The Fracturing of the Modern Mind

Polytheism Returns With a Vengeance

In C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, which I first read as a child, I remember a passage where Screwtape, a senior devil, writes to his nephew, a junior devil called Wormwood, about the mental condition of modern human beings. “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 . . .”

As an adult, not to mention a professor of literature concerned with modern intellectual history, I have long been uncomfortably aware that Screwtape was guilty of gravely understating his case. He was by no means the first, and was certainly not the last to notice that we live in a culture dominated by stereotypes, illusions, copies, imitations, sound-bites and fantasies. Not merely do our clichéd labels invoke ready-made emotions, but also most contemporary humans have many more than half a dozen incompatible ideas floating around inside their heads. Moreover, . . . their incompatibility is not simply a matter of different beliefs or even just of jargon.

Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 5.