Over at Christianity Today Art Lindsley has a good piece on how C.S. Lewis’s support for true progress led him to oppose Progressivism:
Some of Lewis’s most pointed criticisms of “progress” came when he wrote on economics and politics, even though he did not often comment on these topics. When he was invited by the Observer in the late 1950’s to write an article on whether progress was even possible, he titled his contribution “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.”
In this essay Lewis makes it clear he is for progress, in the sense of “increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives.” But he expresses deep concern about the tendencies in the United Kingdom during World Wars I and II to give up liberty for security. He says Britons had grown, “though apparently grudgingly, accustomed to our chains.” He warns that once government encroaches on our freedom, every concession makes it more difficult for us to “retrace our steps.” Perhaps the most striking moment in this essay is the one on the nature of the happiness that he would like to see. Lewis says: “I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind.’ But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs and asks nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”
The full article is here.
