Posted on 10/31/2019 11:15:08 AM PDT by Heartlander
Whose dystopia are we living in today? With Donald Trump as president and the world seemingly ablaze, answering that question can sometimes feel like gambling on a horse race. So bet big on George Orwell, as Chinas terrifying social credit system makes his Nineteen Eighty-Four freshly relevant. Though the odds are still good on Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World offers the timeless warning that sexual and chemical freedom can actually be tools of subjugation. And here comes Margaret Atwood, courtesy of feminists on Twitter who seem convinced theyre living in a word-for-word realization of The Handmaids Tale.
Will it be one of these dark futures we end up inhabiting? Or that of a (slightly) less known author, Ray Bradbury, perhaps, or Yevgeny Zamyatin? Time will tell, but theres one prophet of doom who never seems to get his due. C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don and theological writer, is better known for his Christian apologetics and Chronicles of Narnia series than his playing Cassandra. But Lewis, too, conceived of a bleak future, one in which man seeks to overcome his nature and in so doing ends up enslaving himself. Outlined in his essay The Abolition of Man and his novel That Hideous Strength, his premonitions have been largely ignored, at least in the mainstream, perhaps because theyre so unfashionable. They involve, after all, not easy enemies like communism or patriarchy, but the Wests abandonment of natural law and God.
The Abolition of Man was first delivered as a series of lectures at Kings College in 1943. It begins with Lewis challenging a popular textbook of the time, which he dubs The Green Book. At issue is a passage where the two authors, whom he calls Gaius and Titius, recall the story told by Coleridge of two tourists standing before a waterfall. One gazes upon the flume and pronounces it sublime, while the other calls it pretty. Coleridge naturally rejects the latter judgment as inferior to the former; not so, say Gaius and Titius. The two evaluations are equally valid because both are mere expressions of subjective feelings. This confusion, they say, is continually present in our language: what we think of as true and objective statements are mere shadows off our emotional lanterns.
Its a relativistic way of thinking and Lewis sees in it the road to ruin. The Green Book, he warns, establishes a fatal opposition, one that pits the everyday judgments we make about breakfast and traffic and the family dogessential if we’re to interact with the world around usagainst our very reason. Thus it becomes irrational to think that a waterfall itself is sublime; the rational take is that the waterfall has no inherent qualities at all, at least as we perceive them. Follow this logic to its conclusion and you destroy any sense of objectivity, and with it the common understandings that are needed for a civilization to function.
To do this, Lewis says, is to promote a lie. Not only is objective truth real, but there exists a transcendent moral order that can be found across cultures. He calls this, borrowing from the Chinese, the Tao, though it can also be thought of as natural law or traditional morality. He associates the Tao with the bodily chest, which he sees as a sort of ethical mediator between the appetites of the belly and the intellect of the mind. It may even be, Lewis suggests, that our chests are what make us uniquely human, as by our intellects we are only spirit and by our appetites only animal. Gaius and Titius, then, are Men Without Chests, which is to say not men at all, having abandoned any sense of the objective and thus forfeited any discernment of the Tao.
Jettisoning traditional morality might feel like a liberation, but its actually, as Lewis sees it, the beginning of the most awful tyranny imaginable. Because if man loses that which makes him human, then he can be molded into something else, and it is other men who will do the molding. From this point of view, Lewis writes, what we call Mans power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. These architects Lewis foresees as scientists, or at least informed by science, armed with cutting-edge technology and all the tinkering capabilities of the modern state. Yet without the Tao, they will have nothing to inform their decisions except instinct and desire, thus making them slaves to nature rather than the other way around. It is nature, then, that will have the last laugh, abolishing the very species that seeks to rise above it.
Though Lewis mentions him only once, his chief antagonist here is clearly Francis Bacon. A Renaissance thinker, Bacon argued that man should, through scientific experimentation and technology, extract from nature her secrets and use them to subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity. But that only raises Lewiss question: which man? Who among us gets to do the subduing and overcoming? In his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis imagines an answer: the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., a scientific think tank that gradually and coercively takes control of Britain. Populated by a diverse cast of villains with hilariously unsubtle names (Augustus Frost, Fairy Hardcastle), the N.I.C.E. genuinely believe they can create a better humanity, starting with an executed prisoner whose head theyve managed to reanimate and make talk again.
Theyre assisted in all this by the Macrobes, a new race theyve discovered and who its quickly established are the real voices behind the disembodied head. Those familiar with Lewiss fiction will have guessed that the usual Christian mythology is in play and that the Macrobes may not be quite what the N.I.C.E. suspect. The ending of That Hideous Strength is almost unnecessarily violent, as the scientists are slaughtered by their hellish controllers. But theres a scene just before that in which Lewis explores how exactly man might be abolished. Mark Studdock, a naïve N.I.C.E. initiate, is taken by Frost into several rooms where hes shown things that ought to repulse his sensibilitiesdistorted furniture, for instance, and obscene art on the walls.
The purpose, according to Frost, is to make Mark entirely objective, to shear him of any human emotions and preferences, which Frost dismisses as mere chemical phenomena acting on the brain. The real goal, of course, is just the opposite: to destroy Marks objectivity, to render waterfalls sublime no longer. Mark goes through with this, only to decline when Frost asks him to stomp on a crucifix; though not a Christian, he cant bear to bully a torture victim. His humanity thus intervenes and saves him, though Lewis makes clear this was by no means guaranteed, as several N.I.C.E. members, including Frost himself, went through with the desecration.
This raises the question: just how malleable is our humanity? Would we kick a dying man if those in power demanded it? Would we shed the Tao altogether? Right now, the regnant culture is waging war on a number of things once considered fundamentally human: the family, the two genders, the need to communicate honestly (some would say politically incorrectly), the desire for a national identity and flag. Could it be that the Frosts of the world have already begun their work? Certainly weve seen shades of the N.I.C.E. before, in early progressive advocates of scientific governance like Herbert Croly, and in the Silicon Valley magnates of today who babble about transhumanism and seceding into their own corporate states.
Such would-be conditioners are victims of mans oldest tautology: they can wield power and therefore they ought to wield power. It’s hard not to notice that Lewis, in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, ends up sounding like something of a fusionist, meaning one who thinks that the fates of traditional morality and individual liberty are inextricably linked. The secret police are instrumental to his dystopia. They are the muscle by which man is to be remade. The N.I.C.E. dont slither in with gooey promises of personal betterment; they come with jackboots, enamored with technocracy, fussing drearily about how unhygienic pubs are. Individual freedom is just another human inclination they mean to erase, and their statism is contrasted with Lewiss heroes, who live in a state of ordered liberty under their Director (previous Lewis protagonist Elwin Ransom), free to both enjoy themselves and carry out their duties.
This was how it looked from the belly of the 20th century, as overseas dreamers and revolutionaries morphed into totalitarians. And it’s still plenty relevant today. Because if humanity as we know it is to be abolished, it wont be by those who love country and Constitution. It will be by elites with gauze in their eyes, addled by delusions of progress or reaction, who look upon mere man as he is and think they can conjure up something better.
Matt Purple is the managing editor of The American Conservative.
There are several C.S. lewis sites and youtube video channels. However, Just this morning a subscribed to a really good one that could actually be the backbone of a bible study course. It makes his quotations extremely interesting to “watch”.
It’s called CSLewisDoodle: https://www.youtube.com/user/CSLewisDoodle
In fact, here is chapter 3 of “the abolution of man” at CSLEWISDOODLE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idgYLTnSzxI
This one is absolutely excellent. It’s on subjectivity.
The poison of subjectivism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgcd6jvsCFs
It is important to keep in mind when this was penned to better understand the examples he uses.(WWII era)
Start with Mere Christianity first.
If every literate person in this country would just read it, we’d change for the better.
Don’t forget that the N.I.C.E. was defeated by the power of five angels each responsible for a separate planet, in conjunction with some few Christians and a historical Merlin from Arthurian legend.
“...the fates of traditional morality and individual liberty are inextricably linked.”
Indeed. You govern yourself so that you need not be governed.
This seems hopelessly lost today in America.
Thanks for posting.
The Democrat Party (and I’m sure many Republicans) do not believe in an objective reality (which is at its source, God). We can see the result in self-identifying genders, among thousands of other things that infect our daily lives. To them, all reality is what they believe or want it to be, not what is. Thus power is everything.
Haven’t read those books in a long time, but I suspect that in the end, it’s more of a fusion of ‘all of the above’. The pleasures of Huxley, the boot of Orwell, the mental chicanery that Lewis foresaw. But even these may be transitory phases. In the end, I suspect ‘their’ vision is NK for all.
[[but the Wests abandonment of natural law and God.]]
Anyone with 1/2 a brain can see why abandoning God in this country will lead to our downfall, the road to ruin.
As someone said “If everyone obeyed the great commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, there would be no need for laws” Do away with that commandment altogether, and begin to serve just yourself because you feel you are owede great respect- and you get anarchy- chaos- breakdown-
[[but there exists a transcendent moral order that can be found across cultures.]]
This moral order- or as i like to call it, the objective universal moral code’, is the Holy Spirit- He tries throughout everyone’s lifetime to stimulate their conscience to act upon this universal moral code, and to recognize eventually that this code is given by a code giver- God- and to urge us to turn to Him through Christ-
Sadly though many will sear their inner conscience, and never turn to God- but nearly everyone at soem point in their life has their consciences pricked, and know they are breaking the absolute moral code when they do so-
[[Jettisoning traditional morality might feel like a liberation, but its actually, as Lewis sees it, the beginning of the most awful tyranny imaginable.]]
Exactly- the secularist thinks it ‘freedom’ to move away from the objective moral code, but it’s not!
[[Yet without the Tao, they will have nothing to inform their decisions except instinct and desire,]]
I might just add “instinct and desire controlled by subjective feelings of lust and covetousness, not by objective moral codes
[[the N.I.C.E. genuinely believe they can create a better humanity,]]
Liberals today are no better- they believe they can create a ‘nicer generation’ by allowing everyone to act on their subjective impulses and do whatever makes them happy- problem is, then you have to assign someone as over-seer to make sure one person’s happiness doesn’t infringe on someone else’s happiness- little do they know, the objective moral code sets that standard already- but the left want to do away with that objective moral code, and replace it with subjective immoral feelings, desires and lusts and covetousness- thinking this will free us from the restrictive bindings of morality and free us to be happy=- it won’t- it will just enable more people to trample the rights of others, and be open to subjective restrictions that do nothing but end up punishing the moral and rewarding then immoral depending o n the ever changing subjective whims of the day of those in charge-
I think it;s entirely possible that the ‘great delusion’ that will come upon mankind in the end times is the idea that subjective ideals replace objective code, and it;s touted as the ‘new morality’ that everyone must obey- society is being brainwashed to believe that immorality is morality. subjective feelings are objective truth. we’re seeing it play out with the bastardization of the word gender, and the slow criminalization of the Christian faith in public-
ok, enough thinking for one year!
We get disciplined without, so that we will have a solid objective disciplined character within
[[Because if humanity as we know it is to be abolished... It will be by elites]]
Backed by the military, or even by an international one world force
[[and think they can conjure up something better.]]
there is nothing new under the sun= nothing- objective moral code is still the very best means of a polite and civil society- the left under the control of the Evil One however, will never accept that, because it means that we the people have the power, NOT the elite-
Bttt bookmark
“The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and to save the world from suicide.”
T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture
Good idea. I pulled it from my bookshelf for another read.
Ping
Bacon was channeling Descartes who was the real bad guy.
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