Screwtape History
In CS Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, Hell’s Senior Tempter Screwtape advises his nephew, “Humans are always talking about how we damn them by putting ideas into their heads.” Actually our main effort is in keeping them OUT.”
I always thought of this when I looked at the Capitol Building in DC and in each state. These are all products of the Renaissance, which was a Great Leap Backward for Western Civilization. You see, the Renaissance discovered “Classical” buildings and “classical” sculpture.
Each “classical” building and each “classical” sculpture had long since had the marble and coloring rubbed off it, so they were all dull, gray stone when the “Renaissance” adopted them. If anyone from Classical days saw the gray Capitol building, in the “classic” style, he would laugh his ass off.
“Realistic” movies like the Gladiators show crowds assembling in front of ancient Roman buildings that look like Spanish Harlem on a bad day. They are shot inside a Coliseum that is gray and lifeless and run down.
And the critics rave about how “realistic” it all is.
On the BBCs I, Claudius, supposedly “educational,” you see Augustus among gray statues in his garden that a real Roman would have goosed out. BBC simply CANNOT show Rome in any but the Mommy Professor way.
This SHOULD be a scandal. But it is just an example of the way our “historians” provide us with Screwtape History, keeping reality OUT.
Long, long since the idea of everything originating in the Middle East has been discredited over and over. But every year millions of textbooks are printed and used that give the impression that Pharaoh invented the light bulb. It all begins in the Nile Valley or Mesop and goes down the dreary list of “progress.”
No reality intrudes, any more than it does on the gray statues.
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