We Have No "Right to Happiness"

CS Lewis wrote an essay published in the Saturday Evening Post late in his life entitled "We Have No 'Right to Happiness'." It made a profound impression on me in the 1970's when I first read it in God In The Dock. It was one of the great examples of the time of watching Lewis cut through all the puffery and fine-sounding words of what people that they were saying, down to the reality of what they must actually mean.

Clare, in fact, is doing what the whole western world seems to me to have been doing for the last 40-odd years. When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”

It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines.

Thanks to commenter G. Poulin for prompting this memory with his onbservations under my recent post "Love Wins."