C.S. Lewis Predicted Our Doom

 From two years ago at Intellectual Takeout:

Jettisoning traditional morality might feel like a liberation, but it’s 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 Man’s 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 Lewis’s 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 they’ve managed to reanimate and make talk again.

They’re assisted in all this by the Macrobes, a new race they’ve discovered and who it’s quickly established are the real voices behind the disembodied head. Those familiar with Lewis’s 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 there’s 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 he’s shown things that ought to repulse his sensibilities – distorted furniture, for instance, and obscene art on the walls. (Read more.)

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