Posted on 10/31/2019 4:02:22 PM PDT by aquila48
In 1945, the great English author and medieval scholar, C.S. Lewis, penned an incisive essay in The Spectator called “ After Priggery—What? ” that discussed the dissolution of priggery as a prominent vice in British society. The absence of priggery is in itself no bad thing, but Lewis warns that the vacuum created by the absence of priggery cannot be sustained. In the absence of a replacement virtue, another vice shall come to fill the void. Lewis identifies this vice as an excess of toleration, specifically regarding what is tolerated in the public discourse. Unfortunately, the state of contemporary discourse demonstrates that rather than heeding Lewis’ advice, our society has instead done the exact opposite.
According to Lewis, British society had “sunk below” priggery in its open toleration of a journalist Lewis identifies with the pseudonym Cleon. This Cleon serves as a stand-in for mendacious muck-raking journalists and media personalities who purposefully lie and stir up trouble. In a priggish society, Lewis argues, a fellow such as Cleon would be regarded as being on the same social level as a prostitute, or perhaps even lower. Yet, in Lewis’s time, even those who hold Cleon to be a horrid liar will still meet with “him on perfectly friendly terms over a lunch table.”
Lewis pulls no punches in his assessment of Cleon’s danger to society, claiming that Cleon has sold his intellectual virginity, that “he gives his patrons a baser pleasure” than a prostitute, and that “he infects them with more dangerous diseases.” To Lewis, Cleon’s vile work “is poisoning the whole nation.”
Lewis is careful to explicitly argue against the idea that such danger necessitates government regulation of speech, noting the danger such laws would pose to freedom and questioning whether such a course of action would even be effective.
(Excerpt) Read more at mises.org ...
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
I think it was “That Hideous Strength” that Lewis declared that the average Englishman doubts everything he read in the news except the Sports Page. So back then in the 40s most Brits were intelligent enough to no it was all BS. Then came the ascendancy of the BBC and for some reason Brits stupidly thought Mother Corp could be trusted.
Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything
The odor of Mendacity permeates the newsrooms of America.
bkmk
BUMP
And the dhims and the rest of the drinking drunkard uniparty— assuage their lies and lies upon lies by.... liquid haze.
Nanzi Pelousi is a living testimonial, and Schiff— the paedophile Torquemada of his own self invention— he’s drunk on power and is a mentally ill individual, by definition.
Mendacity, Per Burl Ives as Big Daddy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTWqUhvqXx8
Heh, awesome find, probably been 20 + years since I read it.
I will post it next time on Facebook when liberals claim the “educated” vote liberal.
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