MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely
Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains
mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep
them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and
the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order,
Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research,
Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must
be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for
the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror
of the Same Old Thing.
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have
produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in
counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live
in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it,
therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must
experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at
heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating
Pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than
eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love
of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very
world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.
He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so
that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an
immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from
a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.
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. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we
neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed
novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum
pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be
perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed
hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts
is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.
This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes
pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature
more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued
novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or
both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all
the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by
inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for
example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, "low-brow" and
"high-brow" artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh,
excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire
for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.
The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their
real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those
vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest
to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them
running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all
crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we
make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when
they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are
really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is
directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding".
Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against
Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men are
really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate his horror of the Same Old Thing
into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in
the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of
modern European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy loves
platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to
ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now
if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our
time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?"
they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of
course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will
be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future
to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum,
we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided
on. And great work has already been done.
Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective "unchanged" we have substituted the emotional adjective "stagnant". We have trained them to
think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as
something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever
he does, whoever he is,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTYFIVE
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