I read 1984 as a summer reading assignment in High School. I read Brave New World sometime around 2017. Both had a profound, if somewhat unexceptional, impact on my understanding of the totalitarian mind. Both end in the bleak annihilation of the books protagonist and the inevitable triumph of the omnipotent government.

As I watched the horror of Covid policy unfold in early 2020 comparisons with the regimes in both novels were abundant both in my own mind and on social media. The Covid regime was a weird mixture of the two governments from the novels, as utterly repressive in its scope and aim as ‘The Party’ but couched in language and policies analogous to the ostensible good intentions and paternalism of the ‘World Controllers.’ Yet neither novel resonated perfectly with the events unfolding around me at the time. It wasn’t until I saw a tweet that said;

“What’s going on right now isn’t 1984 or A Brave New World, it’s That Hideous Strength”

that I was aware of the existence of CS Lewis’ 1945 novel despite reading the Narnia series as a child and several of his non-fiction works as an adult. Intrigued, I started in reading The Space Triology almost immediately. Ironically, That Hideous Strength takes place entirely on earth with only one character from the previous two installments tying the series together. The first two novels are well worth reading in my opinion but deal mostly with theological questions rather than political ones. From Out of the Silent Planet one only needs to know that the protagonist, Ransom, was taken to Mars against his will and ends up helping the Martians stop his captors attempts at subjugating the population and looting their resources. In the second novel, Perelandra, Ransom was this time transported to Venus by a divine entity on a mission to thwart the introduction of evil to planet that exists in a state of innocence. Without giving away too much of the plot, he succeeds and has divine truths revealed to him and is promised an immortal place on this planet that will now persist in state of grace after he finishes his work on earth.

That summation is really all that is necessary to contextualize That Hideous Strength and with this understanding it can be read as a stand alone novel.

That Hideous Strength is the account of the rise of N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments), a cabal of scientists, academics, politicians and thugs who’s purported purpose is the elevation of mankind through scientific advancement and social engineering but who’s actual aims are unsurprisingly much darker. We come to meet the players and understand their motivations through our first protagonist, Mark, a sociologist recruited into the organization out of academia. We meet Ransom and company through the our second protagonist, Mark’s wife Jane, who is alternately recruited into a disparate little group of individuals divinely tasked to obstruct N.I.C.E.

I think it suffices to say that Lewis’ work is more than a little prescient on philosophical and political issues we discuss on a daily basis.  Scientism, materialism, journalistic propaganda, orchestrated riots and power as a political end in and of itself  are all worked into the plot of the story. There is also a reanimated severed head, an obese grizzly bear, and and appearance by the Arthurian Merlin to boot. Rather than go further into the plot I’m providing some relevant teaser quotes:

“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. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. 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.”

“Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.”

“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. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.”

“The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already… begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”

“Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who become Fellows of colleges.”

“In fighting those who serve devils one always his this on one’s side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.”

In the foreword of the book, CS Lewis explains that the point of the book is the same as that of his seminal non-fiction work, The Abolition of Man. I read this shortly after finishing The Space Trilogy. In my mind this should be foundational reading for any libertarian. Again, rather than give the grade-school book report I’ll let the selected quotes summarize the work:

“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.”

“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

“An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. A great many of those who “debunk” traditional or (as they would say) “sentimental” values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.”

“The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany: ‘Traditional values are to be debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.”

“When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains. (…) The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. (…) My point is that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse. (…) I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”

“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.”

“But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique; we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. […] It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”

There you have it. I don’t have any further appeals beyond that I found it very rewarding reading that was ultimately encouraging. That Hideous Strength ends on a triumphal rather than despondent note which, incidentally, was why Orwell ultimately disliked it. I leave it to you, dear Glibs, to draw the parallels with our present time.