I'm in my final year of a PhD program in a hard science at a major research university. I read That Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, and LotR years ago.
During my time in grad school, I have had a hard-to-describe underlying fear grow in me, that I work for N.I.C.E. My highly-educated (and soon to be highly-powerful) peers regularly show intense contempt for the "English Farmer" types in our society. In its official messaging and internal communication, the university regularly shows disrespect for the material world or anything that may give it objective meaning. The scientific establishment I interact with deals with matters of intense direct physical importance to billions of people, but at the ground level the task is treated like a mere game for winning credentials and maybe a bit of power. At the top level it is just a flippant exercise in doing what you will, consequences (for other people) be damned.
Like that passage in The Green Book, which Lewis saw as a subtle refutation of basic reality which would later gain immense destructive power, I often see subtle things that scare me. This wasn't apparent when I started, but it's been a slow drip wearing me down for a while, and now I see demonic fingerprints on too much of my daily environment.
I was feeling kind of morose about all of this just this morning, and somehow when I saw the title of your article, I felt like it would be helpful, so I did the 7-day trial to read it. Thank you so much for this. I often think that total collapse is the only realistic endpoint of our cultural and societal quagmire. I am a young husband and father (unlike all my grad school peers), and my children's future can be concerning to me. Lewis and Tolkien really did act prophetically to help prepare people (and men in particular) to face coming waves of darkness with wisdom and courage, and I am thankful to God for that. Your article worked alongside their writings to shore up that Chest in me.
I hope you don't mind me printing this out to send to a friend working on a PhD in the liberal arts school here. Things over there are an order of magnitude worse than in my school.
Supporting a family on a grad school stipend is difficult, but once I'm out of this place I'll definitely be a paying subscriber.
Know (something very like) that feel. Congratulations to you for focusing on the important things first - I would say it does get easier once you decide to come over to the side of the angels, but it sounds like you've put in the hard yards already in that respect.
Austin McDonald, your cohort is vainglorious, smitten with their own story of superiority. The tricky bit is that it’s not just a story, in fact, they are demonstrably superior.
This is a problem: it seems arrogance is in place of proper gratitude.
But what of the people who supported the orange one? Men with chests will see their simpler truths. But you suggest we lacking men with chests, our best and brightest are somewhat less. What is the right word to describe this deficiency in our current crop of the best and brightest?
Wow. I feel as though I just read an analysis and synopsis of everything I've read and thought in the past several years. Thank you for doing such prodigious work. I am exhausted just reading it through, once, with many more to come. You must be spent. I am so grateful.
This piece by itself is worth the price of the subscription (I was already subscribed, hoping for the next magnum opus.) Masterful analysis, compelling writing...made me stop what I was doing in the middle of a workday to read it -- that is really, really hard to do.
Congratulations and many, many thanks for taking the time to think, analyze, and write so eloquently.
When I read your essay to a distressed reader, it sent me back to the works of Plato that I had put aside years ago. It also caused me to subscribe here in the expectation that something very special would emerge. It was a long wait, but worth it. This is what I was waiting for. You take the long view, one could even say you are "swinging for the fences" by tying together all the strands of our dilemma (language distortion, mechanization, lack of courage, nihilism, and the seeming objectivity of radical subjectivism). All this mythically enhanced by the works of Tolkien and Lewis. They would be proud.
I wish I could say whether this would be of value to anyone else, but I'm so horribly biased after stumbling into CS Lewis earlier this year and then reading 19 of his books before pouring over into about 1,000 pages, so far, of Tolkien's work all because I felt their prescient channeling, like a cosmic last-defense against the madness of the void that the post-modern coup is sucking us all into.
But for me, this was a delight!
Felt like I finally had a friend seeing what I was seeing with my last 10 months of reading (it's been a wild Inklings binge!)
Fix that. The two books Lyons cites most -- The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength -- are probably his most important. If you have children, read the Narnia books to them. They are veiled Christian apologetics, but even my daughter and son-in-law, who profess to be atheists, read them to my grandson as rolicking good adventure stories and for instruction in morals. (My daughter is a metaphysician who is working on non-theistic defense of essentially Berkeleyan idealism, and my son-in-law an ethicist and part of the effective altruism movement, so what they mean by the God they don't believe in something I don't believe in either, though I am a professing Orthodox Christian, cf. the remark of St. Gregory the Theologian, known in the West as St. Gregory of Nazianzus, "Inasmuch as God exists, we do not exist; and inasmuch as we exist, God does not exist.")
Superb work as always. I would love to see you do a deep dive on Perelandra as well. Ransom's realization that the Enemy cannot be fought with words alone is one of my favorite Lewis bits.
I do think that describing transgender dogma as an "onramp" to transhumanism is a bit of an undersell. I think it really is full-blown transhumanism, as sex is utterly critical to being human and transgenderism undermines that - a concept that babies understand when just a few months old. I would describe transgender adherents as a vanguard.
Argh, I actually planned to include that scene in this in the "Not Nice" section and then forgot. Ransom's realization of the need for physical courage to confront the enemy would have been perfect. (Also he throws the enemy into a pit of lava, which is a nice parallel!)
Yes, Ransom's realization when confronted by the Unman's unyielding mechanistic evil: "This can't go on ! " , and then physically acting to repel the satanic perversion of Perelandra. Your essay is one of the most remarkable and needful things I've read in a very long time. Well worth the wait!
Edit the current version to include that for future readers like me. I will be reading this again and sharing it. I read The Abolition of Man in 2015 but did not fully understand it until now. Thank you!
NS Lyons, and all: I am 28, without kids, an arts uni lecturer who will probably not last there very long.
I don't want to just read the horizon in fear. I want to do something about it. Something good and lasting like Frodo and Gandalf and Lewis and Tolkien did. I want my life to be added to that which tips the scales back the other way.
I am a Christian, I believe Jesus is Lord, but for reasons too hard to explain, I'm not sure that God will be so quick to disperse the builders of Babel this time.
What is the best thing a 28 year old with a heart and a bit of courage can do in the face of this?
I plan to write on the "what is to be done" part another time. But for now I think there are a few quick things that would be most helpful, other than your faith. (Though all easier said than done):
Form or join communities of likeminded people, who know what is happening and are able to support each other in times of need. No one is going to get through this alone. This could be an intentional community that is explicitly engaged in some form of resistance or preparation, but it could also just be for friendship and solidarity. As George mentioned, a strong family would be the ultimate example of such a community (but is insufficient alone). This is probably the most important thing, but of course may be the most difficult.
But there are some other things as well, like learning to focus your attention - to be able disengage from all the "skinner boxes" that condition us from every direction today, including digital addictions. I have a feeling people who can control their own addiction to these modern temptations are going to have a huge advantage and be an increasingly rare breed.
Read the humanities, and read deeply. I find it really helps, in part because it broadens one's understanding of human nature, and in part because I at least find it vaguely comforting to see how nothing too much changes in history. Plus it will help with the focus. I wrote a little bit on this a while ago: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/why-inquire
Overall, as Lewis put it: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” I think that solution probably still applies.
Like Ruma, I feel that “for reasons too hard to explain, I'm not sure that God will be so quick to disperse the builders of Babel this time”. I’m 66, a nurse who fought the Covid vaccine mandate and almost lost her job, alone in a Los Angeles sea of leftists and what Mary Harrington described as lawn-signers. I responded positively to Jack Leahy’s suggestion of a 12-step group for machine-addicts, mainly because I want and need to have a community of likeminded people. The problem is where to find them. Online is the easiest way, but it does not substitute for real human contact. I recently found a meeting of people who follow Fr. Thomas Keating’s contemplative outreach. It is only 2-3 people because too many people were treating these meetings as social clubs so the organizer amended the guidelines and attendance dropped. I like it because for 20 minutes, we sit together with our eyes closed centering our hearts on God and it is quite powerful. Unfortunately in the guidelines, there is now no room for some sharing. What I have in mind would be a combination of some form of centering prayer and the 12-step sharing. It could strengthen our spiritual faith as well as build community.
Tolkien and C. S Lewis are two very prescient men. From a literary criticism angle, I think Tolkien was a better writer so I had not read any of Lewis’s works until recently and only the Chronicles of Narnia at that, which alerted me to Lewis’s depth of thinking. Great literature is a balm to the soul, because of the immense humanity of these writers who have looked deeply into their souls and the world’s, and wrote out of the truth of their hearts and the strength of their faith. In the midst of despair, when I feel like Ruma does, it helps to hear such voices that reminds us of the age-old story of hubris, destruction, and the road to redemption.
Indeed. Vitamin D deficiency turned out to be a substantial risk-factor in responses to Sars-Cov-2. So while this is sound advice for aesthetic reasons, it's also Basic Health 101---a course which our university system does not teach. If you Google "Basic Health 101 university," what you get is links to Public Health programs, poised to train the next generation of Conditioners in technocratic management of their subjects' bodies and immune systems.
Needless to say, these Pfizer reps-in-lab-coats have proven to be worse-than-useless over the past few years. Their adoption of Chinese-style mass containment measures, their rushing of experimental mRNA technology, and their coordinated attempts to control media in order to suppress dissent have all failed spectacularly. Even if the next lab chimaera their virologist colleagues generate turns out to be truly horrific, I wouldn't trust them to handle it. I mean, these are people who still had NYC gyms shuttered in late 2020 while partnering with Dunkin' Doughnuts to promote their vaccination campaign. Fuck 'em.
So yeah, go outside. Do outside stuff. Exercise. Lift weights. Bench press to grow your Chest, as well as your chest. Executing a solid set engenders a neurochemical response in your brain akin to reading Marcus Aurelius. Do Yoga. The ancient yogis had some wacky ideas about chakras and whatnot, but they understood the muscular-skeletal system of the human body, via heightened proprioception, as only trained meditators can. Or just play pickleball. Whatever.
Whatever you do, do not trust these technocrats' promise of salvation. They cannot deliver it, and even if they could, it would be utterly corrupt and inhuman.
This may sound dumb, but I've come to think the purpose of life is grandkids. So maybe find a partner and start a family. (I'm near the end of my life, and do sometimes wish I'd started a family sooner... more grandkids. :^)
I wonder if God will disperse the builders of this Babel by simply eliminating sources of electricity (I.E. everything will require more electricity than can be produced). But it's pure speculation on my part.
well, our source of energy is definitely finite and its demise will come about. Nate Hagen talks about what he calls The Great Simplicity that happens when, not by choice but by necessity, we will have to simplify our lifestyle. Daniel Schmattenberger also has very good analyses of how human civilizations develop, how we dig ourselves into our current mess, and what he sees as some things that will need to change, or happen.
Ruma, I’ll echo everything N.S. Lyons said to you. I’m in a very similar spot to you, and trying to build community is tough. I’m in a small community with not a lot of church options, and most people around me seem to be quite okay with trucking along with the status quo. However, I started a bible study, and once we got into the nitty gritty and were able to really share with each other, a lot of like-minded people started to come out of the woodwork. There are more than likely people feeling just like you are in your own church who need some guidance. The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher is a good book about building communities.
Disengage from digital media: totally. I think the Spirit has been grieved in the Church in this area, and we can’t even come close to seeing the damage that has been done by our willingness to adopt the mediums of the world. We are called to be a people set apart, and to do whatever it takes to get there (Matt 5:29-30). Holiness by J.C. Ryle is a gut punch of a book about, well... holiness. We’ll worth the read.
Ruma, I would like to add a small, but hopefully not insignificant, suggestion: never forget that AI (artificial intelligence) is just statistical modeling (h/t William Briggs). AI will fail to live up to the transhumanists' utopian nightmare. As a Christian, you know that Jesus has already won this war.
It is hard to express in words how well I think you did with this article and how important I think it is. Suffice it to say that I am raising two young boys and you have renewed my resolve to raise them as men with chests. Thank you.
(As it happens, I am reading Lord of the Rings to my sons at bedtime; we are just about to reach the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. The oldest just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia on his own, and I handed him the Space Trilogy to try next. Serendipity!)
Nov 15, 2022·edited Nov 15, 2022Liked by N.S. Lyons
Brilliant, Mr Lyons!
A quick observation that this part:
"Yet even in this state – even in the void – “the Conditioners will act,” Lewis writes, for:
When I said just now that all motives fail them, I should have said all motives except one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo [thus I will, thus I command] has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism… When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.
Unlike the reason of the mind or a belief in objective value, the force of mere appetite “cannot be exploded or ‘seen through’ because it never had any pretentions.” The Conditioners will therefore “come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.”
...tracks perfectly with Frankl's description of the "existential vacuum" in Man's Search For Meaning:
"The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).......there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido
This is one of the best essays I have ever read. I feel profoundly moved in a way I have not before been moved by an essay. Sincerely, thank you. I made an account just to finish the article.
I have always loved Tolkien and Lewis, and been the resident Tolkien nerd in every friend group I’ve ever had. I’ve tried to argue before that Tolkien is much deeper than many fans of the movies or people who have read only LOTR/The Hobbit quickly might realize. That, fundamentally, Tolkien’s works are a commentary on seeing the transcendent (and specifically seeing God as revealed through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, though non-Christians can also find resonance in his argument) in the face of cold modernist mechanistic nihilism.
This essay made that argument so perfectly. It also captured all the thoughts I have been having over the past few years. Working in an “elite” field, I feel utterly alone in seeing what I see and knowing others are fully bought into the story of modernity.
So thank you for this. It was an utter joy to read. Most people I know aren’t keen to talk about metaphysics and theology, but they might talk Tolkien. I’ll be sure to point anyone who is keen to listen towards this article.
I loved Tolkien through reading LOTR, and of course that made me read all his other works as well as the commentaries on his works, but even if one just read LOTR, it’s all there for those with eyes to see. I find Tolkien better at the craft of writing than Lewis, because he says all he has to say through a story so well written that it captures our imagination and speaks to our hearts so powerfully. I would argue that that is the best way to teach values, because it speaks to imagination and emotions which are so much more subtle and deep than our conscious minds. Maybe it’s why Jesus likes to teach in parables. That being said, I respect greatly Lewis’s depth of thinking through reading Chronicles of Narnia. Though it is ostensibly a children’s book, gems of wisdom shine throughout the stories. I’m so glad Lyons has written such a wonderful essay using the works of these two great writers. And yes, this was the straw that broke the camel’s …. I became a paid subscriber in order to read the full essay.
The Chronicles of Narnia are quite deep according to Dr. Michael Ward in his “Planet Narnia” book. Lewis saw the world as enchanted, or permeated with God. Both the Narnia books and the Random books feature this idea of enchantment and the truth about reality, of which we are only dimly aware. Another good book that brings this out is Christina Hale’s Deeper Heaven. I’m reading these books, along with Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s “For the Life of the World” until Rod Dreher comes out with his book on enchantment.
2 hours to read this. It will take longer to digest. For now, thank you for doing this important work that helps to connect the dots a little more each time.
If man were to succeed in recreating man by changing (or perverting, if you will) his fundamental nature that would necessarily lead to the destruction of man. A being cannot be the thing it is without its form, which is why Sauron's elves were not elves but orcs. Happily, no one can change human nature, no matter how far our science 'advances' or how barbaric some of us become in our behavior toward each other. This is not to say that the gross philosophical errors playing out through the west right now are going to end well, or that we will not suffer on account of them, just that we will remain human beings in the end. It was not luck that allowed Mark to escape the subjective mental tyranny of NICE, it was his human nature, his existence as a human being with an essence and nature oriented toward a final end. We are all naturally oriented toward the good and the true, 'called' if you will, and like Augustine we can choose to heed that call, or not.
Happily no one can change human nature you write. Unhappily this means those who try, given enough means, will destroy human nature in the attempt. It long ago occurred to me that the attributes of the Mark of the Beast in the Apocalypse of St. John almost require that whatever it is it will involve a neural interface -- repenting of accepting it will be impossible, as it will destroy, replace or render impotent the human will. Yet some people long to have their brains directly connected to the internet.
We may not be able to change our fundamental nature as you say, but each of us can stray from it for a wide variety of reasons in a wide variety of ways, sometimes for a few moments, sometimes for much longer, entire lifetimes even.
Phew! Can't thank You enough, Sir. Long but exceedingly wonderful and enjoyable article. Can't say that LOUD ENOUGH.
I've read C.S. Lewis, but not The Abolition of Man. Must. And learned a *lot* from Your exposition of That Hideous Strength.
I had hoped to put down a few of the other things I learned. But I'm a little past my dinner hour, after a long day. I'll just make this one minor point:
I didn't know Yuval Noah Harari was saying this "stuff." Unbelievable he's known as a smart man. Yeah, the new species past homo sapiens is gonna be *DESIGNED.* No one to question how well our designs have panned out so far. Because if they did, he wouldn't even get a hearing. "We are really upgrading humans into gods." I'm stunned by the ignorance. And this is one-a the leaders? Today, not much worse than the others.
Biden and his Executive Order? I got as far a section 5:
"...shall develop a strategy that identifies policy recommendations to expand domestic biomanufacturing capacity for products spanning the health, energy, agriculture, and industrial sectors, with a focus on advancing equity, improving biomanufacturing processes, and connecting relevant infrastructure."
"[A]dvancing **EQUITY.**" Oh great. More-a *that* crap. That's not to overlook the rest-a the "stuff." This just jumped out.
This Zoltan whoever! Yeah, I'm familiar with Rothman. I bought his book of trash, but haven't had the stomach to read it. We'll upload our consciousness? Find me *one* person who can give an intelligent answer as to what consciousness even *IS!* Crickets. Because I said "intelligent."
I too was baffled at how Harari is a well-regarded public intellectual.
I was eager to read Sapiens a few years ago given the rave reviews, especially by people I respected in my social circle. I think my library hold on the eBook was in a months-long queue before it became available.
I read everything up to the section on future humanity. I ran out of time on my check-out, and the book was thoroughly un-ground-breaking, so I didn't bother placing another hold. What I'd read up until that point was mostly old pop science, like pre-agricultural man having few dental problems compared to modern man. I came away confused at how a compilation of such things, sorted chronologically, was Book of the Year material.
I'm now guessing the future humanity bits were what earned the great reviews, and that they were a transhumanist vision of man's glorious post-human potential. So, it wasn't the history that was exciting, but the prophecy.
TY for Your reply M adamsb6. I had an interest in Sapiens. Mebbe skip it, based on what You say here. Or just read the prophecy section with ire (and try for an open mind despite).
Still in an early part of this but - worth the wait. I just wish you'd released it a few hours later so I could stay up into my timezone's wee small hours reading it with whisky and a sense of chthonic horror.
Ringing in my ears as I read the early sections is 'Moloch whose name is the Mind!' And of course that's what Filostrato turns out to exalt.
Yes, this was a good one. And footnote 1 is entirely correct.
The image of aluminium birds in aluminium trees really sticks with me. Perhaps not a coincidence that on a recent visit to London, to attend a party alongside well-credentialed engineering graduates working exactly the sort of Virtual jobs you'd expect, I mentioned to three people that I'd built a birdbox in my spare time and two of them asked "what's one of those?"
I'm in my final year of a PhD program in a hard science at a major research university. I read That Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, and LotR years ago.
During my time in grad school, I have had a hard-to-describe underlying fear grow in me, that I work for N.I.C.E. My highly-educated (and soon to be highly-powerful) peers regularly show intense contempt for the "English Farmer" types in our society. In its official messaging and internal communication, the university regularly shows disrespect for the material world or anything that may give it objective meaning. The scientific establishment I interact with deals with matters of intense direct physical importance to billions of people, but at the ground level the task is treated like a mere game for winning credentials and maybe a bit of power. At the top level it is just a flippant exercise in doing what you will, consequences (for other people) be damned.
Like that passage in The Green Book, which Lewis saw as a subtle refutation of basic reality which would later gain immense destructive power, I often see subtle things that scare me. This wasn't apparent when I started, but it's been a slow drip wearing me down for a while, and now I see demonic fingerprints on too much of my daily environment.
I was feeling kind of morose about all of this just this morning, and somehow when I saw the title of your article, I felt like it would be helpful, so I did the 7-day trial to read it. Thank you so much for this. I often think that total collapse is the only realistic endpoint of our cultural and societal quagmire. I am a young husband and father (unlike all my grad school peers), and my children's future can be concerning to me. Lewis and Tolkien really did act prophetically to help prepare people (and men in particular) to face coming waves of darkness with wisdom and courage, and I am thankful to God for that. Your article worked alongside their writings to shore up that Chest in me.
I hope you don't mind me printing this out to send to a friend working on a PhD in the liberal arts school here. Things over there are an order of magnitude worse than in my school.
Supporting a family on a grad school stipend is difficult, but once I'm out of this place I'll definitely be a paying subscriber.
Please do. And as should be obvious: you aren't alone!
Know (something very like) that feel. Congratulations to you for focusing on the important things first - I would say it does get easier once you decide to come over to the side of the angels, but it sounds like you've put in the hard yards already in that respect.
Austin McDonald, your cohort is vainglorious, smitten with their own story of superiority. The tricky bit is that it’s not just a story, in fact, they are demonstrably superior.
This is a problem: it seems arrogance is in place of proper gratitude.
But what of the people who supported the orange one? Men with chests will see their simpler truths. But you suggest we lacking men with chests, our best and brightest are somewhat less. What is the right word to describe this deficiency in our current crop of the best and brightest?
https://www.reddit.com/r/lotrmemes/comments/t25fmf/what_else_would_i_be_scrolling/
Doom scrolling, was that for me?
I will answer my own question , what word describes our current crop of best and brightest: normal. Austin M is abnormal.
Wow. I feel as though I just read an analysis and synopsis of everything I've read and thought in the past several years. Thank you for doing such prodigious work. I am exhausted just reading it through, once, with many more to come. You must be spent. I am so grateful.
Grateful yes but more than that I’m excited. For me that piece is a Rosetta Stone, it dovetails into my practical life and philosophical outlook
Ardath--thank you for putting into words my exact reaction, in the same order, from "wow" to "gratitude." A tour de force from N.S. Lyons.
This piece by itself is worth the price of the subscription (I was already subscribed, hoping for the next magnum opus.) Masterful analysis, compelling writing...made me stop what I was doing in the middle of a workday to read it -- that is really, really hard to do.
Congratulations and many, many thanks for taking the time to think, analyze, and write so eloquently.
When I read your essay to a distressed reader, it sent me back to the works of Plato that I had put aside years ago. It also caused me to subscribe here in the expectation that something very special would emerge. It was a long wait, but worth it. This is what I was waiting for. You take the long view, one could even say you are "swinging for the fences" by tying together all the strands of our dilemma (language distortion, mechanization, lack of courage, nihilism, and the seeming objectivity of radical subjectivism). All this mythically enhanced by the works of Tolkien and Lewis. They would be proud.
Remarkable.
I wish I could say whether this would be of value to anyone else, but I'm so horribly biased after stumbling into CS Lewis earlier this year and then reading 19 of his books before pouring over into about 1,000 pages, so far, of Tolkien's work all because I felt their prescient channeling, like a cosmic last-defense against the madness of the void that the post-modern coup is sucking us all into.
But for me, this was a delight!
Felt like I finally had a friend seeing what I was seeing with my last 10 months of reading (it's been a wild Inklings binge!)
I haven’t read any C.S Lewis... yet. But this was definitely of value!
Fix that. The two books Lyons cites most -- The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength -- are probably his most important. If you have children, read the Narnia books to them. They are veiled Christian apologetics, but even my daughter and son-in-law, who profess to be atheists, read them to my grandson as rolicking good adventure stories and for instruction in morals. (My daughter is a metaphysician who is working on non-theistic defense of essentially Berkeleyan idealism, and my son-in-law an ethicist and part of the effective altruism movement, so what they mean by the God they don't believe in something I don't believe in either, though I am a professing Orthodox Christian, cf. the remark of St. Gregory the Theologian, known in the West as St. Gregory of Nazianzus, "Inasmuch as God exists, we do not exist; and inasmuch as we exist, God does not exist.")
Superb work as always. I would love to see you do a deep dive on Perelandra as well. Ransom's realization that the Enemy cannot be fought with words alone is one of my favorite Lewis bits.
I do think that describing transgender dogma as an "onramp" to transhumanism is a bit of an undersell. I think it really is full-blown transhumanism, as sex is utterly critical to being human and transgenderism undermines that - a concept that babies understand when just a few months old. I would describe transgender adherents as a vanguard.
Argh, I actually planned to include that scene in this in the "Not Nice" section and then forgot. Ransom's realization of the need for physical courage to confront the enemy would have been perfect. (Also he throws the enemy into a pit of lava, which is a nice parallel!)
Yes, Ransom's realization when confronted by the Unman's unyielding mechanistic evil: "This can't go on ! " , and then physically acting to repel the satanic perversion of Perelandra. Your essay is one of the most remarkable and needful things I've read in a very long time. Well worth the wait!
Edit the current version to include that for future readers like me. I will be reading this again and sharing it. I read The Abolition of Man in 2015 but did not fully understand it until now. Thank you!
NS Lyons, and all: I am 28, without kids, an arts uni lecturer who will probably not last there very long.
I don't want to just read the horizon in fear. I want to do something about it. Something good and lasting like Frodo and Gandalf and Lewis and Tolkien did. I want my life to be added to that which tips the scales back the other way.
I am a Christian, I believe Jesus is Lord, but for reasons too hard to explain, I'm not sure that God will be so quick to disperse the builders of Babel this time.
What is the best thing a 28 year old with a heart and a bit of courage can do in the face of this?
I plan to write on the "what is to be done" part another time. But for now I think there are a few quick things that would be most helpful, other than your faith. (Though all easier said than done):
Form or join communities of likeminded people, who know what is happening and are able to support each other in times of need. No one is going to get through this alone. This could be an intentional community that is explicitly engaged in some form of resistance or preparation, but it could also just be for friendship and solidarity. As George mentioned, a strong family would be the ultimate example of such a community (but is insufficient alone). This is probably the most important thing, but of course may be the most difficult.
But there are some other things as well, like learning to focus your attention - to be able disengage from all the "skinner boxes" that condition us from every direction today, including digital addictions. I have a feeling people who can control their own addiction to these modern temptations are going to have a huge advantage and be an increasingly rare breed.
Read the humanities, and read deeply. I find it really helps, in part because it broadens one's understanding of human nature, and in part because I at least find it vaguely comforting to see how nothing too much changes in history. Plus it will help with the focus. I wrote a little bit on this a while ago: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/why-inquire
Overall, as Lewis put it: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” I think that solution probably still applies.
Finally: go outside.
Like Ruma, I feel that “for reasons too hard to explain, I'm not sure that God will be so quick to disperse the builders of Babel this time”. I’m 66, a nurse who fought the Covid vaccine mandate and almost lost her job, alone in a Los Angeles sea of leftists and what Mary Harrington described as lawn-signers. I responded positively to Jack Leahy’s suggestion of a 12-step group for machine-addicts, mainly because I want and need to have a community of likeminded people. The problem is where to find them. Online is the easiest way, but it does not substitute for real human contact. I recently found a meeting of people who follow Fr. Thomas Keating’s contemplative outreach. It is only 2-3 people because too many people were treating these meetings as social clubs so the organizer amended the guidelines and attendance dropped. I like it because for 20 minutes, we sit together with our eyes closed centering our hearts on God and it is quite powerful. Unfortunately in the guidelines, there is now no room for some sharing. What I have in mind would be a combination of some form of centering prayer and the 12-step sharing. It could strengthen our spiritual faith as well as build community.
Tolkien and C. S Lewis are two very prescient men. From a literary criticism angle, I think Tolkien was a better writer so I had not read any of Lewis’s works until recently and only the Chronicles of Narnia at that, which alerted me to Lewis’s depth of thinking. Great literature is a balm to the soul, because of the immense humanity of these writers who have looked deeply into their souls and the world’s, and wrote out of the truth of their hearts and the strength of their faith. In the midst of despair, when I feel like Ruma does, it helps to hear such voices that reminds us of the age-old story of hubris, destruction, and the road to redemption.
"Finally: go outside."
Indeed. Vitamin D deficiency turned out to be a substantial risk-factor in responses to Sars-Cov-2. So while this is sound advice for aesthetic reasons, it's also Basic Health 101---a course which our university system does not teach. If you Google "Basic Health 101 university," what you get is links to Public Health programs, poised to train the next generation of Conditioners in technocratic management of their subjects' bodies and immune systems.
Needless to say, these Pfizer reps-in-lab-coats have proven to be worse-than-useless over the past few years. Their adoption of Chinese-style mass containment measures, their rushing of experimental mRNA technology, and their coordinated attempts to control media in order to suppress dissent have all failed spectacularly. Even if the next lab chimaera their virologist colleagues generate turns out to be truly horrific, I wouldn't trust them to handle it. I mean, these are people who still had NYC gyms shuttered in late 2020 while partnering with Dunkin' Doughnuts to promote their vaccination campaign. Fuck 'em.
So yeah, go outside. Do outside stuff. Exercise. Lift weights. Bench press to grow your Chest, as well as your chest. Executing a solid set engenders a neurochemical response in your brain akin to reading Marcus Aurelius. Do Yoga. The ancient yogis had some wacky ideas about chakras and whatnot, but they understood the muscular-skeletal system of the human body, via heightened proprioception, as only trained meditators can. Or just play pickleball. Whatever.
Whatever you do, do not trust these technocrats' promise of salvation. They cannot deliver it, and even if they could, it would be utterly corrupt and inhuman.
This may sound dumb, but I've come to think the purpose of life is grandkids. So maybe find a partner and start a family. (I'm near the end of my life, and do sometimes wish I'd started a family sooner... more grandkids. :^)
Recommendation No. 1: Have as many children as possible and raise them to be warriors in defense of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
I wonder if God will disperse the builders of this Babel by simply eliminating sources of electricity (I.E. everything will require more electricity than can be produced). But it's pure speculation on my part.
well, our source of energy is definitely finite and its demise will come about. Nate Hagen talks about what he calls The Great Simplicity that happens when, not by choice but by necessity, we will have to simplify our lifestyle. Daniel Schmattenberger also has very good analyses of how human civilizations develop, how we dig ourselves into our current mess, and what he sees as some things that will need to change, or happen.
Marry. Have many children and teach them well.
Refuse to go along with it, and build something in the opposite direction.
Ruma, I’ll echo everything N.S. Lyons said to you. I’m in a very similar spot to you, and trying to build community is tough. I’m in a small community with not a lot of church options, and most people around me seem to be quite okay with trucking along with the status quo. However, I started a bible study, and once we got into the nitty gritty and were able to really share with each other, a lot of like-minded people started to come out of the woodwork. There are more than likely people feeling just like you are in your own church who need some guidance. The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher is a good book about building communities.
Disengage from digital media: totally. I think the Spirit has been grieved in the Church in this area, and we can’t even come close to seeing the damage that has been done by our willingness to adopt the mediums of the world. We are called to be a people set apart, and to do whatever it takes to get there (Matt 5:29-30). Holiness by J.C. Ryle is a gut punch of a book about, well... holiness. We’ll worth the read.
Ruma, I would like to add a small, but hopefully not insignificant, suggestion: never forget that AI (artificial intelligence) is just statistical modeling (h/t William Briggs). AI will fail to live up to the transhumanists' utopian nightmare. As a Christian, you know that Jesus has already won this war.
It is hard to express in words how well I think you did with this article and how important I think it is. Suffice it to say that I am raising two young boys and you have renewed my resolve to raise them as men with chests. Thank you.
(As it happens, I am reading Lord of the Rings to my sons at bedtime; we are just about to reach the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. The oldest just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia on his own, and I handed him the Space Trilogy to try next. Serendipity!)
Brilliant, Mr Lyons!
A quick observation that this part:
"Yet even in this state – even in the void – “the Conditioners will act,” Lewis writes, for:
When I said just now that all motives fail them, I should have said all motives except one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo [thus I will, thus I command] has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism… When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.
Unlike the reason of the mind or a belief in objective value, the force of mere appetite “cannot be exploded or ‘seen through’ because it never had any pretentions.” The Conditioners will therefore “come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.”
...tracks perfectly with Frankl's description of the "existential vacuum" in Man's Search For Meaning:
"The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).......there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido
becomes rampant in the existential vacuum."
It seems like the entirety of Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" is a proof of the truth in Frankls quote.
This is one of the best essays I have ever read. I feel profoundly moved in a way I have not before been moved by an essay. Sincerely, thank you. I made an account just to finish the article.
I have always loved Tolkien and Lewis, and been the resident Tolkien nerd in every friend group I’ve ever had. I’ve tried to argue before that Tolkien is much deeper than many fans of the movies or people who have read only LOTR/The Hobbit quickly might realize. That, fundamentally, Tolkien’s works are a commentary on seeing the transcendent (and specifically seeing God as revealed through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, though non-Christians can also find resonance in his argument) in the face of cold modernist mechanistic nihilism.
This essay made that argument so perfectly. It also captured all the thoughts I have been having over the past few years. Working in an “elite” field, I feel utterly alone in seeing what I see and knowing others are fully bought into the story of modernity.
So thank you for this. It was an utter joy to read. Most people I know aren’t keen to talk about metaphysics and theology, but they might talk Tolkien. I’ll be sure to point anyone who is keen to listen towards this article.
I loved Tolkien through reading LOTR, and of course that made me read all his other works as well as the commentaries on his works, but even if one just read LOTR, it’s all there for those with eyes to see. I find Tolkien better at the craft of writing than Lewis, because he says all he has to say through a story so well written that it captures our imagination and speaks to our hearts so powerfully. I would argue that that is the best way to teach values, because it speaks to imagination and emotions which are so much more subtle and deep than our conscious minds. Maybe it’s why Jesus likes to teach in parables. That being said, I respect greatly Lewis’s depth of thinking through reading Chronicles of Narnia. Though it is ostensibly a children’s book, gems of wisdom shine throughout the stories. I’m so glad Lyons has written such a wonderful essay using the works of these two great writers. And yes, this was the straw that broke the camel’s …. I became a paid subscriber in order to read the full essay.
The Chronicles of Narnia are quite deep according to Dr. Michael Ward in his “Planet Narnia” book. Lewis saw the world as enchanted, or permeated with God. Both the Narnia books and the Random books feature this idea of enchantment and the truth about reality, of which we are only dimly aware. Another good book that brings this out is Christina Hale’s Deeper Heaven. I’m reading these books, along with Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s “For the Life of the World” until Rod Dreher comes out with his book on enchantment.
2 hours to read this. It will take longer to digest. For now, thank you for doing this important work that helps to connect the dots a little more each time.
If man were to succeed in recreating man by changing (or perverting, if you will) his fundamental nature that would necessarily lead to the destruction of man. A being cannot be the thing it is without its form, which is why Sauron's elves were not elves but orcs. Happily, no one can change human nature, no matter how far our science 'advances' or how barbaric some of us become in our behavior toward each other. This is not to say that the gross philosophical errors playing out through the west right now are going to end well, or that we will not suffer on account of them, just that we will remain human beings in the end. It was not luck that allowed Mark to escape the subjective mental tyranny of NICE, it was his human nature, his existence as a human being with an essence and nature oriented toward a final end. We are all naturally oriented toward the good and the true, 'called' if you will, and like Augustine we can choose to heed that call, or not.
Happily no one can change human nature you write. Unhappily this means those who try, given enough means, will destroy human nature in the attempt. It long ago occurred to me that the attributes of the Mark of the Beast in the Apocalypse of St. John almost require that whatever it is it will involve a neural interface -- repenting of accepting it will be impossible, as it will destroy, replace or render impotent the human will. Yet some people long to have their brains directly connected to the internet.
We may not be able to change our fundamental nature as you say, but each of us can stray from it for a wide variety of reasons in a wide variety of ways, sometimes for a few moments, sometimes for much longer, entire lifetimes even.
Phew! Can't thank You enough, Sir. Long but exceedingly wonderful and enjoyable article. Can't say that LOUD ENOUGH.
I've read C.S. Lewis, but not The Abolition of Man. Must. And learned a *lot* from Your exposition of That Hideous Strength.
I had hoped to put down a few of the other things I learned. But I'm a little past my dinner hour, after a long day. I'll just make this one minor point:
I didn't know Yuval Noah Harari was saying this "stuff." Unbelievable he's known as a smart man. Yeah, the new species past homo sapiens is gonna be *DESIGNED.* No one to question how well our designs have panned out so far. Because if they did, he wouldn't even get a hearing. "We are really upgrading humans into gods." I'm stunned by the ignorance. And this is one-a the leaders? Today, not much worse than the others.
Biden and his Executive Order? I got as far a section 5:
"...shall develop a strategy that identifies policy recommendations to expand domestic biomanufacturing capacity for products spanning the health, energy, agriculture, and industrial sectors, with a focus on advancing equity, improving biomanufacturing processes, and connecting relevant infrastructure."
"[A]dvancing **EQUITY.**" Oh great. More-a *that* crap. That's not to overlook the rest-a the "stuff." This just jumped out.
This Zoltan whoever! Yeah, I'm familiar with Rothman. I bought his book of trash, but haven't had the stomach to read it. We'll upload our consciousness? Find me *one* person who can give an intelligent answer as to what consciousness even *IS!* Crickets. Because I said "intelligent."
Ah well... Mebbe more tomorrow. Mebbe not.
Just wanted to say TYTY again, is all.
I too was baffled at how Harari is a well-regarded public intellectual.
I was eager to read Sapiens a few years ago given the rave reviews, especially by people I respected in my social circle. I think my library hold on the eBook was in a months-long queue before it became available.
I read everything up to the section on future humanity. I ran out of time on my check-out, and the book was thoroughly un-ground-breaking, so I didn't bother placing another hold. What I'd read up until that point was mostly old pop science, like pre-agricultural man having few dental problems compared to modern man. I came away confused at how a compilation of such things, sorted chronologically, was Book of the Year material.
I'm now guessing the future humanity bits were what earned the great reviews, and that they were a transhumanist vision of man's glorious post-human potential. So, it wasn't the history that was exciting, but the prophecy.
TY for Your reply M adamsb6. I had an interest in Sapiens. Mebbe skip it, based on what You say here. Or just read the prophecy section with ire (and try for an open mind despite).
Still in an early part of this but - worth the wait. I just wish you'd released it a few hours later so I could stay up into my timezone's wee small hours reading it with whisky and a sense of chthonic horror.
Ringing in my ears as I read the early sections is 'Moloch whose name is the Mind!' And of course that's what Filostrato turns out to exalt.
Yes, this was a good one. And footnote 1 is entirely correct.
The image of aluminium birds in aluminium trees really sticks with me. Perhaps not a coincidence that on a recent visit to London, to attend a party alongside well-credentialed engineering graduates working exactly the sort of Virtual jobs you'd expect, I mentioned to three people that I'd built a birdbox in my spare time and two of them asked "what's one of those?"
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. It puts into words a lot of thoughts I've had kicking around, but haven't been as skilled at coalescing.