A wonderful, subtle work of reverse psychology. A morality tale about the reclamation of a soul, told in letters from one demon to another, with its own pacing, narrative arc and surprise ending.
Interesting on another level too: there's an intriguing meta-discussion running throughout the text about how rhetoric, propaganda, dialectic, media, current events, and even the use of theological doctrinal disputes can further either good or evil--depending on how they are used. Even a global event like World War II can be a device either to ruin the individual and distract him into petty evils, or it can cause him to focus on what really matters in life.
The reader can also view these demons as a manifestation/incarnation of our own egos. We can all be as unmindful and ego-driven as we wish to. We can all make any virtue into vice by being proud we have it. We can all blind ourselves to our vices and see only our virtues, while for friends and family we do the reverse. Quite a subtle and intriguing book.
Notes/Quotes:
* "Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.
* Excellent example of egoic homeostasis in the early pages of this book: the "patient" reasons to himself that considering a universal idea is much too important to tackle at the end of a morning--but in reality he's just hungry for lunch. By the time lunch is over, he's forgotten all about the entire subject and goes on with his life. Presto! His ego "protects him" from the "risk" of considering this new idea.
* "But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'." A quote incredibly relevant to today's COVID era of constantly iterating "expert" recommendations and policies.
* Interesting imagery on how people are muddled, easily distracted, easily irritated, and find it difficult to concentrate on what's really going on, what are the real reasons why we're here, the real universal truths that require focus and attention. It makes you realized that the real superpower, the real act of individual agency and self-direction, is the control of one's own attention, which is something almost no one has--especially in this modern era of spastic inattention, distraction and constant amusement. "Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords."
* Focusing on the sins or soul of someone else, or the irritating things about them, rather than your own: "I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to beating or insulting the real life or son without a qualm."
* Tremendously useful relationship advice on page 13: "When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other.... Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy--if you know your job he will not notice the immense in probability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her."
* Or, another really good quote: "In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or in such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow to the face... Your patience must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: 'I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.' once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offense is taken."
* WWII as that era's anguish outside of our circle control, much like COVID today. It invites fear, a wish for better times, for the happier past, etc.
* "... suffering is an essential part of what He calls Redemption" (see conceptions of dukkha in Buddhism, this idea shows up in lots of places...)
* "There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human mind against the enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them." Again, the idea of how enervating and pointless it is to worry about things outside your circle of control: the "future" is (temporally) just as outside your circle of control just as whatever daily horror brought to you by the media is (physically) outside your circle of control!
* The idea that uncertainty, fear, anxiety are "the devil's hunting grounds." Mindlessness and non-awareness (being "asleep" in the Eckhart Tolle sense), likewise, are hunting grounds. Better to accept one's current life situation with patience and to say, basically, "thy will be done" and trust that things will work out for the best.
* Also, the idea of thinking of your current collection of fears as "your appointed cross"--in contrast to being caught up just in experiencing the fears themselves. This is an interesting way to apply both psychological agency and awareness to an emotional state.
* Likewise a helpful and resonant cautionary message not just about staying outside of your circle of worry and staying inside your circle of control, but furthermore, not letting your circle of worry cause you to be malevolent to the people in your circle of control. A classic example might be: don't be an angry watcher of the news who becomes stressed out and therefore rude, argumentative or aggressive to the people he interacts with in day-to-day life. Be the opposite: don't watch the news and radiate positive vibes to the people around you.
* On how even can stay hidden in the modern era using misdirection: if a human starts to suspect the existence of some manifestation of evil in the human world, place in his mind a childish or easily-mockable personification of evil, like a devil in red tights with a pitchfork. He will laugh and put away such a childish thought while evil can remain hidden. This is an interesting idea: there is evil in the world, but we do often overlook it for various reasons. This technique is sort of like "agree and amplify" as a way to hide something that you're doing right in plain sight.
* Factionalism (political or otherwise) and other secular pseudo-beliefs: "Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more 'religious' (on those terms) the more securely ours." In the modern era politics is a pseudo-religion for many, with rituals, hymns, beliefs, etc.
* The "law of undulation": that wisdom and insight come at troughs in life not at peaks, it comes through periods of suffering, not through times when life is easy. A counterintuitive idea, and these demon characters are trying to work it out themselves! The one is telling the other that you would think that it would be easy to convert him to the side of evil during during a trough, but it's actually not--it's easier to do so when times are good, or when he's not feeling anything (when "the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty").
* Our ignorance of the system and how it works, is what keeps us trapped inside that system. For example, our unawareness of the "law of undulation" is what gives the demons a better way of exploiting us.
* Of life's "troughs" and how humans think that things shouldn't trough, that good things should last and they ought to last. And that's why we are thrown much deeper into "troughs" than we otherwise would be.
* The "patient" meets some very desirable new acquaintances (meaning: desirable from the standpoint of the demons): "rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly skeptical about everything in the world." Not unlike well-educated intelleckshuals today...
* On intellectual superiority, two ways: "He can be taught to enjoy it kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrary wise, to enjoy the body and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a 'deeper', 'spiritual' world within him which they cannot understand... Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction." Ouch.
* The demons achieve a triumph in making the word "puritanism" into a pejorative: "By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life."
* The four causes of human laughter: Joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy.
* "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor would I liked." One realizes this too late in most cases!!!
* On living life without attention, without mindfulness and agency; rather, having your activities dictated by others and by your own lack of attention span.
* "Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."
* Another good quote about how virtues can easily become vices: "Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble', and almost immediately pride--pride at his own humility--will appear." Another way I guess I would look at this is:
1) virtue must be practiced in secret,
2) virtue signaling is a sin, and
3) we must not become proud of our own virtues, paradoxically they must somehow be invisible even to ourselves as we practice them.
* "The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present." Sounds a lot like Buddhism: "Being" versus some samsara/separation.
* The future is the thing least like eternity, it inflames hope and fear, all the passions point in that direction etc: "Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead."
* Using the word "complacency" on a human to misguide him, either out of the present (e.g.: "you're too in the present, you're being complacent about the future!"), or to use it to convince him he is being too naive and trusting that things will ultimately work out okay in the future (e.g.: "you're being complacent if you think things will just work out for you!"). This is kind of an interesting manifestation of the midwit problem here, where intelligent people actually navigate reality unintelligently because their "intelligence" simply takes the form of quicker and better rationalizations.
* "Humble receptivity to any nourishment" which sounds a lot like the Buddhist idea of good nutriments.
* "So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring church is as soon as possible. Your record up to date is not given us much satisfaction." Note how the demons are contemptuous of the very humans that they are supposed to tempt.
* Gluttony as a deeply internalized sin to the point that we don't even know we have it in the Western world today. A type of sensuality based on delicacy, wanting the the best of the best, producing in us "querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern"
* Also: "She never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practicing temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, 'Oh, that's far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it.' if challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want." In other words, this is a demand for exactly what you want, not for what you have been given, which is also a type of gluttony, "which conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines... Meanwhile, the daily disappointment produces daily ill-temper."
* The delusion that "your time is your own."
* The delusion of ownership. "And all the time the joke is that the word 'Mine' in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything." I feel like I'm reading one of my books on Buddhism, so many parallels!
* There's a meta layer in this exchange of correspondence: the demons do not trust each other, and they are trying to subvert each other, this plot line develops later in the book as a thread. Very interesting.
* Also interesting that the "senior" demon is made physically nauseated at things that are good and true and beautiful.
* "For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them."
* Back to the idea of "virtues becoming vices" once we take pride in them: A subtlety here is that this process happens at a level below our conscious awareness as we trick ourselves with our own egos. And there's so many ways we can fool ourselves!
- "Look how humble I am" ("By jove! I'm being humble")
- "Look at the impressive people I'm now with now that I'm a [member of this church/ a Christian /a Buddhist /whatever]"
- "Look how moral I am, how good a person I am" etc.
- "Look at how often I pray/meditate" etc.
* The demons recognize the trap of neomania and use it against humans: "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart... Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty."
* Chasing earthly happiness using "petitionary prayers"
* Recognizing the rot in modernist academia and among modernist intellectuals, a really good quote here a few decades ahead of its time: "Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge--to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior--this would be rejected as utterly simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for we're learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another." Lewis sees all the meta-analysis and deconstructionism for what it is, a technique to make us forget (and thus not learn from) the wisest minds of our past.
* On the combination of hatred and fear, and the literal pleasure one can get through hatred, another really good quote: "But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all devices, is purely painful--horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate." I sometimes wonder if this is a possible explanation for the rage/hatred/fear we see in so many people during the current COVID era.
* "For men usually feel that a strain could have been endured no longer at the very moment when it is ending.... In attacks on patients, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight."
* The demons are interesting as characters too: they lie to each other, they mislead each other, they attack each other, they tell on each other to their "demon authorities," they backstab each other, they're phony to each other, they even eat each other. They're capable of (actually unable to stop themselves from) committing the same sins they're trying to entrap humans into. They have fear, terror, greed, jealousy, etc., while at the same time they can be very sophisticated about using these same sins to bring down the humans they are assigned to. This book reminds me of Milton's Paradise Lost in that Satan and his team were the really fascinating characters of that work (they were antiheroes capable of doubt, with imperfections and flaws that made them interesting to the reader), while the characters of God and all the other "Heavenly" characters were flat, too perfect to be interesting.
* The appendix: "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"
CS Lewis had an idea for a toast given at a "graduation dinner" of the Tempters Training College for Young Devils.
* Interesting discussion of (philologically) using the word "democracy" as a wedge to produce seething envy in people, very interesting. Democracy repurposed in an incantation of "I'm as good as you" which them morphs into a society-wide manifestation of tall poppy syndrome, causing people to suppress their urge to grow, to be more than their current selves. It also creates suspicion of anyone who's different, and "suspicion often creates what it suspects."
* The same concept translated into the education domain: "Dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'." Thus one can repurpose education to infantilize all (again this is a form of tall poppy syndrome). In the 1950s Lewis saw and articulating a mechanism that would, decades later, hollow out many American public education systems.
* We can also draw a dotted line from here to many of the various traumas and triggerings of the SJW class in modernity. See also this theme explored in Kurt Vonnegut's work Harrison Bergeron, in which fetters and weights are literally placed on society's most talented to make things "fair" and to avoid damaging the self-esteem of those who are not as talented. An entire civilization based on limiting the very best and most talented so that the average would feel better about themselves.
* "Democracy" used in this diabolical, propagandistic sense will eliminate the political existence of democracies from the face of the Earth.
To read:
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne