“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled…When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys the papers for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows…He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” – That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis, 1945)
That Hideous Strength is part three of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, yet is so different from the first volumes, it stands as an independent tale – a dystopian one on par with its contemporary, 1984 by George Orwell. As with 1984, That Hideous Strength is just as relevant now, as it was decades ago.
A lesser author couldn’t pull off switching from a space setting to a terrestrial one, or changing the narration to that of the author, in this final volume. Nor could many authors successfully weave higher themes into a story, but Lewis was an intellectual – when that still meant something – with a penchant for converting high ideas into accessible stories.
Themes of manipulation and control by hidden powers, abuse of science, eugenics (now returning as transhumanism) all are very relevant in our day. Especially applicable are the dangers of turning science into a form of fundamentalism that reduces humans to nothing more than an accident. An accident with no real foundation of truth or reality. This fatal flaw was apparent in the materialist thinking of Lewis’ day, even more so now, with its modern evangelists like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, et al, masterfully camouflaging their beliefs with science, intermixing the two.
Lewis would also discuss these issues in his classic, The Abolition of Man, and even in the Narnian tale, The Magician’s Nephew. As postmodernism, secularism, transhumanism and other isms return – and the history of their past failures and terrors forgotten – Lewis’ works on the nature of man, science, scientism and society are more important than ever for those not content to be told by the oligarchies what to believe and how to live.
Lewis was a “prophetic critic” in his time, and apparently for our own.
Darrick Dean 