Is It Good to Be Bad? Immoralism in Narnia
Like his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of Middle-earth, C.S. Lewis, the creator of Narnia, believed in an objective moral order, which each showed in his created world. In The Abolition of Man (1943) and Mere Christianity (1952), Lewis argued the point directly by offering a powerful critique of immoralism—the view that morality is fundamentally a matter of power or superiority, and that many things called “bad” could just as easily be called “good” (and vice versa), but perhaps only by an elite few. In The Chronicles of Narnia, three characters—Uncle Andrew, Queen Jadis, and the Queen of Underworld—endorse versions of this immoralist ethics. In this chapter we’ll see how Lewis critiques immoralism.
Three Immoralists: Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Nietzsche
The fashionable notion that “might makes right” may seem like a uniquely modern idea, but actually it is very old. The Dialogues of Plato (428–348 B.C.E.) contain two versions of the idea.
In the Republic, where the discussion focuses on what it means to be just, and whether injustice ever pays, Socrates is defending the claim that it is never right to injure another person, when Thrasymachus bursts in and tells Socrates to wipe his nose and quit spouting such childish nonsense. In every society, he says, those with power call the shots, and those without power obey. Justice is “the interest of the stronger”—that is, doing what benefits the strong.1 Though milksops like Socrates might prattle on about the “virtue” of justice, it’s better, for those who are powerful enough to get away with it, to be unjust rather than just. Indeed, the best life of all would be that of the successful tyrant, who takes whatever he wants and commits the grossest acts of injustice with impunity.2
Callicles, in Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias, has a similar view. Popular ideas of “right” and “wrong,” Callicles claims, are human inventions cooked up by the weak to restrain the strong: “convention” (nomos) rather than “nature” (physis). An honest look at nature shows “that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker.”3 A superior individual, if he had sufficient power, would break through conventional moral restraints; “he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms,”4 and “allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to the greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings.”5
Thrasymachus and Callicles, though, are different in one respect. For Thrasymachus, justice is bad; it’s doing what the boss man—the guy with power—wants you to do. It’s better, Thrasymachus thinks, to be unjust—assuming you can get away with it. But for Callicles, justice is a good thing. True justice is natural justice: when the strong subdue the weak. Callicles, unlike Thrasymachus, doesn’t think it’s bad to be just. Both, however, are immoralists, for both hold that morality is fundamentally a matter of power, and that the good is very different from what most people think it is.
The most famous modern defender of immoralism is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While Nietzsche’s version of immoralism is different from the crude, self-aggrandizing versions of Thrasymachus and Callicles, they do have something in common.
Traditional Western morality, Nietzsche believes, is doomed. “God is dead,” he declares, and the loss of God has left us sailing in a vast uncharted sea with no recognizable ethical landmarks to steer by. Nietzsche paid his enemies the compliment of accepting their belief that without God, we’ve come to the end of truth and morality as we know it. Without God, people can no longer rationally believe that truth or morality is objective. “We have abolished the real world,” he says.6
Far from being depressed by this prospect, Nietzsche is rather glad that God is dead. Belief in God is responsible for the illusion of objective morality, and now we are free to be more honest and creative. We can embrace all of life, the good and the bad, not just some of it. If God isn’t calling the shots, then we are. Well, some of us are calling the shots—in fact, a very small number of us. “The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating.”7
The purpose of culture, Nietzsche says, is the production of genius: “A people is nature’s detour to arrive at six or seven great men—and to get around them.”8 To provide a fertile soil for the production of such individuals, “the enormous majority must, in the service of the minority, be slavishly subjected to life’s struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. . . . Slavery is of the essence of Culture.”9
By contrast, Christianity places a premium on values like humility, kindness, justice, and equality. Like Callicles, Nietzsche believes that these are slavish ideas invented by the weak to protect themselves against the strong. Christian as well as democratic values hinder the will to power and hamper the production of genius. What’s needed is a “transvaluation of values”—a radical rethinking of what is considered “good” in light of the death of God and the rejection of objective moral standards and objective truth. The best virtues are the aristocratic values of the superior few: strength, boldness, creativity, ruthlessness, and daring. “What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.”10 This is the morality of Nietzsche’s “supermen,” his “free spirits” of power.
Does this mean that ordinary individuals should give up their “herd morality” and adopt the strong master morality instead? Not at all, says Nietzsche: “It is immoral to say that ‘what is right for one is proper for another,’”11 given the real inequalities between people. “The spirit of the herd should rule within the herd—but not beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their actions, as do also the independent ones or the beasts of prey, etc.”12 The superior few should follow one morality—the morality of the “beasts of prey”—while the inferior masses should continue to adhere to the servile values of traditional Judeo-Christian ethics and democracy.
Sounds like Thrasymachus and Callicles . . . but Nietzsche’s hero must conquer himself. Nietzsche’s cultivated, self-overcoming, art-loving “free spirits” aren’t the tyrants Thrasymachus and Callicles admired. But Nietzsche’s is also a version of immoralism: what Lewis had in mind for Uncle Andrew, the White Witch, and the Queen of Underworld.
Andrew Ketterley, the anti-hero in The Magician’s Nephew, clearly embraces an immoralist view of ethics. He tells Digory that his fairy godmother, Mrs. Lefay, was imprisoned because she did things that were “very unwise” by the standards of the strong (she got caught), and which the “narrow-minded” call wrong. But “it depends on what you call wrong,” says Uncle Andrew with a chuckle (MN, Chapter 2, p. 12). Uncle Andrew thinks that Mrs. Lefay should not be judged by the standards of “ordinary, ignorant people” but by how she treated him, another one of the elite few. “She was always very kind to me.”
Uncle Andrew had the power, via some magic rings, to send people out of this world. . . but to where? He didn’t know; he needed human guinea pigs who could talk when they returned . . . if they returned.
Uncle Andrew shows his immoralist colors after he tells Digory about a promise he broke to this fairy godmother:
“Well, then, it was jolly rotten of you,” said Digory.
“Rotten?” said Uncle Andrew with a puzzled look. “Oh, I see. You mean that little boys ought to keep their promises. Very true: most right and proper, I’m sure, and I’m very glad you have been taught to do it. But of course you must understand that rules of that sort, however excellent they may be for little boys—and servants—and women—and even people in general, can’t possibly be expected to apply to profound students and great thinkers and sages. No, Digory. Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures.” (MN, Chapter 1, p. 15)
Like Thrasymachus, Uncle Andrew believes that one set of moral rules applies to ordinary people (poor saps forced by the powerful to do what is “just”), and another to the rulers. Also like Thrasymachus, he believes that those with power are exempt from ordinary moral rules. But unlike Thrasymachus, Uncle Andrew focuses on intellectual superiority (“profound students and great thinkers and sages”) rather than sheer power or force.
Consistent with this view, Uncle Andrew can, and does, use a tactic that most people consider to be immoral: deception. He sees that the children are hesitating about being part of his experiment, so he conceals from Polly the truth about the pretty rings he has; he pretends to be innocently making her a gift, when he is actually tricking her into being used for his experiment.
Notice how Uncle Andrew’s two-level ethics works. He’s not willing to endanger himself for the sake of the experiment, but he is willing to endanger others. Using and deceiving people is okay for him to do to others, but it wouldn’t be okay for others to do it to him. Uncle Andrew doesn’t follow the Golden Rule of traditional morality, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That rule belongs to conventional morality and applies only to common people.
Uncle Andrew thinks that because he’s a Master, it’s permissible for him to break a cardinal rule of traditional morality: Don’t use people merely as means to your own ends. Like Thomas Anderson (Neo) in The Matrix, he believes that he is “special,” that “somehow the rules do not apply” to him. Only later, when he encounters Queen Jadis, who wants to use him, does he realize how mistaken he was.
Who’s Got the Power?
As political philosopher Thomas Hobbes points out in Leviathan (1651), there’s a problem with banking on power: Eventually, someone shows up with more of it. Uncle Andrew learns this lesson when he meets Jadis, usurping Queen of Charn. Uncle Andrew might lust for the power that comes with knowledge, but Jadis scorns what for immoralists is the merely conventional preference for knowledge over ignorance. She thinks of Uncle Andrew as her slave. “Stand up, dog, and don’t sprawl there as if you were speaking to your equals” (MN, Chapter 6, p. 46). Jadis wants all the power she can get, in her own world as well as his.
Jadis, like Uncle Andrew, is a big fan of the idea that there are masters and there are slaves. She is very fond of distinctions of rank and the ways in which those distinctions put her above rules that apply to others. When Jadis tells Digory and Polly how she used the Deplorable Word to destroy all living things on Charn, Digory gasps, “But the people.”
“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.
“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”
“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.” (MN, Chapter 5, pp. 41–42)
This sounds a lot like Uncle Andrew’s two-level morality, but in fact it’s more extreme in two respects. First, there is no suggestion that mere intellectual superiority confers any privileged moral status; for Jadis, like Thrasymachus, being a Master is a function of raw power. And second, she claims to be exempt not only from ordinary moral rules but from all constraints of morality—and truth. Unlike Uncle Andrew who thinks of himself and his kind as moral and even noble in a weird and wonky way, in her thirst for power, she dispenses with all the niceties. (She got the throne of Charn by murdering her sister, after all.) She goes beyond morality, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsehood. It’s as if she somehow sneaked into our world and read Nietzsche: “To recognise untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”13
To Uncle Andrew and Queen Jadis, anyone with a conscience is a fool, one of the common people (two of her Majesty’s favorite terms). When the Jadis meets Polly and Digory in Charn, her first order of business is to establish the power lines. Completely ignoring the obviously powerless Polly, she first directs her attention to Digory, and then to Uncle Andrew, the “master magician” who sent the children into her world. Utterly lacking what Lewis calls “the taste for the other,” she has no interest in people except insofar as they are either potential rivals or potential servants (MN, Chapter 6, p. 47).
In Lewis’s devilishly good book, The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil, Screwtape, warns a junior devil, Wormwood, about the dangers of letting people see that they can’t possess or use other people. The senior devil offers this advice:
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. . . . We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog,” “my servant,” “my wife,” “my father,” “my master,” and “my country,” to “my God.” They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots,” the “my” of ownership.14
For Lewis, via Aslan, the true King of Narnia, in contrast to both Andrew and Jadis, the usurping Queen of Charn, all created rational beings are equally subject to objective truth and objective moral values. And according to this true morality, it is always wrong for some to treat others as a mere means to personal or collective ends.
The immoralist rejection of universal morality is grounded in the rejection of objective reality. Going beyond good and evil is accompanied by going beyond truth and falsehood. This provocative corollary to the immoralist stance is nicely illustrated in a conversation in The Silver Chair between the wicked Queen of Underland and four prisoners trying to escape her clutches.
The Queen (a.k.a. the Lady of the Green Kirtle) attempts to talk Prince Rilian and his companions out of their belief in Overworld, the real world of Narnia. All the longing that they have for the real world almost completely disappears when they fall under the spell she casts on them. Rilian’s view of that world, like Plato’s, is that the world of goodness and light is most real: “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky” (SC, Chapter 12, p. 631). But the Queen of Underworld laughs at him, and almost convinces him that Narnia doesn’t exist; Narnia is a mere dream or children’s story.
But believing doesn’t make it so. As the story unfolds, the Narnians’ Overworld triumphs over the Witch’s Underworld. Indeed, it always will, as Lewis is fond of reminding us. We may not always like it but there is objective reality. “Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself.”15
Gimme That Ol’ Time Morality
So what does Lewis think of this immoralism? To quote Trumpkin: “It’s all bilge and beanstalks” (PC, Chapter 11, p. 383). Truth is objective, according to Jack (as Clive Staples Lewis insisted on being called from the age of four), and is impervious to our attempts to diddle with it. Ditto for morality. For Lewis, a moral realist, moral laws, like the Golden Rule, are real facts about the world, like gravity.16 In God in the Dock,17 Lewis agrees with Nietzsche about our wanting to be stronger and smarter; but Lewis believes this desire is bad and false. He is convinced that there are such things as goodness and truth.
The immoralist’s ethic is impossible to believe in consistently. Although Andrew thinks Jadis is a “dem fine woman” (MN, Chapter 6, p. 49), he constantly complains about her haughty treatment of him. He thinks that it’s unfair of her to treat him, a fellow magician, like a slave, and meekly protests her “regrettable violence” in flinging Aunt Letty across the room (MN, Chapter 7, p. 52). Yet on Andrew’s own principles, Jadis is exempt from ordinary rules of morality, and so she is not treating him or Aunt Letty unfairly.
Look: say you’re a student who has worked hard on a paper and it’s really good. You’re shocked when you get the paper back with a big fat red “F.” The professor says she knows you deserve an “A”, but she’s giving you the “F” for her own purposes and she has the power to do so. If you challenge the grade, she’ll get you kicked out of school. A believer in Uncle Andrew’s brand of “clever-people-are-exempt-from-ordinary-moral-rules” ethics wouldn’t be able to say to the teacher (either politely or in Howard Sternese) that what she’s doing is unfair.
Moreover, who’s to say who’s a Master and who isn’t? It’s human nature for people to think that they’re better than they are. “Since most men, as Aristotle observed, do not like to be merely equal with all other men, we find all sorts of people building themselves into groups within which they can feel superior to the mass: little unofficial, self-appointed aristocracies.”18 Uncle Andrew is a prime example. Although he thinks of himself as a towering brainiac, even the children can see that he is a vain, cowardly egotist, blind to even obvious truths. Digory sees that all Uncle Andrew’s grand words mean is that “he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants” (MN, Chapter 2, p. 20). Later in The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan chooses Frank the Cabby as King of Narnia because he’s humble and doesn’t have a false sense of his own merits.
For Lewis, it’s impossible to believe that morality applies to some people but not others. What Lewis calls Natural Law, or “the Tao,” is simple and obvious to virtually everyone.19 However tempting it might be to deny these rules, we continually make clear through our language and our behavior that we accept them as true in an objective sense. To go on to claim that other basic principles are groundless or only relatively true is arbitrary. One cannot pick and choose, for moral laws are part of reality.20
Why suppose that superior power or intelligence confers a right to dominate? Although Lewis believes strongly in a divinely ordained hierarchy of creatures,21 he denies that superiority implies a right of the strong to dominate or exploit the weak. Note Lewis’s condemnation of slavery (VDT, Chapter 4, p. 451), his lampooning of demeaning caste distinctions in Calormene society (“Way, way, way! Way for the Tarkheena Lasaraleen!”) (HHB, Chapter 7, p. 249), and Aslan’s command to the Talking Beasts to cherish and treat all lesser animals gently (MN, Chapter, 10, p. 71).
For Lewis, all rational creatures are “free subjects” (MN, Chapter 12, p. 83) and have inherent value that even self-professed “superiors” are bound to respect. In fact, power and authority, far from amounting to a “Get Out of Morality Free” card, imposes additional burdens and responsibilities on their possessors. In The Horse and His Boy King Lune explains to Cor that being a king means “to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and where there’s hunger in the land . . . to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land” (HHB, Chapter 15, p. 310; see also MN, Chapter 11, p. 82). In Narnia, as in our world, “to whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48), and “he who would be first must be last” (Mark 9:35).
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
“God is dead,” Nietzsche declared, having been killed by our modern ideas. And it’s divine genocide we’re talking here: Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra says that “dead are all gods.”22 Lewis could partly agree: almost all the gods are dead: there’s just one. And certainly Lewis, like Nietzsche, acknowledges the importance of the will; Lewis just thinks that nature as well as will matters, and that there is more to the will than the will to power. Also, although Lewis can’t agree with Nietzsche that all there is to a moral claim is what it tells us about the one who makes it,23 he can, like Nietzsche, be worried about the ulterior motives of the watchful dragons of morality.24
1 Plato, Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), Book I, 338c. All subsequent quotations from Plato are from this edition.
2 Ibid., 344a–c.
3 Plato, Gorgias, 483d.
4 Ibid., 484a.
5 Ibid., 492a.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 51.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 260.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 444.
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Greek State,” quoted in Frederick Copleston, S.J., Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture, second edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 39.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in A Nietzsche Reader, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 231.
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, translated by Helen Zimmern (New York: Modern Library, 1954), p. 524. This may sound like moral relativism, and in fact Nietzsche has often been interpreted as a moral relativist. His considered view, however, seems to have been a kind of moral anti-realism—the view that there are no moral truths or moral facts. See, for example, Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 501, and Beyond Good and Evil (Kaufmann translation), p. 85. For Lewis’s critique of moral anti-realism, see his books The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 15–84 and Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 3–20, as well as his important essay, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 72–81.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, I, aphorism 287, quoted in Copleston, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 107.
13 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Zimmern translation), p. 384.
14 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 113–14.
15 C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, 1964), p. 76.
16 Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 20.
17 Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 87.
18 C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), p. 41.
19 Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 5; The Abolition of Man, p. 52. Lewis admits that “you might find an odd individual here and there” who doesn’t know some elementary moral principle, “just as you find a few people who are colourblind or have no ear for a tune” (Mere Christianity, p. 5).
20 Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 54–55; “The Poison of Subjectivism,” p. 77. A similar point is made in Lewis’s science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Macmillan, 1965 [1938]), when the villainous Weston asserts the right to exterminate all Martians based on loyalty to humankind and “the right of the higher over the lower.” To this the angelic Oyarsa reply that there are “laws of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like” (p. 138) that all rational creatures know, and that Weston is arbitrarily treating one of these laws—love of kindred—as the be-all and end-all of morality.
21 See Gilbert Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C.S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 70–84, 145–159.
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 191.
23 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Kaufmann translation), section 187.
24 Blessings of Aslan on Gregory Bassham and Paul Ford, author of Companion to Narnia, for their help.