"Lillies that Fester" from The World's Last Night by C.S. Lewis

by quasimodo at 05/24/05 5:44AM
In the essay "Lillies that Fester," Lewis considers the word culture and all that it implies. He argues that modern society is pretentious in its use of the word. He considers the difference between a group of "transparent snobs" going on and on about the great wine they have tasted to prove their sophistication and the little boy sitting on a schoolbus reading a science fiction novel rapt and oblivious to the world. The first group has feigned culture, but there was no hint or suggestion there was any real enjoyment. With the little boy, we meet something real. He has appreciation for a book and the tools are there for him to appreciate good books. The little boy is to be preferred because he is unconcerned with the word culture or being cultured.

This is important.

As we move away from real appreciation to a worship of culture, we find ourselves in what Lewis calls a Charientocracy.

"Thus to say that, under the nascent regime, education alone will get you into the ruling class, may not mean simply that failure to aquire certain knowledge and to reach a certain level of intellectual competence will exclude you. That would be reasonable enough. But it may come to mean, perhaps means already something more. It means that you cannot get in without becoming, or without making your masters believe that you have become, a very specific kind of person, one who makes the right responses to the right authors."

This is dangerous because it eliminates deviation from art and culture. People who will not fall in line with the right answers will be eliminated from the power to make change. Donne and Wordsworth would have been "fixed" by the age of ten.

This may seen innocuous. But we do the same with religion. We start at the end with the word itself. We teach our children the right answers to the questions. We feign interest and there is no real appreciation or love for God. And we wonder why there is no power in our faith.

"who could bring to repentence, and who can unmask, those who were attempting no deception? who don't know that they are not the real thing because they don't know there ever was a real thing?"