C.S. Lewis: Scientism And The Abolition Of Man

Source: Fort Russ

By Guest Author | August 23, 2020

M.D. Aeschliman

Editor's note: Published on August 16, 1945, C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is a dystopian novel that eerily reflects the realities of 2020. This week and next, to mark the book's three-quarter century anniversary, Evolution News presents a series of essays, reflections, and videos about its themes and legacy.

M.D. Aeschliman's The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism has recently been republished in an updated new edition by Discovery Institute Press and in French translation by Pierre Téqui in France.

Seventy-five years ago today, in that momentous year 1945, C. S. Lewis published the third and final volume in his series of three space-fiction, mythopoeic, dystopian novels, That Hideous Strength. The novels are hard to categorize and have never reached the levels of popularity of his Narnia chronicles and satirical and apologetic works, but their over-arching philosophical project entails a profound meditation on the character of Western and world history over the previous 150 years but especially during the catastrophic, apocalyptic period 1914-1945. The novel deserves comparison with the more famous dystopias such as the Russian Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949), and also the English Catholic-convert Msgr. R.H. Benson's apocalyptic fantasy Lord of the World (1907); but it even merits comparisons with first-order philosophical-historical writing in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1839) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1974) and with the history and philosophy of science as conveyed by Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, and the great Hungarian refugee scholars Michael Polanyi and Stanley L. Jaki. The very width of its inter-disciplinary scope and depth of its philosophical-ethical penetration make it a hard book to categorize but are also characteristics of its importance and power as a work of metaphysical fiction.

Himself a wounded veteran of World War I, Lewis delivered in 1943, in the middle of a second, even vaster and more destructive world war, a series of invited university lectures in the north of England that were published by Oxford University Press later that year as The Abolition of Man, a dystopian title with an innocuous-sounding, specialist subtitle, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. High claims continue to be made for this short, dense, lucid expository essay; the outstanding Oxford literary scholar A. D. Nuttall (1937-2007), author of one of the finest books of the last fifty years on Shakespeare, wrote of it: "The argument as it unfolds is dazzling. It is in a way odd that a work which so thoroughly routs whole volumes of Nietzsche and Sartre is not more widely admired, especially as the style in which it is presented is brilliantly lucid." In Lewis's own Preface to That Hideous Strength, he tells us that the novel is "a 'tall story' about devilry, though it has behind it a serious 'point' which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” It is also a uniquely revealing "ghost story" and can be profitably read alongside the science journalist Deborah Blum's excellent Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (2006).

A Philosophical Anatomy

The novel is a narrative, fictional version of a philosophical anatomy of the satanic dimension and implication of much modern history from 1914 onwards, which Lewis himself had lived through, viscerally as a soldier, intellectually as a scholar, and vicariously as a spectator of world events and as a novelist. But unlike Brave New World, 1984, We, or Lord of the World, it also contains a benign vision of human possibility and glimpses of beatitude. It reminds one of the clairvoyant, apocalyptic psychological and metaphysical insights of Dostoevsky but also contains visions of cosmic, human, and even animal and vegetable harmony that are reminiscent of St. Francis of Assisi, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare's late romances, Blake, Tolstoy, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" and the pious, imaginative ecology of Wendell Berry are more recent examples.

But "if a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." For Lewis, the great modern apostasy that had led to the 20th-century Armageddons had taken place in the late 19th century with the marriage of Darwinian and Nietzschean thinking that simultaneously produced a calamitous decline in religious-humanist belief in Natural-Law theism and an enormous increase in post-moral cynicism and ruthlessness in the writings of Nietzsche and the emergent ideology of Social Darwinism, whether in its nationalist-fascist-militarist form, a so-called "scientific-socialist" Communist form, or in the less fully organized competitive-capitalist form. In 1992 the literary critic John Carey published The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, in which he argued that during this whole period in the British Isles only two major writers withstood the glamorous, radically "enlightened" appeal of Nietzsche: G. K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett. Lewis may well be seen as a disciple of Chesterton, and like him he felt the seismic shift of consciousness away from the often-contested but durable Judaeo-Christian Natural-Law tradition of figures such as Samuel Johnson, Burke, Jane Austen, Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Lord Acton, and William Jennings Bryan.

The Darwinian-Nietzschean Heresy

A.D. Nuttall astonishingly argues that Lewis's short philosophical treatise The Abolition of Man "routs whole volumes of Nietzsche and Sartre," but that its very lucidity has put modern intellectuals off and led to its undervaluation. That Hideous Strength attempts to give a vivid narrative picture of how the gigantically potent Darwinian-Nietzschean heresy actually works out in practice, something that Lewis felt was truly evident during the decades of his life up to 1945. In an anti-reductionist 1972 essay on Blake, the combative Cambridge moralist and literary critic F. R. Leavis pointed out that "Though we have to recognize that Darwin's life testifies to the existence of intelligence and purpose, his theory of evolution offered to dispense with the need for these words" (emphasis added).

Lewis's novel conveys the idea that the human person is inevitably, almost gravitationally, drawn to some conception of ultimate worth and significance. "The difficulty that ensues," G. K. Chesterton epigrammatically put it, "when people cease to believe in God is not that they believe in nothing, but that they believe in anything." The clairvoyant Dostoevsky saw that the destruction of the orthodox belief in the God-man Jesus Christ led to new divination and deification, the pursuit and celebration of the man-god, "homo deus," foreshadowed by the Marquis de Sade and Max Stirner and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and fully articulate in Nietzsche's conception of the post-moral "Superman." It could take nationalist, racialist, imperialist, utilitarian, or Promethean-proletarian forms, or eventuate in a simple but thoroughgoing hedonistic egotism as in the Marquis de Sade and Stirner; but some assumption or assertion of ultimate worth or value, for individuals or groups — nations, races, classes — is inevitable. Language and conceptualization themselves assume or entail it.

Please go to Fort Russ to read the entire essay.
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