C.S. Lewis Saw It Coming: Don't Trust "The Science®"

“Mad scientists who think they can redesign human experience are always undone by eternal truths that arrogance won’t allow them to grasp...." - Matt Taibbi

W.D. James’ Philosopher’s Holler 5-part series—“Politics of the Heart”—explores C.S. Lewis’ thinking in light of philosophers from earlier eras and other cultures, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Confucius, Stoicism, Christianity, Taoism. The first installment arrived just as my wife and I were re-reading Lewis’ “space trilogy”.

W.D. explained the focus of his series as “maintaining the integrity of our hearts”:

Maintaining the integrity of our hearts is (as is, conversely, the regime’s assault on our hearts) a matter of politics as well as a matter of maintaining our wholeness and individual sanity and wellbeing.

This focus suggests profound questions leading to deep discussions— What is “Heart”? “Integrity”? “Politics”? “Sanity”? “Wellbeing”? “Wholeness”? And what is “Individual” anyway? All these terms are familiar, but what happens when we get radical and dig into meanings? “Radical”: late Middle English, from late Latin radicalis, from Latin radix, radic- ‘root’.

W.D. takes as the seed of his series Lewis’ 1944 The Abolition of Man, a book about education, moral values, and natural law. I point you to the “Politics of the Heart” series to grapple with the philosophy.

My aim here is to share thoughts and excerpts from a different Lewis book—the final volume in the “space trilogy”: That Hideous Strength. {If you want to read it, I suggest starting with the first two: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. The whole trilogy is in the Internet Archive.} The science-fiction trilogy carries Lewis’ perspectives outside the realm of philosophy per se into fictional worlds, just as The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis called out the connection between his strictly philosophical writing and his fiction in the Preface to That Hideous Strength:

This is a “tall story” about devilry, though it has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.

The subtitle of Hideous Strength—“A modern fairy-tale for grown-ups”—points in the same direction: It is a work of philosophy told through magical and imaginary beings and lands. The trilogy as a whole interweaves science fiction themes—rockets, space travel, alien life on other planets—with Christian and pagan mythology and philosophical history. The difficult nuggets of moral philosophy emerge in sparkling and startling tales of cosmic good and evil.

W.D. explains this same point and provides a brief synopsis:

That Hideous Strength... covers much of the same territory [as Abolition of Man to explain how the very being of humanity was under assault] but in a fictional format. It focuses (mostly) on ordinary English men and women of Lewis’ day and how they are seduced to work for the sinister N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). I say ‘mostly’ because malevolent supernatural beings and Merlin (who, like Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, is not tame, or nice, but who is good) also show up in this space fantasy.

David McIlroy discussed the linkage between the novel and the nonfiction work in his 2004 essay, "Mere Legality - C.S. Lewis on the Necessary Connection between Natural Law and the Rule of Law”¹ :

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis presents philosophical arguments in favour of natural law in order to counter what he regarded as dangerous subjectivist approaches to ethics. Lewis then illustrated the contrasting worldviews of natural law and subjectivism in his novel That Hideous Strength. Lewis's decision to do so is consistent with his claim that the natural law has to be discovered through desire and imagination rather than irrefutable logic.

All Lewis’ writing centers on ideas of objective morality, natural law, and personal responsibility. His target—in fiction as in non-fiction—is “subjective values”—the belief that values have no existence apart from personal emotional preferences and social choices. Lewis offers a respite and a basis for rethinking in a time and place like the present, when value is imagined as a “subjective” phenomenon and society is imagined as a conglomeration of “individuals” related only by their personal “choices”.

The domination of the “subjective” view, at least in “advanced Western societies” [read, “late imperial decadence”] is visible today even in some grade schools, where a narrative of “gender fluidity” teaches children they can be whatever gender they “feel like” in the moment, changing even from morning to afternoon and back again the next day. What might at first seem “playful” is deadly serious.

Lewis points to grade school education in the first line of Abolition of Man:

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text-books.

David K. Naugle remarks on this opening line:

Lewis was concerned about his culture’s inattentiveness to primary school text-books because he believed they contained the seeds which, when implanted in young, impressionable minds, would eventually produce a rejection of the natural law tradition of objective right and wrong. Such a rejection, Lewis justly believed, would put the whole of ethics, theology, politics, and, indeed, the future of humanity, at stake.

David McIlroy quotes Micah J. Watson framing a challenge to subjectivism, asking on what basis can you answer the following questions:

Does racism violate a truly objective and knowable principle? Or is anti-racism merely a subjective taboo that some societies have happened upon at this particular juncture of human history? What about domestic violence? Or a callous disregard for the environment? Slavery?

These questions illuminate the inadequacy of a subjective notion of values to sustain useful discussion of the issues: If all we have is personal preferences, discussion becomes only an exchange of opinions, a pointless exercise that perpetuates endless irresolvable disagreements serving political machinations of ‘divide and rule’. If that’s not your aim, you’ll have to step away from “personal preference” as the definition of values. This includes the variation of subjective value known as “all value statements are equal”. If all value statements are equal, there’s really no need for discussion anyway, is there?

McIlroy quotes Michael Ward:

Only by recognizing objective value does one have grounds for hoping that a resolution of moral differences can be obtained through reasonable and peaceful means. Without such a shared premise as a bedrock, we cannot dispute matters rationally with one another, but only assert our particular subjective preferences and try to shout down those whose preferences conflict with our own.

So what did C.S. Lewis say about the source of “objective value? How are we to find it? W.D. explains the answer offered in Abolition of Man:

To ground his analysis and to point to the possible solution[,] he would set out to provide a very concise statement of what he took to be the universal moral wisdom of pre-modern humanity which he terms The Tao (The Way).

In short, Lewis reached far outside conventional western thinking about “Natural Law”. To point to the Tao is to point beyond the determinable, even as—perhaps paradoxically—we point to it to determine something—an understanding of value.

It seems that fiction may be better than non-fiction at doing the pointing. In all cultures, stories are the most potent bearers of values—in education of the young and in ruminations among the storytellers.

That Hideous Strength is Lewis the storyteller grappling with what Lewis the philosopher focused on in The Abolition of Man: What does it mean to be “human’?

JoDe Goudy, founder and director of Redthought.org, expands that question into six questions:

                Who / what are you?
                Where do you come from?
                Where are you going?
                What is?
                What isn’t?
                Why?

The first three questions are a personal prerequisite to a discussion of value: If we cannot answer those questions, we are not ready for the journey. The next three questions are about the world: Their answers form the necessary premises for a real discussion— a sharing of minds.

In the novel, Lewis depicts humanity under assault by the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). He imagined that entity in the 1940’s after having seen totalitarian efforts—fascism and communism—try to violently reshape humanity. But, as W.D. emphasizes, Lewis did not limit his understanding of totalitarianism to Fascist and Communist regimes. On the contrary—as the excerpts I will provide below show—the N.I.C.E. looks very much like the global “scientific” industrial organizations that recently imposed “lockdowns” and “medical mandates” on humans around the world, in the name of “health”, “public safety”, “to protect the community”.

C.S. Lewis saw it coming and he provided us with tools to defend ourselves—the wisdom of the ages and the natural world.

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EXCERPTS FROM C.S. LEWIS, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH (1945)

Sub-title -- “A modern fairy-tale for grown-ups”…

Preface: “This is a “tall story” about devilry, though it has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”

Narrator sets the stage:

The [National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments] N.I.CE. was the first-fruit of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. …

Edgestow [University] had lured the new Institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London. It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours. At times the Progressive Element in Edgestow had almost despaired. But success was now practically certain. If the N.I.C.E. could get the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow. And once it came, then, as everyone felt; things would at last begin to move.

The sub-warden of Bracton College in Edgestow University says:

The N.I.C.E. marks the beginning of a new era — the really scientific era. Up to now everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day...

A young sociologist recently added to the faculty says:

I think...that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. …. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did: but what’s certain is that it can do more.

A “progressive” member of the House of Lords insinuating himself into the affairs of the College to promote the N.I.C.E. says to the sociologist:

Humanity is at the cross-roads. ...It is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on — obscurantism or order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period; to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and recondition it; make man a really efficient animal. …We have at last got real powers: ... the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years. …

There are three main problems. First, the interplanetary problem...[which] must be left on one side for the moment.

The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples: and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of Nature. All that is to be gone into.

The third problem is man himself. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest ….You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. ...

Quite simple and obvious things, at first — sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it ’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain.

It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him. …

The sociologist asks:

You ...want me to write up all this?

The Lord replies:

No. We want you to write it down — to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.I.C.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity: call it re-education of the maladjusted and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is — the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You mustn’t experiment on children: but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it’s all correct!

Narrator:

The police side of the Institute was the Really important side. They had already popularised in the press the idea that the Institute should be allowed to experiment pretty largely in the hope of discovering how far humane, remedial treatment could be substituted for the old notion of ...punishment.

The head of the N.I.C.E. Police says to the sociologist that soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the N.I.C.E.; in the end, every citizen:

And that’s where you and I come in. Sonny…. There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and sociology. You and I’ve got to work hand in hand.

The sociologist asks an older member of the faculty, a physical chemist why he will not participate in the N.I.C.E.:

I came here because I thought it had something to do with science. Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home. I’m too old for that kind of thing, and if I wanted to join a conspiracy, this one wouldn’t be my choice.

The sociologist replies:

You mean, I suppose, that the element of social planning doesn’t appeal to you? I can quite understand that it doesn’t fit in with your work as it does with sciences like sociology, but—

The chemist interrupts:

There are no sciences like sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police...and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again…. I happen to believe that you can’t study men, you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.

Narrator:

The sociologist’s education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. ...He had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational group,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”….

The head of the N.I.C.E. Police, exasperated with the sociologist’s naïveté about the N.I.C.E. media campaign, hammers him about the newspapers:

Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.CE. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done you get each side outbidding the other in support of us —to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.

The exchange continues:

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said [the sociologist]. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”

“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey…. Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” …

“Well,… this is all very interesting,… but it has nothing to do with me. In the first place, I don’t want to become a journalist at all; and if I did I should like to be an honest journalist.

“Very well…. All you’ll do is to help to ruin this country, and perhaps the whole human race. Besides dishing your own career.”

Narrator:

To find himself no longer in the confidence of the Progressive Element, to be thrust down ... seemed to him unendurable. And the salary of a mere [college] don looked a poor thing after the dreams he had been dreaming for the last few days.

The sociologist, after days of despair, finally agrees to do the bidding of the Head of Police. At a meeting of members of the Inner Circle, she assigns him his first writing assignment for the newspapers:

“And the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riot.”

‘‘But how are we to write it to-night if the thing doesn’t even happen till to-morrow at the earliest?”

Everyone burst out laughing.

“You’ll never manage publicity that way,” said [the member of the House of Lords]. “You surely don’t need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it!”

"Well, I admit,” said the sociologist], and his face also was full of laughter, “I had a faint prejudice for doing so, not living in ...looking-glass land.”

“No good, sonny,” said [the Head of Police]. “We’ve got to get on with it at once. Time for one more drink and you and I’d better go upstairs and begin.”

Narrator:

This was the first thing [the sociologist] had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice…. It all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

An Institute Insider, a physiologist, initiates a conversation with the sociologist about the organic life of Nature and introduces the notion of disembodied Mind:

“The forest tree is a weed. … At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why natural trees? I foresee nothing but the [metal] art tree all over the earth. In feet, we clean the planet.”

“Do you mean… that we are to have no vegetation at all?”

“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”

“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”

“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

“It sounds...like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”

“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it? ... And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. ...The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”

“What are you driving at. Professor?” said [another listener]. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body; learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation. ...Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has quite thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. …What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that Mind can live without any of the three?”

“This Institute ...is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death; or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”

A Reverend, an Insider who articulates the Institute in religious terms, explains:

“Don’t you see ...that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first draught of the real God. It is a man— or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.”

A philologist, incarnation of the ancient Pendragon of King Arthur’s realm, acquaintance of Merlin the Druid Wizard who speaks “language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon”—a character central to all three books in the series appears as Director of a group of companions engaged in spiritual battle with the N.I.C.E. He ruminates about the history of science:

The physical sciences, good and, innocent in themselves, had already, even in ...[the time before the N.I.C.E], begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. ... Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.

The sociologist, preoccupied by a deepening emotional conflict between his increasing distrust of the N.I.C.E. and the lure of the prospect that he was on the verge of “the supreme power, the last initiation” into the “new age”, debates with a Professor in the most Inner circle, who tells him:

You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.

Meanwhile, the philologist Pendragon meets with Merlin, who, awakened after centuries, chafes with impatience to battle the evil of N.I.C.E. Merlin suggests recruiting allies in other unaffected lands. The Pendragon explains the impossibility of that and points to the one possibility remaining—to work with celestial Powers:

The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus [Earth]. …

The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.

After vanquishing N.I.C.E. in a spectacular battle, members of the Pendragon’s little group ponder the meaning of their success:

“There’s good and bad men everywhere.”

“It’s not ...that at all. You see, ...if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised — some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each.”

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For those readers who want a scientific view

McIlroy quotes Lewis’ "The Poison of Subjectivism" ² ², published the same year as The Abolition of Man:

“The pretence that ... no outline of universally accepted value shows through – is simply false... Far from finding a chaos, we find exactly what we should expect if good is indeed something objective and reason the organ whereby it is apprehended - that is, a substantial agreement with considerable local differences of emphasis and, perhaps, no one code that includes everything."

McIlroy adds:

“Lewis's contention that the objective nature of morality and something of its content can be inferred from the similarities between the ethical codes of different civilisations across the globe has found support from a 2019 study by Oxford University anthropologists across 60 societies. The anthropologists concluded that seven forms of co-operative behaviour (helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to your superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession) were considered morally good in all cultures.”

Abstract of the 2019 study— ”Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies: ³:

What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of “morality-as-cooperation” argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. To test these predictions, we investigate the moral valence of these seven cooperative behaviors in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that the moral valence of these behaviors is uniformly positive, and the majority of these cooperative morals are observed in the majority of cultures, with equal frequency across all regions of the world. We conclude that these seven cooperative behaviors are plausible candidates for universal moral rules, and that morality-as-cooperation could provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked.

1. David McIlroy, "Mere Legality - C.S. Lewis on the Necessary Connection between Natural Law and the Rule of Law," Law & Justice - The Christian Law Review 192 (2024): 51-67.

2. See: Jerry Root, “C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis Institute (2009).

3. Scott Curry, O., Austin Mullins, D., and Whitehouse, H., 'Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies', (2019) 60 Current Anthropology 47-69.