Not-so-N.I.C.E.

The lazy blogger's last resort is publishing (slightly emended - especially if there were any egregious spelling errors) letters to the editor. So, here I go:

Dear Mr. Taranto,

Don't know what you think of C. S. Lewis, but today you mentioned Britain's "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence," or, "N.I.C.E." There is already a precedent for a sinister organization called N. I. C. E., dating from around the same time Orwell was writing, and that is C. S. Lewis's "National Institute for Coordinated Experiments," a sort of genetic engineering center cum Frankenstein's lab cum Faustian summoning chamber that houses the bad guys of That Hideous Strength, the final installation of Lewis's space trilogy. The three novels have much more religious than governmental overtones. Out of the Silent Planet portrays a trip to Mars, a sort of mature Eden, where the inhabitants have gone on to procreate but still live in harmony with God, each other, and nature; Perelandra tells of a trip to Venus, where the inhabitants are only two - a Venusian Adam and a Venusian Eve, both subject to temptation from a visiting demon; That Hideous Strength is one I've not read as recently as the other two, but I know it is set on earth - the "silent planet," due to its sinful state - and has, if I remember, its conflict as the efforts of the hero from the first two books, Professor Ransom, to prevent the members of N.I.C.E. from bringing to life a corpse that most of them think they are reanimating through scientific means, but which they are actually making ready for demonic possession.

If, again, I remember correctly, Lewis's essential criticism is similar to what he writes of in The Abolition of Man, which is that there is a certain breed of utopian in this world that thinks he could solve all our problems if only he could extirpate just this or just that imperfection, whether by means of eugenics, biological engineering, different governance, or different education. Being a Christian who took seriously the existence of the devil, Lewis believed this tendency a mistake and associated it with a demonic desire to remake mankind, thus perverting (though in his - the devil's - mind, perfecting) God's creation. By opening mankind to reanimation through ungodly means, one was not rescuing from death the soul of the man so affected, but opening his body up to be enslaved by evil. Hence Lewis's "men without chests" in The Abolition of Man, and hence his Professor Weston in Perelandra, essentially a automaton acting not out of his own free will, but because he (it) is enslaved, or possessed. Anyway, this is becoming a bit of a digression, but Lewis distrusted big, unaccountable, elite-staffed bureaucracies trying to remake the world by removing what they see as the sources of human evil. It's kind of shocking - or perhaps it's not - that the British bureaucrats and scientists are so ignorant of the writings of one of their most famous 20th century authors that they would use an ironic and previously used name for their big, unaccountable, etc.

Sincerely,

Jay Hawking

P. S. Hope you don't mind, but I'll probably post the text of this letter in my infrequently-updated and less-frequently-read blog. When I actually get around to writing something, I might as well publish it.

Another point to make, that I won't get into now: Lewis uses Perelandra to posit a solution to the free will vs. predestination debate, suggesting that they are somehow one in the same. In Perelandra, Professor Ransom goes to bed one night conflicted about how to act, and wakes in the morning knowing precisely what he will decide to do. Lewis's narrator (can't remember if it's Ransom himself) suggests that perhaps there is no true difference between these. Lewis was of course trained in the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox, so perhaps he's being more credulous than he should be, but I'm also not phrasing my point quite as eloquently and subtly as he did (sorry that I don't have the time or text handy to quote him on this). Also, not meaning to demean "the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox," as I myself am one of its pupils, but phrasing something as a paradox doesn't, of course, make it true.

Return

Something about the school year just takes it out of me. Whatever sort of blockage or death-wish or simple laziness is in me prevents me from posting for much of the year. I’ve actually written a few short pieces, but I’ve never gotten around to putting them up. Some of them are done, some not. Few of them are all that high-quality, but that’s not what blogs are about, now, is it? As Easter Break is beginning soon for me, I will post some of these out-of-date musings. (Some are not so out-of-date; to quote one of my favorite lines from C. S. Lewis, provenance forgotten, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date”; some of these are, if not eternal, at least applicable to any particular time). I’ll also, I hope, write a few originals. One thing to think about over the break includes the adoption process, which really we should have begun already. We’ve seen the lawyer, but done little else. Also, I’ve been watching the film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the newer one with Peter O’Toole, which is really quite the odd long film (halfway through it, it’s a whole new movie), and I’ve been reading Waugh, specifically The Sword of Honor, a book that meanders along in a quiet, occasionally funny, occasionally mystifying way, and then comes together all in a satisfying rush in the final book (there’s some oddity of revision and re-revision alluded to but imperfectly explained in the intro that might be worth investigating). That’s launched me on a re-reading of Brideshead, a rapturously written book, one that the gay man who gave it to me said had such a sad ending, but which I found ended rather beautifully and happily, if with a touch of the true melancholy with which the world is, I think, suffused. I’ll have to decide if that opinion from my first and only reading of the novel (I was 22, or so, working my first job), is accurate. I’ve also been reading, a bit, from The Mary Book, an anthology by F. J. Sheed last published in the 1950’s, that offers some food for thought. I had to do a little grammatical sleuth-work myself in the past few weeks, having tried to teach phrasal verbs and having the “textbook” I am using (actually, a PowerPoint projection prepared by a professor-friend of a professor-friend) blow up in my face. The stuff’s of interest to me, so perhaps I’ll bore my legions of happy readers with some of my own formulations. Much to look forward to, you have.

Some Reading

Finished Volume I of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War the other day, then blasted through Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Great novel, though perhaps a bit unpolished – part of its conceit, but causes it to end abruptly and perhaps never commit to a mode: is it supposed to be a tale of Scottish adventure and family drama, like Kidnapped and David Balfour, or an exploration of evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or a dark journey through unavoidable passions in stormy landscapes, ala Wuthering Heights? Still quite entertaining. Will try to write more on it later. Just picked up John Gardner’s bio of Chaucer, but being more in the mood for fiction just now put it down almost immediately for American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Enjoyable and vulgar. Can see it as a comic book – Shadow’s early internal monologues and the wry humor more generally seem typical of the genre. Couldn’t help but compare the love-goddess-as-anthropophagous-whore scene early on to Lewis’s Aphrodite in Till We Have Faces. The former is horror-film gross, the latter deeply frightening in its darkness. Only about thirty pages in, though, so these are first impressions.

Elizabeth Anscombe

Briefly, something I read over the weekend and intend to return to is Elizabeth Anscombe's article on the Church's ruling on contraception, "Contraception and Chastity." I'm putting it up simply to increase its exposure on the web, even though I do not know one way or the other whether I am able to accept everything it says. It's apparently quite a famous essay, and Anscombe is apparently quite a famous woman, which doesn't speak well to my studies in philosophy in college, especially since I took a class on Wittgenstein, on whom Anscombe is an acknowledged expert. (I always felt that if I had only read Wittgenstein about ten or fifteen more times, instead of only once, and only partially, that I would have come to understand him. There may be something to that belief.) You may have heard of Anscombe, as I had without recollecting her name, if you are a fan of C. S. Lewis, and know that he was humbled in philosophical debate with a young woman philosopher.

Hypocrisy - a Parenthetical Observation

This is an overly-long parenthetical break in one of my sentences from the last post, so I thought I would isolate it as a separate post:

An interesting side note on what occasions hypocrisy, which I think I am reporting accurately, though it has been a long time since I read it: C. S. Lewis says somewhere that he will not speak in judgment upon those sins to which he is somewhat impervious – he will only speak to those sins which he finds himself tempted by and sometimes acting out. Some would regard this as hypocrisy – how dare he judge those who do what he has done? But his rationale is that he cannot account for what motivates those who commit sins that do not tempt him. He can only understand the weaknesses that he himself possesses. He can speak to the sinfulness of those actions because he knows it at first hand. I guess he avoids hypocrisy by being honest about his own shortcomings. My college girlfriend refused to identify anything as sinful which she did herself. She thought it was hypocrisy to do so. I thought it was a kind of solipsism that turns objective categories into subjective ones, that defines the world by one’s own personality.

There are some other interesting observations by Robert Miller and Richard John Neuhaus, over at First Things's blog. The substance of Miller's entry is best summed up by this line from his entry: "A man is not a hypocrite because he violates a moral norm in which he sincerely believes." Neuhaus moves off into the wider implications of the situation of Ted Haggard.

The Sin of Onan?

This is the section I wrote on masturbation, in response to some point of my father's, I forget which. Perhaps it was his attack on the claim that IVF is necessarily immoral because it involves masturbation. I don't know that that is the case, but I have a hard time disagreeing with the Church on self-gratification, as seen below. As my subject line implies, I realize my blanket statement about the Old Testament banning masturbation is at least open to question. It's something that, since I've written it, I have realized is at least controversial, but I have not yet taken the time to look into it, so I'm offering it here unexpurgated, sort of an archaeological shard of my mindset at the time this letter was written (sometime last summer).

Regarding masturbation, I have come to believe it is immoral. This is not an easy thing to say, and I suppose could be regarded as hypocritical, because it is an action I have had a hard thing keeping myself from. These are the reasons I do believe it is immoral: for one, it is expressly rejected in Scripture (at least in the Old Testament – I don’t know whether it is mentioned in the New Testament, nor what qualifies something spoken of as a sin in the OT as a sin in the NT – I understand that the coming of Jesus means a sea change in the way we think about God, but I don’t know the rationale behind the rejection of some prohibitions and the keeping of others). Two, it uses the sexual faculty for the purpose of personal pleasure alone, and, in my case at least, can be a very powerful lure, to the point that many hours over one’s life are wasted in daydreaming about an ever-widening series of encounters, each of which loses its charm after awhile and has to be replaced by some other, quite possibly stranger and more immoral encounter. That which is not sexual comes to seem useless in a world where this need dominates, and giving into it does not satisfy, but only increase the urge. If you’ll forgive me more poetry, C. S. Lewis has a poem called “Lilith” that a scholar named W. W. Robson thinks is about the temptation to and the sterility of (in more ways than one) masturbation:

When Lilith means to draw me
Within her secret bower,
She does not overawe me
With beauty’s pomp and power,
Nor, with angelic grace
Of courtesy, and the pace
Of gliding ships, comes veiled at evening hour.

Eager, unmasked, she lingers
Heart-sick and hunger sore;
With hot, dry, jeweled fingers
Stretched out, beside her door,
Offering with gnawing haste
Her cup, whereof who taste,
(She promises not better) thirst far more.

What moves me then, to drink it?
— Her spells, which all around
So change the land, we think it
A great waste where a sound
Of wind like tales twice told
Blusters, and cloud is rolled
Always above yet no rain falls to ground.

Across drab iteration
Of bare hills, line on line,
The long road’s sinuation
Leads on. The witch’s wine,
Though promising nothing, seems
In that land of no streams,
To promise best — the unrelished anodyne.

Three, in a saying by Jesus that you yourself have quoted to me, “‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart’” (Matthew 5.27-8). Masturbation, at least for me, pretty much requires that I commit adultery in my heart, as images of women I have known and seen are instrumental to the act. And before I was married it pretty much meant that I committed fornication in my heart.

Since I have been accused of the faults of the Pharisees, hair-splitting and unthinking rule-following, I would like to explain what I think is the spirit, rather than the letter of this law. First, I don’t think that Jesus thought committing adultery in the heart to be wrong, but committing fornication in the heart to be permissible. Second, I don’t think this line condemns those who look at a woman and find themselves momentarily enraptured, even momentarily caught up in a fantasy. I think it condemns those who cultivate such thoughts, dishonoring the independence and privacy of those they use in their daydreams, wasting the time of their brains and bodies, directing their desires towards that which is sinful.

I have from time to time been successful in resisting this temptation, but the only recent success has been the last two-to-three weeks. Thinking on how much my attempt to adhere to the Church’s teaching has angered and saddened my wife, her parents, and perhaps others, I realized that, if only out of justice to them, I need to resist the sins that are so easy for me to accomplish, and which are so self-serving in their aims. My other great sin is my laziness, or, if laziness is too strong a word, my resistance to getting things done, which allows me to be behind when I am at work, and allows me to accomplish very little of enduring consequence during the summer months, when I have talents and abilities that could be put to more use.

Regarding masturbation as a means to an end, as it is in the case of IVF, I would have a harder time judging it as immoral. If testicular cancer, for instance, could only be cured by an operation preceded by masturbation, I doubt there would be moral condemnation of the act. This agrees with what you have said about the intention of the act being important in the definition of sin.

One last comment: I have been somewhat faithful in my rejection of this action, but often only in a somewhat painful, legal sense. I still have not purged my mind of "the witch's wine," and will undoubtedly continue this struggle for much of my life.