Our technological world is rapidly changing. Last year, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was introduced—potentially disrupting job security, education, and even threatening to transform humanity. As transhumanism aims to overcome the limitations of biology, we risk losing our humanity to computerized versions of consciousness.
Marianne Wright, Peter Mommsen, and Susannah Black Roberts recently appeared together on the PloughCast to discuss C.S. Lewis’s 1945 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength, its criticisms of transhumanism, and man’s role in a political system.
That Hideous Strength was written amid World War II, as the final installment of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. The story follows a young married couple. The husband, Mark, is an academic whose university is being subsumed into a plot to improve humanity, N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. The husband is swept up into the institute, which turns out to be a front for sinister supernatural forces. His wife, Jane, however, ends up in an organization opposing N.I.C.E.
An overarching theme of the book is the dichotomy between pure knowledge gained through artificial consciousness and people striving to live out their humanity.
That Hideous Strength is “a story about people trying to live as human beings; how to make families and societies in the face of the wicked temptations of power,” Wright evaluated.
Another theme of the book is the relationship between science and the meaning of humanity. Roberts argued that Lewis’s technological society “is very much like a vision of technological society that is seeking to do what technological society starting with the Tower of Babel has always done, which is to reach heaven on our own terms without being subject to God’s rule and …to make ourselves gods.”
Although the idea of immortalizing the individual human being and creating human-like machines that are outside of biological laws seems modern, Lewis pointed to it being an ancient idea wrapped up in human nature.
“This is a very old dream. And the nature of that dream—I think that nightmare—is what he’s really examining here,” said Roberts.
Lewis also addressed the question of political power and how Christians should live well in political systems. Roberts suggested that living together and waiting for “the moment” to come is how Christians should pursue political ends. As Roberts said, “You can’t tinker with a society even with the best intentions to fix it through political or technological power. There’s no technique of being politically well ruled.”
Lewis suggests that we should leave the big picture to God and focus on our duties.
“There is big picture political stuff going on, but it’s probably not your business, it’s the business of various principalities and powers,” argued Roberts.
The New Testament establishes that Christians are members of one body in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. However, Jesus also speaks of some who are great in the Kingdom of God in Matthew 5:19.
Wright used Lewis’s other 1945 novel, The Great Divorce as an example. She described a heavenly scene where a great lady, who was beautiful beyond description, approached. It turns out that one of heaven’s greatest queens was a humble woman from East London who took care of all the neighborhood cats and people.
As Mommsen summarized, “One thing that Lewis’ book has to say about how Christians should promote the common good… is to live out your vocation and… not to do what N.I.C.E. does, which is to seize the political moment and attempt to force through a vision of the perfect society.”
The earthly social order emphasizes power and intelligence—and it is not afraid to use whatever necessary means to get there. God’s social order paints a vastly different picture—emphasizing humility, justice, and gratefulness rooted in God’s sinless nature. As Christians, we must first accept that man cannot create perfection and then reject the temptations of power from the earthly social order.
Readers may access the podcast in full here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/that-hideous-strength-is-nonfiction
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