erage lifespan for a species on earth is about million years. and and, you know, we're in the tens of thousands for our species right now. you know, like imagine what, 5 million years of humanity could achieve and what that could mean for what el could look like across the rest the universe. well, before gleaves closes the show, ladies and gentlemen garrett graff garrett graff.

and it is a great privilege for me to be with you at acton university this summer. eight years ago, our family had to make a decision about a move, and we ended up deciding to come to grand rapids. and in our pro and con list, the physical presence of the acton institute in grand rapids was a major plus. on the good side.

so i'm glad to be here. i'm also glad that we are here in person. it wasn't too long ago when we had to meet in a rather gnostic fashion, and so that we were able to meet incarnation early is a very good thing. i'm also delighted to join you because we are discussing the intersection of c.s. lewis, liberty and law, or jack lewis as he was known to his friends and family. if your name was clive staples you might go by jack as well. if you're attending this session, i probably don't have to sell you on why lewis liberty and law is a fun combination. i hope you'll find our conversation illuminating. whether you are new to lewis or a long time 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's at oxford and one of lewis's first

biographers. he writes, as i walked away from new buildings and as an aside oxford's new buildings were completed in 1458. i found the man that lewis had called taylor's sitting on one of the stone steps in front of the arcade. how did you get on? he asked. oh, i think rather well. i think he will be a most interesting tutor to have. interesting? yes. he's certainly that said, the man who i later learned was j.r.r. tolkien. you'll never get to the bottom of him, but we're not going to get to the bottom of him either. right here now. but we are going to try to make some headway into lewis's views. i want to hit on four areas about lewis law and liberty in my opening remarks and as food for thought for our discussion afterwards.

first, that contra to the conventional wisdom that lewis disdained and ignored politics. his personal life was very much intertwined with politics and law, and sometimes even policy. and 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. so the first point is about lewis's personal and indeed biographical interest in things political. second, we'll talk a little bit about a particular the justice issue that lewis was quite invested in. he was no wonk, to be sure, but 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 and its impact on human flourishing and freedom.

third 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 very conflicted attitude about the welfare state. lewis was, by instinct and temperament, very sympathetic to a more libertarian approach and a get off my conservatism. but he also later in life became more aware of the plight of the less fortunate and thus, in his view, more open to government solutions to poverty. fourth, we moved from human made law in human politics to god authored law with a capital l. lewis is justly famous for his defense of natural law or what he referred to as the law of human behavior in mirror christianity or the dow in the abolition of man. this is the endure 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'll conclude by suggesting that all of lewis's musings about politics law, both civil and natural and liberty, are framed in a teleolo context. that is his understanding of liberty, properly understood is directional. it's heading somewhere. we as human beings are heading somewhere. and to miss this aspect of lewis's teaching is to miss understand everything else. we might get from him. so claim number one, the personal life and the political. the conventional wisdom on lewis was that he really didn't care much for politics or for law and that he thus would not have spent much time on those things or liberty either. and there's some truth to that

in one respect. but the truth is also that he was surrounded by talk of law and politics from his early childhood, all the way through his death on november 22nd, 1963. also the same day that jfk goes down in dallas. and aldous huxley, author of brave new world, passes away. we don't have time for the full case about lewis politics today or his views. he did remain interested in politics throughout his entire life. his father, albert lewis, was a lawyer and apparently took his work home with him. lewis's older brother, warning, described their childhood as dominated by a one sided torrent of grumble and vituperation about irish politics. and it's admittedly hard to avoid talk of law and politics. if you were growing up in northern ireland, as lewis did. lewis his life as a young man was also dominated by political matters, as afte1914 all

young british men his age knew that sooner or later they would be drafted to serve in the first world war. and lewis did serve in the infantry in world war one, fighting in the trenches and getting wounded. his father had tried to get him in the artillery, but lewis was so bad at math that that wasn't going to be an option. so if you struggle with math you are in good company. with lewis. his life as a young man after the war became much more scholarly, of course, and on his return to oxford, he wrote to his father about 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 are made some five years before. with nothing to record. in theany little thing that has made me realize the absolute

suspension and waste of these years. 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 servants and military leaders. the staggering waste and incomprehensible loss caused by the great war cast an immense shadow over the turn of the century. generation of britons. it's no wonder that lewis would harbor a lifelong distrust of government. as with most of us lewis's political views were intimately connected to his biography, and so biographical details shed some light on thosi want to focus on one particular event from lewis's personal life that gives us an interesting insight into his view of law and liberty.

lewis married joy davidson gresham in 1956, first in a civil ceremony, and then in a real anglican service in december of that year as joy's death imminent. this is the account depicted in the film in the play shadowlands. joy did recover from her cancer and they had a four short but happy years together before the cancer return and took her life at the age of 43. in july of 1960. what you may not know about joy lewis was that she was a divorcee, a former communist a trenchant and rather salty literary critic, and an american of eastern european, jewish background. and as a good american. she, of course, had a shotgun and she was known to be rather prolific with that shotgun in the backyard of lewis's at the kilns in oxford. during this time, the lewis's had some trouble with some local

young men. really. hooligans who had trespass on their property and vandalize, steal, cut down trees, all sorts of mischief crimes. and on one occasion, when lewis was wheeling joy around for a walk in their backyard, they caught the young man in the act. lewis shiver closely jumped in front of joy in his wheelchair, ostensibly to protect her. and i can't repeat in this company exactly what joyce said but i will paraphrase. it was something to the effect of, gosh darn it, jack. get out of my way. you're blocking my aim. one result of this encounter was lewis's rather curmudgeonly piece, delinquents in the snow published in a humor magazine in 1957, where you see some of the hooligans were later caught by

the police and tried and caught. in this essay, lewis complains about how the legal process had failed miserably. the presiding judge had let them off with a fine and encouraged them to stop such pranks as if planned robbery and vandalism are mere pranks. lewis worried about what such leniency might mean for england's political future. and 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 political theory of this country, lewis summarized, we surrendered our right 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 state's promise of protect is what morally grounds are

obligate nation to civil obedience. according to lewis. if this sounds to you a little bit like john locke, then i think you're on to something. the government's protection of natural rights including the right to property, is why it is right for us to pay taxes. and wrong for us to exercise as vigilante justice. lewis argues the state protects us less against criminals at home and manifestly grows less and less able to protect us against a foreign enemies. at the same time, it demands from us more and more. we seldom hadand liberties, nor more burdens, and we get less security in return, while our obligations taken away. lewis drew the same conclusion from this state of affairs that locke did. when the state can not or will not protect, lewis warns nature.

is come again. and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual. i share this reflection of lewis's not only as an excuse to tell that story about joy lewis and her shotgun, but because it illustrates well the libertarian leaning. leave me alone. literally. get off my lawn. side of lewis's personality in writings, he was very careful not to appear too partizan. politically, one way or another, goingrn down a winston churchill's proposal to honor lewis by making him a commander of the british empire. by some of his critics to paint him as a political conservative. but we do see here in this episode and the piece that resulted from it a little bit of lewis's views, he had a deep distrust of government power whether it was misused in

foreign wars or not, used properly enough to keep the domestic peace. and this deep distrust was not merely theoretical, but personal felt by lewis. so claim number two, lewis on law and public policy. lewis has interest in criminal justice. extended beyond this particular case with the hooligans. in may of 1962.lewis wrote to the poet t.s. eliot the following we must have a talk. i'd wish i wish you'd write an essay on it about punishment. the modern view by excluding the retributive element and concentratin solely on deterrence and cure is hideously immoral. it is vile. tyranny. to submit a man to compulsive or a cure or sacrifice is him to the deterrence of others. unless he deserves it.

one might wonder why lewis didn't write the essay himself except that he did. 13 years earlier, lewis wrote the humanitarian theory of punishment, which appeared first in an austrian law journal in 1949. he sent it to an australian journal because he could get no hearing for it in england. nevertheless, the piece did responses from three law professors in australia to whom lewis then in turn responded and the resulting back and forth was published in rté's judge adjudicator. then the law journal of the university of melbourne law school. you can now find lewis a side of this spirited, but well mannered debate in the garden. the dark collection in is the lincoln's 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 criminals being treated as less than human. he was worried about developments in european jurisprudence such that deterrence and rehabilitation soon 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 a wrong, we acknowledge the dignity of that human being and make possible restoration. because that human being should have and could have known better have the dignity enough to have known better. there is nothing with deterring crime or rebuild hating a criminal as a 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 god's image of intrinsic worth as a mere means rather than an end in himself. in that case, the more effective the punishment, the more effective the punishment so that the state might put on for the public, the better. from the point of deterrence what lewis worried about was the truth of whether the accused is actually guilty or matter. it's the effect of the show. rehabilitate shown as the chief priority. lewis worried meant that instead of criminals being sentenced by their peers to a designee rated amount of time as punishment for what they've done, criminals will instead be treated as patients who are sick and it will be experts in psychology and penology who will determine when or if they are ever cured. and only then will they be

released. and unlike a prison sentence, there's no time limiten. and yet, individuals freedom will still be restricted. it will still feel like a sentence. but there's no limit to that restriction in principle except what the expert doctors have to say. and who are we? ordinary citizens, to question the considerable expertise of the experts. lewis insisted that only the concept of moral desert and ground, legitimate punishment and limit the state's abusepower. we see in this essay how seriously lewis took human freedom and dignity and that he applied it even to those people, criminals whose interests and dignity, society is most likely to ignore or overlook. we see also in the response from the australian scholars of law that they took lewis seriously on this point, which is rather remaable given his day job was

as a tutor of english and a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. we also see how important this policy issue was to lewis as 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. three. thus far, we've discussed lewis's personal connections to his thinking about politics and a particular policy area. he cared a great deal about criminal justice. now we move to lewis's thinking about government at a more theoretical level, and in particular, the welfare state. and both the legitimate purpose of government and theemptation 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 the rationale for government as well as reason to

fear its excesses. in a short essay called equality, lewis says i am a democr b believe in the fall of man as a calvin professor, i have to get human depravity in the fall in there by contract. and lewis here endorses it. he says that many others endorsed democracy for the wrong reasons. and he mentions here rousseau because they think human being so naturally good that everyone deserves a share in government. lewis goes on to say, i know for myself i don't deserve a share in ruling a hen roost. let alone a government. lewis wrestled with the tension between his desire for a limited government which both protec 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 exists 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 sun 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 and that all economies, politics, laws and institutions save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes are a mere plowing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit. collective activities are, of course necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary. lewis insisted that the state exists for individuals and nd not the other way round. we see here a lewis's favorite teachers,

plato and aristotle. lewis was a platonist. lewis was an aristotelian, but both those thinkers alike favor the collective over the individual. the public over the private, and aristotle in particular defines a political activity as an intrinsically natural part of human 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. and lewis recognized the appeal of technocratic government 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 this there is a conspiratorial government organization and i see the national institute of coordinated experiments. this illustrates exactly his fear. and if you actually go and google uk and i see there is such a government organization, it's just it's not about that but something else. 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 all in a competent global technocracy. three pretty scary words. the temptation to use a real need as a pretext to accumulate

and concentrate power is not a new temptation. but the difference in the mid 20th century, lewis warned, was that success looked more and more like a legitimate possibility. he writes, in the ancient world individ joules have sold themselves as slave boys in order to eat. so in society, here is a witchdoctor who can save us from the sorcerers, a warlord who can save us from the barbarians. a church that can save us from hell. give them what they ask. give ourselves to them bound and blindfold. 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 whether we can discover any way of

submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. he closes with this question is there any possibility of getting the super welfare states honey and avoiding the sting? whether we can get that welfare state honey without the sting was perhaps the most pressing practical political question for lewis. and the st and i think remain enormous. while acknowledging the great needs for which technology and big government provides answers lewis endorsed simple values that he feared were endangered by a no at all state to live one's 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 the the worth the cost. lewis predicted soberly that, as always some men will take charge of the destiny of others. they will be simply men. none. perfect. some greedy, cruel and dishonest with an allusion to the namesake of our institutional hostess 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 every human legal system and

political regime rests on an underlying view of human nature and morality. and we can't talk about lewis and law without discussing natural law. as i've said, i believe lewis was a natural law apology est rather than a theorist. we don't go to lewis for the nooks and crannies of how a natural law system delivers specific moral conclusions on this or that particular issue. but lewis does article eight 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 abandon the natural law. he also delivers these apologies, these defenses in straightforward, logical works like mirror christianity and the

abolition of man. this year being the 80th of man, he also illustrates these ideas imaginatively in his fiction. most prominent prominently in the ransom trilogy or the sci fi trilogy, but also in the chronicles of narnia and other writings. on august six of 1941, lewis delivered the first of his bbc broadcast talks which later would 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. and in his first 15 minute segment, 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 a

constant appealing to moral standards in interacting with each other. i gave you a bit of my orange. you give me a bit of yours. hey, don't cut in line. you promised you would do this. so i. we were constantly appealing to some kind of standard. this doesn't make sense unless we believe that there is a standard out there that we can appeal to a law of sorts. this law. lewis explained, was 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 were 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 it real thing which the nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced if they had had no notion of what

we mean by right then, though, we might still have had to fight them. we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair. evils of nazi ism, and he gets a pass from godwin's law because he actually fought germans in the first world war. use the evil nazi ism to highlight the reality of the moral law in a dramatic way. if your moral ideas can be true he argued. and those of the nazis 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 foundation all to lewis's 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 they do not, in fact behave in that way. he maintained that these two claims that there is a natural moral law and we fail 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 post christian society could recover moral truth by first directly becoming christian. and to be clear, he believed that the britain of his day was post-christian somewhere in the same comparison as a divorce. he is to someone who is married. lewis thought the truth of the matter was the reverse. instead of returning directly to christian ethics, the world must first simply return to a belief in real objective morality.

only then would it be open to returning to christianity. for he writes, christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. it is a dress only to penitence only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law. it offers forgiveness for having broken and super natural help towards keeping that law. and by so doing, reaffirms it. in other words, you have to admit you're sick before you will see the doctor. and jesus did not come for the healthy in his essay god in the dark. lewis posits that the main difference between the ancient and the moderns is that the ancients, christians --, pagans all believed that there was something wrong with them and they were in the dock or on trial. god was the judge. we moderns, lewis says. put god in the dock. he has to make his case as to

why we should believe in him. we might with this case and believe. but the roles are reversed. one challenge faced by the modern world the christian for lewis, for morally serious people, is that many deny that morality has any objective that doesn't mean that they are relativists or mild mannered about their own moral claims. as we see in our civil or uncivil discourse today. far 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 will 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's a tricky proposition for

reasons we'll get to shortly. but he is trying to persuade his audience and us that we already believe in objective morality. lewis also didn't just defend the natural law. he played offense. he attacked the 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. as i mentioned, 80 years ago this year. one of the most intriguing features of abolition is how lewis frames the debate. many works of natural law theory take something of a defensive position where the author assumes that natural lawor in the dock, as lewis might say and must be valid or reasonable. lewis does not take that tack. instead, he turns the tables. instead of assuming that the dow his word for the natural law must be established or defended he proposes to interrogate the

alternatives. values by teaching students to see through or check the privilege of old fashioned sentiments and moral judgments. but why think we should only defend our position? why not ask what motivates them? what grounds their positions? and 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. lewis's apocalyptic conclusion to the chronicles of narnia. in this scene, forces of evil have been defeated. goodness has prevailed as maybebut aslan wins in the narnia chronicles. all that remains is to pass into aslan's country for eternity. yet one troubling plot point remains unresolved. the treacherous dwarfs are determined to snatch 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 lewis's moral exemplar, tries to persuade the dwarfs to see things as they really are. they are not in a black hole but in the midst of the open sky. the grass and fragrant flowers. paradise awaits them. if only they have eyes to see. o hear. lucy tearfully begs aslan to help the dwarfs, and he provides them a sumptuous feast, but to no avail. not even aslan will force those who choose blindness to see what truly is. they will not let us help them. as one says, they have chosen cunning instead of belief. their prison is only their own minds. yet they are in that prison and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. the last chapter of the abolition of man is about that prison.

it is about the predicament of those people who do not merely misunderstand or misapplied this or that moral teaching, but who reject root and branch the very possibility of moral reality. it is about the predicament of nihilism. from lewis's perspective writing a book of natural law theory. when many people question the very foundations of morality itself would something of a fool's errand. you don't write chess manuals for those who think games are complete waste of time. you cannot persuade someone to take their medicine if they reject the good of health. you don't review. an opera for cultural philistines who despise music. one has to first write about the intrinsic good of play, the good of health, and the good of art and music. only if those basic premises or goods are 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. 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 be sacrificed to my own as we just see that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. if we cannot prove either axiom. this is not because they are irrational. but because they are self-evident. and all proofs depend on them. their intrinsic reasonableness shines light. to not see that reasonable ness is to be like the minority and dwarfs morally blind. lewis does not attempt to prove the validity of natural law, a quixotic task. but rather he appeals to our capacity to reason to illustrate the alternatives to a belief in fundamental moral principles. lewis hopes to awaken a realization in his readers that they do, after all believe in

natural law. he does this differently in each of the three chapters laying out in men without chess, a platonic and aristotelian picture of the human person, as well as the high stakes for moral education and the political community. in the second chapter, the way attempt to extract one isolated component of the natural law and build a new ethic just about around that while getting rid of all the others and the last chapter or the abolition of does not so much present the positive case for natural law, as it does reveal the stark and to a minimally decent moral person horrific alternative. what we have been through a brief survey of some of lewis's thoughts about law and liberty. glancing quickly at his biography and his thinking about criminal justice and the welfare state, and we've touched very briefly on lewis's work defending natural law and

putting its alternatives to the test. i said earlier that i would conclude with a brief word on ultimate understanding of liberty 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, not running into them. the other part of morality for these ships is internal. keeping one's own ship seaworthy by proper and ship maintenance and discipline. but lewis notes, the two parts are interconnect. it if you let your own ship go to port, you're noty to long avoid mishaps with the other. and if you're constantly into other ships, your own won't remain seaworthy very long. but there is a third element, and that is where the ships are

sailing to. lewis took seriously law and politics and culture, justice, literature, all sorts of earthly goods. but ultimately true not the absence of restraint in the ambitious pursuit of whatever one's 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. and lewis was nothing, if not insistent that we are meant for more than this world. all of those goods i. i've mentioned culture, justice, literature, music, family are second things. they're 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. and lewis offers some resources with which to grapple with these problems. understanding natural law and

objective morality is crucial and lewis's thought on the matter can be instructive. our resistance individually and collectively to the moral law and rationality itself, is discouraging. and lewis's logical 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 depends not even on not only or even primarily upon these things. it depends the people of god living out their faith with integrity, humility and verve. we will not achieve the perfect answer, nor be perfect people on this side of eternity. and though 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 answer is, lewis did leave behind positive and negative arguments for the moral law. the rational christian

apologetic and imaginative fiction should inspire those who share 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 christians have largely 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 a at earth, and you will get neither. we would do well to do likewise. thank you. at this point, we have a chunk of time for q&a. we have mike here and a mic here. so if you have any questions challenges, diatribes, denunciations. come on up.

i'm really fascinated with understanding of social order and i appreciate the way in which this lecture is kind of illustrated some of his concerns state to kind of trump other kinds of orders friendships and whatnot. i do remember in one of lewis's essays, it might have been membership. he talked about democracy being a necessary fiction and it was something that that decided that we all have kind of a fundamental equality. he is actually an illusion, but a necessary illusion. i just love to hear you kind of comment on this concept of lewis, which is that democracy is a necessary fiction think so. there's the essay membership and then there's the the shorter essay equality. and i think what he says and i could get the chapter in verse wrong, i think he says a democracy rests on the fiction of our equality. and so he takes aim at equality. there as a good in itself.

he does not think equality is good in itself. he likens it to medicine and clothing that is needed because of the fall that actually god created us to delight in unequal relationships. we look up to our parents. our children when they're younger. we look up to our coach or a mentor or to a saints right. we don't claim to be equal to a saint. and so he does. he's not against equality as you know. abraham cobb recalled some goods, mechanical goods or goods that we need because of the fall. so lewis, in that essay, defends and thinks that legal equality is very good. and he says, we need more economic equality. but he says that he's not he's not against equality in those spheres. what he worries about and here he is, he's swallowing a little bit. he didn't read tocqueville, i don't think, but was concerned about as well that the the the chief liability of a democratic government could be a democratic culture in which everyone thinks i'm as good as you to the next person. and he thinks that that leads to greed. right. which is it's a spiritual

poison. so he does say in that essay that we should work for more equality in the legal sphere and in the economic sphere, but that in our in our relationships, we should not be so troubled by by inequality. now, i'll say one more thing. so it's a it's one i actually want to talk about on this subject. so i've talked a lot about it in the great divorce. any of you have read the great divorce that lewis imagining himself visiting hell and then riding a bus up to up to heaven and in that book he has a vision in heaven of a woman coming in who is who is in front of a great procession, just completely celebrated, such that lewis almost wonders if it might be our lord's mother and his guide. george mcdonald says, no, no that's someone you'll neverebut during her life in england, she she was saintly. she took in the poor and the kids and even animals. she hasn't credible life to lewis's vision what greatness is, you know, is not musker or

bill gates or churchill. it's someone who lives a saintly and sanctified life following god's commands. so yeah. thanks. thank you. thank you very much for your talk. i'm daniel pitt. i was wondering if you could talk some more about lewis's concept of freedom. my understanding is that he believes that the law enhances our freedom. so it's not a freedom from law. actually, rule of and laws actually provide the basis for human flourishing. is that correct? i think given the fall, we're going to need human laws to direct us so when we think about guardrails on a road that limits us, but it limits us for our good to get where we should go. so there is a sense, i think it's quite right to say that he endorses a view that law restricts us for our good. but he is also as a believer in the fall. he knows that the government is also people by fallen officials and he is quite worried about the intrusions of that. so he's in terms of what he is

worried about, he's more worried about intrusions than he is about articulating the need for it. on the i think on the higher understanding of law, as in the natural law or god's law, then i think it's much more the law of what it means for us to flourish. right. that that this is so you know, if i'm talking with my students we talk about you know, the the perspective athlete who wants to be excellent, she will restrict aspects of her life. she will 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. and so i do think that is deeper conception of god's law for us is that there are things that it would say no to, but for the purpose of this, this deeper purpose of being who god calls us to be is that you've put it excellently. right. thank you. thank you. first of all. so we see the weight of glory. lewis says, of course, 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 perpetrator and the victim, but he thinks that it respects their dignity because they are treated as someone who could have known better. right. so when we think about an animal doing something wrong, we might scold it, but we don't blame it in the same way. it is only someone who has enough right in his from his point of view. and this is something that comes up in his treatment of purgatory, which is controversial among some, but basically saying, you know, if i need to be cleansed or punished, i should want that right that i deserve it. you're exactly right about this. question of capital punishment raises it in particular and

remains a live issue. he he nowhere has a considered treatment of that. he did write a couple of letters to the newspaper. lewis did not like newspapers never read them or said he didn't read them. he said if something important enough happens, someone would tell him. did write to a few newspapers and on one on capital punishment, he doesn't argue for it with a positive view that the capital punishment is absolutely right. but he undermines the argument that it's necessarily wrong. so i think he was not quite settled on it. his argument was that he's not sure that anyone who needed to spend 40 years of the rest of their life in prison would be any more likely to come to faith has, i think he says, two weeks until the gallows. so. so i think he i don't want to get to be careful. i don't want to say what i think what lewis said. but there is room in there for the sort of thinking that when it comes to someone's reception of the truth, such that they might be saved it's not clear or entirely clear that living their russell one life in prison would be more likely lead to

that then than than capital punishment. that said, i don't want to say that lewis officially or publicly endorsed capital punishment. i think he was uneasy about it as i think anyone should be. but he did not he did not argue against it either. thank you. thank you, dr. watson, for your your talk today. the first question was maybe think of lewis's chapter on hierarchy of preface to paradise lost as one of those places where he definitely you can see lewis kind of does think there's room for equality, but he also deeply loves the sense of hierarchy that he sees in milton.my question for you is really based off of your reading of lewis and his write he wrote. so much and you've read solewis seems to be incredibly prophetic in that he writing across the late thirties forties into the fifties. i mean he without the not in particulars but in very broad trends, he accurately predicted several of the moves that

modernity would make. some of them that seem obvious to me at least, are the he at the end of abolition of man. he's sort of outlining the transhumanist movement. he projects that globalism is going to be the trend. he almost is talking about some of the big tech privacy invasions that are possible today without the actual technology at his day. he the government, was going to continue to grow and that would continue to be a danger to to liberty. so with that, what in your view is it what allowed lewis to be so prophetic? why was he able to look at his world and kind of see the trends and be more right than wrong in those broad, sweeping kind of senses? that's a fun question. yeah, i would. and just recently, ross douthat just had a piece about lewis's that hideous strength and how prescient he thinks it is, which i commend to you. if you are if you also want to see a bit of lewis that that transhumanist subject you mentioned google ray kurzweil

who is was may still be the chief engineer of google and and has been waiting for the singularity takes 100 something pills every day and has collected every scrap of information about his father, whom he tragically lost to early in the hopes that once the a.i. reaches singularity, it will be able to effectively recreate his father and they'll be able to commune in the cloud. so the idea is a sound quite freak of narcissism, right? sound outlandish, to put it mildly, but also a fellow who has several. and again, if you google, google kind of has an effect on our lives. so a real guy when lewis, you know so sometimes people will dismiss lewis a little bit as a children's author or think he's overdone. and there are a lot of people talk about him a lot, and i'm guilty of that. my response to that is that cambridge university created a chair in renaissance and medieval literature to steal him from oxford and cambridge doesn't steal people from oxford people are pretty pretty good scholarly chops. and in his inaugural address at

cambridge, he he he talks about himself as a dinosaur. and because he sees himself as being of the age that his past of the ancient and medieval age, and he feels out of touch with with modernity and so the dinosaur thing is get a look at me. you can there won't be many more of me left. right. so in terms of how he could do it, he i do think he's remarkable.thinkers and and there have been talks on them this week in father newhouse said, you know there are people who can stop reading c.s. lewis and those who can't. and the latter are eventually thought to be lewis scholars. and so in my own life, i know there's i'm always got something by lewis, but thenm just consistently impressed with his insights here, there and everywhere there are some things i think he got wrong, which is a different talk, but most part i think he's remarkable and i think that's because he lived through languages and books and in the different epochs and eras.

he was able to read. you know, he said he sometimes found himself thinking in greek for those of you who know another language, you to the point where, you know, when you if you were an american, you wake up his writing and you think he'll play, you know, you know french, if that's what comes. he's what he this was those things and then he also you know he lived a life at oxford that was kind of the protestant version of a monastery. right. he wasn't married every night to dinner, was with other scholars. he was asked by oxfo to write the the the oxford university press entry for they they did a volume on each century of literature. so the us the oxford english history of the 16th century which turned out be oh he called it his oh hell project. and for that he every book in the boden library that was published in 16th century. so the guy was just he was gifted and then he worked. i mean, he's like michael jordan was incredibly gifted and worked his tail off. and i think lewis in some ways, that might be the first time lewis ever been compared to michael jordan. so i want to get that get that

out there. but yeah, i just i do think he's remarkable. not perfect, but a pretty remarkable fellow. i don't know where no one among us is perfect. personally, having come from the inner smug comfort of being in anarcho capitalist, in the belief that government is essentially evil, and that the worstt could happen if anarcho capitalism didn't work is another government having moved into reality based on the foundation that you've outlined, which is naturalize self-evident and impossible for us to fulfill, there that tension between, yes we had to have a government, but then, as in the case of the hooligans, the government fails us and i expect that there is no answer to this from c.s. lewis nor anyone else. what is the yardstick by then which we can measure particular government act whether they are just in accordance with natural law? good grief, that's a that's a tough one. a one yardstick i think wouldbe, you know, when we think about the rule of law, one requirement of the rule of law is that it applies to everybody

or should. and that's never going to be perfectly applied. but some systems will get closer to it than others. we think about, you know, the only teaching parable. i think that's right. in the old testament is nathan's story about the the rich man who steals the poor man's you. right. and is used to to illustrate what david did with bathsheba and when david's ire is fueled against this rich man who has stolen the poor man's you, he says that, you know, surely this man must die. and nathan's response is, you are the man, right? so one test, then, of a government that has some integrity is can those in charge and the rich and powerful get in trouble? and we can all think of examples in the united states and in other countries that are represented in this room or that has not been the case but it's also it's reason to i would take some comfort, irrespective of

the particular details of both ca that we've had a couple of presidents in my lifetime who have been impeached. even if you don't agree with either impeachment or both that a president has to worry about that strikes me as a good sign about our system. as problematic our system is in many ways. so that be one one test i we give is are those in charge worried about the law at all and and well you know that continues to be an ongoing story even now in our headlines. having recently read screwtape makes a toast, i was wondering in regards to the discussion on quality, those brought up earlier are. you sure he didn't read tocqueville? and if not, where do you think he got this idea on equality of how and example in school it makes a toast is the emperor that just takes a sword out in the field and chops off all the heads of the of the wheat right where what influences do you think is there and do you think that or why was

lewis so passionate about this idea of equality? well, see, yeah, you're it's actually dangerous to say that. i know he didn't read tocquevillk he wrote. i hope i can find it in four. so my little trick for figuring out a shorthand if lewis read somebody is there's a three volume set of his letters, which are if you're a lewis fan they're wonderful to read through and you'll see him responding to things like his joy, his ex-husband, about what to do with the kids after she's died. i mean, it's really quite poignant and personal. and i look in those in the index since tocqueville is not there, you know roosevelt, he's in there a few times. so it could be that he he would have read tocqueville, but i don't know that he did. but you're exactly right. that that that concern about the liability of a democratic culture. so yeah. as as to his different influences, i think in some ways both of them would have been had had some of the same classical education. i don't know that i can give you at this point, like the five

books that you would have read that have led him to that. those conclusions he does. he was enchanted by aristocracy, but aristocracy liability is cruelty. and so given his belief in the fall he was not an aristocrat for government, but he was pretty sympathetic to it culturally. and so similarly tocqueville was an aristocrat, but who saw that the tide of democracy as aligned with god's will and know how much he believed in god doing that in personal kind of theistic ways is debatable but inevitable. and so they both kind of shared this yearning or appreciation for, the glories of past accomplishments while at the same time both being, i think, horrified by how those systems treated the least of these right. so i'm punting a little bit on the exact sources. i think it was just part of the

warping move of all of his education to to appreciate the greats. i mean, he was and he was a platonist in an aristotelian and plato, you know, wasn't a big fan of democracy, killed this guy. so, yeah i hey, so somethi c s lewis conversion is that it seems to have been prompted through a large period of time and then eventually through divine revelation. so he describes this conversion experiences getting into a cab and coming out a completely different person and i'm paraphrasing there. c s lewis is a really powerful force for natural law proponents because out of that conversion experience, he can share truths for through well-crafted metaphors and through story. and however, i wonder how we can replicate that work today and if it's effective outside of divine revelation. so whae t ways that that this modern generation of truth seekers can copy? lewis is persuasive work in the 21st century. thank you. yeah, great question. so lewis in the screwtape

letters screwtape letters publication is what gets him famous in the united. he's on the cover of time magazine. after that, he has screwtape say to and if you haven't read them. it's a series of letters from senior demon to a junior demon. the junior demon attempting to so it's advice on how to get someone to hell. lewis said it was his least favorite thing to write because he didn't. it was dry and gritty to put oneself in the mindset of hell. and in the first letter, he says, you're relying on reason to try and get your patient to hell. and human beings don't really rely on that anymore. it used to be that they they relied on reason. if they were persuaded something was true, then they would actually change their lives and do it. and now they don't. so lewis, while still believing in the legitimacy of reason and writing books that relied on reason, abolition man miracles, problem of pain, mere christianity. to somextent, he shifts his approach to a morethat, you know, people resist. 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 that they can sleep past or you can sneak past those watchful dragons that resist being told w' and so at the same time he very much oppose the idea of christians and other people of goodwill other faiths, thinking, okay here's the moral i want to get out of this society. what's the story that can do that? right when he talks about how he wrote the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, he says, i saw a faun carrying parcels through the snow right. and that's what started the story. and later, this lion kind of came in so he would well, he does think that that we need stories and fiction and music and culture, not for the sake of it has to be those have to be good. right? those stories told us stories and good literature themselves. and then in lewis's case, the moral and the faith came naturally into them because it was coming from him. and that's what he was all about. he says, i believe in christianity as i believe the sun has risen not only because i see it, but by it i see everything else. so i think christians, we cannot be c.s. lewis was i think, a one

off. but we can i think, follow his lead to some extent in doing and providing and working on good things that can win over our our who don't share our faith also has really good and get it pass those watchful dragons into the water, into the culture particularly now that i think as my own view, politically speaking, the time at which the protestant, catholic, -- kind of consensus is done. and we can, we can. i'm not sure it was ever right to take on that mantle in the first place, but we are going to be more i think a more of a of a minority, which gives us something of a freedom to just let loose and be ourselves and see what happens from it in the different spheres of law and literature and music and art and all those things. so that's sort of a convoluted answer. what you really, really need there is that. so that's a good book project there for someone to write. i think. i think we're yeah, i have a more broad question about the

relationship between token and lewis was curious. it seems to me that lewis is rather conservative about some things, that token is much much more. so more skeptical about technology, democracy and so on. do you think that there is any record them interacting about this or other kind of topic? yeah. so bradley bursar is here this and he would he would to give an even better answer to that but they certainly did share a distrust of technology. we see this in lord of the rings, right, with saruman is realm and lewis even he didn't really ever learn how to drive a car he thought cars he sounds like a front porch person familiar from portrait that the introduction of cars has destroyed the sense of space that you can now get someplace 60 miles away in an hour. he used to on these long walks he go on these walking tours with friends. we're talking would be more conservative than lewis. marriage. i agree with tolkien on this.

lewis has some i think some problematic things to say about marriage. and then in his own marriage was a little controversial with joy, david and gresham, in terms of how it started. ot married to keep her in the country and then, you know, fell in love with her. and they were married in a real sense. tolkien wrote a letter to lewis about his treatment of marriage and your christianity and never sent it. but we have the letter and we can see that that difference. they were good friends. there was a bit of a, you know not a quite a falling out, but a cooling of the and it did, i think,ound when joy came into the picture. but i think there was a reconciliation after, her passing away and there's there is a number of good works out there looking at the of them talking was certainly crucial in playing a role and lewis is to faith in other in other areas tolkien could be not as conservative as one would think in terms of his rewrites and reimagining some of the northern and norse literature works.

that's something i've just been learning about recently, but but yeah, i know it's a fascinating area and i think the two of the most interesting that just happened to end up being very good friends in the same place. it would have been fun to been a fly on the wall. thank you so much and greetings greetings. you talked about lewis making a move from more libertarian get off my lawn and as you said later a little more concern for the poor and other things like that that he starts to have factoring into his political thinking very bright guy. right. we're in a very bright room as i pastoring a church. i've got people in the room who are morally fumbling. they struggle telling their own cases. you know, if you will write that. how did when lewis looked at the world, he's got this of self-reliance that affords him a kind of liberty when he looks the world and he sees nietzsche, call him the bungles in the botched. when he sees people that are kind of broken, struggling. they can't put their own moral laces together. does he ever talk about that? about about the element society

that just doesn't have the benefits of, his education and thinking and yeah yeah he does and. and you would find that more in his letters than this. there's two two ways to answer that. one is once lewis became as popular as he was, he got a lot of letters and he wrote everybody back towards the end of his life, his brother when he would help. but he almost felt it was a duty. he hated, in part because got so many cards and felt this kind of, you know, categorical, imperative requirement to write everybody back. he does write about that. so he he he got know people in their problems because they would write to him about their problems. they would also send him stuff of americans in particular had a really funny or at least relationship with the united states i married an american, a two american stepsons. then some ways found around the united states culturally problematic. he, you know, he had about as privileged a life as one could have without being, you know, a baron or something. but he also lived through world war two in the rationing went

on, i think, through 1956, in the rationing in britain was significant even past the war. and so people would send him stuff all the time and he would hear about their problems and write back. so that's one element. the other is his is marriage. so joy davidson, gresham, her ex-husband, was abusive was outlandish and mistreated. and their boys and, he saw through her experience how hard it would be to be trying to raise two kids, just he was kind of but he'd just do it on your own sort of thing, a man and, you know, calling it as home as castle. but in her position and a mistreated and then you know ussband and so he writes a letter to an in florida basically says you know i've said hard things about our british health system. all right. he's been critical of it. but it's better than if there's nothing. right, which is a little bit of a, you know, a view that it's not the ideal, but it'd be better than there being no safety net all. so i think it was his experience knowing joy and seeing what it was like for her to try and struggle for a while, that it

helped him appreciate a little bit more that there's got to be something out there for. those folks, ideally it would be the church and, you know family charity. but if that's not their, you know, there's needs be something else. yeah. good morning so lewis's views on equality are, you might say, provocative, given today's atmosphere of gender equality or gender relations. could you contrast just his view of equality and hierarchy, i guess, including like what he talks about in the end of that hideous strength with today's climate. yeah i think lewis, you know, the earlier earlier question from joshua saying he was prophetic and i think he saw the direction things were going. he has another essay called democratic education and then the screwtape proposes a toast is about american education in particular. he had it published in the saturday post and he basically predicts that everybody everybody wins a trophy culture

and so i think, you know, hewould be i mean he he would be in danger of being canceled if he were around today he also believed in wifely obedience to husbands and things like that. so he had a more view on those things. and although he makes a a paradoxically pro working class, pro-gun or less educated case in that democratic education piece does he argues straightforward aerostar heresy in education. education should be aimed at the students who do best and then he anticipates the objection, which i think is what he's here today. he says, well, what about the parents of tommy and tommy just sits in the back of the classroom. no offense. anyone sit in the back and in the back he is he's whittling and you're going to do is you're going to come to him and say hey, let's know that whittling that's going to give you. we're going to give you a first class grade for that. and turnarounds. and lewis said, leave him alone. he doesn't his want that right he's he's the one who on the you know out on the playfield is is beating up the and he' have a

happy life doing something else. in other words lewis argues there that one does not have to go to college or get a doctorate in order to be successful, that you can have a fulfilling, genuine, good, flourishing life in the trades. so his argument elitist in one respect and insofar he wants education to be aimed at the kids who do well in calculus all. but he doesn't think that that is the only way to have a good life. and he defends and he actually goes on to say democracy he needs folks like tommy to keep the eggheads in line because the fall doesn't just apply to one class more than another. it's the eggheads who get us into the most trouble. so, you know it'd be it's fun to think about what someone would be like in a, in a different era. i think he would be allergic to some the egalitarianism that we have today because he would because he said he's as if you make it into an ideal you effectively are going to be

fostering envy. and i think a lot of our discourse is fueled by envy and and a you know and is the is the opposite of that and we're in supply of that. and so yeah, i hate to interrupt, but we have time for one more question. lucky me. and got in the he has a little discourse on the thedy. and i think that's a theme through a lot of his fiction that oftentimes the attack on liberty or what is truly good comes from the projected position of the moral high ground. so seeing how today that's really the case, that a lot of the attack on liberty comes from tolerance, these these virtues. how could we learn from louis to communicate the importance liberty over maybe some of those projected high grounds of the moral good in our society. i think you're first a firm that you're right. well, thinking about how to answer the question.

at one point says that theocracy is his most detested form of government because it is because those who are in charge of enforcing it will be motivated by their duty to god to make sure that we're all doing what we supposed to be doing. whereas other folks might or sleep. but the holy motivation keep people in line is look. and so yeah, the moral busybody he is throughout all his works he really doesn't care for that. and there's a personal aspect that to his life as well and biographically which we don't have time to get into. so how do we o combat the overweening crucible like atmosphere that there is particularly on social media that can be exaggerated i think it's going to be standing up to the bullies. i think it's going to be it's going to take some people who are who who are elite to do that. whatever you make of j.k.

rowling as an author or the harry potter stuff or of her other views, she is kind of refuse to shut up about her views of that about women being biologic cli women and i think that's had an enormous impact and will continue and so i think one of the thingat have to we do is is not not give in to the little request that we're asked to do. so how that might be manifest for me as a in some circles. i don't have pronouns. if you have to look at me and wonder what my pronouns are, you know just seem pretty obvious. but so i think there's going to be little things like that where we just don't we actually up and it's going to take people when they're pressured by companies or societies or families to say, look, we live in a free country. you can live how you like it. i'm not going to support that or buy into it. and i think we at some point, we have pay some penalties on that. but i there's this i'm not a classicist, but horace has this

line. i won't be able to say it in latin. something to the effect that if you if you drive out nature, she will come back a pitchfork and i think in a lot of these these debates and these two minute hates that we have online from places we're trying we're driving out nature and so the long term in the medium term we might be losing on the short term i think things will come back and i think we have to kind stand our ground. going to help people don't people don't like resisting us and they're empowered by going along. so that's i don't i't know. that's how lewis would put it. but i think that's that's what i would say. okay.