Scott Alexander reviews The Great Divorce
Published: Tue, 27 Mar 2018
Book Review: The Great Divorce [Nov. 7th, 2012|01:42 am]
by Scott Alexander
The frame story of CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce is sparse but cute: there is regular bus service from Hell to Heaven. The damned souls from Hell take a field trip to Heaven, where they meet their blessed friends and relatives. They have conversations about their past lives and about good and evil. It is revealed that any damned soul who wants to stay in Heaven is free to do so, but in the end most of them choose to get back on the bus to Hell.
There was some theological discussion, but it didn’t seem very central. Lewis pretty much said all the Christian sects were simultaneously right about everything and it was a mystery exactly how.
So the setting was a straw dystopia and the theology was hand-wavey. The book was about morality. And like most of Lewis’ writings about morality, it was really good.
The Sin of Pride
Pride is considered not just a deadly sin but the worst deadly sin, the one that ensnared the Devil himself. I have always been confused about this. In his Book of Ratings, Lore Sjoberg asks pretty much the same question I would:
I’m not sure how pride works. Do you go to hell for saying “this is a pretty tasty three-bean salad I’ve made, if I do say so myself,” or do you have to say “why, I bet this is a better three-bean salad than GOD could make”? And what about self-esteem? My high school counselors were always pushing self-esteem on me. Were they pawns of the Adversary?
I’ve been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender recently, and Uncle Iroh said something that helped pride click for me:
You are trying to escape your shame with pride. But pride is not the opposite of shame. Pride is the source of shame, the other side of the same coin. It is deep humility that opposes both of them.
If I had to choose the exact passage of Lewis’ that this reminded me of, it would be the one where one of the blessed is trying to convince one of the damned to stay in Heaven, and the damned soul keeps thinking up all of these worries - for example, that as a damned spirit it’s grown ghastly and transparent, and finally the blessed soul asks “Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”
What I’m getting from Uncle Iroh’s quote is that pride and shame are both about obsessing over yourself and your status - in the one case how great you are, in the other case how lowly you are. What he’s calling humility is thinking about something outside yourself; devoting your life to some purpose other than self-promotion.
But the spirit in Lewis’ book never answers the question, and I’m not sure what the answer is. How do you go about trying to think of something that’s not yourself? If you think “Okay, gotta get to Heaven, so I’ll start thinking about Jesus”, you’re focusing on how to get yourself to Heaven. If you think “I wanna be a nice person, so I’ll give to charity”, you’re thinking about how to make yourself nicer. I wonder to what degree this is what the Protestants mean when they say that salvation is entirely by grace: you can’t get there from here, if you’re thinking entirely about yourself there’s no way to bootstrap yourself to thinking about other things.
Am I reading this at a level of philosophical sophistication greater than that in the text itself? I don’t think so. Lewis starts off with some boring straw men (the passage with the liberal clergystrawman was particularly grating) but then he does a commendably good job of examining the hardest possible cases for his theory of self-absorbedness. One of the damned souls is a mother whose son died when he was young; the mother spent the rest of her life mourning the son in the worst possible ways: refusing to do anything happy or fun, telling all her living children they could never live up to the dead son’s example, chiding anyone who acted happy as being insensitive to her misery. And so she went to Hell. It sounds harsh to send someone to Hell for being excessively sad that their son died, but Lewis did a good job showing how what looked like caring about another person (the son) was really self-absorbedness: trying to prove to everyone how righteous and sensitive she was and give herself an entitled position as the Poor Grieving Mother. She had built an identity as a Wronged and Bereaved Person, and she continued mourning not out of love for her son but in order to protect that identity. Lewis’ mantra that you have to shed your identities in order to become enlightened blessed was a constant theme, and the mother went to Hell not for loving her son but for loving her identity as the Wronged and Bereaved Person, which was in a way a sort of pride.
I interviewed at another psychiatric hospital yesterday, and we were discussing some of the cases there, and one thing that struck me was the similarity of Lewis’ idea of pride to the psychological idea of the defense mechanism. You have something bad happen to you - some threat to your self-esteem - and instead of rolling with it and saying “Yeah, I guess I’m not quite as great as I thought” you come up with some narrative that preserves your self-esteem. One of Lewis’ characters in Divorce is a good example: he was a poet, he wasn’t successful right away, so he decided he was a soul too pure for this world and that everyone else saw his inherent goodness and envied him and was in a conspiracy against him and that’s why they were mean to him. Or when some of the damned first found themselves in Hell, instead of admitting they had made a mistake they told themselves that because they had their freedom there and didn’t have to worship God, it was the real Heaven, and the people in the place above who said they were in Heaven were just deluded goody-goodies trying to sound better than everyone else. Or another guy who had known a criminal in life, found the (repentant) criminal in Heaven, and then went back to Hell in a huff because going to Heaven would legitimize the system that said a criminal got better treatment than upstanding law-abiding citizens like himself. It helps clarify an idea I wrote in another article, that “people aren’t just seeking status, they’re seeking the ability to believe that they have status.”
In Lewis’ Hell, the reason people don’t choose to go to Heaven even though the gates are open is that they’d have to abandon their defense mechanisms. They’d have to admit that there’s no conspiracy of jealous people against them and maybe they just weren’t that good a poet. Or that they’re in Hell because they were bad people, not because Hell is super awesome.
It has nothing to do with making good three-bean salads. Lewis’ Hell is full of people who are too proud to admit they were wrong.
I think I’m good at admitting I’m wrong in philosophical debates, but The Great Divorce made me realize how terrible I am at it in my personal life and in my quarrels. Once I had a good idea what pride was and what to look for, it was depressingly easy to find it in myself.
The Dark Side of Divorce
Other than the straw dystopianism and the hand-wavey theology, there was one much more substantive problem I had with Great Divorce. It is not directly a criticism, because I can see where it is coming from, but it left me profoundly uncomfortable.
One theme of the book - the quote on the back cover, in fact:
Narrator:Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?….What some say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.
Narrator’s Spirit Guide: Ye see it does not.
Narrator: I feel in a way that it ought to.
Spirit Guide: That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.
Narrator: What?
Spirit Guide: The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven….Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.
This reminded me of my attempts to come up with a theory of drama, one which I explicitly quoted Lewis in. The idea is that people use their misery in order to control and blackmail other people. At some point you just have to say “Nope, don’t care” and walk away. That seems to be part of Lewis’ theodicy; God allows Hell because the people there are deliberately making themselves miserable in order to gain power over others (think of the woman mourning her son mentioned earlier, or the poet talking about the conspiracy against him, or the upstanding citizen who refused to go to Heaven if he would have to share it with penitent criminals) .
But Lewis continues his policy of always choosing the cases most difficult for himself. One of his damned souls is a woman who was put in a terrible abusive nursing home where she was starved to death. She keeps complaining about this to all of the blessed souls in Heaven, leading the narrator’s spirit guide to say what I interpreted, fairly or unfairly, as “Wow, what a grumbler. You can see why we keep her in Hell to prevent her from being a total downer up here.”
I can almost understand a world in which a mother goes to Hell for mourning her dead son too much. But it’s really hard for me to accept that you can go to Hell for complaining too much about being starved to death in an abusive nursing home.
I can sort of see where Lewis is coming from. You could say she’s dead now, she needs to abandon her grudge, stop being so focused on wrongs done to herself and on her status as a victim and just accept God’s eternal love and go up to Heaven. I can sort of see a world in which God offers her the healing forgetfulness-waters of the River Lethe, and she refuses because she wants to hold on to her anger at her maltreatment. I have certainly known people who are so fond of grumbling about their wrongedness that they make everyone around them miserable and are a far cry from Lewis’ bright spirits of total joy who inhabit Heaven.
But I keep thinking of pride as a defense mechanism. And you know who develops defense mechanisms? People who have horrible experiences. Lewis is extremely evasive about whether everyone will be saved eventually, but taking him at his orthodox word and assuming they won’t be, it seems extremely unfair for people who have worse experiences and so develop more mental defense mechanisms to get the short end of the salvation stick. If someone is abused for their entire life, and so they develop some unhealthy coping strategies to deal with it, then rejecting them from Heaven for those unhealthy coping strategies seems like adding insult to injury.
And on the one hand, I don’t care. I’m not religious; the criteria for keeping people in or out of Heaven is a completely hypothetical thought exercise no more interesting than critiquing the color scheme of the Hell-Heaven bus.
But on the other, Lewis’ theory of salvation has some very obvious political overtones. There are political groups that act a lot like that damned woman from the nursing home. They make a big deal out of feeling wronged and offended and spend large portions of their lives complaining about it and bringing everyone else down.
And it really is unpleasant, and Lewis’ morality seems to think the answer is to dismiss them as being therefore unpleasant people. But what exactly are they supposed to do? Complaining works (well, sometimes). If people were nicer to them, they wouldn’t have to complain as much. I’ve seen patients in hospitals complain to their families about the conditions there. Sometimes the patients just like whining and are looking for something to whine about (just so I don’t look like I’m inferring this disposition from people I don’t like: I used to like whining and look for things to whine about). Other times the hospital is really maltreating them and there’s not really much they can do about it except whine to people who are still mobile and healthy and might be able to do something about it. And although I understand that “whine less in certain situations” may be a moral truth, I would hate for it to get mis-Schelling-fenced into “don’t whine about things”.
I had the same thoughts about a discussion where Lewis’ spirit guide criticizes people with bad aesthetics - aesthetics that say broken, ugly things are just as good as righteous, beautiful things and that anyone who says otherwise is naive or prejudiced or whatever. On the one hand, I like beautiful things as much as anyone else. On the other, the project of questioning aesthetics - for example, trying to make our society have less of a knee-jerk revulsion to overweight people - seems like not only a potentially useful one, but one that could even be in accordance with truth, for example if it turns out that our revulsion to overweight people is totally contingent on images we get from TV and so on and that other societies find overweight people perfectly okay or even more attractive (as is indeed the case).
So I guess my problem with Great Divorce is that it talks about a very personal morality. But its personal morality doesn’t translate very well into a political morality, unless maybe you’re an extreme conservative, which for all I know Lewis might very well be (I think writing about the Great Divorce as a critique of liberal politics would be an interesting essay on its own). Yet I worry that personal morality and political morality are not so easily separated: that people just don’t think finely-grained enough to understand that if you’re in Heaven, you should stop annoying the angels with your self-absorbed victim-spiel about your abusive nursing home, but if you’re on Earth then when someone complains about an abusive nursing home you take it frickin’ seriously and if you’re in an abusive nursing home you complain as loud as you humanly can to anyone who will listen.
This may be a special case of my worry that what is beautiful is not always true, and that the things that actually improve the world may give us an icky feeling inside when we do them. Lewis presents a compelling vision of morality and redemption, and in some ways the vision is enough, in that it solidifies some things we know are good and gets us to start questioning our pride and ego-defensiveness. In other ways, it suffers from exactly the problem that I would expect: that a moral system designed for dead souls in Heaven might not be strong enough for living people in a flawed world where there is very likely not a God.
As mentioned in this Jordan Peterson review