The book for this hour

Sixty-one years ago today, after a quiet day of correspondence, crossword puzzles, and tea, C.S. Lewis entered his heavenly reward. While many famous persons are celebrated on their birthday, Lewis is often remembered on his death day, Nov. 22, a day made infamous because he shares it with Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy.

While Lewis is, of course, remembered as a Christian apologist, a literary scholar, and the creator of Narnia, at present, he is frequently celebrated as a timely prophet of modernity, anticipating religious, social, and scientific developments that greet us every day on our social media feeds. Thus, on this anniversary, I want to commend his novel, That Hideous Strength, as the story for this moment.

Imagine a dystopian novel in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World, but one that is more prescient than both. It’s a modern fairy tale for grown-ups, one that weaves together the core arguments of many of Lewis’ most profound books and essays: The Abolition of Man, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” “The Inner Ring,” “Membership,” and “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”—all of which could be read as an appetizer for the main course.

The novel’s relevance is nowhere more apparent than when it speaks to issues of sexuality. On the one hand, we see the dehumanizing grossness of gender ideology and insanity. From the Italian Filostrato—who finds sexuality disgusting and desires to geld and castrate humanity to make it more manageable—to Fairy Hardcastle, the sadistic and grotesque head of Belbury’s institutional police, insolently sexed and wholly unattractive, surrounded by hyper-sexualized young women and arousing herself through torture. (Though if That Hideous Strength were written today, Fairy Hardcastle would no doubt be a man in drag insisting on being treated as a woman.) The novel even alludes to a cold and barren society that uses realistic sex robots as substitutes for the actual marital act, using devilish arts (technology) to fabricate children in secret places.

The male protagonist of the novel is consumed with the lust for the Inner Ring and a deep fear of being ostracized by the Progressive Element so that he becomes an emasculated and pathetic stooge in Belbury’s plots, manipulated and steered until he finds himself caught in the web of the materialist magicians in charge of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). The female protagonist considers herself to be an up-to-date and modern feminist, one who refuses submission in marriage and deeply fears being invaded by children, until she comes face to face with true masculinity (both the earthly and the heavenly kind) and is forced to choose to bow up or yield.

Indeed, at one level, the novel is fundamentally about marriage and the centrality of childbearing, from the opening word (“matrimony”) to the final scene in which Ransom tells the female protagonist, “You’ll have no more dreams. Have children instead.”

But the mundane troubles of a young married couple are embedded in a cosmic war between the bureaucratic tyranny of the scientistic conditioners and the humane and Christian resistance at St. Anne’s. The N.I.C.E. is a prophetic depiction of the Total State, complete with bureaucratic ambiguity and doublespeak that renders all accountability impossible. No one is ever to blame for anything, and yet anyone can be scapegoated at any time. Belbury is committed to “the liquidation of anachronisms,” the destruction of traditional ways of life because of its lack of efficiency. Native populations (small business owners and agricultural laborers) must be displaced and assimilated into the new progressive society. If they show themselves recalcitrant, Belbury is prepared to employ anarcho-tyranny—importing criminals as workmen to spark conflict with the locals as a play for emergency police powers, as well as prosecuting old petty crimes to the maximum degree.

All of this is managed through propaganda directed at the educated middle class. As one character puts it, “[I]t’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? … The educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. … They’ll believe anything.” This includes the so-called “humanitarian theory of punishment” that substitutes “rehabilitation” and “reeducation” for just retribution, thereby enabling the state to experiment on criminals with impunity. (The novel even takes a shot at the folly and stupidity of the so-called “social sciences.” Consider: “‘I can quite understand that it doesn’t fit in with your work as it does with sciences like Sociology, but—’ ‘There are no sciences like Sociology.’”)

But lurking behind the Progressive Element and the social scientific conditioners at Belbury and the religiously infused technocratic tyrants of the Inner Circle are the Macrobes, dark and demonic forces seeking the domination and destruction of humanity. Opposed to them is a motley assortment of Christians (and one reality-respecting atheist), led by a crippled academic who has traveled to Mars and Venus and conversed with the angelic Intelligences in Deep Heaven, and assisted by a reawakened Merlin in hopes of resisting That Hideous Strength.

In short, the novel is timely for a world in which everything is narrowing and coming to a point—good getting better and bad getting worse, and the possibilities of even apparent neutrality always diminishing: “The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. … ‘Life’s business being just the terrible choice.’”

And so, this holiday season, the choice is before you. So take up and read.