Of Social Media, Humility and Toolsheds

To the degree that social media encourages us to look at others and treat that perspective as the only one to be considered, it has contributed to the breaking of our politics. We must, as Lewis said, “on the pain of idiocy,” deny that “looking at” is intrinsically more true or better than “looking along.” Today, we must also deny that “tweeting at” is the equivalent of dialogue, discussion, or understanding.

If we are to repair the worst aspects of today’s social-media politics, we should start by not just looking at others but attempting to look along their experiences as well. That requires us to do the harder work of taking ideas seriously and treating the experience, values, and beliefs of others as being worthy of actual consideration and respect, rather than reflexively dismissing them with jargon-laced hostility or the dismissive shrug.

These are the last lines from a recent Op Ed I offered riffing on C. S. Lewis' magnificent "Meditations in a Toolshed." You can read the rest of the article here.

Remembering C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley on the 50th Anniversary of their Death.

 

50th Anniversary--

Remembering Lewis and Huxley

by Gary L. Gregg

22-November-2013

For the last week our televisions and newspapers have been taken up with commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  As I write this, we are just an hour away from bells tolling across the land. It is right that we pause and remember the event that changed so many lives and in ways we won't ever fully unravel, changed a generation of Americans and altered the cultural landscape of our nation.

Two other giants of the 20th century also died on November 22, 1963 and deserve our remembrances and appreciations. Perhaps the most important Christian apologist of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis died in his beloved Oxford the same day one of the most prophetic writers of the century, Aldous Huxley passed away in a bed in Los Angeles. The death of both men was overshadowed by Kennedy's assassination and have been for the last fifty years.  Still, these writers had a profound and lasting influence on minds and imaginations around the world and, at least in the case of Lewis, it might well be that his influence over the last fifty years  has been more wide and profound than was that legacy cut short in Dallas.

Nearly all of Lewis' books are still available in print and in just the last couple of years at least two new volumes have been salvaged from his records and made available to the public. His life has been the subject of a major motion picture. His children's books continue to baptize the imaginations of our young and have been made into movies that have reached even more. His Christian apologetics have converted atheists, like he once was himself, and instructed anew millions raised in the church. His scholarship stands the test of time. His adult fiction, particularly his novel That Hideous Strength has never been more timely. His The Abolition of Man remains a powerful tonic to the moral relativism of the modern world.

Later today Clives Staples Lewis joins the likes of some of the greatest literary artists in the English speaking world including Chaucer, Browning, Blake, Dickens, Austin, and Kipling, with a special memorial in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey. The honor is more than well-deserved.

Aldous Huxley's literary influence has not remained nearly as influential as has Lewis' but his _Brave New World_ remains one of the greatest warnings against the trends of the modern world. From genetic engineering to drugs for sexual enhancement, few writers were as prescient about the way our culture would decline into decadence over the last seventy years. His imaginary world built on the elimination of pain and the maximization of mindless contentment deserves reading and re-reading in our age of electronic distraction, declining education standards, and sexual mores as loose as the novelist could ever have imagined.

As we commemorate our fallen political figure today, let's also remember the literary giants who warned us, prepared us, and continue to inspire and instruct those who still read books in our own Brave New World full, as it is, of hideous strengths.

The Dalai, the Dinosaur, and the Tao

 The Dalai, The Dinosaur, and the Tao

Here are the last two paragraphs from a short essay I wrote after having the chance to listen to the Dalai Lama in Louisville, Kentucky on May 21, 2013. 

"At the root of the Dalai Lama’s understanding of the good life is a profoundly illiberal understanding of humanity. Where the modern liberal project is based on the Lockean and Hobbesian lie that everything rests on the autonomous individual, the Tibetan gave us a vision of humanity existing in families and in community with one another. He told the story of how his illiterate mother carried him on her back while she toiled in the fields and how he learned compassion through a deep and nearly constant communion with her.  A good life within the Tao sometimes requires us to carry others and sometimes to be carried as we attempt to make our way on this journey. We are never really autonomous and self-sustaining individuals. The very office of the Dalai Lama teaches just such an understanding as Buddhist believe he is the reincarnation of a soul who reached its journey but turned back to commune with those still suffering and striving.

"Perhaps we should not be surprised that the teachings of the Dalai Lama are so fully within “the way” that C. S. Lewis identified.  What is surprising is how much the undergirding vision of the man and his teachings are misunderstood by the post-moderns who admire him for lessons they don’t quite understand.  For the sake of the Tao itself, let us hope this 14^th incarnation of the Dalai Lama is not the last of his kind. For now, we Christians of the west should join in his teachings as we are all, despite our differences, either within the Tao or in the shadow lands beyond."

Thanks to the Drepung Gomang Institute and the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts for hosting the Dalai Lama and (Traci Simonsen) for inviting me to tag along.

The full essay can be found by going to:

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-dalai-the-tao-cs-lewis/#.UZ4WgIJ1Fyg