That Hideous Strength and 1984, Part 1

The last piece dropped into place

There are a few times when we are told something we already know, and it opens our eyes. Of course today most of us are told nothing we don’t already believe, and generally we seek out that state such that we can keep our eyes comfortably closed. That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is when we are told something, or more likely, I think, read something, and we realize we had been putting it together in the back of our minds for years, and now it crystalizes and we realize “I knew it, NO, I could feel it, I just needed to hear you say it!¹”

For my part, the prime example was reading Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. It just snapped right into place, and while before reading it I would never have been able to express it myself, as I read it was as understandable as my own thoughts and clearly true. Which is strange, because how often can you simultaneously marvel at fresh insights and feel as though you have known it all along?

Well, in a smaller way, John Carter did that for me here. In what has become an embarrassing pattern worthy of an 80’s sitcom, I have been struggling with this essay. Promised some months back now, I have smashed my face against the keyboard, alternating between draft n-of-X and the delete key, for so long that it was slipping into shamefully put off email reply territory. You know, the one where you think “Well, maybe if I put this email reply off a little longer I will get lucky and die, then I won’t have to face the shame in the response.”

Yet, like like his mighty namesake charging across the red planet on a hexapod steed to save the day, John posted this little gem, and damn if it didn’t fit nicely into the gap my edifice kept crumbling around. Until reading that I had not realized what I was missing, and what it was I probably couldn’t have provided so well: a poetic summary of our troubled times, the backdrop for a story in which everything seems wrong.

The brilliant Professor David Levy once told me “I really hope someone writes this paper, so that I can cite it. I’ll give them all the research, just so I don’t have to write it myself.” John wrote the essay, and I didn’t have to do the research, just direct you over to read it. Just the first half, down to about the share button. The hydra part doesn’t come into Lewis’ story; more one for space angels, he².

Read it, and know that what we are experiencing now, C.S. Lewis wrote about in the 1940’s in “That Hideous Strength³.” How his view of the world’s possible doom parallels and contrasts with his contemporary George Orwell’s is the theme of this essay, and John’s essay nails down exactly why it feels so relevant today.

NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD! The Space Trilogy and 1984 are over 70 years old, and practically free in e-book form now, so really just get them and read them already. I am not going to do a step by step walkthrough of the plot and reveals, but I might spoil some surprises.

Also note: this is going to be in two parts, because apparently Substack loses its nuts if you get past email length and stops saving properly. I though I lost ~3,000 words to the void, although it turns out there was a saved version from 8 minutes ago in the version history that retained them. My blood pressure is about 5 points higher than it was 10 minutes ago.

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So You Never Heard of C.S. Lewis’ Scifi Space Trilogy? I Hadn’t Either.

The world of The Space Trilogy’s third book, That Hideous Strength (THS), is our world, Britain circa 1945, with a key difference: while the angels of the heavens, literally space, guide and rule the universe, Earth is “The Silent Planet”, cut off from the rest, due to the Fall of Man. Earth is the domain of a dark angel, and only reconnected to the outside world when agents of said angel take a man against his will to Mars, violating the agreement that kept Earth separate⁴.

Understand that, but otherwise entirely ignore it because while THS has some mythical and science fiction aspects, it is really a book on society. Lewis does a fascinating job of world building in mapping the Christian conception of heavens and angels to a modern(ish) understanding of planets and space. If you ever thought “You know, I really dig Christianity, but their cosmology makes no sense to me” this book will get you over the line.

Still, the world Lewis describes is very obviously our everyday world, albeit with something rather wrong with it. All our primary characters have that splinter in their mind, without John Carter to explain all in one place why that is so. The first few chapters are driven by Mark Studdock and his wife Jane dealing with their dissatisfaction, and importantly would not be able to understand it if J.C.⁵ appeared to explain. Both our protagonists need to understand why they struggle, and their struggles are necessary for them to understand why.

Mark is a low level academic at a small college, what in the States would be an assistant professor perhaps, called a Fellow in Britain⁶. His driving motivation is to be in the inner ring, or perhaps less charitably, to not be outside of any inner rings. He wants to be part of the smart crowd, those important guys who get things done and “really run the place.” If you have spent any time among professional academics, politicians or non-profit folk you have met Mark many times over. He constantly strives to improve his network, abandoning less valuable relationships for those more promising.

Jane is herself an ABD (all-but-dissertation) turned housewife after she and Mark married. She still plans to finish her degree but can’t quite get up the motivation for it, finding it frustrating and impossible despite having ample time. Jane has ample time because she is a stay at home mom, but without the mom part; she and Mark are both putting off having children until… well they don’t really know, but they are not done “living their lives yet” is their point. In short, Jane, the independent woman living her own life, is directionless in life without knowing what to do with it. She doesn’t want to be a professional academic, but neither does she have another vocation nor a family to direct her energy towards.

Mark and Jane are increasingly estranged, but neither understands why, precisely. Mark increasingly spends time with the college clique, whom Jane (rightly) finds distasteful. Jane wishes for more time and attention from Mark, but pushes him away at the same time.

Mark and Jane’s issues feed into the splitting point, where the story takes off: Mark is invited to join the NICE at Belbury, and hares off to stay there for a week to see if he wishes to be there permanently⁷. Jane, suffering from loneliness and nightmares seeks help and advice from a mysterious lady doctor on the recommendation of one of her former professors. Mark and Jane aren’t going to see each other for some time, and have very different journeys through the metaphorical underworld before their absolution⁸.

But let’s talk about the NICE, because that’s the scary bit for us moderns. In a book with evil space angels that rule Earth, the National Institute for Co-Ordinated Experiments is the most nightmare inducing, because it is entirely the work of humans. Frankly, the dark angels are probably just sitting back and taking notes on how to be evil and taking credit for our innovations with their boss.

“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.”

The key aspect of NICE is that it is made up of many concentric rings, inner circles within inner circles. Although terrifically hierarchical, there is no explicit hierarchy; “we are all one big family” is essentially the catch phrase.

The outer rings are rather anodyne, almost intentionally boring. Social scientists toiling away in committees, passing notes to each other, writing reports, and seemingly not really amounting to much more than the usual silliness academics get up to. Some interesting findings here, some questionable arguments here, all theoretical nothing to really worry about, but the start of putting society on a really scientific footing instead of all this wasteful mucking about haphazardly. Just the sort of highly paid, high prestige but low practical importance sort of “Center for X” job academics love.

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.

As one spends time there, it starts get a bit more real.

“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 . . .”

…

“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.”

[emphasis mine]

The NICE is always open about its goal: the improvement of man. The trouble is that just what that improvement entails gets rather unsavory the more you delve into the logical conclusions of it. Note, the above quotes are from Chapter 2… you don’t have to delve far, and it is all down hill from there. For those of us living in 2022, even the later chapters are disturbingly familiar.

More disturbing for us today is the recognition that the NICE, while not officially wielding power, has an immense amount of pull. Nearly all the reputable news papers are outlets for its propaganda; after all, the NICE represents the future of science and rational organization of society. Far from being opposed to the NICE, all political parties vie to demonstrate that they support it more. For those of you familiar with Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter” and “The Case Against Education” that should sound really familiar. Until very recently it is hard to imagine any politician arguing to abolish government funding of universities or public schools. Any politician that expects to be elected, anyway.

“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.”

Indeed, the main opposition to the NICE is the disorganized, ambivalent lower classes. The elites of Britain are largely all for the institute that promises the rationalization of society under elite guidance, and consider the opinions of the NICE as they appear in the papers to be the mark of an educated person in the know. The working man recognizes that all the stories are lies, and only buy the paper for the sports scores and wrapping fish. The yeomanry might not know what the truth is, but they recognize it is not whatever tat the elites believe.

“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.”

The NICE, of course, intends to extend its control over all Britain, tyrants with an iron slide rule. They use lies, media propaganda and purposefully incited riots to extend their control, gatekeeping social status via entry to their elite group while holding bitter terror over those inside lest they be exiled into irrelevance⁹. Yet that is still only an outer ring goal. The real horror, the real logical conclusion to the parts they tell you openly, is much, much worse. “In the future you will own nothing, and you will be happy” is the happy little light jiggled around to get you closer to the jaws of the anglerfish. Who then seems a jolly chap compared to what is next.

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Speaking of which, let’s bring 1984 into the story here. In many ways you can see That Hideous Strength as a prequel to 1984, assuming you neglect to read the last couple chapters. 1984 of course is set after the great collapse of global civilization in the wake of WW2, and the rise of the three mega-states Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia, a world of perpetual warfare between invincible countries, grinding oppression, ceaseless propaganda, omnipresent surveillance, and all controlling state. Through the course of the story we learn a bit about what happened between 1945 and 1984 that caused the world to take such a turn, and why the current miserable state, described famously as “a boot stamping on a human face - forever” is the desired end goal of the Party.

I am not going to go into the details of the story that brought us the terms Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, etc. It seems likely that if you are reading this, you have read 1984. If you have not, or if you haven’t read it recently, read it again after finishing this. I posted a few months back on re-reading 1984 for this essay (yes, it has been that long) that Orwell was strangely comforting to read these days; you might find it so as well¹⁰.

Instead I want to highlight some of the similarities and differences between TMS and 1984, and argue that really they describe two different paths to totalitarian hell. One happened in the communist states, the other may well be the downfall of the west.

Similarities

Many of the similarities are obvious and pervasive today, and really can be taken to be universals of how movements take power, how oligarchies solidify into tyranny¹¹.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the Newspaper

The first and most obvious is the use of media, especially official media, to change the present and past in people’s minds. 1984 features this as a core function of the state, with Winston working in the "Ministry of Truth”, which not only creates new media content for propaganda but spends most of its resources constantly editing records of the past to suit the needs of the present. The slogan “He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future.” sums it up nicely¹². No doubt this focus on how control of the narrative leads to control of people stems from Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War and seeing how all newspapers, left and right, were lying about the situation, particularly the Russian controlled communist papers decrying the revolutionary Spanish socialist militias as traitors which led to Orwell and his wife fleeing Spain¹³. The far left declaring former allies heretics and traitors to be burned at the stake for disagreeing over goals that were perfectly orthodox a few weeks back? Does that sound familiar?

THS also draws attention to the use of media to control, particularly the elites as noted above, but it is not the primary focus. Yet it is important to note that both Orwell and Lewis recognized that the lower classes, the proles and working man, were largely impervious to such propaganda, recognizing it as background nonsense. Orwell points out that the job of the Ministry of Truth is to control the minds of the outer Party members, what passes for a middle class in Oceania, not the proles who are “beneath suspicion.¹⁴” Just like Lewis, Orwell notes that what the lower orders think is largely irrelevant because revolutions are not executed by the lower classes, but rather middle class against the upper class, replacing the upper with the middle. An upper class that wants to keep its power secure must convince the middle class that it deserves to stay in power; it is the middle that must be controlled, for it is the middle that has both the power and the potential drive to overthrow the status quo¹⁵.

One particularly interesting thing to me in THS is how Lewis explicitly points to the ability of state power to trample the rights of the ordinary individual by convincing outsiders of its preferred narrative. The NICE wants to have a village condemned in order to reroute a river through it. How to do that? Well, describe it as blighted, and get people who don’t live there to assent to their politicians taking it from the owners and handing it to the NICE.

“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 today¹⁶. 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.”

Lewis doesn’t harp on this; he isn’t one to go into Randian monologues about why this is bad. It is worth keeping in mind when the next Kelo comes up that this has been the tactic for a long time: seek political power through legitimacy granted by people far from the issue at hand. Lewis seems to recognize the danger of shouldering aside individual rights in the name of progress, even when “overseen” by the electorate, namely that the electorate generally only sees what it is told and many atrocities can be accepted in the name of progress with the right story tellers.

-Continue to Part 2- (as soon as my blood pressure drops enough and I finish writing it)

1. Bonus points for naming the reference that I am butchering the mostly remembered quote from. (No one claimed the last “wtf is Hammer talking about?” reference prize!)

2. But with sufficient mead and insufficient sleep I probably could map them onto each other.

3. This might be comforting if you are taking the “we survived those times” tack; less so if you take the “very different people survived those times” tack.

4. This is covered in the first two books of The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, and Perelandra. One should really read them before book three, THS, although it is not strictly necessary I don’t think. Also, note the similarity of a man being unwillingly sent to Mars for sacrifice breaking the cosmic law and Aslan being sacrificed on the Stone Table for Eustace breaking death itself.

5. Either one, although John Carter of Mars showing up would be an awesome crossover.

6. Note: I am going to be explaining lots of this as I, an American, understand it in American academic terms. The actual words in the book will be different here and there, and I am possibly missing a few details and differences I didn’t quite grasp about UK academia.

7. This was apparently more common in early 20th century Britain, sort of a boarding school for working adults? Essentially members have rooms and offices all in the same building, working, eating, living all on site. No one in the story remarks on this being strange.

8. Although the story spends as much time with Jane as Mark, and she is definitely the more sympathetic character, I am not going to follow her arc. She gets the happier path to tread, and we are going to focus on everything wrong with the world. Read the book.

9. Whatever I write here cannot quite capture how well Lewis captures that key aspect of modernity: power over the elite via allocating status to the ideologically pure who then cannot survive outside the circle of those allocating the status. A bit like raising wild deer to rely on being fed by humans, then threatening to return them to nature which they never learned to navigate and will certainly kill them. Only the deer are deeply aware of how screwed they now are. That’s the best I can do off the cuff, and that is why C.S. Lewis is a far better writer than I will ever be.

10. If you have read 1984 recently, consider reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of serving in the Spanish Civil War. It is… well it is really good reading, made all the more horrifying because it was real. The Spanish Civil War was a huge turning point in our British socialist’s world view. (Note the link leads to a PDF)

11. A great work on this topic is Eric Hoffers “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”. Hoffer was also a contemporary of Lewis and Orwell, although The True Believer was published a few years after their works.

12. If you have been wondering where the phrase “Memory Hole” originated from, you need to read 1984.

13. Again, “Homage to Catalonia” is a must read.

14. Ok, that isn’t the context of “beneath suspicion” in 1984, but I love the phrase so much I use it when I can.

15. Gordon Tullock, among others, has pointed out that revolutions are always fought between competing elites. I don’t think this is necessary opposed to Orwell and Lewis’ point, as it is certainly the upper middle classes that wind up in power after a successful revolution. I expect it depends a lot more on where you draw the lines between classes, but it definitely isn’t the lower 2/3 that are doing the revolting and taking power.

16. When I worked for a non-profit my boss said this all the time. “Don’t worry about finishing the analysis, you already know what you should say so start writing the report.” “But I don’t know what I should say because I haven’t finished the analysis.” “No, you should know what the report should say well enough.” Welcome to modern science when the state is a client. I resigned, so you can have my seat.