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Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 17:09:48 -0800
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: C. S. Lewis Essay (fwd)
<snip>
>
> From "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State" (1958) in \Timeless at
> Heart\ by C.S. Lewis:
>
> ... "Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the
> slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the
> linguistic analysts.
> "As a result, classical political theory with its Stoical,
> Christian and juristic key conceptions (natural law, the value of
> the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern state
> exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us
> good--anyway, to do something to us or to make us do something.
> Hence the new name "leaders" for those who were once "rulers."
> We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic
> animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them,
> 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives \are\ their business.
> "I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize
> that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our
> effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all ...
> "I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he
> has 'the freeborn mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this
> without economic independence, which the new society is
> abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not
> controlled by the Government; and in adult life it is the man
> who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize
> its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne;
> that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table,
> eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will
> talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and
> employer? ...
> "Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim
> to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered,
> mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely
> on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians
> proper become merely the scientists' puppets. Technocracy is
> the form to which planned society must tend. Now I dread
> specialists in power because they are specialists speaking
> outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about the
> sciences. ... Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do
> so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no
> more a question for him than for any other man.
> "Thirdly, I do not like the pretensions of Government--the
> grounds on which it demands my obedience -- to be pitched too
> high. I don't like the medicine man's magical pretensions nor
> the Bourbon's Divine Right. ... I believe in God, but I detest
> theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is,
> strictly viewed, a makkeshift; if it adds to its commands, 'Thus
> saith the Lord,' it lies, and lies dangerously.
> "On just the same ground I dread government in the name of
> science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men
> who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put
> forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of
> that age render most potent. They "cash in." It has been magic,
> it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science.
> Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants'
> 'science' -- they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories
> or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled.
> ..."We have on the one hand a desperate need: hunger,
> sickness and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the
> conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global
> technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for
> enslavement? This is how it has entered before: a desperate need
> (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent)
> to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals
> have sold themselves as slaves in order to eat. So in society.
> Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers -- a
> war-lord who can save us from the barbarians -- a Church that can
> save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to
> them bound and blindfold, if only they will!
> ..."All of this threatens us even if the form of society
> which our needs point to should prove an unparalleled success.
> But is that certain? What assurance have we that our masters
> will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves?
> ... All that can really happen is that some men will take
> charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men;
> none perfect; some greedy, cruel, and dishonest. The more
> completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have
> we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not
> corrupt as it has done before?"
>
<snip>
===========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell, Sui Juris : Counselor at Law, federal witness 01
B.A.: Political Science, UCLA; M.S.: Public Administration, U.C.Irvine 02
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