“The Real Thing At Last”
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said 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.”
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Mark Studdock is talking about the coming of the N.I.C.E. (“National Institute of Controlled Experiments) to the little college town of Edgestow in the culminating novel of Lewis’s space trilogy. Published in 1945, the tale presents a distopian society placed sometime in the future in which a group of elitists stage a takeover of British society, and ultimately the world, cloaked in the guide of scientism. A trained sociologist himself, Mark is initially lured by the promise of social planning as a solution to inefficiency and suffering in human communities. He also hungers to belong in what Lewis calls “the inner ring,” that exclusive clique in every institution that wields immeasurable influence. These characteristics initially blind him to the more ominous implications of science controlled by human power institutions and applied to every field of inquiry and governance.
In the novel, Mark is slow to recognize that the scientific enterprises of the N.I.C.E. are only a cover for a much more aggressive program to eliminate selected classes of people, achieve total dominance over the ones who remain, and do away with most organic life save for the favored few who will live on eternally. Eventually we learn that dark spiritual entities are masterminding the project. It’s as dystopian a vision as could be imagined, seemingly over-the-top enough that we might initially think Lewis has completely overreached.
That’s why it’s so unnerving to recognize many aspects of the plan have parallels to today. I’ve read this novel many times now, but never with more foreboding than in these days. The outsized reverence for “science” in our public debates is all too apparent, though what passes for science is more like what Gil Eyal calls trans-science: the intersection of science with ethics, public policy, and other matters outside its realm. It manifests itself everywhere we look: the climate change, transgenderism, vaccines, and the unprecedented pandemic measures taken in the last year in the name of public health. Every one of these issues involves ethical, political, Constitutional and spiritual impacts. Every one of them includes both a fashionable or favored view that claims the mantle of science (sometimes with astonishing hypocrisy), and a dissenting view charged with “not believing in science.” This is a good rhetorical ploy to make your opponent look ignorant, but it’s almost never accurate. True science always involves debate over the proper interpretation and right use of scientific data.
Mark gets an early glimpse of the N.I.C.E. agenda in a conversation with Lord Feverstone, who explains that ultimately there is simply too much organic life; the “balance of nature” must be tweaked, but the animating motives are mostly not scientific at all, but rather political. Asked what the first steps might be, Feverstone replies,
“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 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 be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get 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.”
The spirit of cancel culture emanates from a passage like this: the entitlement of one group to dictate the correct program of thought for everyone. We may not have sterilization or selective breeding yet, but we have appallingly high abortion rates and an ongoing debate over the relationship between Planned Parenthood, its founder Margaret Sanger, eugenics, and the black community. We may not have forced education of the style Feverstone describes, but we do have state-sponsored intrusion into values and behavior modification in the name of schooling, such as the “comprehensive sex ed” legislation proposed starting in kindergarten in New York. And as far as “direct manipulation of the brain,” we may not have shock treatment or whatever Lewis may have been picturing, but with the surveillance state enforced via our technologies, we are far more “remotely controlled” than we may realize.
