The US Democrats and Republicans, together with other political activity around the world, probably takes up too much space in my head. In 1945, C.S. Lewis gave a talk on “Membership,” later published in his collection, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Lewis is writing one of his Christian apologetics in this essay. However, when he writes in the second sentence that he is “thinking only of natural values,” that is his way of setting aside his primary topic of Christian faith and discussing secular society for a few lines. Here’s Lewis:
To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. Collective activities are, of course, necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary. …
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind–if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else–then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease. There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve. Thus money comes to hinder the exchange of commodities, and rules of art to hamper genius, and examinations to prevent young men from becoming learned. It does not, unfortunately, always follow that the encroaching means can be dispensed with.
Here’s my earlier meditation on the Samuel Johnson quotation, “To Be Happy at Home is the Ultimate Result of All Ambition” (December 26, 2018), with relation to an earlier similar comment from Blaise Pascal. As I wrote there: “I aspire to remember and to live out the value of happiness at home. But I recognize in myself the contradiction of aiming at rest through agitation. I know that my opinion of myself, along with the opinions of those who have known me longer and more intimately, should matter most. But I recognize in myself a desire to receive attention and plaudits from those who barely know me at all.”
