Would C. S. Lewis Own a Smartphone?

I recently gave a talk at a local coffee shop on “C. S. Lewis and a Posthuman Future.” My aim was to engage some of the themes in the philosophical movement called transhumanism with the prescient observations of the great Oxford Don. During the Q&A afterward, one sharp member of the audience asked, “Do you think Lewis would have a smartphone?” What a great question! What do you think?

After just a moment’s reflection, I said, I think he might. But given what he said in both The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength about the burgeoning scientism of his own day, I have to believe that Lewis would have pondered that decision for a long while before buying any digital device. In fact, he might have brought up the quandary over beers with the company he kept, his mates at The Bird & Baby, the nickname for The Eagle & Child pub where the Inklings met regularly. I could imagine them helping him develop a set of criteria for adopting a new technology.

One of the problems we have created for ourselves in the 21^st century is that we are unreflective, early adopters of technology. We stand in long lines at that big box store with the icon of a bitten apple salivating over the next shiny object on offer. We are suckers for the next tool that promises us what every technology promises—efficiency. We can do more, faster. Productivity and speed are the only temptations needed to entice us to trade our plastic money for a new leash by which to be dragged behind. It’s only after we find ourselves enslaved that we wonder if early adoption was such a good idea after all.

In 1988, Kentucky novelist, essayist, and poet, Wendell Berry, published what has become a manifesto of sorts for all of us who question early adoptionism. In the Harper’s magazine essay, “Why I’m not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry outlined his criteria for purchasing any new tool.

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately-owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Whether or not we agree with these criteria, the point is, he had criteria. Most of us do not. We get the new device because others do so or because it is the latest so-called advancement.

Lewis most definitely had something to say about that. And based on what he said, I have to believe he would have needed to develop some sort of criteria for buying a smartphone. In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1954, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis offered a critique of our penchant for the newest and latest gadget.

[The birth of the machines] is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature. . . What concerns us . . . is its psychological effect. How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word “stagnation,” with its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called “permanence”? Why does the word “primitive” at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort . . . Why does “latest” in advertisements mean “best”? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin’s theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really different from it, and earlier.

We are now inhabiting a world that has become inebriated with the belief in spontaneous progress. Our vertigo is sometimes breathtaking. Lewis continued:

But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.

So, I think Lewis might have a smartphone if he lived today, but he would not be its slave. It would be a tool, like other tools, subject to the regular liturgies of life, including a technological sabbath. He would be able to put it down, leave it at the Kilns when he went to the pub to have a long evening with Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams. In answer to the question “WWJD?” What would Jack do? Jack would be a thoughtful conserver rather than an early adopter.

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C. Ben Mitchell, PhD is professor of philosophy, ethics, and technology and is a member of Anglican Church of the Redeemer where he will be speaking at FORMED 2024: Technology and the Christian in Chattanooga, TN on September 12-13, 2024.