we have online in some places, we are driving out nature. So, in the longterm, the mediumterm, we might be losing on the short term, i think things will come back, and i think we have to stand our ground, and that is going to help. People dont like resistance. And, they are empowered by going along. So, i dont know if that is how louis would put it, but that is my thought. Okay, thank you for coming. As part of our new series, we are asking you what books you think shaped america. Books that shaped america . My pic is to kill a mockingbird. Upton sinclairs, the jungle. You can join in the conversation by submitting your pick for the books that you think helped shape this country. Just go to our website, click the viewer input tab and select rerd video. In 30 secondor less tell us yo