C.S. Lewis/Screwtape and the spiritual threat/value of "flippancy"

[smiling_bandit]

@BrainGlutton

If Heaven and Hell exist, I suspect George Bernard Shaw is nearer the mark than C.S. Lewis, as to the difference between them. See Man and Superman.

Ah, but you should remember that while Shaw was (and still is) the greater celebrity, Chesterton was right and won in the end. The Shavian superman went nowhere, except onto paper. Chesterton went everywhere.

If this be flippancy, then flippancy is a spiritual good.

Flippancy? No. Shaw could be flippant, but he was serious and earnest. He took his opponents’ views seriously and argued against them in better ways

Chesterton liked him and had a great fun arguing with him, and Chesterton had a great deal of tolerance for others but wouldn’t have respected someone who simply wouldn’t deal fairly. The key to flippancy is disrespect. The flippany man can’t be engaged and won’t engage others. It’s neither fair nor honest.

Shaw is wrong. But he was not flippant. Aside from which, better theologians than we have considered that Heaven and Hell could exist right in the same neighborhood, so to speak.

[marshmallow]

@Ogre

In my opinion, he’s talking about sarcasm, and some uses of verbal irony. And he has a point. It can shape the way you think and make you one hell of a negative bastard.

Suuuuuuure it can.

(sorry)

I wonder how true that is. I’d tend to think the relationship would be the other way around, with the negative people using negative language. But the mind is a funny thing.

[Freudian_Slit]

This is the part of the Screwtape Letters that, above all for me, made me think that maybe C.S. wouldn’t be such a fun guy to hang out with. Satire about how devilish making jokes is? All the things Screwtape encouraged are the things I find most awesome in life…

[Andy_L]

@Freudian_Slit

This is the part of the Screwtape Letters that, above all for me, made me think that maybe C.S. wouldn’t be such a fun guy to hang out with. Satire about how devilish making jokes is? All the things Screwtape encouraged are the things I find most awesome in life…

Screwtape said that making jokes was ** not **devilish. He said that flippancy was useful to devils.

[Skammer]

@Freudian_Slit

This is the part of the Screwtape Letters that, above all for me, made me think that maybe C.S. wouldn’t be such a fun guy to hang out with. Satire about how devilish making jokes is? All the things Screwtape encouraged are the things I find most awesome in life…

That’s exactly the opposite of what Lewis said. Jokes (what Lewis called “the joke proper”), humor, laughter and joy are all the domain of the Divine; little windows into the joy of God. Negative, cutting, “flippant” humor, which is destructive and lazy, is a twist of the Devil.

[smiling_bandit]

@Freudian_Slit

This is the part of the Screwtape Letters that, above all for me, made me think that maybe C.S. wouldn’t be such a fun guy to hang out with. Satire about how devilish making jokes is? All the things Screwtape encouraged are the things I find most awesome in life…

Others have directly answered you. I can say that people who knew Lewis said that was quite fun, and not above a little mischief now and then, either.

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling_bandit

Ah, but you should remember that while Shaw was (and still is) the greater celebrity, Chesterton was right and won in the end. The Shavian superman went nowhere, except onto paper. Chesterton went everywhere.

Where did Chesterton go that Shaw did not?

@smiling_bandit

Aside from which, better theologians than we have considered that Heaven and Hell could exist right in the same neighborhood, so to speak.

As we say in the Church of the SubGenius, “The difference between Hell and Heaven is which end of the pitchfork you’re on.”

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling_bandit

Others have directly answered you. I can say that people who knew Lewis said that was quite fun, and not above a little mischief now and then, either.

Really? From what I’ve heard (on NPR, FWIW), everyone who knew him viewed him as entirely stuck-up, self-righteous and de haut en bas.

[BrainGlutton]

@Skammer

That’s exactly the opposite of what Lewis said. Jokes (what Lewis called “the joke proper”), humor, laughter and joy are all the domain of the Divine; little windows into the joy of God. Negative, cutting, “flippant” humor, which is destructive and lazy, is a twist of the Devil.

I think Lewis’ problem here is that he is trying to live and exhorting others to live a life constantly centered on things that are not supposed to be funny. Who can laugh at a church service, even silently, and still be participating in it spiritually? But, just because it is serious does not mean it is what life should be about, even for a Christian.

I am thinking that Lewis is really thinking of his contemporaries, and there were many, and many of those counted themselves among the intelligentsia (a “superficially intellectual” couple features early in the book, as helping damn the Patient through worldliness), who snickered at old-fashioned English things like churchgoing and imperialism. This is really an ill-natured and poorly-thought-out swipe at them.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

I am thinking that Lewis is really thinking of his contemporaries, and there were many, and many of those counted themselves among the intelligentsia (a “superficially intellectual” couple features early in the book, as helping damn the Patient through worldliness), who snickered at old-fashioned English things like churchgoing and imperialism. This is really an ill-natured and poorly-thought-out swipe at them.

For a contemporary and well-thought-out swipe at them, see George Orwell.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia–their severance from the common culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling_bandit

I think you’re confusing people with a strong sense of humor with people who turn everything into a joke because they can’t take anything seriously.

What’s your point? Surely you wouldn’t want a Heaven with none of the latter, either?

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

Where did Chesterton go that Shaw did not?

And, no, “Heaven” is not a satisfactory answer.

[Wendell_Wagner]

BrainGlutton writes:

> From what I’ve heard (on NPR, FWIW), everyone who knew him [C. S. Lewis]
> viewed him as entirely stuck-up, self-righteous and de haut en bas.

This doesn’t match anything I’ve ever read about Lewis, and I’ve read a whole lot about Lewis. Can you give us a cite on this - something more precise than that you heard it sometime on NPR? For that matter, I would be interested in what sort of news story NPR has done that would come anywhere close to discussing such an issue.

> I think Lewis’ problem here is that he is trying to live and exhorting others to
> live a life constantly centered on things that are not supposed to be funny.

Just how much do you know about Lewis’s life? He didn’t spend his life going to church. In fact, it wasn’t till several years after his conversion that he even began going just once a week to church. Basically, he spent his life reading everything and teaching and writing about Medieval and Renaissance literature. He spent a lot of time talking, drinking, and smoking with his friends in his college rooms and at pubs, often reading to each other the fiction that they had written. He spent a lot of time hiking across the countryside with his friends. He spent his time on all the usual things most people spent it on, including having sex with his wife Joy (and with Janie Moore during his twenties, if that rumor is true). Who are you to say what things are interesting? How do you defend spending all your time posting to the SDMB?

[Andy_L]

@Wendell_Wagner

Just how much do you know about Lewis’s life? He didn’t spend his life going to church. In fact, it wasn’t till several years after his conversion that he even began going just once a week to church. Basically, he spent his life reading everything and teaching and writing about Medieval and Renaissance literature. He spent a lot of time talking, drinking, and smoking with his friends in his college rooms and at pubs, often reading to each other the fiction that they had written. He spent a lot of time hiking across the countryside with his friends. He spent his time on all the usual things most people spent it on, including having sex with his wife Joy (and with Janie Moore during his twenties, if that rumor is true). Who are you to say what things are interesting? How do you defend spending all your time posting to the SDMB?

Lewis also had no problem appreciating people whom he completely disagreed with - he corresponded with Arthur C. Clarke and praised his “Childhood’s End” even though it postulates an end to religion, and after a night drinking with Clarke and his friends said , ‘I’m sure you’re very wicked people-but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’

[Freudian_Slit]

@Skammer

That’s exactly the opposite of what Lewis said. Jokes (what Lewis called “the joke proper”), humor, laughter and joy are all the domain of the Divine; little windows into the joy of God. Negative, cutting, “flippant” humor, which is destructive and lazy, is a twist of the Devil.

But cutting, sarcastic humor is the best kind! Who wants to sit around making joyful jokes to please god?

[smiling_bandit]

Good God man, mega-post much?

@BrainGlutton

Where did Chesterton go that Shaw did not?

Shaw’s philosophy went extinct entirely. Nietzchism*, that bastard offspring of creduulousness and romanticism, died a total death. Chesterton, in small ways, affected a hell of a lot since.

*I cannot recall how to spell his name and refuse to learn.

As we say in the Church of the SubGenius, “The difference between Hell and Heaven is which end of the pitchfork you’re on.”

And there is the great difference. I would take up the sword (or the gun, or lascannon, or solar detonator) as the situation demanded. But one of the great points of Christiantity is that humans don’t handle power very well. It would not accturate, but would be far from incorrect, to state that the entire point of Christianity to produce people who can indeed handle power without corruption.

What’s your point? Surely you wouldn’t want a Heaven with none of the latter, either?

Hell yes! If anything is worth taking seriously, it’s humor. But rmoe than that, there are times for solemnity, and some subjects which demand it at least msot fo the time. Any good man must sometimes not make a cheap joke, and some cheap jokes should never be made. Everyone should take something seriously and with respect, even if it’s only humor.

This is really an ill-natured and poorly-thought-out swipe at them.

Not at all. It’s a simple and effective point for them to consider. But not jsut them, whole swaths of men from every culture and place who might ever read Lewis’ work. You like Orwell’s essay better. Fine.

Frankly, Brainglutton, I know your game. There’s nothing religious which is ever good. Lewis must be a sad, miserable man souring the fun of others because he’s a Christian! (Despite no source I’ve ever heard of, anywhere, ever, period, which remotely suggested anything like it. I propose you made it up from your imagination, period. Yes, I get your opinion. But it doesn’t count for much because you’re so clearly reaching your conclusions first and then judging the work or the men. Everything which doesn’t fit with your personal whim is bad. :rolleyes:

You need to rethink things when even I think you’re too negative. And I can hardly find a good word to say about anything.

[Skammer]

@BrainGlutton

I think Lewis’ problem here is that he is trying to live and exhorting others to live a life constantly centered on things that are not supposed to be funny. Who can laugh at a church service, even silently, and still be participating in it spiritually? But, just because it is serious does not mean it is what life should be about, even for a Christian.

Do you mean laughing at a church service in the sense of laughing IN church, or laughing AT the service? Because we laugh in my church all the freakin’ time. It’s often the most fun part of my week. I suppose if you’re laughing AT (i.e. the service is the object of ridicule) then that’s what Lewis might be talking about - because what’s so funny about it?

I am thinking that Lewis is really thinking of his contemporaries, and there were many, and many of those counted themselves among the intelligentsia (a “superficially intellectual” couple features early in the book, as helping damn the Patient through worldliness), who snickered at old-fashioned English things like churchgoing and imperialism. This is really an ill-natured and poorly-thought-out swipe at them.

I agree that Lewis had no patience for peole who laughed at certain values. Like he said, that laughed as if a joke had already been made. I don’t see his comments ill-natured or poorly-thought-out at all. He had great respect for people who disagreed with him thoughtfully, but not people who were dismissive out of hand.

You seem to have a really skewed view of what Lewis was about (and what a healthy church is like).

[ITR_champion]

@Freudian_Slit

But cutting, sarcastic humor is the best kind!

I must disagree. People today still laugh at a good production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night, in which the humor is pleasant and uplifting. By contrast, how much cutting and sarcastic humor has stood the test of time?

[Malacandra]

@Freudian_Slit

But cutting, sarcastic humor is the best kind! Who wants to sit around making joyful jokes to please god?

points and laughs at Freudian Slit

[Miller]

@ITR_champion

I must disagree. People today still laugh at a good production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night, in which the humor is pleasant and uplifting. By contrast, how much cutting and sarcastic humor has stood the test of time?

Well, two examples that springs to mind are… A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. During the play by the Rude Mechanicals in Midsummer, the commentary from the royal box is pretty scathing. I half expect to see Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank to show up. And Twelfth Night has a subplot that revolves around the absolutely brutal humiliation of Malvolio, for no particular reason except that he’s a bit stiff. The love plots are, on the whole, uplifting, but the humor is as black and biting as anything in a Judd Apatow movie. Just about as vulgar, too, except most of the double entendres go right over the heads of a contemporary audience.