Diversity
It is foolish to declaim against “sentimentality” at Christmas, as I often do. Declaim, if you will, against false sentimentality, or even against the cheap, but not against sentiment itself, though it is sometimes noisy. When it is true, it is normally silent, and may be spookily and profoundly silent. But “gushing” or “corny” do not make it untrue. What is good commands sentiment in men with chests, has always done, and will always.
At the opening of The Abolition of Man (1943), C. S. Lewis made an attack on the progressive educationists of his day, that applies to academics in all times and places. This slim book is among those which persuade me that I should not be writing, lest I distract from more necessary authors. Read at a slight angle to the commonplace, it exposes the whole scheme of the “academic left,” that would suppress everything not materially “objective.”
As Lewis grasped, by Christian faith, there is, at the root, not a contest between two potentially valid world-views. It is explicitly an invasion of the good by the evil. Yet also it is an exposure of the good, as evil can uniquely do, when the good has been lost sight of.
The concluding book of his “space trilogy” — That Hideous Strength (1945) — is in fact the great dystopian novel for our scientistic age, and not anything by “George Orwell.” It is set with invincible aptness in the university-research world, in a “Nice” institution. Lewis does not present selfishness and hypocrisy within this environment, but the agency of Satan.