PWJ: S2E2.5 – Bonus – “The language we use…”

This week is a short episode and Matt and I are not discussing The Great Divorce. Instead I talk about an interaction I recently had on Facebook and how we’d all be better off if we took to heart a little piece of Lewisian wisdom…

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S2E2.5: “The language we use, and wishing black was a little blacker…” (Download)

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Show Notes

• I talk about an interaction I had on Facebook where an old friend referred to viewers of a particular news channel as “the enemy”. I spoke about the corrosive nature of language and how it can enable us to justify anything as long as it means “our side” wins victory. We quickly dehumanize the opposing side. I quoted from Mere Christianity:

“Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 7)

• I explain that Lewis gives us a test which will reveal the state of our heart:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible?”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 7)

Lewis warns us that, if we do this, it will take us down a very dark path:

“…it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 7)

This ends up taking us to a Hellish destination:

“Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 7)

• This isn’t an attempt for us to get political (Matt inevitably talked about Taylor Swift).

• I invite the listeners to ask themselves who they regard as “the enemy” and spend some time this week trying to find something about that opponent which they can recognize as good and praise it.

• You can hear Matt and I discuss this passage from Mere Christianity in more length in Episode 20 of Season 1.