After giving “Pilgrim’s Regress” a bit of a thumbs-down review, I’ve been finding that some snatches and excerpts of it keep coming back to me. Recently, I was having to do time-consuming, repetitive chores to get a stack of documents to print correctly, and I found myself thinking of what John’s angelic helper tells him about industrialized society. It comes from a chapter that Lewis subtitled “Seeing the evil of a technological society.”

John’s conscience, Vertue, sees the changes wrought in the countryside by factories, mechanization and increased technology and says that there must be some good and lasting change it will bring, since God allowed it to happen.

John’s angelic Guide replies (emphasis mine):

“To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. Their next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves — though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do.

“It is the same with all their machines. Their labor-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent; their amusements bore them; their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them time have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change. And as for permanence — consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will someday be green again, and of all cities that I have seen, these iron cities will break most suddenly.”

I can’t think of any more profound truth where technology is concerned. Those who are most invested in it exhibit the worst symptoms, but it can’t help but affect us all.