Themes
Philip Hensher has objected to the description of Eustace and his family, regarding it as evidence of Lewis's anti-intellectual and anti-progressive leanings. In Lewis' essay The Abolition of Man, he argues that modern education is producing "men without chests" – people whose lives are divided between the purely cerebral and the purely visceral, without any middle ground of sentiment or imagination—and Eustace (in his initial state) is clearly intended to be one of these. In the same essay, however, Lewis denies the suggestion that he is attacking intellect as such, and in his book on Miracles he even argues for the scholastic belief that the intellect is our participation in the supernatural world. Similarly, he was not against progress in the sense of objectively justifiable social improvement, but did oppose purely fashionable progressivism, and in particular what he called "chronological snobbery", the view that the superiority of modern values can always be assumed automatically and without investigation.
Read more about this topic: Eustace Scrubb
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