Why Eustace Almost Deserved His Name: Lewis’s Critique of Modern Secularism
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it” (VDT, Chapter 1, p. 425). Lewis doesn’t say this merely because Eustace is an insufferable prig. Eustace is Lewis’s portrayal of the thoroughly modern secularist, someone who views the world as a storehouse of physical stuff which science can use for human progress, but who rejects or ignores the ideas of spiritual reality and objective moral values. Unimaginative and closed to the supernatural, Eustace is a chronological snob (someone who thinks that new ideas are necessarily superior to old ones) who reads books that have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains,” but are “weak on dragons” (VDT, Chapter 6, p. 464). Eustace’s character and worldview reflect his “progressive” parents, Harold and Alberta, who are “very up-to-date . . . and wear “a special kind of underclothes” (VDT, Chapter 6, p. 425). Harold and Alberta see to it that Eustace goes to a modern “scientific” school, “Experiment House,” where bullies are viewed as “interesting psychological cases” (SC, Chapter 1, p. 549) and Bibles are “not encouraged” (SC, Chapter 1, p. 551). It’as an environment that produces “men without chests,”1 people who use their heads to satisfy their bellies, quite unchecked by the moral virtues that can lead one to sacrifice one’s immediate wants for the greater good of the community.
Eustace is but one of several characters in the Narnia stories that embody modern secularism. The philosophy is critiqued throughout the Chronicles. This is not only because modern secularism conflicts with Lewis’s own orthodox Christian worldview, which affirms spiritual reality and objective morality. Lewis was also concerned that, due to modern educational trends, all too many children growing up in the West were uncomfortably like Eustace. He witnessed this firsthand when he took evacuees from London into his Oxford home, the Kilns, during the Second World War: the children were fixated on the immediate world of the senses and on utilitarian projects, as if life had no higher meaning than transient experience and gaining material goods. Lewis himself had espoused modern secularism, but came to believe that this philosophy was both pernicious and intellectually flawed. After Lewis became a Christian, he wrote several works addressing modern secularism, exposing its dangers (for example, The Abolition of Man) and refuting its central claims (for example, Miracles). Lewis’s critique of modern secularism takes the same two-pronged approach in The Chronicles of Narnia.
It’s the Power, Stupid
We first encounter the philosophy of modern secularism in the person of Uncle Andrew, a reclusive figure who has found a way to travel to other worlds. Readers may be surprised that Uncle Andrew is described as both a scientist and a magician. This is quite intentional on Lewis’s part. Lewis argues that experimental science, like magic, is liable to corruption by the lust for power.2 When Digory (Uncle Andrew’s nephew) and Polly (a neighbor) stumble into Uncle Andrew’s laboratory, he sees the children as just the experimental subjects he needs: “This is too good an opportunity to miss. I wanted two children. . . . [A] guinea-pig can’t tell you anything” (MN, Chapter 1, p. 16).
Like Eustace, Uncle Andrew is a man without a chest, quite willing to use other people to take the risks he lacks the courage to face himself. Viewing value as mere usefulness for a given end, he has no basis for granting that anything, even another person, has any inherent value or worth. On the other hand, people may have great instrumental value for the one thing Uncle Andrew does care about, scientific knowledge that he can use to make himself powerful, famous, and fabulously wealthy. On seeing the creation of Narnia by Aslan, Uncle Andrew is particularly struck by the fact that part of a lamp-post (brought into Narnia from London) grows into a brand new one.
“The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. Bring a few old bits of scrap iron here, bury ’em, and up they come as brand new railway engines, battleships, anything you please. They’ll cost nothing, and I can sell ’em at full prices in England. I shall be a millionaire.” (MN, Chapter 9, pp. 67–68)
Although modern secularists like to emphasize the prestige of science, Lewis suggests they often have a rather low view of truth. This is not surprising. If nothing has intrinsic value, then even truth is not valuable for its own sake. What matters are only useful truths, truths that grant power. And because a secular framework provides no basis for objective morality, the strong can pursue power free from obligation to the weak. Lewis thereby argues that modern secular assumptions lead to a Nietzschean “master morality” in which power becomes the ultimate good.3
We see cruder expressions of the same philosophy in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” When King Caspian arrives, the Lone Islands are home to slave-traders who capture the landing party. Slavery depends on denying that all people have equal dignity and worth. While the rights of free people are protected, slaves have value only so far as they serve the interests of others. An unwanted slave, such as the hapless Eustace, has no value at all. Although Caspian abolishes slavery on the Lone Islands, he is himself tempted to reduce value to material gain. When Caspian discovers a magic pool that can transform any object into solid gold, he seeks to claim the island for Narnia so that he will become the richest king in the world (VDT, Chapter 8, pp. 483–84). Caspian does not learn from the fate of the Narnian lord, transformed into a golden statue at the bottom of the pool. We may lose the value we really have by placing it in a material substitute. Only when Aslan appears is Caspian awakened from his enchantment, restoring a divine perspective on value.
Openness to the Transcendent
Modern secularism not only devalues human beings, it closes off the realm of the spiritual or supernatural—what philosophers call the transcendent. When the Pevensie children first visit the Professor’s house, all except Lucy have a prejudice against possibilities that transcend their everyday experience. When Lucy claims to have found another country through the back of a wardrobe, they immediately suppose that she is either lying or deranged. They assume that these are the only possibilities even though all their actual evidence counts against both of them (Lucy is very honest and perfectly coherent). They do not seriously consider a third possibility, that Lucy is telling the truth, even though it better fits the evidence, for given their background philosophy such a thing “couldn’t be true” (LWW, Chapter 5, p. 131). The Professor protests that their philosophy has closed their minds to the true logic of the situation. Lewis is arguing that modern secularism leads to a mind-set that dismisses claims for the transcendent (the existence of God, objective morality, miracles, “intelligent design”), even if they are well-supported by facts and logic. When the Professor complains, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” (LWW, Chapter 5, p. 131), Lewis thereby suggests that modern education is to blame.
An inadequate emphasis on critical thinking is not the only problem. Lewis argues that the secularization of education leads to a built-in bias against the transcendent. This is an important theme in Prince Caspian. When Miraz usurps the throne, he is eager to start a line of kings independent of Aslan. Rejecting Aslan’s authority, he seeks to suppress all the stories that connect him to Narnia’s history. Since Aslan is the Christ-figure of the Chronicles, Miraz’s program is one of secularized revisionist history of the sort attempted in the Soviet Union. Miraz requires teachers to reject the old stories of Aslan as myths, no matter how well-attested. When Miraz discovers that the young Caspian’s nurse has told him of the great Lion, Miraz responds with Orwellian censorship: “never let me catch you talking—or thinking either—about all those silly stories again. . . . [T]here’s no such person as Aslan. And there are no such things as lions” (PC, Chapter 4, p. 335). The nurse is summarily dismissed. An educational system that only presents secular accounts of reality inherently favors modern secularism over religious perspectives. Since students are only allowed to think along secular paths, they will easily, though erroneously, identify rationality with secular thought. The abstract logical possibility of the transcendent will not suffice to gain it a fair hearing.
We learn that a centralized educational system can be highly effective at promoting a secular bias. Miss Prizzle, one of Miraz’s loyal teachers, taught “’History’ that was . . . duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story” (PC, Chapter 14, p. 408). When brought face to face with Aslan, Miss Prizzle, and all of her class except Gwendolen, preferred flight from transcendent reality to an acknowledgment of its existence (PC, Chapter 14, p. 408). As Lewis argues in Miracles, evidence alone will not settle the question of the supernatural, because for any experience, no matter how remarkable, the materialist can maintain that there must be some natural explanation, even if all those available are extremely improbable. This is why when Uncle Andrew hears Aslan sing Narnia into being, “he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. . . . Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed” (MN, Chapter 10, p. 75).
In our world, scientific progress has produced far more impressive results than those of medieval Narnia,4 and many hastily conclude that naturalistic science5 is the only source of knowledge (a view known as scientism). This has affected both the content of the curriculum and the understanding of the educational process itself. As Nancy Pearcey argues in her recent book, Total Truth,6 modern secularists have claimed that only naturalistic science makes objective, cognitive claims. In disputed questions such as the origin of the universe and of life, this means that religious answers are treated as subjective preferences that could not amount to knowledge, and which therefore do not belong in the classroom. This is why the Bible is not encouraged at “Experiment House.” For the same reason, ethics can neither be taught nor enforced. The pupils of the school are treated as experimental subjects, devoid of intrinsic value, who are conditioned to be useful to society. Like Miss Prizzle, the Head of Experiment House cannot accept the transcendent in front of her face: “when she saw the lion and the broken wall and Caspian and Jill and Eustace . . . she had hysterics and . . . began ringing up the police with stories about a lion escaped from a circus, and escaped convicts who broke down walls and carried drawn swords” (SC, Chapter 16, p. 663). She said this even though the police found no evidence to support her story and even though her own crazed behavior suggested she did not believe it herself, but was desperately repressing what she really knew.
By relegating issues of ultimate meaning and ethics to a private, subjective realm, modern education creates “men without chests,” people who lack any credible basis for putting the needs of others before themselves. This is illustrated in secular, totalitarian societies where people are required to serve the State not because it is right, or because it is a calling from God, but simply so that they may play a useful role in the human machine. As various communist experiments have shown, this approach does not work, because no amount of conditioning really convinces people that they should give ultimate allegiance to the State. Having denied an objective basis for the moral authority of anything, modern secularism provides no reason to respect State authority. If power is the only prerogative, people will serve the State only when coerced, and will otherwise do as they please. But modern secularism gives no particular meaning to one’s personal projects either. Can one really enjoy life if nothing ultimately counts as success, because life has no inherent value or purpose? We see the depressing fallout of modern secularism most clearly in the gnomes of Underland who were brainwashed into thinking that the Witch’s dark world and quest for power were the only realities that mattered: “We didn’t know who we were or where we belonged. We couldn’t do anything, or think anything, except what she put into our heads. And it was glum and gloomy things she put there all those years” (SC, Chapter 14, p. 642). By “liberating” human beings from God, modern secularism allows the strong to enslave the weak for amoral purposes. When the illusory authority of the State’s conditioners and usurpers is revealed, only nihilism, the view that nothing really matters, remains.
Is There Nothing More?
To call attention to the regrettable consequences of modern secularism falls short of a refutation. If the modern secular worldview is true, then we are stuck with these consequences and our preference for alternatives only shows our proneness to illusion. Indeed secular thinkers offer debunking explanations of our beliefs in transcendent realities, such as God or objective morality. For example, psychologist Sigmund Freud claimed religious beliefs were masks for childish wishes and repressed sexual desires, and the philosopher Michael Ruse and the scientist E.O. Wilson argue that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate (so that human genes survive).”7 But Lewis does not stop with exposing the unsettling fall-out of modern secularism; he uses the Chronicles to mount an effective critique. He argues both that modern secularism is inconsistent and that its debunking approach to transcendent realities is fatally flawed.
One of Lewis’s arguments (developed at greater length in The Abolition of Man and Miracles) is that modern secularism is inconsistent in its treatment of human beings. The inconsistency is evident in those secularists who believe that human beings can be experimented on (“conditioned”) for the sake of social progress. For these same secularists also assume that that some human beings (educators and scientists) are autonomous agents who cannot be experimented on, even though they can experiment on others. Thus, Uncle Andrew is quite happy to use Digory and Polly as talking guinea-pigs, to find out about other worlds. But he exempts himself from trying the magic rings on the grounds that he is a scientist.
“I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on. . . . No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice. But the idea of going myself is ridiculous. It’s like asking a general to fight as a common soldier.” (MN, Chapter 2, p. 22)
The inconsistency is clear. Officially, the modern secularist thinks all human beings can be shaped to promote progress, and if that is so, Uncle Andrew has no basis, other than arbitrary power, for claiming a privileged status for himself. Uncle Andrew acts as if he alone has the special dignity and value of a person, exempting him from being experimented on, but allowing him to do experiments on others. But if Uncle Andrew is such a person, then his secular view of human beings is false, and there is no reason to deny that other human beings are persons as well. It follows that if it is wrong for experiments to be done on Uncle Andrew, it is equally wrong for him to do those experiments on others. Through his inconsistent philosophy of human beings, Uncle Andrew is violating what philosophers call the Principle of Relevant Difference. According to this principle, it cannot be right to treat one person in a certain way and wrong to treat another person in that way unless there is a relevant difference between the two people. Sometimes there are relevant differences, which is why we can incarcerate criminals but not law-abiding citizens, and why traffic cops are free to exceed the speed limit but the rest of us are not. But there is no such relevant difference between Digory and Polly, on the one hand, and Uncle Andrew, on the other, just because he is a scientist, while Digory and Polly are not. This difference is not sufficient to support the claim of Uncle Andrew that he has distinctive personal rights that set him apart from others.
More generally, Lewis believed that modern secularism is incoherent because it assumes that the conditioners (scientists and educators) have capacities that are incompatible with that philosophy. Uncle Andrew and the teachers of “Experiment House” think of themselves as rational beings with free will, since they believe they can design experiments and curricula and can choose whether or not to implement them. Yet they treat the subjects of these experiments and curricula as passive objects, to be shaped like the clay in a potter’s hand. Either everything is merely a passive subject of the forces affecting it, in which case the conditioners have no more rationality or free will than their subjects, or there really are autonomous agents, in which case there is no good reason to say conditioners belong to this class but their subjects do not. In the first case, modern secularism undermines the rationality of education and science, because no one, including the conditioner, can make rational choices. In the second case, the conditioners have abandoned secularism by recognizing the transcendent value of persons. Either way, modern secularism is false.8
Debunking the Debunkers
Lewis also responded to the debunking strategies of secularists. As early as The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), an allegorical spiritual autobiography Lewis wrote shortly after his conversion, Lewis discerned a common logical pattern to the debunkers’ theories. Debunkers always claim that transcendent ideas (such as the ideas of God, eternity, absolute truth, and objective morality) derive from mundane material causes. But, following Plato and Descartes, Lewis realized that one can think of an idea as a sort of copy, and its cause as the original. In that case, we should ask whether the original proposed by the secularist (a mundane material cause) is adequate to explain the copy (a transcendent idea). Lewis’s argument is that the content of transcendent ideas could not derive from material causes. The most dramatic expression of this argument is found in The Silver Chair.
Prince Rilian is captured by the Witch of a dark, subterranean world called Underland, and placed under an enchantment that makes him forget who he is. Each night the enchantment abates and he is bound in a silver chair. Eustace (now reformed by his encounter with Aslan), Jill, and Puddleglum free the prince and are about to escape when the Witch returns. She tries to convince them that their departure is futile because Underland is all there is. One can view Underland as what the world is really like if modern secularism is true. The children, Rilian and especially Puddleglum all protest that Underland cannot be everything because they have ideas of an Overworld above, including its sun and Aslan. These can be read as the ideas that appear to transcend the secular.
Given this interpretation, we can see the Witch as a classic secular debunker. The Witch uses a heavy enchantment to make the others believe that what they can immediately see exhausts reality. This expresses Lewis’s view that secularism appeals to our “favoritism for the familiar,” our bias in favor of what we can directly experience. But Puddleglum still remembers the sun, comparing it to a lamp in the room. The Witch exploits the fact that the lamp is visible but the sun is not and argues that the idea of the sun derives simply from the lamp, which is all there really is. The same strategy is applied to the idea of Aslan himself, which must have been copied from a cat in Underland. The Witch triumphantly asserts a general principle for debunking transcendent ideas: “’you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world’” (SC, Chapter 12, p. 632).
The enchantment is almost complete when Puddleglum counteracts it by stamping on the Witch’s fire and replying to her debunking philosophy:
“Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.” (SC, Chapter 12, p. 633)
The argument is left rather implicit, but Lewis is clearly attacking the intelligibility of the debunkers’ claim that our ideas of “higher” things can derive from “lower” sources. How can the idea of something great derive from something lacking that greatness? Could the idea of eternity arise from the materialist’s temporal world? Could the ideas of infinity and perfection derive from the finite, imperfect world of the secularist? Could the idea of a necessary being like God derive from the secularist’s contingent universe? There is a good case to be made that material causes do not account for the content of these ideas.
Fundamentally, modern secularism must claim that the ideas of eternity, infinity, perfection, and necessary existence are no more than illusions thrown up by a temporal, finite, imperfect, and contingent world, even though nothing in the causes of the ideas explains their content. But surely there is another possibility. The secularist assumes that we begin with matter and everything that seems to transcend matter must somehow be reducible to it. What if, instead, we begin with a being who actually is eternal, infinite, perfect and necessary? This original would surely suffice to explain anything else in the universe that is less than itself, but it would also explain how we have transcendent ideas, since they are copies of transcendent originals. Lewis suggests that the world around us is “shadowlands,” a shadow or a copy of heavenly realities. At the end of The Last Battle, Narnia comes to an end and there is a new heaven and a new earth. Lord Digory explains:
“[T]hat was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here. . . . And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” (LB, Chapter 15, p. 759)
Lewis here turns the tables by suggesting that the material world is not the bedrock of reality, but only a copy of a divine original.
Beyond Shadowlands
Eustace Clarence Scrubb almost deserved his name because he had been taken in by modern secularism, a philosophy that Lewis argues is dangerous, inconsistent, and unable to explain transcendent ideas. But just as Eustace’s mind was changed by his encounter with Aslan, Lewis suggests that a philosophy that affirms the reality of the transcendent can overcome the problems that beset modern secularism. Amazingly, he communicated all this through books ostensibly for children. But then Lewis saw the very idea of “children’s books” as reflecting a condescending, progressive picture of education that derived from the very secularism he was combatting.
1 Lewis uses this term explicitly in The Abolition of Man. It is a reference to Plato’s three-part model of the soul, in which the head represents the reason, the belly the appetite, and the chest the seat of moral virtue.
2 This is an important theme in Lewis’s science-fiction novel, That Hideous Strength (1945). See especially Chapter 9, Section 5 of that book.
3 For more on this theme, see Chapter 10 in this volume.
4 Upon hearing the Dawn Treader praised as a fine Narnian sailing ship, Eustace boasts of the technological superiority of our “liners and motorboats and aeroplanes and submarines” (VDT, Chapter 2, p. 437).
5 By “naturalistic science” I mean science that will admit only natural causes for natural phenomena.
6 Wheaton: Crossway, 2004.
7 Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” New Scientist 108: 1478 (17th October, 1985), pp. 51–52.
8 For a more careful version of this argument, see my Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), especially Chapters 1–3.