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The N. I. C. E. Dystopia: C. S. Lewis on Escaping Our Humanity
Christmas 1944 dawned well below freezing around Bastogne, Belgium, during one of the coldest winters on record for northwest Europe. Neither the cold nor the harassing German artillery was the worst part, though. Many in the 101st Airborne Division, along with their U.S. Army compatriots and allies from Great Britain and Canada, expected to be home by now, or at least across the Rhine in Germany.
Instead, they suffered and died under siege in Belgium. During the surprise German attack dubbed the Battle of the Bulge, more Americans were killed, wounded, and captured than in any other single battle of the Second World War. Though many knew they couldn’t win the war, Hitler’s forces proved they could still drench the Allied victory in buckets of blood.
Winston Churchill saw the battle as a blessing, despite the bloodshed. Better to fight the Germans on attack in relatively open country instead of inside pillboxes on defense. Better to bleed the Germans dry, the quicker the better, because at least the Allies could replace their dead on the front lines. “Harsh as it may seem to say, a terrible thing to say in dealing with our own precious flesh and blood,” Churchill qualified in a January 1945 update for Parliament, the war would only end when Germany turned white first. Viewed this way, Churchill celebrated what he considered the greatest American battle of the war, a victory that would be remembered for ages. Thousands of Americans still make pilgrimage to the foxholes outside Bastogne today.
Five months later, Germany surrendered. Writing two days after Victory in Europe, C. S. Lewis didn’t effuse over the end of this front in the bloodiest war of world history, from which Great Britain emerged triumphant. His homeland had been saved from seemingly certain defeat less than five years earlier and spared from utter destruction, unlike so much of exhausted Europe.
“I found it impossible to feel either so much sympathy with the people or so much gratitude to God as the occasion demanded,” Lewis wrote his former student and Catholic priest Bede Griffiths. “I am sometimes a little awed by the burden of our favours. Every one of us has escaped by a series of Providences, some not far short of miracles: and it seems to me that the sort of life which [would] be saintly for men less favoured becomes mere minimum decency for us. And how to live up to that standard!”
When a generation has dodged artillery shells in Bastogne to save Western civilization, how do you move on with your life? How can you ever live up to your earlier exploits? What’s left when you’ve conquered the evil empire?
Sinister Feel
The literary record of 1945, however, doesn’t reflect the ecstasy of victory. The most prescient writers of this era sensed that while the battle of blood had been won, the battle of ideas still raged. C. S. Lewis and George Orwell, in different ways, diagnosed the same disease.
Published in August 1945, the same month Japan surrendered, George Orwell’s Animal Farm looked east to the Soviet Union, triumphant from Berlin to Vladivostok to the Oxford lounges where academics chattered, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” In this era when readers turned to dystopian novels to explain the dystopian news, Orwell followed in 1949 with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a world where up is down and left is right and clocks strike 13. In Oceania, some thoughts have been banned. Assent to others has been demanded: Ignorance is strength, war is peace, and freedom is slavery.
Lewis published his own dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength, in August, the same month as Animal Farm. That Hideous Strength puts a narrative behind the ideas Lewis shared in 1943 with The Abolition of Man and in 1944 with “The Inner Ring.” While third in his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength takes on a more concrete, realistic, and thus sinister feel than the earlier two books.
Set sometime after the war, That Hideous Strength indicates that while Western civilization had been saved, Lewis didn’t consider settled the debates that contributed to 85 million dead. As if the war generation needed prompting, the novel imagines how ideas behind eugenics could jump from the page and become a life-and-death struggle of historical and even cosmic proportions. Lewis envisions a world much like his own where scientists conjure magic in their plans for sterilization, breeding, and even mass murder of groups seen as backward or unpreferred.
Compared to Mere Christianity, the defining apologetic text of the 20th century, That Hideous Strength might be more relevant in the 21st century. The antagonists (N.I.C.E., whom we’ll meet below) promise an escape from biology. More than wealth, or fame, or purpose, or identity, the modern West pursues escape—from obligations, from commitments, from confinement, from limits. Aided by digital technologies, we’ve come closer than ever before to escaping the need for God, the need for each other, even the need for our own bodies.
Only Modern
That Hideous Strength opens with a mundane faculty debate at Bracton College in the fictional University of Edgestow. According to Lewis, the setting merely reflects the profession and setting he knew best. Mark Studdock is a sociology fellow without the bearing of the aristocracy or the wisdom of the peasantry, with an education neither scientific nor classical, Lewis tells us, only modern. He sides with the faculty’s Progressive Element in voting to sell college property. But Mark, who likes to be liked, is less concerned with the merits of the property sale and more concerned with finding his way into the college’s “Inner Ring,” where a favored few plan the future for all.
Compared to Mere Christianity, the defining apologetic text of the 20th century, That Hideous Strength might be more relevant in the 21st century.
At the center of this group is businessman Lord Feverstone, the former Richard Devine, antagonist from the earlier two Space Trilogy novels. Recruiting Mark, he shares the vision behind the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), coming to Edgestow thanks to the property sale by Bracton. Their goal, Feverstone explains, is “to take control of [their] own destiny” in a war against reaction: “If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal” (39).
The stakes couldn’t be higher: “It is nothing less than the existence of the human race that depends on our work,” says Filostrato, a scientist working with Feverstone and N.I.C.E, symbolized by a type of Michelangelo’s David wielding a thunderbolt (58). The progressive unveiling of N.I.C.E. anticipates Lumon of the Apple TV+ series Severance. Mark (same name as the chief character in Severance) must choose sides. “Man has got to take charge of Man,” Feverstone explains. “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” (40).
It’s not a hard decision for ambitious Mark. He just wishes he knew his job description, or his boss, or other details of his new employment.
It’s too late by the time Mark finally learns the true nature of N.I.C.E., which is as altruistic as the Ministry of Truth is honest in Orwell’s Oceania. By embedding the story in academia, Lewis highlighted how it’s not just ordinary people on the right wing who fall for government lies, as they did in Nazi Germany. The West’s left-leaning intellectuals suffer the same problem. Orwell, a veteran of the BBC’s propaganda machine during the war, emphasized the same point in his works. Defeating Nazi Germany didn’t end disinformation. If anything, it made Western sympathizers more likely to believe the lies coming from the Soviet Union.
Compared to Orwell, however, Lewis took a more expansive view of the problem in Western civilization. Perhaps the most chilling words of the novel come from Reverend Straik, whose enemy is life after death:
With every thought and vibration of my heart, with every drop of my blood, I repudiate that damnable doctrine. That is precisely the subterfuge by which the World, the organization and the 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. (76–77)
Listening to Straik, Mark is terribly embarrassed by any Jesus talk. He didn’t sign up for religion. He hated church as a child. Lewis writes that Mark would much rather have talked about perversion, even abortion, to a crowd of young women. But Straik presses on, undaunted, with his attack on Theology, a “game for rich men,” unlike his views on science, an “irresistible instrument” based on observation. To science, Straik assigns the powers of God as an “instrument of judgment as well as of healing.” He explains,
That is what I couldn’t get any of the Churches to see. They are blinded. Blinded by their filthy rags of humanism, their culture and humanitarianism and liberalism, as well as by their sins, or what they think their sins, though they are really the least sinful thing about them. That is why I have come to stand alone: a poor, weak, unworthy man, but the only prophet left.
Leaning over his daughter’s coffin, Straik works out his prophetic message in grief:
I knew that He was coming in power. And therefore, where we see power, we see the sign of His coming. And that is why I find myself joining with communists and materialists and anyone else who is really ready to expedite the coming. The feeblest of these people here has the tragic sense of life, the ruthlessness, the total commitment, the readiness to sacrifice all merely human values, which I could not find amid all the nauseating cant of the organised religions. (78)
Lewis expects his readers to know more than Mark does about the progressive theology that prevailed in Germany and the church leaders who became early adopters of the Nazi program. With stark framing for the vision of N.I.C.E., Straik could have recruited for the Hitler Youth in the Third Reich’s gory, futile, final days:
No one goes out of the N.I.C.E. Those who try to turn back will perish in the wilderness. But the question is, whether you are content to be one of the instruments which is throw aside when it has served His turn—one which having executed judgment on others, is reserved for judgment itself—or will you be among those who enter on the inheritance? For it’s all true, you know. It is the Saints who are going to inherit the Earth—here in England, perhaps within the next twelve months—the Saints and no one else. Know you not that we shall judge angels?
Next, the prophet lowers his voice. “The real resurrection is even now taking place. The real life everlasting. Here in this world. You will see it” (78).
It’s religion he’s promoting, all right—a religion, Lewis warns, without an afterlife. And a religion without an afterlife makes this world the alpha and omega. When everything’s riding on our “threescore years and ten” (Ps. 90:10, KJV), when no judgment looms behind the veil, leaders won’t hesitate to sacrifice our lives for theirs. Hitler didn’t order the Ardennes attack because he thought he could win. He ordered the attack to punish the men who failed to deliver his vision of a thousand-year Reich in this world. If he would perish, they would perish too, proving their fealty to a false prophet.
A religion without an afterlife makes this world the alpha and omega.
These “filthy rags of humanism,” Christianity’s contributions to Western civilization of cultural and humanitarianism and liberalism—this is what Lewis wrote to protect, and advance, after the Second World War ended, and before a Third could begin. Straik pretends to champion the little people. But like the revolutionaries in Berlin and Moscow and would-be autocrats of Oxford, he must first trample those little people if they don’t join the revolution by coming under his power.
More Real than Reality
By using the dystopian novel, Lewis and Orwell illustrated the real-life consequences of these ideologies. In That Hideous Strength, Mark toggles back and forth between the revolutionary ideas of Feverstone and Straik and the sights and smells of the English countryside he’s conspiring to destroy behind his press release propaganda. He’s not working from the objective observations of science. He’s pushing revolutionary ideology.
Mark’s “education had had the curious effect of making things he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw,” Lewis writes. “Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow” (85). Mark’s sociological Platonism justifies deadly measures if any “backward labourer” or “wastefully supported pauper” gets in the way of N.I.C.E. plans for their village.
Mark’s welfare-state sociology also reflects a story related by Father Zosima, the elder in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A doctor once told him,
“I love humanity,” he said, “but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,” he said, “I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.”
Even the saints among us can relate to this tendency, or at least the momentary feeling of frustration. For Lewis, as with Dostoevsky, the problem took on civilizational proportions. Any society that ends with this life will think nothing of ending your life.
At the heart of Dostoevsky’s novel is the assumption that if God doesn’t exist, if there’s no eternity or final judgment, then everything is permitted. In the Karamazov brother Ivan, Dostoevsky captures his critique of academics who spout such high-minded theories but don’t expect anyone to act on them. The novel unfolds the mystery behind which character acted on Ivan’s theory and killed the Karamazov father.
Lewis takes a similar approach to the fictional academics at Edgestow. Mark can write N.I.C.E. press releases, but he can’t seem to perceive reality. He’s slow to discern the real power that controls both sides of political debates. He’s not cynical enough to see that neither side needs to advocate for good if they can just make the other side look bad. Mark is an organization man. He trusts the system. He just wants to advance himself and his career. The aptly named Miss Hardcastle puts him in his place when Mark claims educated readers will never fall for these political tricks:
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. . . . 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. (97)
Through Mark, we see how evil advances, just as Hannah Arendt captured in Eichmann in Jerusalem, published the year Lewis died. Both portray ordinary bureaucrats as carriers of destruction. Mark’s evil is banal. He’s the academic in the gray flannel suit. He doesn’t necessarily support everything N.I.C.E. does. He just can’t imagine going back to his boring academic life. N.I.C.E. is like the Nazi Party for low-level bureaucrats: exciting, new, dramatic, profitable, and maybe even dangerous. He thinks the N.I.C.E. colleagues are his friends. “Incurable romantic!” says Feverstone, a true believer in the cause. If Mark won’t do the dirty work, he knows someone else will.
Love Lost
Lewis’s Christianity shapes his framing of the central conflict of That Hideous Strength, a debate that rages even more intensely with technology that has brought his dystopian vision to reality.
Lewis wants us to see that the vain effort to defeat death will instead lose love. Writing at the end of the Second World War, he wasn’t confident the Allies had learned this lesson. The United States and Soviet Union conquered the world together by the might of their scientific achievements. The United States and United Kingdom claimed freedom and progress as their moral fiber. But you can win the war and forget while you fought the battles. Lewis worried the West had forgotten that love thrives within limits, that the certainty of death protects the quality of life.
Lewis wants us to see that the vain effort to defeat death will instead lose love.
In a half century filled with more human-caused death than any other time in history, the promise of overcoming biology felt especially appealing in 1945. Filostrato explains this battle of nature vs. N.I.C.E.:
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. (174)
Straik likens this process to how humans created God. Jesus’s resurrection was a symbol, a foreshadowing of what science would deliver. Lewis then introduces us to the Head, probably the most grotesque of his fantasy creations, not appropriate for the readers of Narnia. The Head belonged to François Alcasan, a French scientist executed by guillotine after killing his wife. Now the scientists have resurrected or at least reanimated this Head to demonstrate the power and possibility of their plans to transform humanity into “all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy” (256).
Mark, ever ignorant, spews grievances when he sees the Head. But he takes no responsibility for his role in aiding the cause of N.I.C.E. and the Head. And he can’t turn away from its “exciting horror.” Speaking as the Director, the character also known as Ransom, Lewis leaves humanity with no excuse and no escape from the consequences of trading ethics for experiments. “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?” (200).
Lewis has written an elaborate and disturbing novel that underscores his view that the Second World War didn’t settle the most important problems in Western civilization. In some ways, the victory may have even deluded the Allies into mistaken assumptions. Can freedom and science overcome our limits, even death? Can a civilization built around Christianity retain its core values without actual Christian belief? And if Christianity gets in the way of freedom and science, should Christianity still be practiced or even tolerated at all?
Conscience is what Lewis hoped to revive with his novel. Liberation was the goal of the Second World War and has ever since been the cry of Western civilization straining against its historical and spiritual constraints. Liberated by whom, and for what, Lewis asks us as readers in the 21st century. And what’s the cost of this ransom?
If God is dead and everything is permitted, it’s kill or be killed. When there is no God, men vie for his throne. They won’t think twice about sending each other to death to forestall—even for a moment—their own end.
Deep in our Western subconscious, Lewis believed, was the memory of something more, of something big enough even to redeem everything suffered in that terrible half century.
Mark is Lewis’s hope for humanity, that we would wake up and realize we can’t really live, and don’t really want, a “scientific” outlook. “He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself—nothing else in the whole universe—that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places” (244).
Deep in our Western subconscious, Lewis believed, was the memory of something more, of something big enough even to redeem everything suffered in that terrible half century. And unless this conscience could be revived, the aftermath of victory could demand even greater sacrifices from humanity longing for relief from death.
The naughty of N.I.C.E. are a warning from Lewis. Only God gives his life for man. Only God can raise from the dead. It’s Cavalry or Calvary: choose your own death. Lewis makes it clear which path leads to life.
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