C.S. Lewis, Prophet of Postmodernism

How two of his books from the mid-1940s diagnosed the inevitable pathway of nihilism, "wokery," and the abject decay of today's universities.

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

—C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

I have long argued that the third novel of C.S. Lewis’s “space trilogy,” That Hideous Strength, is actually the most profound of the anti-utopian novels of the mid-20th century. But it usually takes a back seat to the better known 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and others (throw in Dostoyevsky for good measure). In part this is because it was the third book of the sequence that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, with their visits to Mars and Venus by the hero, Elwin Ransom. Many readers might not have made it to, or through, the concluding novel, which was three times longer than the first two, and entirely terrestrial, seeming not to fit neatly with the first two. Then, too, there are some minor literary defects, and the reluctance of the secular book work to embrace a book with so much latent Christianity crossed with Arthurian legend.

Among other delights of the book is Lewis’s pitch-perfect portrait of the modern college administrator. He draws a bead on John Wither, the deputy director of NICE, which stands for the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments.” NICE is housed on a college campus, naturally.

I particularly enjoy this passage describing Wither:

“What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. . . Or it may, after all, be that souls who have lost the intellectual good do indeed receive in return, and for a short period, the vain privilege of thus reproducing themselves in many places as wraiths.

Or today reproducing themselves as deans of diversity. Who do indeed seem very wraithlike.

Beyond this dead on character sketch is the deeper teaching of the novel. It is remarkable and ultimately enduring for its anticipation of the (at that time) incipient doctrines of what we now call “postmodernism.”

Lewis makes clear throughout his writing that it is not science or technology or even bureaucracy itself that are responsible for a loss of freedom, but rather our moral condition, born of metaphysical confusion. As he mentions in a preface to the novel, he explains its main theme in his shorter book The Abolition of Man. This metaphysical confusion, he realized far ahead of the fact, would infect what we today call our “mediating” institutions—especially schools and churches and “cultural” organs—and in turn transmit its poison chiefly through education, both formal education and the “popular” education of the broader populace that comes from the constant hum of mass media, art, and entertainment. The result is the kind of education and character formation that Lewis describes for the protagonist of the story, Mark Studdock:

“It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him.”

Indeed even before the reader reaches the scene with the “Objective Room” late in the novel—a scene which resembles nothing so much as one of today’s “sensitivity training sessions” that so many students and even professional people are required to endure these days—the contemporary reader begins to recognize all the signs of a woke education.

I have always thought remarkable the way in which Lewis, writing The Abolition of Manat a time when our inherited moral order was still reasonably robust, was able to see so clearly how the premises of moral relativism would unfold. It is even more remarkable, at 50 years remove, how Lewis could see that moral relativism was itself, to borrow the up-to-date language of the environmentalists, “unsustainable.” The relativists, as Lewis noted in several passages about the self-refuting character of modern thought, would end up sawing off the branch they were sitting on by radicalizing relativism.It would decay into nihilism on account of what Lewis inThe Abolition of Man recognized as “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination.”

I dislike the term “post-modernism” myself, but use it because it is the most accessible term in the glossallalia of the modern academy to describe the rejection of the very idea of reason and objectivity. Lewis provisionally called it “Bulverism,” after his imaginary character Ezekiel Bulver, who witnessed what is now commonplace in our higher discourse: the dismissal of an opinion because of the sex, or class, or race of the person expressing the opinion. “Oh you say that because you are a man,” Lewis’s fictional Bulver overhears.

“At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or right, or (worse still) try to find out whether he is right or wrong, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.”

Lewis notes that “the fruits of his [Bulver’s] discovery [are] almost everywhere,” and especially “at work in every political argument.” And until this degradation is crushed, Lewis recognized, “reason can play no effective part in human affairs.” This trend really can be said to represent, to paraphrase the narrative of The Magician’s Nephew, the successful attempt to make ourselves stupider than we already are.

But if those who toil among the intellectual vineyards tend to despair about turning around the intellectual climate of our time, perhaps Lewis provides the proper perspective. As he notes in both That Hideous Strength and in an essay called “Private Bates” (unavailable online apparently), most ordinary folk don’t read the leading articles and intellectual journals; they read the sports pages, which are mostly true. While clear thinking about the metaphysical basis of our freedom is vitally important to civilization, freedom’s best safeguard is to be found in the common sense of people, and upon common sense sound metaphysical foundations can be rebuilt. That is why perhaps the most instructive bit of narrative in That Hideous Strength comes near the end, while Mark Studdock is virtually incarcerated and undergoing extreme pressures and evil temptations. In the midst of this, Lewis narrates, “Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing.” It is counsel reminiscent of H.L. Mencken’s remark that “a horselaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms,” and is sound advice for consumers of the network news or the New York Times editorial page.