Screwtape is Hiding in Your Pocket

While reading Vice President Vance's second memoir, Communion, two dots connected as I reflected on my own transition from the analog to the digital world in the late '90s. The first was Vance's mention of rereading C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters during his military deployment, noting the cleverness of the demon's ability to get man to lose his faith. The second dot came later in the book, when Vance warns us of the dangers of the "attention economy," or the monetization of the mind.

Being the same age as the Vice President, not only did I begin to romanticize the simplicity of my childhood, but a sense of guilt also washed over me, knowing I couldn't divorce my phone and social media. While my work in public policy requires frequent phone use, I have to be honest with myself—it frequently crosses the line into mindless distraction. Even though my social media activity has been outsourced to a contractor, many of the posts still have a "look at me" vibe as I try to build the platform of followers needed to sell a future book. Between the subtle distraction and micro self-worship, I couldn't help but ponder, "Is Screwtape hiding in my pocket?"

C. S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, during World War II, when men faced extreme adversity and hard times. The fictional book is about a senior demon, Screwtape, who writes instructional letters to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, detailing psychological tactics to tempt a human man away from God and into damnation. The layman believes the path to hell is through the sin of hardened behavior such as stealing and killing, but the devil knows ease is his preferred method of success. "Indeed," the senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood in the twelfth letter, "the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

In the time of Lewis, Screwtape's "gentle slope" strategy had to be improvised with the mediums of the day, including newspapers, radio, and idle conversation. Today, it has been optimally engineered, shrunken down, and placed in the pocket of nearly every man, woman, and child in the Western world. Reread the Letters with a smartphone on the desk beside you and the book looks more like a product roadmap.

Two Tracks, Same Destination

Hell's strategy, as Screwtape lays it out, runs along two tracks. The first bends the soul's attention inward slowly until the self becomes the object of worship. The second dissipates attention outward into what Screwtape calls "Nothing." It's not pleasure, not even sin in any sense, but a drift toward aimlessness that consumes a life without anyone ever choosing it. The tracks seem like opposites, as one concentrates attention and the other scatters it. They share the same destination, however, because both accomplish the only thing Hell needs: keeping the soul from looking at God. The smartphone is the first device in history that runs both tracks at once.

Self-Worship

Screwtape's earliest advice about prayer is not to prevent it but to redirect it by keeping the patient's mind on his own performance. Teach him to "estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling," Screwtape advises in the fourth letter, so that his attention curves back on himself rather than out toward the God he is addressing. Later, in the fourteenth letter, comes the trap of humility: "Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble,' and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear." The pattern is consistent. Hell does not need you to declare yourself a god. It needs only to make you the permanent subject of your own thoughts.

Now pick up your phone. Its camera faces both ways, but in the age of "selfies," the lens pointed at your own face gets the attention. It counts your steps, your followers, your likes, operating like lights on a car's dashboard, tracking one's metrics and updating them in real time. Wormwood was assigned one patient and studied him individually, learning his moods and vanities to exploit them. The recommendation algorithm is Wormwood at scale: a tempter assigned personally to you, attentive to you alone, laboring around the clock in the background to learn your interests and addictions and then feeding them back to you. Today, our virtues arrive pre-photographed: the workout posted, the volunteer event hashtagged, the job promotion announced.

Distraction

The second track is boring but just as efficient, and Screwtape is most honest and direct when describing it. In the twelfth letter he celebrates the patient's slide into vague, unsatisfying habit: "Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why." The damned man's epitaph, Screwtape says, will be his own bewildered admission: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

Lewis needed a metaphor for "a dreary flickering of the mind," but today we have it: a screenshot of last week's screen-time report, ironically sent on the morning of the Sabbath. Few people choose to spend four hours a day on a phone, and that is precisely the design. The infinite scroll has no milestones and no signposts. It never asks for a decision, because a decision is a moment at which a soul might wake up. Screwtape even supplies the economics of the attention industry in a single sentence from the ninth letter: "An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula." Any big tech product manager optimizing for engagement has rediscovered it, and only recently have some come forward to admit the strategy.

In the very first letter, Screwtape recalls an atheist patient he believed was safely in hand—that is, until his thoughts began drifting in a dangerous direction during an afternoon in the British Museum. Screwtape did not argue with him but instead merely suggested lunch. By the time the man was in the street, watching the buses go by and picking up a newspaper, the demon's crisis had passed. "He is now safe in Our Father's house," Screwtape reports. No argument was ever needed, just an interruption. The smartphone notification is the perfected form of Screwtape's lunch suggestion, delivered dozens of times a day, timed to arrive whenever one's attention threatens to settle on anything meaningful in one's life.

Lived Experience

I write this as a member of perhaps the last generation able to testify from inside a single life, also known as Elder Millennials. Born in 1985, I grew up with technology on a leash and anchored in place. The landline phone was attached to the kitchen wall, the cable television sat in the living room, and eventually the dial-up modem for the internet was stowed under the computer desk. 

Being forced to play outside, I found long stretches of hours that nothing arrived to fill. The bicycle was my getaway vehicle to stay busy and elude parental oversight. Boredom, it turns out, was load-bearing for my own betterment. The integration of what I call the "tech-triad"—smartphones, social media, and high-speed internet—morphed our existence through young adulthood. For those of us who went to college and pursued white-collar careers, we were conditioned to focus on showing the world our "resume virtues" as key to secular pursuits like getting a better job or making more money which often uprooted us away from family and community. The Book of Matthew gives us multiple examples of why we are supposed to do good without advertising it or drawing attention to ourselves. But the internet constantly nudges us to join the infinite loop of content creation where we feel the need for publicity in order to scale the operation of good that we perform.

A Disguise

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils," Lewis wrote in the preface of the book. "One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." He writes that Hell is "equally pleased by both errors," hailing "a materialist or a magician with the same delight." 

The devil's real advantage is not that he is powerful but that he is hard to locate. He’s easily waved off by the skeptic as superstition to the atheist but also shrunk by the believer to a cartoon. The guy in red tights with a pitchfork, as described by Screwtape in the seventh letter, is the image he hopes we will visualize—the joke he wants us all to believe. The truly deceptive power of the devil is that he can shapeshift into anything he wants to achieve the mission, much like the T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2 (a childhood favorite). The screen glowing in your palm never announces itself as a temptation. It arrived first as a tool then it became a convenience and over time we all saw it as the easy way to stay connected. This is precisely the disguise a competent tempter would choose.

Analog Resistance

For those of us trapped in the Matrix, counsel is needed, and it's found in the thirteenth letter, where Screwtape furiously rebukes Wormwood for a catastrophic blunder: the patient was allowed two real positive pleasures. The first is reading a book he actually enjoyed, and the second is walking alone to an old mill for tea, through country he really likes. 

Real pleasures are dangerous to Hell, Screwtape explains, because they are real: they give a man "a touchstone of reality," and they are, "in a sense, on the Enemy's ground." The man who "truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack."

For me, deer hunting and fishing with my dad on the weekends provided hours of silence in the woods and on the water. Although not religious, he found peace and was one with the land, whereas I, like any hyper young boy, felt the pain of extreme boredom. It would take me several years after his death from ALS in 2003 to appreciate the solitude that only nature can provide.

In 31 letters, Screwtape provides us with the whole counterattack in one sentence, similar to the lectures I received from Dad after staying up all night from a new addiction to the internet. It's not about abstinence from tech for its own sake, but the deliberate recovery of unmediated reality, including things like the walk without the fitness report, the meal without the photograph, the goal achieved without announcement, the real friend across an actual table. 

Attention is the raw material of worship, so in many ways, we become what we behold. The smartphone proposes two objects of beholding, the self and the void, and it will alternate between them indefinitely. The older and more rooted discipline proposes a third direction: outward, toward creation, neighbor, and God, on ground the Enemy of our enemy has held all along.

Screwtape closed his letters "Your affectionate uncle." The device in your pocket sends its regards.