This book is a collection of essays by C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and perhaps the most famous 20th-century British Christian apologist. The essays range in subject matter from ethics, theology, aesthetics, cultural concerns, and vaguer trains of thought. I will give each essay a brief outline critique before offering my thoughts on the collection as a whole.
- "Why I am not a pacifist" - an impassioned, largely balanced, pragmatic argumentation against pacifism, which I think just about succeeds on its own merits even though it barely delves deep enough into moral philosophy to make its point well.
- "Bulverism" - a study into a plague of modern thinking, which is how people will oftentimes approach an argument by showing why their opponent must be wrong before demonstrating that they are wrong. An original and genuinely compellingly insightful essay.
- "First and second things" - a pretty bland reflection on myth, cultural memory, and authenticity.
- "Equality" - a rather kneejerk if you ask me take on egalitarianism, which wears its complete lack of engagement with political philosophy almost proudly on its sleeve.
- "Three Kinds of Men" - a mercifully short and horribly shallow categorisation of all of humanity into the eponymous trio of camps. Not helpful.
- "Horrid Red Things" - an intriguingly original reflection on assumption, truth, pragmatic value, and shared understanding: robustly common-sense.
- "Democratic Education" - makes a couple of interesting-sounding points but overall falls at the same hurdle as [4]; largely comes across, especially to a 21st-century reader, as unsympathetic elitist huff.
- "A Dream" - anecdotal recount of a dream about the Home Guard; I honestly struggled to see what point if any this one was trying to make.
- "Is English Doomed?" - a despairing take on the decline of academic English studies which is largely, if not utterly, disproven by historical educational trends since.
- "Meditation in a Toolshed" - an original and pleasurably-imaginative musing on how to best balance objectivity and subjectivity in one's perspective.
- "Hedonics" - another highly original and entertaining reflection on the nature of pleasure, and the deplorable lacuna in intellectualism of studying it for its own sake so that it can be better propagated.
- "Christian Apologetics" - originally read to an audience of Anglican priests and youth leaders in the Church of Wales, this is a robust and engaging and open sketch of the challenges and opportunities of its title matter.
- "The Decline of Religion" - a level-headed take on the secularisation of British society that had started to rear its head in Lewis's lifetime to the shock of the religious establishment, even though it was merely, as he argues, the manifestation of trends that had been bubbling away for centuries.
- "Religion Without Dogma" - for my money the best essay in the book: Lewis, with zero philosophical academic weight but a wealth of common sharp logic, strips the concept of religion of everything it can bear to lose while still being worthy of the name to discover if there is an acceptably universal minimal form of it. His rigour in this endeavour paired with actual scholarly study could fill an entire series of theology books, but ultimately for his conclusion that Christianity suffices the lowest-common-denominator middle-ground seems to me well made.
- "Vivisection" - a fairly utilitarian anthropocentric reflection on the topic, that if you ask me bares the underdevelopment of Lewis's thinking on animal being and rights (not simply because I disagree with him - I don't, in places, but rather that he uses them as a springboard into human concerns with a clear lack of having landed on a satisfactory understanding of them in themselves.)
- "Modern Translations of the Bible" - a sane and uncontroversial (nowadays at least, unless you're one of those KJV-only-purist nutjobs) take on alternate English versions of scripture: all points in here are completely justified by the proliferation and worth of such translations in the years since this was written.
- "On Living in an Atomic Age" - weirdly jovial in its Christian nihilism; Lewis here pays no attention to international relations or ecology and merely goes off on a sprawling tangent about the value of purposeful life over mere survival (as if the two were wholly disconnected concepts) and lands at a conclusion that I understand but think is morally entitled and politically bankrupt.
- "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" - a two-parter in which first the essay and then a response to two critiques of aforesaid essay lay out Lewis's (oh, how shall I say) interesting perspective on the nature of crime and punishment. From a purely moral standpoint I understand his perspective but on a pragmatic level I think he completely fails to grapple with any serious philosophical notion of justice and on a social level he makes "logical" leaps into un-contextualised territories to make his points that left me simply scratching my head at his paranoia.
- "The Pains of Animals" - this one opens with a letter by a Dr. Joad, critiquing the chapter in Lewis's book The Problem of Pain on this essay's topic, and then follows with Lewis's reply. We already know Lewis's grasp of animals [see 15] is weak to put it mildly, so even though respectably he does admit that his points here are "speculative", the fact that he would have devoted a chapter in one of his books to this subject is intellectually sloppy and from an apologetic standpoint even irresponsible (especially considering what he said in [12] about the responsibilities of apologetics).
- "Is Theism Important?" - a brief but cogent dissection of the line between intellectual faith and spiritual or personal faith, and how these are or aren't bridged.
- "Xmas and Christmas" - not even an essay, just a prolonged whinge about the secularisation of the holiday. Zero intellectual content but a fun[ish] read.
- "Prudery and Philology" - the least consequential thing in the whole book; this is basically just a spiralling diatribe about how problematic it is or isn't that words for genitals are often rude.
- "Is History Bunk?" - a fairly interesting look into the nature of historical study and where exactly judgement or critique comes into it; I struggle to see any meaningful application of these ideas anywhere they aren't already being wholeheartedly engaged with though.
- "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State" - the half-baked political thinking Lewis proudly showed off in [4] and [7] is now applied on a global level, with zero economic understanding displayed and zero substantive philosophy utilised, to draw us into an alarmist sketch of global future dystopia under the guise of universal wellbeing.
Overall I think this is a pretty hit-and-miss collection. Some, like [2], [11] and [14], are definitely worth a read and are original and robust. Many others just smack of rather bland conservative cynicism from a man whose position as a public intellectual privileges him to talk about anything he wants regardless of how much he actually understands the complexities or nuances or the topic (or fields of study entire) at hand. Readers looking for a whole book's-worth of biting, truly compelling argument as Lewis is known for in his Christian writings will only find perhaps 30-40% of such a books-worth here, but anyone interested in his way of thinking should still find this an interesting read.