C.S Lewis might have been a prophet
Perhaps as much as Orwell, only with more space angels
Until last year I had not been aware that C.S. Lewis had written a science fiction trilogy as part of a game with J.R.R. Tolkien (who, alas and predictably, did not finish his because he wrote so slowly.) When my wife asked “Do you have ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ for Kindle? It is by C.S. Lewis, and I have some credits to get it for free,” it was a bit like being asked if I wanted a copy of Adam Smith’s rough draft of his book on governance, and my response as similar1: What now? That exists? I didn’t know that existed… are you sure it is his? Well, whatever, if it is free I don’t care if it is a collection of resolution photographs of notes scrawled on cocktail napkins…
Turns out the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) was a thing written by Lewis, and has become possibly my favorite thing, challenged only by the Screwtape Letters. Perhaps it is unfair to call it a trilogy, as the first two books represent only 47% of the total according to my Kindle, and really feel more like “I told you this short story so I could tell you this story” segments, with That Hideous Strength2 being the point of the whole set. Not that the first two are not interesting or useful, but if you don’t buy the omnibus and just read them all back to back you are really missing out.
What follows now is my review and comment on the trilogy, specifically THS as I just reread it and made copious notes and highlights. In the hopefully near future I am going to write up a comparison between THS and 1984 discussing which better captures the present state of society3.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Not too many, however, as the exciting bit is less about how the story progresses and more how the two groups in British society function. Still, spoilers ahead.
Short Review: Buy the trilogy, read it all for the story, then read THS again to soak up the social and political commentary and observations. The books are not terribly long, the first two being in total smaller than the last, but the last is just dripping insight. If you are the kind of person who reads a blog like mine, I can unequivocally recommend the books. If you ever read anything of C. S. Lewis’ that wasn’t the Chronicles of Narnia and thought “That was pretty interesting” you will get a lot from That Horrible Strength, both in entertainment and edification. If you just read the Narnia books and kind of liked them, you will very likely enjoy these stories as well.
BEGIN SPOILERS
A Basic Review
This is only sort of science fiction; H. G. Wells’ work looks like a how to book series by comparison. What Lewis has really done is make a cosmology to map his Christian belief to (what was) known science at the time with regards to planets and space. Now, to quote George Will “I don’t have a problem with religion, I just don’t happen to have any.” As a result, I can’t quite say whether Lewis’ project will work for all Christians. Is it blasphemy to say God created life on other planets at different times, in the sense that some planets are at the end of their life while others are just now starting up in the Eden phase? Is it wrong to claim that Heaven is really space, and all the planets are merely the lower mortal planes? Is it problematic, Biblically, to say Earth is severed from the greater heavens as a result of the fall of man and the fallen angel being that rebelled and occasioned the event, resulting in the heavens blockading Earth from intercourse with the other planets and their beings? I don’t know.
Is it all awesome?
Yes. Yes it is.
What Lewis has done is make a world, our world, the one we live in currently, that at least to an outsider works with the Biblical world, and makes sense. As I said, I am not religious, but I could believe in the construction Lewis has put together in the same way I believe in any theory of history: it is internally consistent, and even if I don’t know about some of the details, I can understand why things have happened and make predictions that turn out pretty close to what happened for the things I don’t know, instead of spending all my time picking apart contradictions.
The only science fiction part is how the universe works, and the handwaved existence of a space ship allowing for travel between planets. The series was published during the WWII era, 1938, 1943 and 1945, so spaceflight was still science fiction, but really the series probably falls closer to being social science fiction. If you are expecting something like Ring World, sorry. Imagine a prequel to 1984 or Brave New World that details what happens to create those societies, then mixed in with Gulliver’s Travels and the Bible, with less satire than that all implies. Christian Science Fiction? Defining it doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
What is important is the world building, the explanation of why we see the world and universe as we do, yet God and angels exist and are active. The first book OSP is what really explores that, but the theme is built throughout. Also throughout are many of the themes Lewis wrote about ethics and behavior that made him great one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
What isn’t throughout is a really gripping narrative. OSP and P are both fine narratives, but I wouldn’t call them gripping. The world building is interesting, but like some of Lewis’ other works in e.g. Narnia, once the world building is internalized the story is a little pedestrian. I am not interested in rereading them for their own sake, unlike say the Hobbit or the Screwtape Letters, or even the Chronicles of Narnia for that matter. Others might get more out of them, but I just didn’t.
That said, That Horrible Strength is gripping, even on the second read through and knowing what happens. The character interactions, the decisions made, the internal conflicts, all resonate powerfully and prompt reflection on our own choices and the behaviors of those around us. Seeing the internal logic of characters, how they fit into and affect groups, and seeing the parallels between them all and how their differences shape their worlds is really fascinating. It also doesn’t hurt that you can see the same forces at work in our world today, to revolting effect. As the second part of this review hints at, Lewis’ theology explains more of the modern world than just about anything since.
If you are not religious, That Horrible Strength might just change your mind. If only C. S. Lewis was still around to be elected Pope or something.
In sum, this is a story that will rewrite your stories about how the world works, what evil lurks and how it ensnares, and what we should do as people to make our way. The fairytale it tells becomes the tale of your life, the evils it describes are the evils you live, and the challenges the characters face are the challenges we personally must overcome, not in a metaphorical way, but in a very real way. Lewis pulls this off without beating you over the head with moralizing or making strident calls for action. He simply takes deep insight and creates a very real world, one distressingly familiar, and quietly asks “Which way of life would you prefer?” while reminding us that the times when we really make those decisions often are distressingly subtle:
This was the first thing Mark 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; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, 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. A few moments later he was trotting upstairs with the Fairy. They passed Cosser on the way and Mark, talking busily to his companion, saw out of the corner of his eye that Cosser was watching them. To think that he had once been afraid of Cosser!
Where to go from here…
Well, I think I will bring up some of the great passages in the books. I highlighted many bits, although nearly all from THS. Lewis could write. Damn, could he write. Although nothing from Out of the Silent Planet really grabbed me prose wise, there is hardly a dearth of great passages.
From Perelandra:
My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable?
I wonder how many young people, having worked so hard to be part of the in crowd, to get into a top college, a key job in the government or industry leader have had occasion to stop and stare in horror that this was what they sacrificed so much for.
I wonder how many people revaluate their definitions of “good” afterwards, and whether those changes are for better or worse.
On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?
If that latter doesn’t foretell of online Twitter mob culture…
and from That Hideous Strength:
“Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?”
Ok, that is Lewis quoting another source, but read that out loud in your best John Wayne impression and tell me it isn’t endlessly amusing? Go on, just try.
Lines from within the bad guys’ club:
“The NICE 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 and they’ve got a wonderful gadget—I was shown the model last time I was in town—by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it’s connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institute actually taking shape under your own eyes. There’ll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It’s a marvelous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different colored lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer.”
This isn’t really apropos to anything, in fact that is the last time it is mentioned in the book, but damn, if you ever had work meetings to discuss the results of other meetings, all of which were conflictingly scheduled at the same time, this hits home. What is actually the goal? Who is making the decisions? No one knows, but look at how well we can track and talk about what we have no idea about. The bureaucracy in action.
The third problem is Man himself.”
“Go on. This interests me very much.”
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest—which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
“What sort of thing have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first—sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including prenatal 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 . . .”
“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”
“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.”
“That’s my trouble. Don’t think it’s false modesty, but I haven’t yet seen how I can contribute.”
These two quotes, both from the same page, highlight two of the main themes, addressed in “The Abolition of Man” the control of people, through various methods, being imposed in the name of some good end. Yet, even at the beginning there is evil beneath; the good intentions are just the spoonful of sugar to help the poison go down, both in the minds of the public and the minds of the planner. After all, if it is you who are controlling, you won’t do anything bad because you are not a bad person, right?
Also, we can see Lewis describing the early 20th century progressives’ goals and methodologies regarding improving the human race. (See Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers) Lewis doesn’t even have to make this stuff up, it was all around him. Although biochemical conditioning and direct manipulation of the brain had to wait for modern science4.
But the Fairy [head of NICE’s internal police force] pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen.
“And that’s where you and I come in, Sonny,” added the Fairy, tapping Mark’s chest with her forefinger. “There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and Sociology. You and I’ve got to work hand in hand.”
Consider this for a moment, and then consider Canada’s new power to demand banks freeze the accounts of whomever the government wants. Consider the US government making “recommendations” for what web sites and newspapers should censor. Consider mandatory DIE training sessions. Deserved punishment is finite; treatment and prevention can be inflicted forever.
Mark, one of the protagonists, talking to Hingest upon the latter’s deciding to leave the NICE:
“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—”
“There are no sciences like Sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn’t wear corsets 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 think I do understand the sentiment that still attaches to the small man, but when you come to study the reality as I have to do—”
“I should want to pull it to bits and put something else in its place. Of course. That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.”
Two thoughts:
This was written over 70 years ago. Has sociology improved? Or has sociology infected every other academic realm of study?
“You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” Paging Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, George Akerloff and Robert Schiller. How much of social science these days is arguing that everyone makes stupid decisions, and so decision making should be adjusted by smart guys so that everyone can make smart decisions like that. And if you like Cinnabon, you are too stupid.
Mark and Straik (a priest/preacher involved with NICE) discussing the future:
“Do not imagine,” said Mr. Straik, “that I indulge in any dreams of carrying out our program without violence. There will be resistance. They will gnaw their tongues and not repent. We are not to be deterred. We face these disorders with a firmness which will lead traducers to say that we have desired them. Let them say so. In a sense we have. It is no part of our witness to preserve that organization of ordered sin which is called Society. To that organization the message which we have to deliver is a message of absolute despair.”
“Now that is what I meant,” said Mark, “when I said that your point of view and mine must, in the long run, be incompatible. The preservation, which involves the thorough planning, of Society is just precisely the end I have in view. I do not think there is or can be any other end. The problem is quite different for you because you look forward to something else, something better than human society, in some other world.”
“With every thought and vibration of my heart, with every drop of my blood,” said Mr. Straik, “I repudiate that damnable doctrine. That is precisely the subterfuge by which the World, the organization and body of Death, has sidetracked and emasculated the teaching of Jesus, and turned into priestcraft and mysticism the plain demand of the Lord for righteousness and judgment here and now. The Kingdom of God is to be realized here— in this world. And it will be. At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. In that name I dissociate myself completely from all the organized religion that has yet been seen in the world.”
A good many religious officers wind up on the evil side, one way or the other, interestingly enough. One can’t accuse Lewis of tribalism in his condemnation.
“Exactly. That’s where you and I come in. We’ve got to make a report on Cure Hardy. We’ll run out and have a look round tomorrow, but we can write most of the report today. It ought to be pretty easy. If it’s a beauty spot, you can bet it’s insanitary. That’s the first point to stress. Then we’ve got to get out some facts about the population. I think you’ll find it consists almost entirely of the two most undesirable elements—small rentiers and agricultural laborers.”
“The small rentier is a bad element, I agree,” said Mark. “I suppose the agricultural laborer is more controversial.”
“The Institute doesn’t approve of him. He’s a very recalcitrant element in a planned community, and he’s always backward. We’re not going in for English agriculture. So you see, all we have to do is to verify a few facts. Otherwise the report writes itself.”
I once left a job in a non-profit where “write the report first, then look for facts and evidence” was pretty much the standard practice. Seems very prevalent in academia as well. Does anyone doubt it is the case in mainstream journalism these days? All journalism?
Speaking of education, social sciences and reality:
Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his 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 laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, plowman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations:” for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.
Published in 1945. Have the social sciences realized their mistakes and made Arnold Kling’s “Stare more at reality and less at your models” our watch word?
Mark and Fairy Hardcastle (who is one of the more amusing, and frightening, baddies):
“I’ve no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles,” he said. “And if I had, I’d want to know a good deal more about the politics of the NICE before I went in for that sort of thing.”
“Haven’t you been told that it’s strictly nonpolitical?”
“I’ve been told so many things that I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels,” said Mark. “But I don’t see how one’s going to start a newspaper stunt (which is about what this comes to) without being political. Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?”
“Both, Honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “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 NICE 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 nonpolitical. The real power always is.”
For years I have been arguing that neither American left or right want to solve many of the problems they campaign about, nor do they want to “win” and put an end to them. Rather, it is more valuable to have the problems to fight over so that people will support one side or the other. The real things they care about happen in the background. Just like how for football teams who wins this week’s game is infinitely less important than that there be a game to contest next week, the contest is what generates the power, not the resolution of the contest.
Everyone at political economy conferences said I was nuts. I wonder if they ever came around to my way of thinking…
Remember the good old days when we all thought this crazy Woke nonsense was just college kids with crazy ideas who would all calm down once they got jobs? I wonder why that didn’t happen… and I wonder if that ties in somehow with the correlation between education and radical political affiliation….
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader 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.”
…
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy. “Where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a freethinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the highbrow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.”
Oh… right. Controlling the schools and news outlets that are the definition of “what smart people ought to know” means you can control the thoughts of those who want to defined as the smart people.
And if you don’t think people are willing to do all sorts of things to be considered “the smart people”, I recommend reading Lewis’ essay “The Inner Ring.” Arguably, THS is the novelization of the ideas in The Inner Ring, the theory applied. What is truly terrifying is that it hardly reads like fiction as opposed to condensed history. Or maybe I am just terrible at non-dysfunctional finding places to work.
Mark discussing the riots in Edgestow (his hometown around which much of the book revolves) with Filostrato, Straik, the Fairy and Feverstone (emphasis mine):
“You are satisfied,” asked Filostrato, “that it—the disturbance—must go forward at once, yes?”
“That’s the joke of it,” said Feverstone. “She’s done her work too well. She hasn’t read her Ovid. Ad metam properate simul.”
“We cannot delay it if we wished,” said Straik.
“What are we talking about?” said Mark.
“The disturbances at Edgestow,” answered Feverstone.
“Oh . . . I haven’t been following them very much. Are they becoming serious?”
“They’re going to become serious, Sonny,” said the Fairy. “And that’s the point. The real riot was timed for next week. All this little stuff was only meant to prepare the ground. But it’s been going on too well, damn it. The balloon will have to go up tomorrow, or the day after, at latest.”
…
“I think the penny hasn’t dropped, Fairy,” he said.“You surely didn’t imagine,” grinned Feverstone, “that the Fairy left the initiative with the natives?”
“You mean she herself is the Disturbance?” said Mark.
“Yes, yes,” said Filostrato, his little eyes glistening above his fat cheeks.
“It’s all fair and square,” said Miss Hardcastle. “You can’t put a few hundred thousand imported workmen—”
“Not the sort you enrolled!” interjected Feverstone.
“Into a sleepy little hole like Edgestow,” Miss Hardcastle continued, “without having trouble. I mean there’d have been trouble anyway. As it turns out, I don’t believe my boys needed to do anything. But, since the trouble was bound to come, there was no harm in seeing it came at the right moment.”
“You mean you’ve engineered the disturbances?” said Mark. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation. Nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind: in the snugness and intimacy of that circle he found his facial muscles and his voice, without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues.
…
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Feverstone.“It makes no difference,” said Filostrato. “This is how things have to be managed.”
“Quite,” said Miss Hardcastle. “It’s always done. Anyone who knows police work will tell you. And as I say, the real thing—the big riot—must take place within the next forty-eight hours.”
“It’s nice to get the tip straight from the horse’s mouth!” said Mark. “I wish I’d got my wife out of the town, though.”
“Where does she live?” said the Fairy.
“Up at Sandown.”
“Ah. It’ll hardly affect her. In the meantime, you and I have got to get busy about the account of the riot.”
“But—what’s it all for?”
“Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”
“Exactly,”
Oh, how I wish this seemed fantastical.
Ok, I will end with one more quote, because it is good and I could do this for pages if I don’t stop:
What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
Thanks for reading. I highly recommend the book, and soon will appear an essay comparing That Hideous Strength to 1984. I will get into my theory of how the desire to be counted among something like Lewis’ inner ring, some anointed elect is one of the two paths leading to hell, yet might be one with Orwell’s path. Is Lewis’ work more complete than Orwell’s? I need to reread 1984 to be certain, but the possibility that something surpasses Orwell’s works of genius is exciting! It is also interesting that they were contemporaries… if anyone knows of any correspondence or reviews of each other’s works or papers comparing the two, please let me know in the comments!
Alternate similes for those who are not… well me and maybe four other people:
It was a bit like being asked if I wanted a copy of the alternate Game of Thrones season 8 that was filmed and then replaced with the one aired.
It was a bit like being asked if I wanted a copy of the 8th Harry Potter book.
It was a bit like being asked if I wanted a copy of … You know what? I have no idea what sorts of non-existent literary thing most people would want a copy of. I struggled to come up with two, and I managed to pick things for me and maybe 10 other people. I don’t even care about Harry Potter…
Hereafter I am going to refer to the books as OSP, P and THS. Although in reality I am only really going to refer to THS.
I want to reread 1984 again before I embark on this.
I don’t know what to make of Yuval Harari. Is he advocating for directly controlling humans, or just warning against it? He always manages to leave a bad taste in my mouth, like he is skipping past the “this might happen” part straight to “it already happened so get used to your overlords.”
“That Horrible Strength”? Did the use of the acronym cause you to play Telephone with yourself? :-)
(I jumped to the end to say this so I don’t forget. Now back to read what you have to say!)