Last Wednesday, as Americans prepared to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, we also marked the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two other men passed away on November 22, 1963 as well, their deaths overshadowed by Kennedy’s. Clive Staples Lewis and Aldous Huxley were both prolific British authors who shaped the discourse of Western Civilization at a time when science, industry, and progressive ideas were changing the way we viewed the world.
The work that Huxley is most remembered for is the novel Brave New World. While George Orwell’s 1984 is the more common allusion for our creeping dystopia, Huxley’s predictions were perhaps more accurate. In Brave New World, the government does not need to watch its citizens 24/7, because it has allowed them to pacify themselves with drugs and pleasure to the point where they simply don’t care enough to pose any threat to the totalitarian order.
In his introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, Neil Postman compared the two dystopic visions:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
I suggest that modern society is a mix of the worst of both Huxley and Orwell, as we are inundated with sensory stimulation while also monitored and censored, with the past being rewritten to match the current thing.
However, it’s easy to forget that C.S. Lewis also created a vision of the future. In essays such as The Abolition of Man, Lewis correctly predicted the way in which progressive influence over education would create a generation of weak men:
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
However, Lewis wrote a more explicit dystopia in That Hideous Strength, the final novel of the Space Trilogy. In this story, a private organization called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE) has co-opted a small college town and engaged in experiments that aim to combine science with pagan rituals.
If you read Lewis’ descriptions of the people, buildings, and activities at NICE, you would be forgiven for thinking he somehow had a vision of a modern college campus. Even the art on the walls was designed to subconsciously subvert the viewer’s mind. The experiments that NICE performs on animals are no less shocking than what Dr. Anthony Fauci oversaw at the National Institutes of Health.
Where Lewis differs from Huxley (and Orwell) is in his belief that our world is ultimately in the hands of an almighty God. Both 1984 and Brave New World end with the main characters defeated by their totalitarian overlords, unable to bring about change or revolution. That Hideous Strength, on the other hand, ends with triumph by divine intervention. Is it no surprise then that Huxley and Orwell were agnostic or even atheist, while Lewis converted from atheism to Christianity?
Just two years before writing his own dystopic novel, Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength for the newspaper. Though he thought it was a good story, he didn’t seem to understand the point of the supernatural. He said that Lewis “…is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader's sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict, one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.”
When looking at the future, those without a hope in Christ see two possible futures: either science leads to a socialist utopia where scarcity is eliminated and all people live together in brotherhood, or it leads to a totalitarian dystopia that is completely without hope. Christians must reject both visions, because of two things we believe to be true: Human nature doesn’t change and our God is sovereign.
C.S. Lewis understood that although God wins in the end, how that transpires in our own lives is largely up to us. Do we make ourselves useful for God? Do we follow His direction? Do we stand up for truth no matter the consequences?
In his epistle to the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.
Ephesians 6:12-13 ESV
No matter how dystopic our world becomes, no matter how hopeless our cause might seem, our course remains the same.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-39 ESV