An Uncertain Certainty
How Screwtape Leads the Postmodern Man to Hell
by David Mills
One cause of misery and vice is always present with us in the greed and pride of men,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1943 in an essay called “The Poison of Subjectivism.” Sometimes, however, misery and vice are “greatly increased by the temporary prevalence of some false philosophy. Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support.”
Postmodern Fall
Lewis did not use the term “postmodern,” but he knew the perennial human temptations so well that he helps us understand the spiritual danger of the fallen creature I call Everyday Postmodern Man: the man who knows just enough of postmodern thinking—almost always in the vulgarized forms passed on through Time and television—to build an effective defense against any appeal to reason and evidence.
A neighbor who has never heard of Lyotard or Foucault or Derrida will tell you that “what you see depends on where you sit,” and that your objection to an error “just depends on whose ox is gored,” and that people like religious leaders make up rules to control everyone else, and that an appeal to principle is just a cover for self-interest, and that words mean what you think they mean. He will defend any behavior of which you but not he disapproves by saying that “it’s all relative” or “it’s a matter of culture” or “people just see things differently.” And he will believe, as he says this, that he is proving his sophistication and wisdom.
And yet, at the same time, he will believe some things to be undeniably true. He will be horrified by child abuse. You will not find, through the length and breadth of the American middle class, a public defender of incest. You will not find anyone advocating slavery, or making women wear burkas, or sending adulterers to the electric chair.
He will believe with equal certainty in a whole host of ideas, depending on his politics, from “a woman’s right to choose” to the constitutional right to keep guns in your house. You may well find him insisting on that truth with jihadist passion and certainty.
If you talk to the Everyday Postmodernist long enough, you will feel as if you are speaking to two people inhabiting the same body. But, and this is the crucial point for our purposes, you cannot get him to recognize the contradiction, much less defend it. He hops from certainty to relativism and back. His philosophy requires no more of him, and justifies him in doing no more.
Postmodern Genius
The genius of this sort of idea is that it protects its devotees from rational challenge. They cannot easily be corrected, and worse, feel this to be a virtue, especially open-mindedness and tolerance. But it is a dangerous point of view, one of those false philosophies likely to increase misery and vice, and it is, unless I miss my guess, the way most of our friends, neighbors, and co-workers think.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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