Of Other Worlds by C. S. Lewis

Author:C. S. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

A REPLY TO PROFESSOR HALDANE

Before attempting a reply to Professor Haldane’s ‘Auld Hornie, F.R.S.’, in The Modern Quarterly, I had better note the one point of agreement between us. I think, from the Professor’s complaint that my characters are ‘like slugs in an experimental cage who get a cabbage if they turn right and an electric shock if they turn left’, he suspects me of finding the sanctions of conduct in reward and punishment. His suspicion is erroneous. I share his detestation for any such view and his preference for Stoic or Confucian ethics. Although I believe in an omnipotent God I do not consider that His omnipotence could in itself create the least obligation to obey Him. In my romances the ‘good’ characters are in fact rewarded. That is because I consider a happy ending appropriate to the light, holiday kind of fiction I was attempting. The Professor has mistaken the ‘poetic justice’ of romance for an ethical theorem. I would go further. Detestation for any ethic which worships success is one of my chief reasons for disagreeing with most communists. In my experience they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come’. One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’—argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me. I gladly recognise the difference between Professor Haldane and such communists as that. I ask him, in return, to recognise the difference between my Christian ethics and those, say, of Paley. There are, on his side as well as on mine, Vichy-like vermin who define the right side as the side that is going to win. Let us put them out of the room before we begin talking.

My chief criticism of the Professor’s article is that, wishing to criticise my philosophy (if I may give it so big a name) he almost ignores the books in which I have attempted to set it out and concentrates on my romances. He was told in the preface to That Hideous Strength that the doctrines behind that romance could be found, stripped of their fictional masquerade, in The Abolition of Man. Why did he not go there to find them? The result of his method is unfortunate. As a philosophical critic the Professor would have been formidable and therefore useful. As a literary critic—though even there he cannot be dull—he keeps on missing the point. A good deal of my reply must therefore be concerned with removal of mere misunderstandings.

His attack resolves itself into three main charges. (1) That my science is usually wrong; (2) That I traduce scientists; (3) That on my view scientific planning ‘can only lead to Hell’ (and that therefore I am ‘a most useful prop to the existing social order’, dear to those who ‘stand to lose by social changes’ and reluctant, for bad motives, to speak out about usury).

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