Please refer to the introduction to this series on C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior Devil to a Junior Devil for the gist on its conception and purpose. 

Here is a brief synopsis of the first letter: Screwtape, the senior devil of a higher administrative position concerned with gathering souls for “Our Father Below,” maintains regular correspondence with his nephew, Wormwood, a junior devil. In the first letter, a response from Screwtape to Wormwood––although we never see Wormwood’s letters, we get their salient points through Screwtape’s replies––advises the nephew on how to secure the soul of his “patient.” In this commentary I am interested in three counsels Screwtape offers Wormwood which all boil down to distraction. 

But what is distraction? According to the embedded dictionary on Sirvin II, my laptop, distraction can be defined as: 1. A thing that prevents someone from concentrating on something else (thus an object: If you‘re like me Sirvin II fits the description); 1b. A diversion or recreation (thus an activity or event: surfing YouTube counts as a good example if you’re me); 2. Extreme agitation of the mind (well I hate to admit it but I get very restless when I am unable to binge my series upon series of programs on YouTube––couch-potato style). Thus distraction comes in the forms of obstruction, sensual gratification and states of frenzy.

Let’s get to the potato of the first letter. I will consider Screwtape’s first suggestion of interest to Wormwood: 

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’ but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. (1)

In other words, Wormwood’s patient, like most contemporary persons, Lewis argues, is like a dandelion seed in the wind. Most things are not simply black and white, yes. But can one really hold the belief that as everything is ingrained with qualities of truth nothing is predominantly false? In other words, to never establish a fundamental ground that holds oneself accountable for one’s psychological growth. Thus we are in a state where committing murder yields no punishment as long as one can prove that it was committed with valid reasons. Or the bank steals from those who can barely make ends meet, every day. But how is it wrong for wealthy entities to exploit the already poor? It is just business. 

Of course, there is truth and falsehood. And yes, even if everything contains some fragment of truth, one must consider and compare the proportions of good and bad and what a decision means for the individual who is one with the community and therefore one with the environment and thus the universe. Can one really afford to be overly diplomatic with matters of obstruction? Of course, the answer depends on one’s core values: a distinct innate system which helps one decide what is right and wrong. But if we haven’t established such a system in the first place, that is, have never decided for ourselves what is really important, why it is really important and why we must protect it, then we can be happily mollified by meaningless jargons which we might never even bother to breakdown and analyze for ourselves. After all, a little thinking is, really, OVERTHINKING—not trending. Yes, let’s just be consumers and leave everything to the EXPERTS.

Screwtape’s second advice to Wormwood speaks to one of our contemporary rules in being likable: 

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’. (2)

By all means avoid disagreement: do not argue. This is one of the main commandments of our contemporary society––Dale Carnegie makes very good argument for it in How to Win Friends and Influence People. If they like blue, I like blue. No? They like red? Then I like red, too. They see the cloud shape to be a horse? It doesn’t matter that I see a fish, a horse it is! Of course, one can easily go with the flow when one doesn’t have any real principles to mess with one’s psyche. How can one argue when one has nothing to argue for—all is the same to one. And since our social environment discourages argument, most of us know neither the technique nor the value of debate, nor do we know how to exercise logic: maintain a genuine interest in discovering and practicing truthfulness. Indeed many of us couldn’t argue even if we wanted to––I definitely cannot. The words run away and I am left with em, em, emmm. 

But who wants to argue, be that annoying, pretentious person who probably just wants to show-off––I mean, who reads Aristotle these days, gosh!? No one wants the curse of a square bore raining spit on what would have been otherwise a very good party. Argument is uncomfortable as it dares to disagree, openly. It is political: I stand for this and not that! And one must not be political. Although everything including the tasteless, pricy, “organic” tomatoes I am eating is  political. Let’s not even talk about that bank system that robs me legally. Hating on capitalism is just naïve. Does this read bitter? Have I gotten bitter? I suppose I am disappointed. Argh. 

Lewis’ “stream of immediate sense experiences” is the same stream as ours, only ours is closer and much more available with terrific ability to disrupt in us either the building or maintenance of protective barriers like self-discipline: innate tools necessary to maintain a healthy check and balance on excessive/useless consumption. One must simply have a mental system that can swiftly question and detect when self-distraction becomes self-destruction by means of diversion and how to prepare for such situations.

Prior to the pandemic, I thought I was pessimistic enough, that I had a pretty good grasp of human nature––nothing could surprise me. And as is often the case when I start to think I have understood something, life shows me that I still have a long-long way to go. Thus things that seemed to me common-common-too-freaking-common sense proved to be rocket science. So I can’t brush-off the following lines as I might have in pre-COVID era: 

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see… But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation’. (4) 

You may replace Christianity with any practice that holds value to you and I feel the lines will still ring true. What is science but the questioning of what things are, what they are made of, why they exist, what purpose they serve, where they originate from and why they function as they do? And can these questions be answered without humility, observation, reflection and patience? 

I was recently admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. My second room-mate––she came after the first left––was an eighty-eight year old woman who spoke to me frankly about her life through the curtains that separated us. I suspect she thought I was caucasian and perhaps older for she became careful after she saw me walk with assistance at a snail pace to our shared bathroom. She would growl and curse excitedly as she watched Fox News—just like how I used to get excited while watching my favorite dramas. She felt that things were better in the past, thus the future must be crafted as the past. I see her point. I have heard that perspective over and over and over again. I have caught myself saying things like, “growing up in the 90s was way better.” I bet certain people have already started saying, “growing up in the 2000’s was, like, the bestest!” 

But is it really the change in time or the awareness of a change—perhaps a disintegration––in our contemporary psyche? An inability to generate and maintain core principles that define us; principles we stand up for, openly, whether or not they are popular. What have we given up, what are we giving up, what have we attained and what do we want to attain? What is important for healthy life and what is only superficially important? If we are not already considering these questions, we really ought to ponder them. 

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Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil. London: William Collins, 2016. Print. 

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Jane A. Odartey