There is no popular writer with real intellectual credentials who has had as much impact on American evangelicalism as C.S. Lewis. He’s often quoted in Republican circles. Fred Barnes I know is a big fan – the same Fred who has dismissed "water-boarding" as a trivial "coercive interrogation technique". Maybe he should have used the euphemism Lewis mocked: "scientific examination." But don’t give Rummy any ideas. Here’s a reader who’s been immersed in Lewis lately:
"I have been rereading C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength from his Space Trilogy, and I came across a quote from a character who’s one of the bad guys. Your discussion of the torture issue brought you to mind when I read these lines, from a figure considering the torture of another:
"Oh," said Wither, "there is nothing I should more deeply deplore. Scientific examination (I cannot allow the word Torture in this context) in cases where the patient doesn’t know the answer is always a fatal mistake. As men of humanity we should neither of us … and then, if you go on, the patient naturally does not recover … and if you stop, even an experienced operator is haunted by the fear that perhaps he did know after all. It is in every way unsatisfactory."
And that’s one of the bad guys!"
But we, as Barnes and Bush would insist, are the good guys. And being the good guys, when we do bad things, that makes them good, see? "We do not torture." Because we’re us.
The Dish 