C.S. Lewis & the News

Like many, I have an approach/avoidance relationship with the news these days. I wonder if too much news is adversely impacting my health, making sleep difficult and increasing anxiety. But on the other hand, I want to be a responsible, informed citizen and that entails keeping up with current events. Where is the balance?

I decided to see how C.S. Lewis approached the news. After all, he lived through two world wars and a nuclear arms race. Two themes stood out to me: (1) Lewis emphasized the permanent over the temporal; and (2) the local over the far off.

Lewis considered the newspapers of his day to be full of inaccuracies. To the American lady he wrote, “I never read the papers. Why does anyone? They’re nearly all lies.”^[1] In response to Mary Van Deusen’s query about Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Lewis said, “I don’t feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they’re always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they’re no better in the places where I don’t know.”^[2]

He was wary of assigning newspaper reading to school children. “Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph …”^[3] This last observation has come to pass as reflected in decreased attention spans attributed to the internet and short-form content.^[4]

Because of inaccuracies and the short-lived relevancy of the daily newspaper, Lewis focused his attention on works that have stood the test of time: Medieval literature, Greek and Roman classics, and the Bible. A grounding in timeless wisdom and truth provides resilience when dark days come.

Lewis also recognized the overwhelming nature of constant negative tidings. He wrote to friend and former student Dom Bede Griffiths in 1946, “It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills wh[ich] he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).”^[5]

If my handwringing over the state of the world immobilizes me from assisting those in my sphere of influence (e.g. family, neighbors, friends), then the news has hindered me from being a disciple of Christ. Don't let fretting replace prayer and action.

Let's see how C.S. Lewis carried this out during WWII. The brothers opened their home, the Kilns, to child evacuees fleeing the London Blitz. After the war ended, Lewis continued his friendship with one evacuee in particular, Jill Flewett Freud. Lewis served with the Oxford Home Guard. Between 1941 and 1944 he gave radio talks on the BBC, which were later compiled into the book, Mere Christianity. Note the subject matter of Lewis's talks: not current events, but rather moral law and Christian theology and behavior. In other words, the permanent over the temporal.

One final word--later, in the same letter, Lewis cautioned Dom Bede about letting the news steal his joy. “A great many people ... seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise."^[6]

^[1] Letters to an American Lady, letter dated 26 October 1955.

^[2] Letter to Mary Van Deusen of 30 April 1951 in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.

^[3] Surprised By Joy, chapter 10.

^[4] “Average Human Attention Span By Age: 31 Statistics.” The Treetop, Applied Behavior Analysis Therapy, 17 July 2024.

^[5] Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths OSB of 20 Dec 1946, in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949.

^[6] Id.