Eighty years on from both the completion of C.S. Lewis’ classic science-fiction parable That Hideous Strength, and the Dumbarton Oaks Conference which led to the creation of the UN, have the worst totalitarian nightmares of Lewis’ imagination finally come to pass for real?
Try to imagine a world in which democracy is wholly dead, having been replaced by its own deliberate inverted simulacrum, a surface-deep regime—an atheistic, science-worshipping, globalist technocracy—in which hideous non-human creatures tempt a fallen elitist ruling class into entering irrevocably into the satanic realm of post-humanity, facilitated by hubristic feats of industrial and mechanical engineering.
If this all sounds like something stolen from a science-fiction novel, then that’s because it is—the novel in question being 1945’s That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, which (publication schedules being what they are) he had actually finished writing some time prior to the end of WWII. It is a horrific and satirical prediction of what Lewis presciently perceived the post-war world most likely had in store for an unsuspecting humanity that naively thought democracy was about to triumph forever with the looming twin defeats of Germany and Japan: namely, a new form of ‘benign’ globalist dictatorship in disguise.
The tool through which such a false-faced regime would be managed, Lewis foresaw, was likely to be some benevolent-sounding organisation of the same basic kind that was soon to become manifest for real in the shape of the United Nations (UN). Although not officially established until 1945, just after the war’s end, this year, 2024, marks 80 years since the basic format of the UN was effectively formulated with the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference. The Conference was held in Washington DC between the then Allied Great Powers who were slated hereafter to become the post-war planet’s main governing ‘Four Policemen’: the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and China.
Better known as a writer of Christian tracts and fantasies like the Narnia series, Lewis also tried his hand at Christian sci-fi with his Space Trilogy of the 1930s and ‘40s. These exciting tales feature as the main common protagonist the character of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a Christian academic. He travels to other planets before returning to terra firma to battle demons named ‘Macrobes’ who falsely pose as all-wise ETs, aiming to tempt human scientists and politicians into transforming the entire planet into a genuine post-human Hell on Earth.
The trilogy’s concluding entry, That Hideous Strength, has a title taken from an obscure 1555 poem about the Tower of Babel, a previous hubristically Faustian enterprise made in defiance of God’s ordained will. Writing it as he did towards the end of WWII, Lewis’ thoughts naturally turned towards what kind of world the Allied victors would try to build for themselves—namely, one so unrealistically utopian in its nature that it would instead end up becoming its precise opposite. He foresaw that such a world would ultimately bring about a globalist totalitarian regime so evil in effect, if not necessarily in intent, that it would make the newly defeated Third Reich resemble paradise. As Lewis admitted in his Foreword, the book was a fictionalized retelling of the basic theme of his 1943 essay The Abolition of Man, whose own title is surely self-explanatory.
The plot is simple, but devastatingly effective. Following Hitler’s and Hirohito’s loss, globalist technocratic elites who have abandoned all faith in God and tradition for a contrasting Faustian belief in science and progress, modelled broadly after left-leaning scientists-cum-social-reformers of the day like Julian Huxley establish a new UN-type organization. It is initially based in England, but this organization intends to dominate the globe. With intentional cunning, it is called “NICE” (the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments).
Well, just like today’s online #BeKind mob, NICE has, quite literally, a very ‘nice’ name, so there can be nothing suspicious or negative about that, can there? Unfortunately, its actions are being directed from afar by the demonic Macrobes. These fake extraterrestrials promise NICE’s leaders Promethean scientific gifts such as immortality, if only they follow their ‘rational’ and ‘progressive’ plans for a benignly totalitarian One-World Government. Implicitly, such a regime is the one followed by the ETs themselves on their perfect alien home-worlds elsewhere. Thus, there is something very suspicious about it indeed.
By combining Marxism, Positivism, scientism, social engineering, and militant atheism, NICE seeks to force humanity into evolving into an entirely new, supposedly ‘improved,’ post-human species—and to kill off all those foolish and ungrateful enough not to cooperate. Lewis himself wasn’t wholly averse to there being actual non-demonic intelligent life on other planets (in his essay Religion and Rockets, he even guessed it possible that our ultimate cosmic quest might be to convert them to Christianity). Ultimately, though, he felt mankind’s true threats lay rather closer to home than invading enemy aliens: namely, within the increasingly God-abandoning hearts and minds of mankind itself.
Science Fictions, Theological Facts
To prove their allegiance to the Macrobes, candidates for NICE’s upper echelons literally have to trample on Christ, a statue of Him being kept prone in their HQ for this very purpose. More figuratively, the organization tramples upon Christ in their wider actions too.
Evidently, Lewis did not have a terribly high opinion of sociologists, for that is essentially what the people at NICE are. They form an organized sociological conspiracy devoted to first of all denying the reality of human nature, and then forcibly remodelling it wholesale by transforming Earth into one gigantic Maoist re-education camp.
For one such irredeemable technocrat, “Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.” Indeed, this individual has a subconscious tendency never to use concrete terms like ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ but rather mere collectivised abstractions like ‘vocational groups,’ ‘classes,’ and ‘populations.’ This, says Lewis, is because, “in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”
NICE takes the Positivist heresy of replacing theology with sociology to its logical ends, creating a kind of Positivist Inquisition, designed to keep the global population in check. For one of their new NICE Gestapo, “There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and sociology.” Whereas old-fashioned police-work focused upon tracking down criminals after their crimes had actually been committed, the sociological police work of the future would involve mentally programming the citizenry never to commit any crimes in the first place. This would be achieved by comprehensive programs of brainwashing and social-engineering. Thus, NICE believe in the heresies both of human perfectibility, and of the abolition of God’s gift of free will.
Not Very NICE Men
NICE’s social engineering encompasses not only man’s mental sphere, but his biological one. By forcibly remodelling the neo-Adam of tomorrow into a new physical shape, these Prometheans literally seek to play God. They are on a blasphemous quest for ultimate power over creation, like that of Dr.’s Frankenstein, Mengele, and Moreau. As one of their number gloats: “You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument.”
And what do the Macrobes want to persuade NICE into forcibly evolving men into? Incipient transgenderists. According to one NICE scientist, like old-style alchemists brewing homunculi (tiny artificial men) in their labs, NICE aims to do the same. Humanity must henceforth “get rid of” their suddenly outmoded sexed bodies via the following means:
Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation … There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
The Macrobes promise to teach NICE how to do all this—but there were genuine figures of Lewis’ own day who genuinely desired to make mankind evolve into just such autotrophic beings for real, no exoplanetary assistance needed.
One off-page Faustian whom Lewis was satirizing was J.D. Bernal, a prominent Anglo-Irish molecular biologist, x-ray crystallographer, and Communist, whose disturbing 1929 book The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, argued that aspirant advanced post-humanoids like himself had three main foes: Nature, human emotions, and the fleshly body. Science, he claimed, should be harnessed to abolish all three. Thereafter, “The scientists would emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind.”
Bernal’s proposal was simple: remove the human brain from its skull and place it inside some kind of artificial jar. Freed from the slowly rotting biological prison of its body, the severed human intelligence might be kept artificially functioning forever, making men immortal. As Bernal wrote: “Sooner or later man will be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all, it is the brain that counts.”
According to the fictionalized J.D. Bernals of NICE:
You are to conceive the [future] species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary … The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy … the day for a large [human] population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the Macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.
These strange post-human creatures who are “all head” sound uncannily like the ‘Grays’ of contemporary ufology, those pallid-skinned, black-eyed entities with huge round heads you may be familiar with from TV shows like The X-Files.
It has often been noted how the Grays resemble nightmare visions of what mankind might one day become under the increasing influence of scientifically forced ‘evolution.’ Their brains, as evidenced by their massive domed foreheads, are huge, but their physiques are spindly and weak. Almost post-biological, their noses have shrunk to nostrils, their mouths to mere slits. Reputedly, they neither eat food nor excrete; eschewing clothing, they are entirely smooth down below, with no genitalia for sex or urination, nor anuses for excretion. Instead, literally bloodless, their veins run with pure chlorophyll, they feed off sunlight, emotions, or cosmic energy, and they excrete directly through their grey skin by sweating.
Some imaginative ufologists think they may not be aliens at all, but time travellers from Earth’s future—in other words, they are us, altered into post-human form by NICE-like scientists of coming centuries. Folklorists, or ufologists of what is termed the ‘psychosocial school,’ prefer to view them as visionary hallucinatory nightmares. As such, they express a latent fear of science gone bad conjured up spontaneously in the minds of alleged UFO abductees when they are actually undergoing realistic seeming waking dreams in their beds at night. Whatever they are, it does seem as if Lewis successfully predicted their eventual coming.
Devil’s Advocate
In truth, Lewis’ book was not intended as a prediction of future alien invasion, but as a religious and political metaphor, albeit a very prophetic one. Lewis no more thought demonic aliens were going to seize control of the planet than George Orwell thought Communist pigs were going to do so when writing Animal Farm.
Following That Hideous Strength’s publication, the prominent scientist J.B.S. Haldane penned a complaint to Lewis, protesting he had libellously depicted all his kind as quasi-Nazi Devil-worshippers. In an initially unpublished reply, Lewis had this to say to Professor Haldane, explaining that his true message was:
… not ‘scientific planning will certainly lead to Hell’, but ‘Under modern conditions any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning’—as Hitler’s regime in fact did. Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most modern countries respect science and want [society] to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ‘scientific planned democracy’. It may be true that any real salvation must equally, though by hypothesis truthfully, describe itself as ‘scientific planned democracy’. All the more reason to look very carefully at anything which bears that label.
Thus, it could be said the wannabe post-humans of NICE in Lewis’ parable have already created a satanic, anti-Christian secular counterreligion of their own. This ‘religion’ comes in the shape of their progressive, Positivistic sociology and scientism. And it simply opens them up to subsequent even further temptation at the hands of the Macrobes, rather than the initial impulse for humanity’s new leaders to sin against creation coming from the demons as such. In his novel, Lewis puts it like this:
From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe … would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe of Tellus, would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.
A dismal prospect indeed. But, without the prior existence of ‘bad men’ upon Earth in the first place, how could this hellish scenario ever actually occur? If there is no Dr. Faustus to desire to conjure up a Mephistopheles of his own hubristic volition initially, then no Mephistopheles can by definition thereafter appear.
Today, there are certain ufologists of theological bent out there who believe the basic plot of Lewis’ novel is now playing itself out for real in terms of the contemporary UFO phenomenon, like something torn from the pages of Borges. One fringe ufological conspiracy theory, espoused by the likes of Fr. Seraphim Rose, a now-deceased American Orthodox Hieromonk, is that the ‘aliens’ that witnesses claim to see whizzing through the skies today in their saucers are, much like Lewis’ Macrobes, just the demons of Hell in a new, historically appropriate, Space Age disguise, here to tempt foolish mankind into damnation by tricking us all into worshipping them and their superior wonder-technologies rather than God Almighty.
It is certainly an interesting theory—but I am sceptical of it. The current NICE-like leadership caste of post-Christian Western mankind have sufficiently proven their own capacity to transform civilization into an increasingly soft-totalitarian avatar of Hell on Earth of their own accord, doing so in the name of pseudo-scientific falsehoods like ‘combatting the climate emergency’ or ‘ending the trans genocide.’ Therefore, I would ask why would the demons even need to bother engaging in such an elaborate sci-fi façade at all? It is far less effort for Screwtape and Mephisto to lie lazily back in Hades and look on laughingly whilst humanity quite happily damns himself all on his own, is it not? Who needs Hell when you have Davos?
Lewis’ Space Trilogy books have been discussed previously on The European Conservative here and here.
