We get an early snippet of modern progressive cancel culture in two of C. S. Lewis’ Narnian books. If you don’t read and follow the progressive memos, you won’t fit in. And you’re likely to get cancelled.
The Dawn Treader & the Progressives
The Silver Chair begins with Eustace Scrubb coming across a crying (blubbering) Jill Pole. But this is a freshly Reformed Scrubb. Scrubb’s Reformation occurs during The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The introduction to Scrubb in that book sees him as the only spoiled son of “Harold and Alberta” – which is what he calls them, instead of mother and father.
Lewis describes Scrubb’s parents as “very up-to-date and advanced people.” They are non-smoking, vegetarian tee-totallers who wear special undergarments and possess little furniture etc. Of course, these things are hardly of themselves bad. Yet I get the impression Lewis saw this as an ideological movement of his day. Better informed folk might correct me.
When I was a teen you would get a social credit from your peers and certain intelligentsia for being broad-minded. Specificallyfor challenging certain outdated morals (sexual, abortion, “soft drugs” etc). Perhaps Lewis envisioned the Scrubbs as the broad-minded progressive people of that era.
Either way, Harold and Alberta raised Eustace up to be a “prig.” Scrubb disliked his two cousins (Edmund and Lucy) but enjoyed teasing them. He was the sort of puny bully who could get away with it because he was enabled by his parents (authority). Scrubb also read up-to-date factual books other children didn’t care for. Yet these had the sort of impractical information which proved useless to him later in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The Silver Chair & the Cancel Culture Progressives
So by the time Scrubb is consoling Jill Pole – who is hiding behind the gym – he’s a changed boy due to Aslan’s intervention. The reason she is crying is because of school-bullying and the mob is after her. The problem was how her experimental school was run (authority),
All sorts of things, horrid things, went on which at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped… but at this school they weren’t. Or even if they were, the people who did them were not expelled or punished. The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked o them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became a rather favorite than otherwise. ~ The Silver Chair
I find Lewis’ use of the word “Head” interesting. The Head enabled these little lawless mobsters. Meanwhile in the novel That Hideous Strength, the dystopian heads of the NICE got their orders from a speaking dead murderer’s Head (Alcasan). The Head’s directives were manipulated by the demonic.
In the Silver Chair, Pole and Scrubb would have gotten along just fine if they had just gone along with the rules and joined the Mob. In The Hideous Strength one of the main protagonists, Mark Studdock, would have saved himself a lot of strife had he just gotten along with the NICE Mob.
The Mob is here
I agree with Doug Wilson where he says that Lewis’s books were prophetic. This is why I’ve mentioned this so often.
Over the years we’ve seen a world which globally protects the worse elements of Islam, yet tries to cancel Israel using outright lies and misinformation. More recently in America we’ve seen mobs riot and pillage, and people have died as a results. Yet the media and one political party have on one hand have denied it; yet when it is acknowledged it isn’t just excused it is encouraged.
Those who question or rebel against the pronoun guidelines, the rights of pregnant “persons” to murder their pre-born children, the rights of eight-year-old children to mutilate their bodies (you won’t be able to even pray for them), Global Climate Change, vaccinations etc, will get canceled. If you’re not part of the New Mob, you will get canceled.
How did we get here? Well I think those who indicate Marxist infiltration of public schools, movies, churches and government make demonstrably valid points. It likely began after the Second World War. But the root cause of the disease is ancient. It is fundamentally Cosmic Warfare – a rebellion against God. It is lawlessness at work.
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 21:25
You could write that verse up for today (and history for that matter): And in those days they rejected God and His Word, and the world did what was right in its own eyes. And they canceled all who obeyed Him.
But Jesus Christ wins
From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. Rev 19:15
…and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away. Rev 21:4
Maranatha!
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