Hell-o Again (Screwtape Revisited)

Craig Payne

      Craig Payne teaches at a community college in southeastern Iowa.

My dear tender Wormwood:

      How delightful to be once again corresponding with someone of your esteemed name! As a matter of fact, I was not even aware of your existence, or I would have made your acquaintance long before. Your predecessor, for whom you were named, I always found to be witty, charming, and-ah-delectable, in his way. And I trust I shall find in you the same delicious qualities I found in him. Sooner or later.

      Indeed, it has been several decades since that previous exchange of devices, stratagems, and spoils, between your namesake and myself, and you are completely correct in seeking my counsel-in seeking, as you put it, a sort of "progress report" on our successes and failures (apparent failures, I should say, and only apparent failures). As I say, I am pleased that you seek my knowledge, although in the future I would suggest perhaps a tone of greater respect, obsequiousness, even self-abasement, when approaching one who is so clearly your super-

      But enough of that. You will find, as you set about to effect the destruction of the current generation, that our work of previous decades has borne much fruit-has become, so to speak, encapsulated in the particular susceptibilities of this generation of the despised human animals. For that matter, much of your work has already been done for you. All you have to do is play skillfully upon the tendencies of those you seek to further ensnare. If I may attempt an elaborate metaphor-and why should I not?-previous generations of humans largely abandoned the well-watered garden of their wretched piety, their "faith" in Our Enemy Above. Subsequent generations further neglected the care of this garden, but continued to depend upon its perennial blooms to sustain their culture and give it meaning and purpose. Now the garden is more or less dead, and the current generation, to whom this dead heritage has been bequeathed, does not even remember a time when the garden may have been alive. To them, the garden of faith is now, always has been, and always will be, quite moribund. All you have to do is keep them thinking that way.

      However, you may have difficulties. It is that "more or less dead" phrase that still occasionally causes turmoil in the ranks of Our Father Below. Faith is not completely dead. This garden of faith still at times recrudesces, breaks out like a pimply rash in populations that we had taken for granted; and when it does, it still has the same accursed salvific power that it has always had! You can readily appreciate the aggravation, the heartburn (literally speaking), such occurrences bring about down here. Indeed, a great deal of your future career will depend on keeping such outbreaks of redemption to the barest of minimums-down to the level of zero percent, in fact.

      In the best interests of this future career of yours, allow me to offer a tip or two, regarding what I perceive as our greatest success and our greatest threat. I do not offer this counsel, you understand, in any sort of self-aggrandizing spirit. Rather, I am concerned only with you, your career, your future-ah-destiny.

      Young demons such as yourself tend to think of the primary hellish activity in terms of the spectacular, the "event"-that particular and exact moment of evil that displays itself, that makes evil so fascinating. However, these displays, I have discovered, can be counter-productive. When humans consider the reality of evil, they are at times led inexorably to consider also the reality of evil's opposite. A great evil, for example-let us say a quite visible evil perpetrated against an entire people or even against a nation-could possibly have the effect of what our enemies label a "revival" or "awakening" of religious devotion. Of course, our damage control department would immediately spring into action, working overtime to make sure religious stirrings are transmuted into something lesser; love of G- can be easily watered down into love of family or even love of country (the "lesser of two goods" theory proposed by some of our political thinkers here below). However, it would be better if even the possibility of religious awakening were avoided.

      I would propose to you that our greatest success does not lie in the overt display of evil, but rather in what I would call evil's "banalization." We have succeeded-and so quickly!-in turning evil into the commonplace, the abnormal into the normal, the sickly into the picture of health. Further, we have succeeded also by taking the opposite tack, that is, by turning the good into something mocked, the normal into that which is dismissed with a sneer, the healthy into the disgusting. And our work here has not been accomplished through large overt displays of our demonic prowess, but rather through linguistics.

      "What?" I can almost hear you cry in a mocking tone (since you are safely, for the moment, out of my reach). "What does linguistics have to do with any successes in the advance of evil?" My young Wormwood, you will quickly recognize, once you are actually involved in field work, that there has been a sea change in the population of Western humans. (You are assigned, I believe, primarily to North America?) Changes in language lead to changes in thinking. Changes in thinking lead eventually to changes in behavior. And we have taught the humans well the changes in language. The changes in thinking have followed; in the case of some behaviors (sexual, for example), further changes followed rapidly. Others took longer. We are just now beginning to reap (especially among violence-prone youth) some of the other behaviors we desire. These results are not being achieved by argument, or logic, or even political power, at least at first. They are being achieved simply by re-definition. By means of this re-definition (especially given the incredible power of the modern human media outlets), an entire cultural climate of opinion can be altered virtually without resistance on the humans' part or special effort on ours.

      Allow me to offer some examples of our linguistic work. These may seem minor, at first, until I point out their ultimate goal, their cumulative impact. Note, for instance, how quickly an argument over the legitimacy of capital punishment can become muddied by the simple expedient of equating capital punishment with "murder." Or when someone praises another's special merit or natural gifts, we can destroy the effect of that praise (and effectively end the use of those gifts) simply by labeling such distinctions as "elitist" or "classist." Special triumphs of my own involve the current arguments among humans as to what exactly constitutes "racism" and "charity." Do vices and virtues such as racism and charity arise out of individual human practices-or do they arise out of political partisanship? Is one "racist," or is one "charitable," solely because of how one votes today? Just the fact that the argument rages so heatedly and confusedly is an exquisite triumph.

      Examples multiply in all fields. In the family, we have made great progress in equating child-rearing and discipline with child "abuse." Of course, actual child abuse is one of our greatest delights down here; you should see us gather around when a child's screams, especially when produced by the hands of a family member, echo through these hellish chambers. But almost as delightful is the confusion of actual child abuse with normal discipline. The breaking apart of normal families-how sweet! In the area of politics, we have made extraordinary inroads. Of course, here we have a natural advantage; we are playing on our home turf, so to speak. Witness the spectacle of a recent U.S. President explaining that when he said he had had "absolutely no sexual relationship" with a young intern, he meant that phrase in-well-his own private way. In fact, this same President had to have explained to him the meaning of the word "is." How wonderful!

      One of the more astute human writers (curse him!), in a famous essay, put the matter this way: "Words of this kind [political language] are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. . . . It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear." Well stated, of course, but why, Wormwood, should we stop with "politics"? Why not debase entire cultures through language?

      You may be thinking that the examples given are too trivial to lead to such debasement. However, nothing is trivial, as you will learn, if it serves our final purposes. In the case of the debasement of language, we have arrived at such a purpose. This is what you will find in your field work: For the most part, humans no longer have any clear conception of what constitutes "truth" or "normalcy." Merely the fact that the words "truth" and "normalcy" typically appear in quotation marks today is a victory of re-definition for our camp.

      "What is 'normal'?" goes the common question. Usually the questioner does not wait for an answer, assuming that there is none. Even here, we have made great strides in confusion. Most of your clientele, for example, will assume that something so normal as little boys playing with toy swords and little girls playing with dolls is not "normal," but socially enforced, stereotypical gender roles. On the other hand, any kind of blatant sexual perversion will be labeled as "normal" for someone-will be labeled, in fact, as a genetically determined practice and hence a part of the mainstream of human activity.

      C.S. Lewis, that petty eavesdropper and mail-opener-although admittedly a leading apologist for Tsirhc (you will understand the inversion)-once called this, in one of his fiction works, the culture's "systematic training in objectivity." He went on to describe it thus: "Its purpose is to eliminate from your mind one by one the things you have hitherto regarded as grounds for action. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, aesthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed." In other words, we are trying to remove from the humans' minds any conception of what they instinctively see as the normal and good. And in this effort, as I have stated, we have largely succeeded. In fact, if anyone ever even brings up such considerations as the "normal" and "good," that person is labeled as venomous, hate-filled, spiteful. Of course, with our heightened appreciation of these ironies, we make sure that this labeling is done in a venomous, hate-filled, spiteful manner-and never recognized as such.

      Even greater linguistic progress has been made with the term "truth." We see this term for what it is, a purely emotive category designed to gain power over others, but at one time the humans seemed to think it meant something, something quite important to them. Our strategy of incomprehension in this regard took only three steps: (1) We taught them to accept nothing but pure rationality as a guide to truth. Revelation, traditions, even history and accepted social practice, we equated with superstition, and then dismissed. (2) We then-and again you will appreciate this-made sure that their education took away from them all the traditional tools of logic and reason! We dangled before them the ideal of pure rationality-and then made sure it became virtually unattainable by them! We made them, in a word, technocrats: unthinking practitioners of one form of employment or another. (The intelligentsia who led this change were especially easy to seduce.) (3) Finally, the easiest step was taken: We taught them that "truth" no longer existed, or, if it did, could not be reached. Even seemingly bedrock foundations such as "reality" or "nature" were presented as social constructs whose main function was to legitimize those in political power. The pure fact that disagreements over truth occurred we used for our gain; as Pascal, another of His accursed thinkers, wrote, "Those who do not love truth excuse themselves on the grounds that it is disputed and that very many people deny it."

      This may seem heady stuff, but I assure you, my dear Wormwood, that these "heady" ideas have already filtered down through the body politic. I had the privilege of sitting in on a classroom discussion not long ago in which the equation "A = A," written in chalk on the blackboard, was the subject of serious dispute as to its truth among first-year college students. When humans cannot recognize a truth such as that A = A, young demon, they will not be recognizing any other truths either-and we will have them.

      HOWEVER.

      I trust that you were not nodding? Perhaps the capitalized word caught your attention?

      Yes, there is danger, even in all of this, for our side.

      This whole messy business of "truth" does seem to keep arising. It seems that humans have some sort of instinctive hunger, perhaps built into their systems by Our Enemy Above, for truth. Their rational minds (and rationality is a great and precious gift, curse it!) want to seize upon system, upon structure, upon order. They do have this intense ordering principle which perceives meaning, purpose, in a word, truth, behind the brute facticity of their existence. They want love, that hated, burning passion behind all reality. Their bodies love life and the givenness of existence; their minds love understanding and truth; their hearts love-

      But I don't even want to think of Him. And I will not.

      In medieval times, humans thought in similar ways. The poet Dante Alighieri, for example, slanderous though he was to our side and Our Father Below, did highlight this search for order and truth. He claimed that he ultimately found the order of the universe both in the profound dignity of each human person and in the final authority of-No, I will not think of Him!

      Our danger is that the current generations are at a similar place in history. Both pure rationality and pure hedonism have failed them, and they are still hungry. Politics and education have failed them, and they are still hungry. In fact, given our continual work of corruption, all human institutions will fail them-have failed them-and these humans are still hungry. They are genuinely hungering, do you understand, Wormwood, my little fool? And He-He-said: "Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled."

      It shall not be. It must not be. They must not find truth-love-Life. Let me make myself clear: You had better make sure that such a divine satisfaction of their hunger does not occur. For if it does, you will discover, as did your predecessor, that there are other hungers-the hungers of Hell, for example, hungers for bungling, incompetent demonic souls, to alleviate, if it were possible, our own torment . . .

      But I anticipate myself; I anticipate you. It may well be that you succeed brilliantly. It may be that you eclipse my own achievements. Or it may be that you fail. In either case, I look forward to our actually meeting for a good long heart-to-heart-a feast of reason, as it were.

      With more sincerity than you can imagine,

      Screwtape