SACRAMENTO, CA - September 11 is supposed to have ended the self-absorption of prosperous America, and yet it is possible to notice, here and there, a new kind of inverted self-absorption: How can we carry on with the Emmy awards, or the World Series, or anything else beneath the non-shadow of the World Trade Center or amidst the anxiety of the next mail delivery?

This is not, of course, the first time in history that a nation and its people have confronted a fundamental shock to their civilization and its future, so this question is not new. C.S. Lewis visited this question during World War II in a lecture entitled “Learning in Wartime.” At a time when most young people were joining the military to engage in armed battle, those remaining in the university or other callings rightly wondered whether their occupations were frivolous or trivial. Lewis’s answer is worth recalling today: “The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.”

“Men,” Lewis added, “propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache. It is our nature.” In the current situation, it is helpful to recall the words of one of Lewis’s intellectual mentors, G.K. Chesterton, who wrote that “It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.” So let’s start working on those Henny Youngman gags about Osama, Louis Farrakhan, and Salman Rushdie walking into a bar....

Another more current reading caught our eye. Our California readers especially will not want to miss Thomas Donlan’s editorial in this week’s Barron’s about the Golden State’s increasingly precarious fiscal situation, brought to you by Gov. Gray Davis’s mishandling of the electricity crisis, that will probably require a huge tax increase next year. Donlan’s penultimate paragraph is what we in the trade call “a keeper”--California is definitely a state of mind. It is a state where politicians and citizens believe that corporations are corrupt and lawyers are virtuous, that charging what the market will bear ought to be a crime, that contracts are mere scraps of paper, that most issues are best settled by referendum and that the rest should be settled by shouting in the street.”

When Gov. Davis steps up next January and announces that we need a huge tax increase to balance the state’s books, he will likely cloak it in the patriotism of wartime necessity. We should follow C.S. Lewis’s attitude and greet this sophistry with the criticism that “normal” times would demand.

Steven Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, and the author of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. He can be reached via email at shayward@pacificresearch.org.