Saturday’s Joplin Globe featured a column by Paul Greenberg, who quoted, favorably and surprisingly, C.S. Lewis:

It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects — military, political, economic and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

I happen to think that Lewis’ sentiments here describe exactly the raison d’être of government. I am just surprised that Mr. Greenberg, a conservative, so enthusiastically embraces those sentiments.

The quote from Lewis is found in his famous work of apologetics, Mere Christianity (first published in 1943), and his thoughts on government are really extraneous to the argument he was making in that book. Lewis wasn’t writing a political treatise, but was evangelizing on behalf of his faith. But he captured the essence of why men and women bind together to create an organized community we call the State, with its complex of relations we call politics, the art—and increasingly—the science of government.

That Paul Greenberg, or any conservative, would adopt Lewis’ beautiful description of why the State exists is really both comforting and off-putting at the same time.

It is comforting because perhaps there is hope that conservatism can yet be retrieved from the clutches of the awful reactionaries who have commandeered it, and the Republican Party can be healed from the wounds those reactionary conservatives have inflicted.

But it is off-putting because so much of contemporary conservatism is not concerned with promoting or protecting “the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.”  The conservative movement these days is about promoting and protecting extraordinary things like tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans or about demanding the termination of government actions designed to actually promote and protect ordinary human happiness, actions like regulating capitalism and trying to make sure all of our citizens have access to affordable health care.

My friend and fellow Globe blogger, Jim Wheeler, wrote eloquently on St. Patrick’s Day about the tragedy of the English subjugation of the Irish (“The Isle of Freedom“), and he made an important point about “what freedom means in America“:

Freedom is found not only in the ability to travel the streets and lanes of the land at will, to choose a religion or no religion, to be secure in one’s own home, and to stand on a soapbox in the town square and orate. It is those things of course, but so much more. In the complex amalgamation of civilized life freedom must be had in an economic context, for without economic equality under the law opportunity is forfeit and with it the meaning of freedom itself.

Of course, it is often hard to define what exactly constitutes “economic equality under the law,” but it is not hard to see that economic inequality in contemporary America is alarmingly high, as this graph from The Economist, , demonstrates:

The graph is based on work done by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, and you may notice that after the Great Depression—after the State stepped in to address income inequality—the income earned by the top earners leveled off. It leveled off until the Reagan Reversal, when conservatives stepped in with their laissez-faire attitudes and ideology, an ideology that established deregulation as gospel and tax cuts as economic salvation, an ideology that today shouts “class warfare!” at those who desire a more equitable distribution of income.

Paul Greenberg—who as far as I know never met a Bush tax cut he didn’t like—joined the ideological shouts of class warfare last month, when he criticized President Obama’s budget:

Behind all the fanciful figures in this budget, there is a simple strategy, also dating back to Roman times. Divide et impera. It’s a battle plan as old as Cannae: Divide and conquer. In political terms, it means setting poor against rich.

You see, anyone representing the State, who wants to ensure that our nation’s wealth is not just the possession of a few, is merely playing politics, “setting poor against the rich.” But let’s look back at Lewis’ words, which Mr. Greenberg quoted so approvingly:

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the State is there for.

It is hard to see how a husband and wife can chat over a fire, if they don’t have a fireplace to call their own. It is hard to see how a couple of friends can have a game of darts in a pub, when there are so few disposable dollars in the pockets of people who might want a pint with their game. And a man needs a decent income to purchase “his own room” or to buy a plot of ground so that he can dig in “his own garden.”

But beyond all that, it is certainly hard to see how the “ordinary happiness of human beings” can happen in a world in which people don’t have money to go to the doctor or who fear they are a sickness away from economic ruin.

Greenberg recently began a column this way:

Have you got health insurance? I do. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody did? Just think:

No more worries about losing your health care if you lose your job, or just get a different one. Ah, peace of mind at last.

If you assume there is a caveat coming from this conservative, you would be right:

Don’t fret. It’ll all be nice. Just leave it to government. It knows best. And it’s all for our own good. The velvet glove will be so soft that after a while we won’t notice the iron hand inside.

…Democratic nations are peculiarly susceptible to a soft form of despotism that doesn’t so much dictate to its people as embrace them, infantilize them, smother them ever so gently in its all-encompassing arms.

We would all be saved the trouble of making our own decisions, providing our own necessities (like health care), and generally thinking for ourselves. Which was always a bother anyway.

To Greenberg, daring to do something about the fact that millions upon millions of Americans don’t have and many cannot get health insurance, or daring to alleviate the widespread fear that ill health could instantly bankrupt them, amounts to “a soft form of despotism.” As if there isn’t real repression involved with going without adequate health care or there isn’t genuine tyranny mixed up in the dread of going broke at the hands of a disease.

Thankfully, C.S. Lewis, whose view of government we now know has Paul Greenberg’s blessing—he  called Lewis’ words a “reliable standard” and “sure guide” and “genius”—had a word or two to say about health care, particularly about what Americans call “socialized medicine” and what Brits like Lewis called their National Health Service.

To an American correspondent Lewis wrote:

What a pity you haven’t got our National Health system in America. (1/14/1958)

What you have gone through begins to reconcile me to our Welfare State of which I have said so many hard things. “National Health Service” with free treatment for all has its drawbacks—one being that Doctors are incessantly pestered by people who have nothing wrong with them. But it is better than leaving people to sink or swim on their own resources. (7/7/1959)

I am sorry to hear of the acute pain and the various other troubles. It makes me unsay all I have ever said against our English “Welfare State”, which at least provides free medical treatment for all. (6/10/1963)*

It is obvious that Lewis came to see that “the ordinary happiness” the State existed to “promote and to protect” was very much dependent on access to “free medical treatment for all,” which is paid for by taxes, particularly by those who have benefited most from the existence of the State.

Somehow I don’t think we will find Paul Greenberg, or any conservative in America, lifting these C.S. Lewis quotes for use in their attacks against what they derisively call “Obamacare,” the essentials of which were originally proposed by conservatives as an alternative to real socialized medicine.

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* All citations taken from Letters to an American Lady, my copy published by Eerdmans in 1967.