In Which C.S. Lewis Wants Some Punks to Get Off His Lawn

Introduction

I recently worked through all of C.S. Lewis’s short essays again, and as a consequence read his piece “Delinquents in the Snow” yet one more time. He wrote this piece after some young hooligans in his neighborhood had robbed him of some things, had been caught, and were brought up before a liberal lady-judge. As Lewis sat in the courtroom, the judge had then admonished the boys that they really must cease with the childish pranks. In the course of his griping about this wrist slap, C.S. Lewis also offered, as was his custom, some prescient observations about our time.

The reason Lewis was able to do this, along with others like him, was not because he understood the future. No. Rather his wisdom was found in the fact that he understood men.

Lewis on Point

When the hand of the law is slack in ungodly ways, the price is paid by that society’s best and most reliable citizens, and in such a way as to demoralize them over time.

For those who suffer are chiefly the provident, the resolute, the men who want to work, who have built up, in the face of implacable discouragement, some sort of life worth preserving and wish to preserve it. That most (by no means all) of them are ‘middle class’ is not very relevant. They do not get their qualities from a class: they belong to that class because they have those qualities. For in a society like ours no stock which has diligence, forethought or talent, and is prepared to practise self-denial, is likely to remain proletarian for more than a generation. They are, in fact, the bearers of what little moral, intellectual, or economic vitality remains. They are not nonentities. There is a point at which their patience will snap.

C.S. Lewis, Delinquents in the Snow

He is talking about what happens when the lawless prey upon the law-abiding for too long. The reason it goes on too long is that they are largely enabled to do what they do without consequences. One of the reasons why God established civil magistrates in the first place was in order to punish this kind of wrong-doer. When the magistrate fails in this basic duty, or simply rejects it as not being his duty, really bad things start to happen. The first thing is that crime spirals out of control. The second thing is that a violent vigilante reaction sets in—and of course the magistrate wants to prosecutes that to the fullest extent of the law. A once stable society is destabilized.

In making this dire prediction of “patience snapping,” Lewis anticipates that he will be accused of “threatening,” and he answers this the same way that I would want any sensible person to answer.

The Elderly Lady [the judge], if she read this article, would say I was ‘threatening’—linguistic nicety not being much in her line. If by a threat you mean (but then you don’t know much English) the conjectural prediction of a highly undesirable event, then I threaten. But if by the word threat you imply that I wish for such a result or would willingly contribute to it, then you are wrong. Revolutions seldom cure the evil against which they are directed; they always beget a hundred others. Often they perpetuate the old evil under a new name. We may be sure that, if a Ku Klux Klan arose, its ranks would soon be chiefly filled by the same sort of hooligans who provoked it. A Right or Central revolution would be as hypocritical, filthy and ferocious as any other. My fear is lest we should be making it more probable.

Ibid

In other words, Lewis also knew the principle of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth

Back in the seventies, a previous era when crime was out of control, Dirty Harry and other vigilante-type movies became a thing. When justice is not brought to bear down by the ministers of justice, then what happens is that volunteers start to take matters into their own hands. This is what Lewis is warning against, and not threatening with.

In the time of Jesus, a famous phrase from the Torah was being used in just the same way that people tend to use it today—as a justification for taking matters into your own hands. “He hit me, so I will hit him back, as the Good Book says . . .” But this is not an application of biblical teaching, but rather is a reversal of biblical teaching.

Prior to Moses, the justice system was a semi-regularized system of personal vengeance, and it was the kind of thing that could easily get away from you. If someone accidentally killed somebody else, say in a logging accident, someone from the deceased’s family, the blood avenger, could kill the person who was guilty of the manslaughter. As one means of applying the brakes to this, Moses established the cities of refuge, which greatly restricted the “rights” of the blood avenger. In addition, at the same time instructions were given to the magistrate to execute justice in a strict and evenhanded way. The magistrate was told to take “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn,” and so on (Ex. 21:24).

This was because, when it was up to the blood avenger, it could easily turn into a life for an eye, or ten lives for one life. We already see that a man could be deliberately killed by the blood avenger because of accidental manslaughter. That is how things escalate.

But these eye-for-eye sentencing guidelines, given to judges, were picked up by individuals who wanted to retaliate themselves. “I can take it upon myself to deliver a blow in exchange for a blow,” and so on. So when Jesus tells His followers not to retaliate themselves (Matt. 5:38-39), He is not reversing the Mosaic code, but is rather applying the spirit of it correctly.

The apostle Paul does the same thing. He tells the Roman Christians not to take personal vengeance, but why? He says that instead of personal vengeance they are to leave room for God’s vengeance because wrath and vengeance belong to Him. But then remember that just a few verses after this, Paul says that the civil magistrate is God’s deacon of wrath, God’s deacon of vengeance (Rom. 13:4).

This is a great system. But what happens when the civil magistrate abandons this basic assigned role? What happens when the magistrate just walks away? This creates a vacuum, and what happens then?

What happens is that society starts to revert to the way things were before—returning to a cycle of blood vengeance and tribal hostilities that creates a true cultural moonscape. The magistrates prattle on with the lamest of bromides (“childish pranks”), and the idea of the heroic vigilante is born. But the epic poem Beowulf illustrates what an untenable situation we get with a macabre fusion of high nobility and hellish retaliations.

Lewis was looking at the principle. When some delinquents stole some of his things, that was nothing new. Thieves you shall always have with you. The thing that Lewis noticed with alarm, a cloud the size of a man’s fist, was that indulgent and excuse-making judge. That is where the fatal disease was. The boys had the decency to commit their crime in secret, as though there was something wrong with it. The judge did what she did in the broad light of day, in a courtroom, with witnesses there, and with the approval of her own conscience. That was the promise of a societal hell . . . and here we are.

So Clown World is Dangerous, and Not Just Stupid

But being soft on crime is only one way that the magistrate abdicates its assigned role in all of this. Another area of abdication, and every bit as serious, occurs when the magistrate is soft on nonsense. Being soft on crime violates common sense, and if you keep that up long enough, your squishy relativism will soon be at war with every kind of sense.

For example . . .

Whatever are we to do with the fact that different kinds of parents are pressuring school boards over different sorts of issues? Some, belonging to an older school of thought, don’t think that pornography should be available in the elementary school library—and they maintain this over the objections of “trained educational professionals.” And other parents, with children who identify as furries, want litter boxes to be made available at school for the poor little buddies.

But insanity is not sustainable, to use a popular word. Stupidity is not a viable long-term strategy. And the longer our ruling elites put up with this kind of lunacy, telling us all that we need to adjust to the “new normal,” the more ominous looking that bulge in the crater of the volcano starts to look.

Danger signs are everywhere. In a preposterous move, Ye (Kanye) went onto Alex Jones’ Infowars in order to say, and I quote, “I like Hitler.” This is obviously a demented statement from a very troubled soul, but there is something about Alex Jones that seems to bring this out in people. Ye’s statement was no more screwy than the recent legal judgment applied to Alex Jones, a judgment that was the better part of a billion dollars. He was fined that staggering amount for having claimed that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. My point here is not that Alex Jones is not unhinged. My point is that everybody seems to be unhinged. And both ends of the fever swamp justify their unhingedness from the clear fact that those other guys are nuts. See Lewis above. Explosive blow back reactions are rarely able to deliver on the promise of reform.

And the people who believe that men can get pregnant want to be in charge of what constitutes “misinformation” on the Internet. They look you straight in the eye as they tell you this piece of news, looking quite solemn and dignified, and backed by a graduate degree from Yale or perhaps Harvard. In short, the elites are bonkers. And if they persist in their frenzied clubbing of anybody who tries to talk retro-sense, it is quite possible that the point of explosion, when it happens, will occur when Lewis’s sturdy middle class finds, opens and downs an entire bottle of red pills, consequently sees red, and then goes on a red rampage. Some will say, linguistic nicety not being in their line, that I threaten. But we have already gone over that.

Speaking of the Internet, Elon Musk has revealed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored, and censored in order to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. As he put it, for a private company to suppress that story is not censorship, but for a private company to do that at the behest of the government, is censorship. Moreover, it is censorship for the sake of partisan advantage during an election. In brief, it is election interference. When The Washington Post or The New York Times turn a blind eye to some stories, and trumpet others above the fold on the front page, that is just the liberal bias that we all know and love. In the words of that old hit from the early sixties, “Its my paper, I can lie if I want to.” We have all grown accustomed to that kind of thing, and we can just bless their pointy little heads.

But this stinker of a story shows us the machinery of a hyper-partisan government, dangling the gatekeepers of a principal news source on a string. The government tells these guardians of free speech to suppress something, and yessir! they cry, and jump to suppress it. And so this embroilment makes Watergate look like Mother Teresa ministering to the downtrodden of Calcutta. And the worst part of the scandal will be all those who persist in acting as though it was not a scandal. They are trying to make civil war inevitable.

I’ve got one more for you.

Sam Brinton is a high-ranking official in Biden’s Department of Energy. Here is a story with details, if you have a strong stomach. He is a non-binary unit of some sort, and some weeks ago was caught stealing a woman’s luggage at baggage claim, a bag worth more than $2K, and a week after that, he hosted a seminar on spanking at a kink conference. But that is not the central problem here. We have always had disturbed people, just like we have always had thieves. What we haven’t always had are the supposedly sane people standing watching it all, saying things like “I fail to see the problem here.” Even The Daily Mail, reporting on the story about him, was careful to use the pronoun they. Oh, good. Things might have gotten a little crazy had they not.

Conclusion

I confess that there are times when I feel like the script writers for 2022 have been drinking on the job, and are pulling our leg.

In Paradise Lost, Satan famously says, “Evil, be thou my good.” We are discovering that it is not possible to retain a long term allegiance to the devil’s party without also saying, “Nonsense, be thou my sense.”

And so it comes time to explain the Lewis meme I posted at the top. The drivers of all this lunacy are masters of accusing others of what they themselves are up to. In their relentless drive for a fascist state, they want to foment anarchy so that they will have a plausible excuse for seizing control because of “the emergency.” And anyone who stands in their way, suggesting that we punish criminals, or allow free speech on Twitter, or not install litter boxes in the government schools, is accused of, you guessed it, fascism. To which, my Lewis replies, “No, no, that’s not fascism either.”