Cheap Fake Lewis

It's not like we don't have good sources, people.

I had it vaguely in my mind all week that there was a quote from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters floating around the internet, about not getting too obsessed with politics. Perfect, I thought, now I know what to write about on Friday in my newsletter. After all, I like not getting too obsessed with politics! I like C.S. Lewis! Surely I’ll have something interesting to say.

Except the quote is fake. That became clear soon after I started looking for it. I had thought it would be easy to find, because I remembered it contained the phrase “fixated on politics.” So I did what I always do when I’m trying to snatch some floating strand of memory like that down from the atmosphere: I got the Kindle version of the book and searched for the phrase. Nothing. Then I tried just the word “politics,” and still no dice.

Finally I searched for “Wormwood” on Twitter, because I remembered that I’d seen the passage in a screenshot with that name in the caption. And there it was: just as I remembered, but obviously not authentic. “Keep up the good work” is much too clunky a valediction for Wormwood, and really obsessive readers will notice that his final sentences end not with periods, but with commas. The letter itself is tolerably aligned with the general attitude of the book, but it lacks all of Lewis’s penetrating specificity. It also contains a reference to “broken systems” that would have seemed uncannily true to contemporary life, even for Lewis.

So actually what I have to say that’s interesting isn’t so much about the quote as about quotes in general. When I was in high school, a couple of my buddies edited Wikipedia to say that one of our other friends had been a taskmaster in the Bataan death march. This obvious lie stayed up for weeks, and our history teacher was delighted. He thought it was a perfect illustration of which sources can and can’t be trusted.

Ah, for such simple times. Now, not only is the intellectual atmosphere thick with jokes and deep fakes, but the places where someone is most likely to prank you are also the places where you’re most likely to get the densest information most quickly. Meanwhile, the officially “authoritative” sources are routinely filled with credulous twaddle. I use Wikipedia all the time now; it’s gotten more discerning about its editors, and I’d rather learn from some online sperg about linguistics than be gaslit by Snopes.

I’ve been fooled plenty of times. But I’ve also gotten better—I think many of us have—at hitting pause before I hit retweet. This isn’t something our machines can do for us; the “do you want to read the article first” warning (RIP) was comically inept. It’s a skill we have to carry with us into the new age from the old one. Which is one reason why we’d do well to keep teaching people how to read books, even as we learn to read websites.

And there’s no question the older skills will atrophy unless we drill them. In my travels through the literary world, I have noticed that people are shockingly ill-equipped to verify their sources in even a basic, traditional way. This isn’t really a Left-Right thing so much as a research literacy thing: maybe it’s because our new media are so disorienting that we assume there’s no way to pin down the truth in old media, either. Maybe everyone’s just pressed for time and blitzing through news articles when they should be hunting down original texts.

But if there’s one thing I’m most deeply grateful for about grad school, it’s my lingering insistence on hearing things from the horse’s mouth—trawling through the Wikipedia footnotes until I can lay my own little eyes on the page of the book where the claim comes from, or chasing down my Loeb so I can see if Marcus Aurelius says what some manosphere guy says he said.

I had one advisor during my Master’s years who would just say “primary sources! Chapter and verse!” whenever you trotted out some claim a modern schoolar had made. C.S. Lewis (for real though) wrote in his preface to Athanasius that he was constantly trying to convince students to read Plato instead of books about Plato: “the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”

In any case, even if you’re reading a fairly credible paraphrase, the original material is invariably more complex, surprising, and rich than whatever some guy is saying about it. Nothing is really too good to check, especially since in the process of spotting a fake you usually come across about ten things more intriguing than whatever made-up thing you set out to look up in the first place. Case in point: when I went looking for the passage that set me off about all this, I ended up at this real passage from “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” an addendum usually printed with the Letters:

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of Democracy in the strict sense of that word; the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government it often works to our advantage; but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realise is that ‘democracy’ in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being like Folks, Togetherness) is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political Democracies from the face of the earth.

It's sort of funny to me that someone found it necessary to cook up a fake quote from this book, of all books, when basically every word of the real thing is already a needle aimed right at the heart of our present moment.

But don’t take my word for it. Seriously, I beg you: Look it up.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Listen to the latest from Young Heretics: