Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Arguing With Lefties?

Earlier, we mentioned that Lefties are--actually--NOT on 'the same mental planet' as Righties.

C. S. Lewis knew that, and has a bit of narrative in his Screwtape Letters about that.

“You young devils,” says Satan, the wily old misanthrope, wise in the ways of man, “believe you can damn the human vermin with reasoned arguments. Reason, as you should know, and for your own sake you had better remember, is of the Enemy. When we fight with it, we fight with his own weapons. What we want in that line, as our dear friends the Sophists have shown us,” and here a couple of the youngsters snigger, as one of them waves a kind of spiritual drumstick in the air, once belonging to a fellow named Dewey, “are tangles of argument without reason, and the more abstract they are, and the less dependent upon that stew of mud and muck called Nature, the better.* No,” he says, “man is an irrational animal. Are you taking notes, Asmodeus?”

A demon with a fishy fume about him puts down his piece of charcoal, which he had been using to draw a caricature of his instructor, not entirely flattering.

“Man is an irrational animal. He acts by the promptings of what he is pleased to call his heart. The heart of man is wicked from his youth, as the Enemy himself has said. But we may not depend upon it without action on our part. The Enemy has also said, and in this case our espionage department has determined that the statement expresses some measure of the truth, that he made man in his image. Man is a sub-creator, as that vile peddler of fabulist goodness Tolkien said. As the Enemy makes man, man makes men, in his art, his imagination. Our task is to turn that heart into a factory of idols. It is not a difficult one. Give us the imagination,” he says, with a curl of the lip, “and we will gladly concede everything else.

“Let the Enemy have all the reasons, every catechism, every seminary, and a hundred thousand ministers who believe every last jot and tittle of that vile book whose name I will not deign to utter. Let him enjoy a few political victories now and then. So what if the Soviet Union fell? Let China fall too. Give us the imagination, and we will do our danse macabre on the grave of Christendom, now and evermore.”...
 *It would be unfair (but really, really, gratifying) to posit that Satan was thinking of lawyers when he remarked on 'argument without reason....[not] dependent on ....Nature.'  On the other hand, why not?

Bear that in mind.  One can persuade a Lefty of damn near any proposition, so long as that Lefty feeeeeelzzzzz good about it.

1 comment:

Dave P. said...

Um...that's not C.S. Lewis. Possibly Peter Kreeft, but certainly not Lewis.