In Conspiracy Theory, Jerry Fletcher, played by Mel Gibson, is compelled to read The Catcher in the Rye. He doesn’t know exactly why. (It’s a good movie, by the way.)
I can relate, a little. From time to time I have to re-read That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis. Mostly, I think, because I happen to be looking around for a book to read, and there it is. My copy is old, yellowed and somewhat battered. If I get the urge again, I think I’ll have to get a new copy.
This time I jotted down a few notes, as they occurred to me. Things I find interesting, compelling, or worth mention.
- There’s a lot to learn in the resentments we feel towards others — especially spouses. At first I labeled this as “feminism causes resentment,” which I think is partly true, but Lewis is an equal opportunity critic here, and he criticizes Mark and Jane for their resentments.
- Ambiguity is a tool of oppression.
- The so-called educated people are the ones who are most deceived by propaganda.
- There are interesting social dynamics and inner motivations to consider in being in or out of the select group. E.g., trying to be in the “in” crowd can be a big temptation for some.
- Importing non-native workmen — especially those of a particular disposition — is a fairly reliable way to cause trouble in a town.
- Crises are sometimes manufactured to justify emergency actions and regulations.
- Obedience is related to love.
- It can be insufferable when a person thinks of himself as educated.
- It’s important to have a skeptic around.
- Modern education does not induce or teach nobility, and modern man lacks noble thoughts.
THS is decently good at diagnosing many of the ills in modern society, but it doesn’t offer much guidance or hope in fighting against it — except to pray and hope for a miracle. So in that respect it’s somewhat disappointing.
Does that mean I’m channeling McPhee?
I never read it and I probably never will, but I read the following in Wikipedia (which is of course by no means definitive): “Somewhat like the early Gnostics, the main antagonists of That Hideous Strength despise the human body and all organic life as frail, corrupted, and unworthy of pure mind.” I don’t see much of that so-called gnosticism in our time, though it might be around somewhere outside of the mainstream. I see a whole lot more of “Let’s totally get into the body!” There might be a lot of transforming of the body to suit the individual’s wants and desires, but this is not at all the same as trying to achieve a state of “pure mind.”
It is true that the antagonists in THS are anti-body. Even anti-biology. They want a “purified” world, with no organic matter at all. And it’s certainly true that there aren’t a lot of people around today who are like that.
Lewis might argue that they are on their way to an anti-biology attitude, and there is a progression like that in some of the bad guys over the course of the trilogy. They start off being (so they think) for the human race, then for whatever intelligence humans might evolve into, then for intelligence itself, divorced from the body.
And while the modern world is definitely more hedonistic and “body positive” from one perspective, it is very anti-body in others. There’s a growing group of people who see biology as a barrier (“biology isn’t destiny”), and biological realities like male and female as things that we can get past based on choice. IOW, will and intelligence and desire are set against biology. Biology is an annoying barrier to be manipulated to conform to desire.
That’s several steps removed from the final “cleanse the planet of living things” craziness in THS, but the bad guys didn’t start there.
It sounds very far-fetched to me that things could get to the point of an opposition to biological reality. Of course we can get beyond certain biological givens such as various diseases and deformities. If the child is born cross-eyed, that can be corrected with surgery. If the body gets infected by bacterial pathogens, anti-bodies can help our immune systems. If we have lost a lot of blood, we can get a transfusion. Now Jehovah’s Wittnesses might argue that such a procedure is going too far in the direction of “pure mind,” but most of us, including myself, would maintain there is nothing wrong with transfusions, corrective operations, anti-biotics, and the like. To maintain that if we keep going in that direction we will be against bodies as such seems utterly ridiculous to me. There is an infinite chasm between getting the body we want and making do without any body at all.
Of course male-female is the hot button issue for the day, but it seems to me that worst that could result of it is that some people, though certainly not very many, will screw up their bodies (perhaps even their children’s bodies in some cases) beyond repair. But that is hardly a basis for dystopian scenario.
It sounds to me that Lewis was something of a drama queen, but I guess there is nothing wrong with playing with certain ideas in fiction just to see where they would go.
A long time ago I read dystopian literature. My favorite was “Brave New World,” because keeping people addicted to drugs and sex seemed to be a very effective way of manipulating them. After all, if you want people to submit to control voluntarily, you’ve got to give them something in return, something that produces immediate gratification.