C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce: Groupthink, Isolation, and the Journey out of Hell.
“You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind…we are living…in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those roads into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision…I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right; but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, with backward mutters of dissevering power—-or else not. It is still ‘either-or’. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost; that kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for Him in the High countries.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Preface.
Three Keys to Understanding The Great Divorce.
What is evil? In The Great Divorce, evil is not exactly what one might think of as typical evil. Lewis is more complex than that. Evil is both subtle and stark. Everyone can think of the obvious forms of evil like lying and stealing and murder. But where real evil lurks is in the subtleties of life, in the good things of life. What are some these good things? They are relationships, jobs, self respect, intellect, our friendships, beauty, desires to change the world, compassion, and yes, pets. Lewis essentially says that all of these things we experience in this world are good, but our love for them can be so strong that they overcome our love for God. And when this is the case, we ourselves, through our disordered desires, transform these good things into evil.
The road to heaven, at least in the great divorce, is to recognize when these things in our life have become our God. This is the fork in the road that Lewis points out. The decision is this. Are we going to continue to be mastered by this thing in our life, or are we going to give it up, to put it to death, to sacrifice this good for the greater Good, which is God? What do we want more? Do we want God more? Then we must give up these good things in order to reach Him. Or do we want these good things more? If that is the case then we must give up God. Every person, every single day, has this fork in the road to choose.
The Journey of the The Great Divorce, interestingly, starts in the afterlife. In other words, what Lewis is implicitly communicating is that every single one of us who makes it to the afterlife has failed in some capacity in this life. We have chosen the wrong road, we have turned left when the proper turn was right. And in the afterlife, we don’t go directly to heaven, rather we must revisit these forks in the road where we have taken the wrong choice.
The Setting of the Great Divorce.
Let us lay the scene in Lewis’ world of the Great Divorce.
The story is told by a narrator who speaks in first person singular throughout the story. We enter into his life as he has been walking for hours in a perpetually damp and rainy city that is perpetually dark. The city is perpetually stuck in the time of day when the sun has gone down but it is still not quite dark. We call this city the Grey City. In his hours of walking, he never gets to a better part of town. Miles and miles of neighborhood after neighborhood, and they are all the same. Every shop, every lodging, every tobacco store, they’re all dark and dingy, and seemingly no one else is walking around. Then the character arrives at a bus stop and there is a line of people waiting for the bus.
Grey City is Hell
We find out more about this Grey City while on the Bus.. We learn that the city has a huge population, and neighborhoods are constantly moving and shifting. The reason for this is because there isn’t a day that goes by when inhabitants of Grey City don’t get into some type of fight with their neighbor. Generally within a week, they’ve quarreled so badly with their neighbor that they get up and move.
In the real world, when you get into a fight with your neighbor, either you don’t talk to them for some time or you somehow manage to live life together in spite of your disagreements. What you don’t do is get up and move. Why is this? Because resources are not unlimited. Time, money, materials, proximity to food, restaurants, etc. keeps you in the same house, or at least in the same proximity. In the Grey City, however, there is nothing restricting you from moving. The inhabitants have endless time and access to unlimited resources. All they have to do in Lewis’ Grey City is think of a home or dinner or a need and those things appear instantly. Therefore, if you don’t like your neighbor, all you have to do is move a couple blocks away and create a new home. The problem is, there is never a neighbor that you will like. In everyone’s quest for peace, rather than working it out with their neighbor, they choose to disassociate themselves altogether with their neighbor and move, as this happens over and over again, the city continues to grow and grow so that people become further and further apart from one another.
The Grey City in the Great Divorce is Lewis’s Hell. The chief attribute of Hell, he argues, is isolation.
Groupthink
Lewis argues that one of the reasons for isolation in Grey City is because of groupthink. What exactly is groupthink? Groupthink is when we choose to form our identity around an idea or group of people that thinks the exact same as we do. The stronger that our identity is associated with this group, the harder it is for us to be able to think outside of this group. It also becomes increasingly difficult to associate and interact with a person in a “competing” group.
Lewis hints at the tension of groupthink through two conversations. The first conversation is between the narrator and a poet. In his first life (that is, his life on earth), the poet was never understood. He was a victim of an education system that didn’t take into account individualism and they never made room for his talent and temperament (perhaps a snapshot of Lewis’ own experience growing up; read Surprised By Joy). The poet experienced the evils of the Capitalist machine and that pushed him in the direction of communism. But being disenchanted with the Communism he saw in Russia, he switched hopes to Sweden’s unique system of thought. For the first half of his life, because of his deep insecurities, he sought answers for life by seeing the world through the eyes of idyllic groups. He believed some system had the answers to life’s problems, and its not a coincidence that the man was never satisfied. Eventually, after a failed relationship with a woman, he committed suicide. Lewis is essentially communicating through the poet that the world’s secular solutions will never satisfy.
The second conversation is with Ikey. At one point in their conversation, Ikey and the narrator begin to talk about “the coming darkness” and what will happen when “they” come. It is apocalyptic, and I think its interesting that Lewis makes it a point that when they began to talk about these topics Ikey began whispering because he didn’t want others to hear him. In regards to whispering, I’ve been listening on audio book to Live Not By Lies by Rob Dreher. In the book, Dreher has interviewed a number of Christians who grew up in Eastern Europe and experienced life in Eastern Europe before and after communism. One of the interviewees recalled how, about 5 years before communism took over, the cultural atmosphere around topics became so vitriol that people began whispering more and more when certain topics came up, even in the privacy of their own homes. It was a sign that all of a sudden people were much more cognizant and careful about they were saying. Why? Because a spirit of groupthink had invaded the country and people were afraid of the Marxist agenda. Just the other night my wife and I were at dinner and as we were talking about a certain subject we both lowered our voice. Have you ever caught yourself lowering your voice to a whisper? Back to the scene in the bus. As the people catch wind of what Ikey and the Narrator are talking about, immediately, almost in unison, they all start yelling and ridiculing them both as scandalous. Someone else shouts that they should be prosecuted and alludes to kicking them off the bus. Another turns around and lectures how ridiculous and irrational they are. When we see the rapid escalation of this scene on the bus, one cannot help but be reminded of some of the images of our own cancel culture driven by woke agendas. Lewis knew it all too well.
When Lewis wrote the Great Divorce, the atheist/marxist ideology was at its peak.
Marxist ideology purposefully paints the world only in groups and persuades its followers to see people not as individuals, but only as a part of groups. A person who is a part of a group is then more or less seen as a manufactured robot with no complexity, no variance, and no ability to change. Marxism purposefully oversimplifies the complex world around us and makes division and judgment the norm. It scapegoats a group as the reason for all of society’s problems. For the Marxist, dialogue becomes merely a tool used to gather enough information so as to label people as “with us” or “against us.”
During Lewis’ England, the stereotypical Marxist fight was between the working class and the ruling class. Lewis was shrewd enough to see a more subtle fight between secular atheism and Christianity, and he highlights this fight on the Bus. The guise of Marxism is that it is compassionate toward the persecuted class. Marxism takes the subjugated group of people and uses that to feed them lies. Marxism gives them false hope and begins to construct within them a group identity that rises to the top and ultimately destroys anything in its way. Today, that same ideological narrative is played out through the pro-LGBTQ group and those standing in their way. It is a text-book example of Marxist ideology.
Within a society like this, it becomes normal to approach people with immense prejudice, to immediately judge them, and to disassociate with them rather than choose to dialogue with them.
Social media only escalates the groupthink mentality. As humans interact with one another in far less personal ways, it becomes easier to be far more vitriol. We tend to shelter ourselves behind our virtual fortress of likeminded inhabitants. And rather than producing a public square that is open to ideas, we have several public squares through cable tv channels , you tube videos, and podcasts that are merely preaching to members of the same choir. Lewis argues that groupthink is an instrument of Hell.
Jesus and Groupthink
Its interesting that Jesus also deals with the Groupthink mentality in his day. Think about the groups we hear about in the gospel: Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Tax collectors, Zealots, Romans, Jews, Gentiles.
In first century Palestine, the culture was rampant with division and prejudice based simply on the group one was associated with. The incredibly unique aspect about Jesus is that he did not treat individuals according to their group identity. Jesus looks into each person he meets and sees them as much more complex and much more deep than the group that they identified with. Think of his interaction with the Samaritan woman. His disciples were in awe of how contrarian he was in dealing so kindly with her. Think of his calling of Matthew the Tax Collector, of Nicodemus the Pharisee, of his impact on the Roman Soldiers.
We need to imitate the action of Jesus when we ourselves interact with people, who are much bigger and much deeper and much more complex than any group can make them. It is groupthink that wishes to reduce people to anonymous imperial storm troopers with no identity. Jesus certainly didn’t do this, and neither should Christians.
Nevertheless, we must also remember how Jesus treated the Groupthink mentality. Even though he treated the pharisee with dignity, he did not treat the Pharisaical ideology with grace. As a whole he calls out the pharisaical ideology multiple times in very public ways. Calling them a brood of vipers, turning over tables, and using a bull whip is not exactly the idea of a soft and passive Jesus. He stood against the tide and we should too. The Church needs to stop pandering to the ideologies that are directly opposed to the faith. We need to be like Jesus by dealing with each individual with dignity and love, but publicly squashing their ideology of destruction.
Lastly, it’s through groupthink that Jesus is ultimately is killed. The Pharisees cannot see outside their own box, and so they kill Jesus. Its also through a radical rejection of groupthink that Christianity emerged as the predominant world religion. Even through 300 years of persecution it quickly expanded from Jerusalem all over the world. Why? Because Jesus rose from the dead, and his Spirit permeated those who believed in His message. People long for an identity separate from the Machine. The Christian faith provides that.
Selfishness is Isolation
In the Grey City, the second form of isolation is because of narcissistic selfishness. Each individual is like a Group in the groupthink scheme. That is, none of the inhabitants will ever get along with others. As individuals, they will continually isolate themselves further and further from everyone else because in their selfishness they are unable to work out their differences. This is the ultimate Hell. At least with groups, we have companions and comrades. In the Grey City, they have only themselves.
As mentioned above, the population of Grey City continually grows because everyone who dies in earth becomes a citizen of Grey City. However, Grey City also grows geographically because people inevitably move further and further out of the city so that they can isolate themselves from their deplorable neighbors (perhaps a prophecy against fabricated suburbia). The longer a person has been dead (or rather, been a citizen of Grey City), the more likely it is that they live further away from the city center. Figures like Julius Caesar and Genghis Kahn are almost light years away from the center of the city because they have constantly been on the move into further and further isolation. Lewis gives us an insightful picture into the hell of isolation through his vignette on Napoleon.
“The Nearest of the those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him….about fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We’ve picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else for millions of miles…He’d built himself a huge house all in the empire style—-rows of windows flaming with light…They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there alright. Walking up and down—up and down all the time—left-right, left- right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it (The Great Divorce, pp. 11-12).
Our isolation is exhausting, unfulfilling, and draining. It never provides rest, making Augustine’s famous quote all the more relevant. “Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”
Amazon moves us closer to the Grey City
Finally, Lewis subtly argues that one of the more powerful graces on this earth that is keeping us from becoming further isolated is that we need resources to live: food, shelter, protection, services, etc; and since we cannot reasonably survive without these necessities, we need to get along with our neighbors. These necessities are one of the only things that keep us tethered together in towns and villages. Reading Lewis offers another keen insight into our modern day world. As our ability to acquire both necessities and luxuries become more and more private (think Amazon home delivery, or Walmart curbside pickup, Netflix, etc.) we become more and more like the inhabitants of the Grey City. In this modern age, people still need physical goods to survive, but like those in the Grey City, they can almost instantly “click” them into existence. As the necessity for human neighbors is removed, inhabitants will quickly choose to be left to their own devices, literally. Through selfishness, our civilization chooses to plunge themselves into ultimate isolation. We are seeing the Grey City come to life more and more in our own world.
Which leaves us with our final point. In order to get on the Bus in the Grey City, the first step is to acknowledge that there must be a better way. Everyone who gets on the Bus sees the better way, but many of them will be utterly surprised when they see what this better way entails. It is better, but it certainly is not easier! For Lewis, it means leaving the old behind and clinging to the New. For the Christian, this is the way of the Cross.