Christianity and Capitalism - Kingdom building

I will likely post my favorite quotations from Dr. Jay Richards's 2009 book, Money, Greed, and God: Why capitalism is the solution and not the problem, tomorrow. It's a fantastic read - and only about 200 pages.

In the book he blasts away eight (8) specific myths that have confused men as to the true character of capitalism. These myths are:

1. The Nirvana Myth - contrasting capitalism with an unrealizable ideal rather than with its alternatives
   
2. The Piety Myth - focusing on our good intentions rather than on the unintended consequences of our actions
3. The Zero-Sum Game Myth - believing that trade requires a winner and a loser
4. The Materialist Myth - believing that wealth isn't created, it's simply transferred
5. The Greed Myth - believing that the essence of capitalism is greed
6. The Usury Myth - believing that working with money is inherently immoral or that charging interest on money is always exploitative
   
7. The Artsy Myth - confusing aesthetic judgments with economic arguments
8. The Freeze-Frame Myth - believing that things always stay the same - for example, assuming that population trends will continue indefinitely, or treating a current "natural resource" as if it will always be needed)

If you want to understand capitalism, you need to read this book. If you want to understand why Christians should back capitalism as the best possible mechanism for engendering virtuous economic activity (regardless of sentiments - given that those of most men are immoral), then listen to Richards. You won't be disappointed.

Even those whose arguments he skewers have recommended his book.

Wisdom - It does everybody good

The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes – Derek Kidner

Page 11

But now he must relate it to the world at large, to the scene spread out on every side: from what lies right at his feet (shrewdly pointed out in Proverbs) to what is barely visible at the horizon – the dark riddle of how the world is governed (the book of Job) and how it should be valued (Ecclesiastes).

Proverbs

Page 20

But appeal will be made to the teaching and discipline of both father and mother (Proverbs 1:9; 6:20), and at one point the grandparents come fondly into remembrance as well (4:3). Not only in these early chapters but in every section of the book it is assumed that truth is to be learnt first at home, instilled there with firmness and affection as lessons for the mind and training for the character.

….

The home remains the place from which this teaching emanates, and whatever threatens its integrity is viewed here with profound concern.

….

Two such threats are given special treatment. First, in 1:10-19 (cf. 4:14-19), there is the fatal appeal of the gang to the restlessness of youth.

…

Secondly, there is the more subtle threat of sexual temptation…The point is that she [the temptress] has put herself outside the loyalties and structures of society and the laws of God, and owes her disruptiveness and much of her fascination to that intriguing fact.

Page 23

Or again, she is Lady Bountiful, with everything to give, from riches to honour to righteousness and life itself (Proverbs 3:15-18, 8:18-21, 35); and her feast, like that of the gospel, is for the hungriest and the least promising. “To him who is without sense she says, “Come, east…and drink….Leave…, and live, and walk in the way of insight”’(9:4-6).

Page 45

Proverbs 31:1-9 (The Words of King Lemuel’s mother

This again is a direct address, in the imperative mood. Its vocational emphasis (on kingship, not on general morality) brings it especially close to the pattern of extra-biblical Instructions, since these were addressed to budding administrators, including (in the case of Amenemhet and Merikare) future kings. So, while other hortatory instructions in Proverbs point out the universal perils of loose living (e.g. Proverbs 5 on promiscuous sex; 23:29ff. on drunkenness), and the universal duty of compassion (e.g. 24:11-12), this one puts them in the special context of power and the heightened obligations which it brings. It spells out the principle of Luke 12:48 (‘much given…much required’) with maternal outspokenness!

Job

Page 56

Even in our encounter with Proverbs it emerged that our best and soundest recipes for success can only be provisional, since our management of life is limited by what exists around us, within us, and, decisively, above us. ‘How then can man understand his way?’ (Proverbs 20:24) was a question which even that book of confident answers had to raise at some point.

But in Job, what was no more than a passing cloud in Proverbs now blots out the very sky. Instead of a simple reminder of human ignorance, what faces us here is the urgent problem of divine justice.

Page 61

A closer look at the material shows that the basic error of Job’s friends is that they overestimate their grasp of truth, misapply the truth they know, and close their minds to any facts that contradict what they assume. That being so, if the book is attacking anything its target is not the familiar doctrines of other Scriptures, such as God’s justice and benevolence, his care for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or the general law that what one sows one reaps. Rather, it attacks the arrogance of pontificating about the application of these truths, and of thereby misrepresenting God and misjudging one’s fellow men. To put it more positively, the book shows (by its context, the opening scene in heaven) how small a part of any situation is the fragment we see; how much of what we do see we ignore or distort through preconceptions; and how unwise it is to extrapolate from our elementary grasp of truth.

Job’s well-meaning comforters demonstrate the force of this by straying ever further from reality as they pursue their fixed ideas of suffering as punitive or, at best, purgative. Shocked, instead of shaken, by Job’s denials that his suffering is deserved, they pass from gentle probings for some hidden sin, to stern rebukes for his intemperate language (e.g. Job 15), and finally inventing a fictitious catalogue of crimes for him (22:5ff.). To reinforce this, they paint idealized pictures of a world of prosperous saints and destitute sinners, brushing aside all contrary examples. And to magnify God’s holiness they are driven to adding to it the element of royal disdain, so that he distrusts the very angels, finds fault with the starry skies, and regards humanity as worms and maggots (15:15f.; 25:5f.). Small wonder that in the epilogue God charges them with folly and slander (42:8).

Ecclesiastes

Page 93

The Book as Qoheleth’s Challenge to the Secularist

G.S. Hendry has expressed this view as follows:

‘Qoheleth writes from concealed premises, and his book is in reality a major work of apologetic or ‘eristic’ theology. Its apparent worldliness is dictated by its aim: Qoheleth is addressing the general public whose view is bounded by the horizons of this world; he meets them on their own ground, and proceeds to convict them of its inherent vanity…His book is in fact a critique of secularism and of secularized religiong.’

Looked at in this way, the shafts of light that we have noticed are signals to the reader that the author’s own position and conclusions are very different from those of the secularist, in whose shoes he is standing for the purpose of his thesis. Without these signals and their final confirmation (12:13-14) the book would simply preach despair, or at best a mere whistling in the dark. But with them, it is saying that the abyss of final vanity is the destination of every road but one.

Page 96

Judge of All

This is double-edged. It has its terror for the wicked (8:13) and its warning for the exuberant (11:9), and there are moments when it could be simply reminding us that all things alike are under a death sentence (3:17 ff.). But in the context of life’s injustices and apparent lack of meaning, the fact that justice will at last be done (8:10-13; 12:14) is not bad news but good. As I have remarked elsewhere, in Ecclesiastes we have faced ‘the appalling inference that nothing has meaning, nothing matters under the sun. It is then that we can hear, as the good news which it is, that everything matters – “for God will bring every deed into judgment…”’.

Page 100

As J.S. Whale put it in a notable Cambridge Lecture, ‘If death means that all is over and there is nothing more, it is life which is pervaded with tragic irrationality. Every column in the great human tot-book adds up to precisely the same result, Zero.’

….

Two turns of speech, however, keep reminding us that these modest pleasures are not goals to live for, but bonuses or consolations to be gratefully accepted. First, they are ‘from the hand of God’, and to be taken as such with a clear conscience (‘for God has already approved what you do’, 9:7; i.e., as the author of these joys he has shown his pleasure in them). This is very different from a defiant hedonism. Secondly – and this is the other ‘constant’ in Qoheleth’s thought – these joys, however innocent, are passing, like all else that is ‘under the sun’. So they too are subject to ‘vanity’. There can be not pretence that they are more than palliatives, brightening ‘the few days of (one’s) life’, the ‘vain life which he has given you under the sun’ (5:18; 9:9).

Page 101

The common-sense sayings are too numerous to be simply foils for the occasional paradox or dark thought. Their role is positive and bracing: to show that there is much that can be done by plain good sense, since all too many of our troubles are of our own making. Just as the brevity of life is no reason to reject its joys (as we have seen), so its blows and hazards are no argument against using our intelligence to mitigate them. The only proviso is that we treat this as a mitigation, not an answer. The deeper questions remain.

Page 103

Two questions, if not three, arise here. First, do Qoheleths, own words end with verse 8? The way they echo his opening suggests this strongly, and the commending of his work to the reader in verses 9-12 has the sound of a new voice (compare verse 10 with John 21:24b). The remaining verses are no less authoritative, as canonical Scripture, for that.

Secondly, does ‘Vanity of vanities’ cancel the positive thrust of ‘Remember your Creator’ and the equally positive ‘end of the matter’ in verses 13-14? To answer this we should notice that such a sequence is typical of Qoheleth’s overall method, which is to present a prevailing picture of earthly futility and tragedy, almost (yet not wholly) unrelieved by any glimmer of light. Where other writers would commend the light to us directly, Qoheleth does it by making the darkness intolerable, allowing the light only the rarest gleam to provoke the observant into second thoughts. ‘Remember your Creator’ is, apart from the clear daylight of the epilogue, the last of these moments before the clouds close in again; and on this occasion Qoheleth is explicit in his warning that they will indeed close in, and his appeal for right relationship with God before they do.

But this leads to the third question, namely what answer even such a relationship can give to a prospect of universal death. Qoheleth, by insisting that God is a judge of every act (8:11-13) and every man (3:17), brings eternity to bear on us, even though time, without that dimension, destroys us. It follows that nothing is meaningless, for God assesses it; and no-one is forgotten, however short may be the human memory.

This is exceedingly far-reaching. Nothing less than this can answer the nihilism, the ‘vanity of vanities’, with which Qoheleth faithfully confronts the merely earthbound. If every act, every person, matters to the eternal God, man can play his part in earnest. Nothing will go unregarded, unremembered or unvalued. But beyond this Qoheleth will not venture. To the question of whether human death has any different sequel from that of animals his answer is, ‘Who knows?’ (3:21), and this must control the meaning we assign to 12:7, ‘the spirit returns to God who gave it’. As in Psalm 104:29-30, it will speak only of the breath, or spirit (ruah, as here), which God lends to man and beast alike.

Page 104

‘The end of the matter’ (12:13-14) makes no breakthrough into such a hope [eternal life], but it does bring into full view what has earlier been glimpsed only fitfully and, for the most part, in deep shadow. Now the fear of God emerges as not merely man’s duty (that word has been supplied by translators) but as his very raison d’être; and the judgment of God has, as it must have, the last word.

Qoheleth’s summarizer has not failed his author.

[per footnote: Strictly the phrase in 12:13b means ‘for this is every man’ – a concentrated way of saying, “every man is destined for, and show be wholly absorbed in, this – A.H. McNeile, An Introduction to Ecclesiastes, p. 94]

Page 115

Thus Qoheleth holds up the mirror to man, showing him the transience of his work and the fact that God’s works alone endures. This is the corrective which man needs to his perennial conviction that he can make unlimited progress; for until the end of the age and the break-in of God’s full reign, Paul’s words in Romans 8:20ff still apply to us. But whereas Qoheleth can only say that God’s work alone will last, Paul proclaims that God has acted in Christ, and that the groaning and travail of the present age will not be in vain.

Comparing the three

Page 116

Between them, the three books clearly cover three aspects of existence which no-one can afford to overlook: the demands of practical good management; the enigma of calamities that are beyond control or explanation; and the tantalizing hollowness and brevity of human life.

Page 122

Qoheleth’s godly ‘Yes’ on this point, whatever contradictions the present vanity may suggest, must be given eventually the last word – which means that his book will end, through the inspired insight of his editor, where Proverbs had begun: with the fear of the LORD God who weighs up every deed and motive. The Alpha of Proverbs has become the Omega of Ecclesiastes.

Page 123

For all his questionings, he has no quarrel with conservative wisdom, as long as it is not the means of hiding from us the darker facts of life which it is his mission to expose.

Some international reflections

Page 128

Thou shouldst not supervise (too closely) thy wife when thou knowest that she is efficient. Do not say to her: ‘Where is it? Fetch (it) for us!’ when she has put (it) in the (most) useful place…Recognize her abilities. How happy it is when they hand is with her! Many…do not know what a man should do to stop dissension in his house… [Ani (ANET, p. 421a)

Page 129

Do not marry a prostitute, whose husbands are legion,...

When you have trouble, she will not support you,

When you have a dispute she will be a mocker.

There is no reverence or submissiveness in her….

…She pricks up her ears for the footsteps of another man [ANET, p. 595b]

Page 131

Strong words from schoolmasters:

Spend no day in idleness or thou wilt be beaten. The ear of a boy is on his back, and he hearkens when he is beaten. [Pap. Lansing 19f. (Caminos, p. 377)]

Advice to parents:

My son, withhold not they son from stripes: for the beating of a boy is like manure to a garden, and like rope to an ass. [Ahikar 2:22 (Charles, p. 732)]

The final chapter - the abolition of man

Chapter 3 – “The Abolition of Man”

Page 67

From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Page 68

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them.

Page 70

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

Page 73-74

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask “Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?” But I am not supposing them to be bad men?” They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what “Humanity” shall henceforth mean. “Good” and “bad,” applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious. We might suppose that it was possible to say “After all, most of us want more or less the same things – food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where’s the trouble?” But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened.

Page 75-76

The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse. We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all “rational” or spiritual” motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men.

Page 76

At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely “natural” – to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.

Page 78

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected…

Page 79

The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psycho-analyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

Page 80

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere “natural object” and his judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will.

Page 81

Traditional values are to be “debunked” and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.

….

The belief that we can invent “ideologies” at pleasure…begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are “potential officer material.”

Page 82

Nothing that I can say will prevent some people form describing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course: and real Natural Philosophers (there are some now alive) will perceive that in defending value I defend inter alia the value of knowledge, which must die like every other when its roots in the Tao are cut.

Page 83-84

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

Page 86-87

To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on “explaining away” for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

A meeting of men

Lewis, Clive S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

On Three Ways of Writing for Childrenˆ

Page 778

Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, “I loathe prunes.” “So do I,” came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. Of the far higher and more difficult relations between child and parent or child and teacher, I say nothing.

To those who say that children must not be frightened and means to keep their minds from knowledge of the world around them:

Lewis, Clive S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Page 776 - On Three Ways of Writing for Children

"There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened."

The Abolition of Man - quotations for keeping (Part 2)

Lewis, Clive S. The Abolition of Man [or]: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

“The Way”

Page 41-42

However subjective they may be about some traditional value, Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all. They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable.

Page 42

For the whole purpose of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval, and this would be either a fool’s or a villain’s undertaking unless they held that their approval was in some way valid or correct.

Page 43

Their skepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values: about the values current in their own set they are not nearly skeptical enough.

Page 45

From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self preservation.

We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself: or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of “rational” value behind all the sentiments we have debunked.

Page 46

That, again is why the modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality: the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to preserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and we can now abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with the preservation of the species. It looks, in fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that he does not want.

….

I will not insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what…for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of a given species…Is it maintained that we must obey instinct, that we cannot do otherwise?...Or is it maintained that if we do obey instinct we shall be happy and satisfied?...It looks very much as if the Innovator would have to say not that we must obey instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obey instinct.

Page 48

Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge.

Page 49

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey “people.” People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.

Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest.

If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity, we could never learn it form them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

Page 50

Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

Page 51

What we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out in the “deserts of vast futurity.”

Page 51-52

As we pass from mother love to rational planning for the future we are passing away from the realm of instinct into that of choice and reflection: and if instinct is the source of value, planning for the future ought to be less respectable and less obligatory than the baby language and cuddling of the fondest mother or the most fatuous nursery anecdotes of a doting father.

Page 52

What is absurd is to claim that your care for posterity finds its justification in instinct and then flout at every turn the only instinct on which it could be supposed to rest, tearing the child almost from the breast to crèche and kindergarten in the interests of progress and the coming race.

Page 53

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

Page 55

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.

Page 56

The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.

If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required.

Page 57-58

From the Confucian “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you” to the Christian “Do as you would be done by” is a real advance. The morality of Nietzshe is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle…But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where w can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: “You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?” and a man who says, “Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.”

Page 59

An open mind about questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.

The legitimate reformer endeavors to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgment of value it professes to embody.

Page 59-60

The direct frontal attack “Why?” – “What good does it do?” – “Who said so?” is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized.

Page 60

I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more “realistic” basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with.

The Abolition of Man - quotations for keeping

Lewis, Clive S. The Abolition of Man [or]: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Men Without Chests

Page 27

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

Page 28

“The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about. To disagree with This is pretty if those words simply described the lady’s feeling, would be absurd: if she had said I feel sick Coleridge would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well.”

Page 29

“Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” (Nicomachian Ethics – 1104 B.)

“In the republic, the well-nurtured youth is one “who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.” (Republic – 402 A.)

Page 31

“It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”

“And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement [sic]: it that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.”

Page 34

“the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’ The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds – making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.”

Page 35

“Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”

“I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical [sic] about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who has been brought up among sharpers.”

Page 35-36

“The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.”

(Alanus ab Insulis. De Planctu Naturae Prosa, iii)

Page 36

“It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”

Page 37

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Select Quotations from "The Chronicles of Narnia"

The Chronicles of Narnia

Lewis, Clive S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

The Magician’s Nephew

Page 30

“Well don’t keep on gassing about it,” said Digory. “Come along, I want to see what’s in one of the other pools.” And Polly gave him a pretty sharp answer and he said something even nastier in reply. The quarrel lasted for several minutes but it would be dull to write it all down. Let us skip on to the moment…

Page 41-42

“But the people?” gasped Digory.

“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.

“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”

“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else where they there for but to do my will?”

“It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.

“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Our is a high and lonely destiny.”

Page 62

“Glory be!” said the Cabby. “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.”

Page 75

“And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.”

Page 93

“I know what errand you have come on,” continued the Witch. “For it was I who was close beside you in the woods last night and heard all your counsels. You have plucked fruit in the garden yonder. You have it in your pocket now. And you are going to carry it back, untasted, to the Lion; for him to eat, for him to use. You simpleton! Do you know what that fruit is? I will tell you. It is the apple of youth, the apple of life. I know, for I have tasted it; and I feel already such changes in myself that I know I shall never grow old or die. Eat it, Boy, eat it; and you and I will both live for ever and be king and queen of this whole world – or of your world, if we decide to go back there.”

“No thanks,” said Digory, “I don’t know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I’d rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Page 131

[Professor Kirke/Digory]“There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

….

[Peter] Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”

“Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

“But there was no time,” said Susan. “Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours.”

“That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true,” said the Professor.

Page 146

“Aslan?” said Mr. Beaver. “Why, don’t you know? He’s the King. He’s the Lord of the whole wood, but not often here, you understand. Never in my time or my father’s time. But the word has reached us that he has come back. He is in Narnia at this moment. He’ll settle the White Queen all right. It is he, not you, who will save Mr. Tumnus.”

….

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Page 151

[Referring to Edmund at the Beavers’s house] And he had heard the conversation, and hadn’t enjoyed it much either, because he kept on thinking that the others were taking no notice of him and trying to give him the cold shoulder. They weren’t but he imagined it. And then he had listened until Mr. Beaver told them about Aslan and until he had heard the whole arrangement for meeting Aslan at the Stone Table. It was then that he began very quietly to edge himself under the curtain which hung over the door. For the mention of Aslan gave him a mysterious and horrible feeling just as it gave the others a mysterious and lovely feeling.

Page 160

[Father Christmas to Lucy] “And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle.”

“Why sir?” said Lucy. “I think – I don’t know – but I think I could be brave enough.”

“That is not the point,” he said. “But battles are ugly when women fight.”

Page 162

[Edmund with the Witch] Meanwhile the dwarf whipped up the reindeer, and the Witch and Edmund drove out under the archway and on and away into the darkness and the cold. This was a terrible journey for Edmund, who had no coat. Before they had been going quarter of an hour all the front of him was covered with snow – he soon stopped trying to shake it off because, as quickly as he did that, a new lot gathered, and he was so tired. Soon he was wet to the skin. And oh, how miserable he was! It didn’t look now as if the Witch intended to make him a King.

Page 185

[Lucy and Susan playing with Aslan after he’s risen from the dead] It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Page 522

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

The Silver Chair

Page 583-584

“That’s the spirit, Scrubb. That’s the way to talk. Put a good face on it. But we all need to be very careful about our tempers, seeing all the hard times we shall have to go through together. Won’t do to quarrel, you know. At any rate, don’t begin it too soon. I know these expeditions usually end that way: knifing one another, I shouldn’t wonder, before all’s done.”

….

He and Scrubb both had swords – Scrubb had brought he one which had been left out for him in his room at Cair Paravel – but Jill had to be content with her knife. There would have been a quarrel about this, but as soon as they started sparring the wiggle rubbed his hands and said, “Ah, there you are. I thought as much. That’s what usually happens on adventures.” This made them both shut up.”

Page 620

This was like cold water down the back to Scrubb and Jill; for it seemed to them very likely that the words had nothing to do with their quest at all, and that they had been taken in by a mere accident.

“Don’t you mind him,” said Puddleglum. “There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant King caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.”

The Last Battle

Page 685

“Please,” said the Lamb, “I can’t understand. What have we to do with the Calormenes? We belong to Aslan. They belong to Tash. They have a god called Tash. They say he has four arms and the head of a vulture. They kill Men on his altar. I don’t believe there’s any such person as Tash. But if there was, how could Aslan be friends with him?”

….

“Baby!” he [Shift the ape] hissed. “Silly little bleater! Go home to your mother and drink milk. What do you understand of such things? But you others, listen. Tash is only another name for Aslan. All that old idea of us being right and the Calormenes wrong is silly. We know better now. The Calormenes use different words but we all mean the same thing. Tash and Aslan are only two different names for you know Who. That’s why there can never be any quarrel between them. Get that into your heads, you stupid brutes. Tash is Aslan: Aslan is Tash.”

Page 713

“I see now,” said Puzzle, “that I really have been a very bad donkey. I ought never to have listened to Shift. I never thought things like this would begin to happen.”

“If you’d spent less time saying you weren’t clever and more time trying to be as clever as you could—“ began Eustace but Jill interrupted him.

“Oh, leave poor old Puzzle alone,” she said. “it was all a mistake; wasn’t it, Puzzle dear?” And she kissed him on the nose.

Page 717

“And the other sight, five leagues nearer than Cair Paravel, was Roonwit the Centaur lying dead with a Calormene arrow in his side. I was with him in his last hour and he gave me this message to your Majest: to remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.”

Page 720

“I was going to say I wished we’d never come. But I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. Even if we are killed. I’d rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a Bath chair and then die the end just the same.”

Page 721

“Kiss me, Jewel,” he said. “For certainly this is our last night on earth. And if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now.”

“Dear King,” said the Unicorn, “I could almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it. Farewell. We have known great joys together. If Aslan gave me my choice I would choose no other life than the life I have had and no other death than the one we go to.”