Category: Psychology

Technonihilism 2023: That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) – 1945

Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God.
It is a man — or a being made by man —
who will finally ascend the throne of the universe.
And rule forever.

__________

No, no; we want geldings and oxen.
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.

__________

But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.
They’ll believe anything.

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What’s on a book is interesting (hey, that’s why this blog’s here!) but it’s what’s inside that really counts.  Some novels; some stories are so compelling that the message they present – whether explicitly or implicitly – demands acknowledgement; demands recognition; demands contemplation.  This is so regardless of a tale’s format, physical quality, or (sometimes being generous!) literary venue.  In some pulp fiction, there has been profundity.  In a few cheap paperbacks, there has been prescience.  And even in some works of mainstream fiction, there can be (on infrequent occasion!) meaning.  Such as, in the four examples below: Two pulps; a mainstream novel; a cheap paperback.  While they certainly merit notice of their cover art, it’s the commonality – expressed in different degrees of sophistication and style – of their understanding of the intersection between human nature, technology, and civilization, and the endurance of civilization, for which they should be recognized.

So, each post features images of the book or pulp’s cover art, followed by a whole, long, big bunch of excerpts.

Astounding Science Fiction – July, 1947 (Featuring “With Folded Hands…”, by Jack Williamson) [William Timmins]

The Temperature of Chaos: Galaxy Science Fiction – February, 1951 (Featuring “The Fireman”,  by Ray Bradbury) [Joseph A. Mugnaini; Chesley Bonestell]

The 14th Utopia: Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – August, 1952 [Charles Binger]

Year of Consent, by Kendell Foster Crossen – 1954 [Richard M. Powers]

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As for the above, so for the below: Given these four previous posts about the three books in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy…

Out of the Silent Planet – 1956 (1938) [Everett Raymond Kinstler]

Out of the Silent Planet – 1965 (1938) [Everett Bernard Symancyk]

Perelandra – 1957 (1943) [Art Sussman]

Perelandra – 1965 (1943) [Bernard Symancyk]

That Hideous Strength (The Tortured Planet) – 1958 (1945) [Richard M. Powers]

That Hideous Strength – 1965 (1945) [Bernard Symancyk]

… some worthy quotes from That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s final novel, follow below. 

But first…! 

here’s George Orwell’s review of the novel from the Manchester Evening News of August 16, 1945, published one day after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast concerning the termination of WW II.  A strange and subtle synchronicity, eh?  Orwell’s opinion of Lewis’ novel is generally positive, but his criticisms of the magical and supernatural elements in the story are, I think, unwarranted and strangely naive, especially coming from a man of such shining literary skill and moral sensitivity.  (I recently finished The Road to Wigan Pier, and, Homage to Catalonia, both of which clearly reveal Orwell’s intellectual honesty, compassion, and political wisdom.)  After all, it was Lewis’ specific and deliberate intention – having successively “segued” from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – to combine elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural as a warning about the dangers of deification of the human intellect, the seductiveness of power – and especially the desire to feel that one is among a society’s elect, and, an entirely mechanistic view of reality. 

Here’s the review…

The Scientist Takes Over

(Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251)

On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.  Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.

Mr. C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out.  For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.

In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”

Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.

His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world.  A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.

All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves.  Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.

There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy.  Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical.  Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.

It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.

One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level.  Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways.  The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.

They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth.  Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s.  The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.

Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle.  Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well.  He 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.  However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.

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This post concludes with a bunch of references to commentary about and discussion of the novel, the most recent of which are N.S. Lyons’ profound “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” – also available in podcast form via Audyo – and Rusty Reno’s “That Haunting Nihilism“.  (Admittedly, the very title of Lyons’ post inspired the leading word in this post’s title: Technonihilism.  One must give credit where credit’s due!)  

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But First, Some Thing to Watch

So, to (try!) to begin on a note of levity, what better way than to poke fun at science scientism than by Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” (Official Video – HD Remaster – April 15, 2009), at Thomas Dolby Official?    

After all, humor may be the refuge of the powerless, but it is a refuge nonetheless.

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 And so, some quotes:

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The most controversial business before the College Meeting
was the question of selling Bragdon Wood.
The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments.
They wanted a site for the building which would house this remarkable organisation.
The N.I.C.E. was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory
on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. (23)

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Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war
when old men were treated with kindness,
and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. (28)

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“And what do you think about it, Studdock?” said Feverstone.

“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point
when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police.
I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe.
The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems
and backed by the whole force of the state,
just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past.
One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did;
but what’s certain is that it can do more.” (38)

______________________________

“But it is the main question at the moment:
which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order.
It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species
for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny.
If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race
and re-condition it:
make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.” (40-41)

______________________________

“It’s the real thing at last.
A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”

“The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting – especially on the winning side.”

“And what is the first practical step?”

“Yes, that’s the real question.
As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on the side for the moment.
The second problem is our rivals on this planet.
I don’t mean only insects and bacteria.
There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable.
We haven’t really cleared the place yet.
First we couldn’t;
and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples;
and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature.
All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.”

“Go on. This interests me very much.”

“Man has got to take charge of Man.
That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest –
which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as you can.
You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge,
not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”

“What sort of things have you in mind?”

“Quite simple and obvious things, at first –
sterilization of the unfit,
liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights),
selective breeding.
Then real education, including pre-natal education.
By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense.
A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly:
whatever he or his parents try to do about it.
Of course, it’ll be mainly psychological at first.
But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”

“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”

“It’s the real thing at last.
A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.” (42)

______________________________

“Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?”

“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Miss Ironwood.

“You mean it will go away?”

“I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.”

Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face.
“Then – can’t anything be done about it?
They were horrible dreams – horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.”

“I can quite understand that.”

“Is it something that can’t be cured?”

“The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.” (64)

______________________________

“But what is this all about?” said Jane
“I want to lead an ordinary life.
I want to do my own work.
It’s unbearable!
Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”

“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.” (66)

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“I happen to believe that you can’t study men;
you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.
Because you study them,
you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music,
which is balderdash.
You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living at
not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” (71)

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They walked about that village for two hours
and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy.
They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather.
They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man
shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle,
and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her)
in earnest conversation with the postman.
It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday,
for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village.
For that reason he felt pleasure in it.
It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer
was rather more interesting than Cosser’s
and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear.
The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly
(When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.)
did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person.
All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions.
Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious,
it could not have done so,
for his education had had the curious effect
of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.
Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance;
any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.
Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work,
ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,”
He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”:
for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic
in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (87)

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“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results
and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats.
He is our problem.
We have to recondition him.
But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.
They’ll believe anything.”

“Don’t you understand anything?
Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right,
both on their toes and each terrified of the other?
That’s how we get things done.
Any opposition to the N.I.C.E.
is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers.
If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us —
to refute the enemy slanders.
Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark.
“Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”

“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle.
“Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results
and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats.
He is our problem.
We have to recondition him.
But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.
They’ll believe anything.”

“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”

“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes?
Look at what the weeklies have got away with!
Look at the Weekly Question.
There’s a paper for you.
When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don,
nothing was too good for it;
as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years?
And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated,
didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight?
Did they drop a single reader?
Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t.
He’s been conditioned.” (99-100)

______________________________

Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school,
in “outsiders” at Bracton —
the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears,
for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil.
His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone.
He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man
or even to be seen with him:
you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under.
But his own craving for companionship was now acute,
so that against his better judgment he smiled a sickly — smile and said “Hullo!” (109)

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The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik.
Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke.
He never drank nor smoked.
He would sit silent,
nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand
and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another,
without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed.
Then — perhaps once in the whole evening — something said would start him off:
usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world
and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it.
At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech,
threatening,
denouncing,
prophesying.
The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed.
There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them
which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy,
but what it was Mark did not discover.
Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular,
talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection.
“Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy.
All the miracles — shadows of things to come.
Get rid of false spirituality.
It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is.
What did the Master tell us?
Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead.
We shall.
The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world —
to distribute life without end, and punishment without end.
You shall see. Here and now.”
It was all very unpleasant. (128)

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The poster was created by John Paul Cokes and is among several conceptual illustrations for That Hideous Strength that can be viewed at Behance.  He’s also created a great series of stylistically similar illustrations for Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which – like That Hideous Strength; like so many other works of science fiction and fantasy (A.E. van Vogt, anyone?) – have long merited wokeless transfer from the printed page to screen.   

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“It was not his fault,” she said at last.
“I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”

The Director said nothing.

“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”

“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.

“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.

“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love,
but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter
was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice)
by the fact that the word Obedience —
but certainly not obedience to Mark —
came over her, in that room and in that presence,
like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, and ambiguous…

“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.

Jane stared at him, open mouthed.
There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.

“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”

“Ah, equality!” said the Director.
“We must talk of that some other time.
Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed,
because we are fallen.
Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason.
But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes,
ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer.
Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

“I always thought that was just what it was.
I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely.
“That is the last place where they are equal.
Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well.
Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it.
It is medicine, not food.
You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”

“But surely in marriage… ?”

“Worse and worse,” said the Director.
“Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition.
What has free companionship to do with that?
Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions.
Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
Do you not know how bashful friendship is?
Friends — comrades — do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”

“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.

“I see,” said the Director.
“It is not your fault.
They never warned you.
No one has ever told you that obedience — humility — is an erotic necessity.
You are putting equality just where it ought not to be.
As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt.
For the present, I must send you back.
You can come out and see us.
In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.” (147-148)

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No, no; we want geldings and oxen.
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.

“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere.
Presently we find a chemical substitute.
And then, why any natural trees?
I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth.
In fact, we clean the planet.”

“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”

“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day.
One day we shave the planet.”

“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”

“I would not have any birds either.
On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house.
When you are tired of the singing you switch them off.
Consider again the improvement.
No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”

“And why not? It is simple hygiene.
Listen, my friends.
If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it,
do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”

“Go on,” said Winter.

“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own
on your own body?
Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”

“That’s true.”

“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic?
Minerals are clean dirt.
But the real filth is what comes from organisms —
sweat, spittles, excretions.
Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example?
The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”

“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould.
“After all we are organisms ourselves.”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind.
It has done its work.
After that we want no more of it.
We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life,
like what you call the blue mould —
all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying.
We must get rid of it.
By little and little, of course.
Slowly we learn how.
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.”

“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.

“My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility.
The Fun itself begins to pass away.
Bah! I know that is not what you think.
But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid, are they not? You see?
Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism.
When she has thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible.
You would understand if you were peasants.
Who would try to work with stallions and bulls?
No, no; we want geldings and oxen.
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.” (172-173)

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“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity.
The clean mind and the clean minerals.
What are the things that most offend the dignity of man?
Birth and breeding and death.
How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” (174) Filostrato

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Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.

“For the moment, I speak only to inspire you.
I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here.
This Institute — Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations
and faster trains and curing the people of cancer.
It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer.
They are the same thing.
It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man,
the man who will not die,
the artificial man,
free from Nature.
Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (177)

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Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God.
It is a man — or a being made by man —
who will finally ascend the throne of the universe.
And rule forever.

“You are frightened?” said Filostrato.
“You will get over that.
We are offering to make you one of us.
Ahi — if you were outside, if you were mere canaglia you would have reason to be frightened.
It is the beginning of all power.
He lives forever.
The giant time is conquered.
And the giant space — he was already conquered too.
One of our company has already travelled in space.
True; he was betrayed and murdered and his manuscripts are imperfect:
we have not yet been able to reconstruct his space ship.
But that will come.”

“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik.
“Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”

“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number —
a small number — of individual men.
Those who are selected for eternal life.”

“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”

“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man.
You are not a fool, are you, my young friend?
All that talk about the power of Man over Nature —
Man in the abstract —
is only for the canaglia.
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.
There is no such thing as Man — it is a word.
There are only men.
No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man.
Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it.
The completed product may be someone else.
It may be you. It may be me.”

“A king cometh,” said Straik,
“who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment.
You thought all that was mythology, no doubt.
You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’
that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Mark.

“But it is very easy,” said Filostrato.
“We have found how to make a dead man live.
He was a wise man even in his natural life.
He lives now forever; he gets wiser.
Later, we make them live better —
for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it.
You see?
Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others.
For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not.
He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases.
They cannot refuse the little present.”

“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return.
God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”

“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”

“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past
that there will be no God also in the future?”

“Don’t you see,” said Straik,
“that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty?
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God.
It is a man — or a being made by man —
who will finally ascend the throne of the universe.
And rule forever.” (178-179)

______________________________

One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee
(who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils)
was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that —
if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man
they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent.
In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth.
Doubtless, the great beings who now so often came to him
had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England
and England from the face of the globe;
perhaps, to blot the globe itself out of existence.
But no power of that kind would be used.
Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men.
It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side,
that they had discovered the state of Merlin:
not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood,
but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place
where those things remain that are taken off thine’s mainroad,
behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields.
Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.

It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow,
in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him.
There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin:
and if they found him they would re-awake him.
The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners —
what could prevent his doing so?
A junction would be effected between two kinds of power
which between them would determine the fate of our planet.
Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries.
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time,
begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction.
Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists;
indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.
Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism
were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians.
Dreams of the far future destiny of man
were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.
The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory
were breeding a conviction that
the stilling of all deepset repugnances was the first essential for progress.
And now, all this had reached the stage
at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back
so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power.
Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done.
You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists.
Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds;
and even if they could have been made to believe,
their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt.
MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition.
It was different now.
Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening;
but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire.
What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe?
What should they regard as too obscene,
since they held that all morality
was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?

______________________________

______________________________

Other Things to Ponder

Some Things to Read

C.S. Lewis on Mere Science, by M.D. Aeschliman, at First Things, October, 1998

A Century in Books – An Anniversary Symposium, by Various Authors, at First Things, March, 2000

George Orwell’s Review of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, at Amor Mundi (Dale Carrico), February 3, 2009

Lewis vs Haldane, by David Foster, at Chicago Boyz, September 16, 2009

The More You Want, by Tom Gilson, at First Things, February 22, 2012

Ideology, Institutions, and Modern Science, by Joseph Knippenberg, at First Things, December 19, 2012

Book Review: That Hideous Strength, by C S Lewis, by David Foster, at Chicago Boyz, July 24, 2014

Good and Evil in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, by Dr. Pedro Blas González, at NewEnglishReview, December 2, 2020

Brave New World?  1984?  No, CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength is the Novel That Best Predicted Today’s World, by David Marshall, at Stream.org, September 4, 2021

Medical Mandates: A Hideous Strength, by David Solway, at Pajamas Media, September 12, 2021

“A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism“, by N.S. Lyons, at The Upheaval, November 15, 2022

“The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington“, by N.S. Lyons, at The Upheaval, January 12, 2023

That Haunting Nihilism, by Rusty R. Reno, at First Things, January, 2023

Some Things to Hear

“A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism (Old Version)”, at TheUpheaval (audyo.ai/theupheaval) (A little fast, but still audible!)

“A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism“, at TheUpheaval (audyo.ai/theupheaval)  (As above!)

“The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington: Something else does“, at  TheUpheaval (audyo.ai/theupheaval) (As above doubly!)

 

The Road Back, by Erich Maria Remarque – February, 1959 (1945) [Unknown artist…]

“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things;
“so that is the love my books at home were so full of
– of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!” 

_________________________________________

The Road Back is a book I’ve read a b o u t, but not yet actually read, having learned about it at ChicagoBoyz.  There, the book is discussed in the context of literature of First World War in general, and, the war’s impact and legacy, in intellectual and cultural terms, in particular, on the generation of soldiers who fought in it.  Much more importantly – with relevance for the world of 2022; our world – is the way in which the war altered ways of understanding, living in, and acting upon (and catastrophically against?) the world, for veterans of the conflict and especially those who came after.  

Like Signet Books’ 1959 edition of Arch of Triumph, I’ve no idea who the cover artist was for this 1959 Avon paperback.  

Akin to Remarque’s to Arch of Triumph, The Road Back was transformed to film in 1937.  The full movie, at Sir Jänskä’s YouTube channel, can be viewed here…

_________________________________________

This photo, (Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R05148, Westfront, deutscher Soldat) supposedly shows Remarque as a soldier in the German Army during World War I.  He was driven from Nazi Germany to France, and in 1939 came to America. 

_________________________________________

The Old Man decides to humor us at all costs. 
We are too many, and Willy stands there too formidably trumpeting before him. 
And who can say what these undisciplined fellows may not be doing next;
they may even produce bombs from their pockets. 
He beats the air with his arms as an archangel his wings. 
But no on listens to him.

Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. 
Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. 
There is silence. 
“Mr. Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice, “you have seen the war after your fashion –
with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. 
But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. 
We do not mean to blame you. 
We, too, thought as you did. 
But we have seen the other side since then,
and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. 
Yet we went through with it –
we went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together,
something that only showed up out there,
a responsibility perhaps,
but at any rate something of which you know nothing,
and about which there can be no speeches.”

Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. 
He passes his hand over his forehead and continues. 
“We have not come to ask a reckoning –
that would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming.  – 
But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. 
We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the “Fatherland” on our lips –
and we have returned in silence, but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. 
And now we ask you to be silent too. 
Have done with fine phrases. 
They are not fitting.
 Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. 
We saw them die. 
And the memory of it is still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are talking. 
They died for more than that.”

Now everywhere it is quiet. 
The Principal has his hands clasped together. 
“But, Breyer,” he says gently, “I – I did not mean to – “

Ludwig has done.

After a while the Principal continues. 
“But tell me then, what is it that you do want?”

We look at one another. 
What do we want? 
Yes, if it were so easy a thing to say in a sentence. 
A vague, urgent sense of it we have – but for words? 
We have no words for it, yet. 
But perhaps later we shall have.  (97-98)

_________________________________________

At last came my turn. 
The man who had been before me stumbled out and I stepped into the room. 
It was low and dark,
and reeked so of carbolic acid and sweat
that I thought it strange to see the branches of a lime tree just outside the window,
and the sun and wind playing in the fresh, green leaves
 – so withered and used up did everything in the room appear. 
There was a dish with pink water on a chair
 and in the corner a sort of camp-bed on which was spread a torn sheet. 
The woman was fat and had on a short, transparent chemise. 
She did not look at me at all, but straightway lay down. 
Only when I still did not come, did she look up impatiently;
then a flicker of comprehension showed in her spongy face. 
She perceived that I was still quite young.

I simply could not; horror seized me and a chocking nausea. 
The woman made a few gestures to rouse me, gross, repulsive gestures;
she tried to pull me to her and even smiled as she did so,
sweetly and coyly,
that I should have compassion on her
 – what was she, after all, but a poor, army mattress,
that must bed twenty and more fellows every day?
– but I laid down only the money beside her and went out hastily and down the stairs.

Jupp gave me a wink.  “Well, how was it?”

“So, so”, I answered like an old hand, and we turned to go. 
But no, we must go first to the A.M.C corporal again and make water under his eyes. 
Then we received a further injection of protargol.

“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things;
“so that is the love my books at home were so full of
– of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!” 
I rolled up my great-coat and packed my ground-sheet,
I received my ammunition and we marched out. 
I was silent and sorrowful, and I thought upon it:
how now nothing was left me of those high-flying dreams of life and of love,
but a rifle,
a fat whore
and the dull rumble out there on the sky-line whither we were now slowly marching. 
Then came darkness, and the trenches and death.  –
Franz Wagner fell that night, and we lost besides twenty-three men.  (157-158)

For Further Thought

World War One, and the Transformation of Civilization, With Relevance for Our Times, at Chicago Boyz…

… Germany’s Descent Into Naziism

… Book Review: The Road Back, by Erich Maria Remarque

… Some World War I Book Recommendations

The Road Back, at…

… Wikipedia

… GoodReads

… Internet Movie Database (1937 film)

Eric Maria Remarque, at…

… Wikipedia

… Internet Movie Database

… Good Reads

… Holocaust Encyclopedia

 

The 14th Utopia: Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – August, 1952 [Charles Binger]

“And as Paul said these things to himself,
a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand.
He was understanding now that no man could live without roots
– roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street.
In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet,
every man had his roots down deep – his home.”

________________________________________

Some works of fiction are didactic:  An author will compose a short story; a novelette; a novel, to impart a lesson or present a viewpoint about the nature of contemporary society through the vantage of a “world”, whether that world be past, present, or future; whether that world be real or purely imaginary.

Other works of fiction can be emotionally cathartic: They create moods of anticipation, dread, and fear; they manufacture a sense of unreality – a perhaps Lovecraftian unreality, one permeated by an inexpressible sense of wrongness: “That which should not be, but is!”  The goal?  To cause aN intensity of feeling through identification with a character‘s (or, characters’) predicament, and then the resolution of that predicament: hopefully for the good.  And if not for the good, at least – if there’s any compensation to be had – with stoicism and bravery.

And, then, some works of fiction can be prophetic.  Whether written a thousand, a hundred, or ten years “prior”; whether through chance; whether by calculatedly analyzing economic, ideological, sociological, and technological trends; whether by intuition born of a sixth sense, or, intuition born from the ability to view the “world” from a vantage point detached from popular culture and the mood of an age; whether ultimately by grasping (to adapt the idiom of Charles Péguy) the “mystique” of an age, some works of fiction can be – and are – windows upon the future. 

The prediction doesn’t have to be accurate – how could it be? – close enough will duly suffice.  

Case in point, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1952 novel (his first novel, at that) Player Piano, excerpts from which follow, quoted from Dell’s 1980 edition. 

Not as well known as his subsequent works, such as The Sirens of Titan or Slaughterhouse-Five (the latter having been adapted for film), the novel – especially in the year 2021 – merits consideration for Vonnegut’s degree of foresight, if not prescience, via his extrapolation of academic, sociological, and technological trends then prevalent in post WW-II America. 

And today, irrevocably prevailing?

While an in-depth description of Player Piano is beyond the immediate scope of this post (such insight is readily available at Wikipedia and GoodReads), and it has been a “few” (!) decades since I’ve read the novel), here’s a mini(mini), highly simplified summary of the work:  Vonnegut posits a scenario where in the United States, through a combination of advances in electronic technology, and, the development of a permanent academic, corporate, and government meritocracy, society has arrived at a great stagnation: A small minority (a very small minority) of corporate bureaucrats and electronic engineers has become responsible for the operation and maintenance of the technology that, in effect and reality, runs not just the United States, but the modern world.  

On a technical note, the word “tapes” appears in the text when Vonnegut alludes to the technology and algorithms that run society, probably reflective of the use of magnetic tape as a medium for data storage in the 1950s.  (Well, this was before the advent of the transistor, let alone integrated circuits.)  

As touched upon at several points in the novel, the only real activity for many citizens has become “employment” with the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps – the “Reeks and Wrecks” – or enrollment in the Army, the latter having no battles to fight.  However, rather than the violence, rebellion, or “underground” one might expect to arise in such a situation, the mood and actions of the citizenry are instead characterized by the opposite: Except for the ruling elite, society is permeated by pervasive lethargy born of resignation: a spiritual, psychological, and intellectual malaise which has vague undertones (no overtones!) of a crudely Huxleyan – not Orwellian – world (by no means a Brave world, either).  The material and physical needs of most of citizens are provided for on a nominal level, but humanity has become permanently “stuck”. 

In this, the novel has similar characteristics to Kendell Foster Crossen’s Year of Consent, published by Dell in 1954.  (Great cover art by Richard Powers.) 

Enter Doctor Paul Proteus.  (Great choice of character name by Vonnegut!)  One of the “engineers”, the 35-year-old Dr. Proteus becomes disillusioned with and alienated from his place and role in society, and becomes involved in an attempt to … well … change things.  Drastically.  Permanently.  For the better.  However (spoiler alert!), despite his best efforts and the mood of optimism and hope that pervades the novel’s latter pages (you really, really think that success will ensue), Player Piano ends upon a solidly, matter-of-factly, pessimistic note:  The organization of society, the pervasiveness and power of electronic technology, the reluctant or willing (and sometimes both) co-option of the intellectual elite by government and corporate (especially corporate) bureaucracy, and the habituation of the population to a gray nature, all combine to generate a civilizational momentum that has irrevocably solidified the structure of society. 

Change, if any, will only come in a way yet unknown.  

One recompense, though a recompense in a sense purely literary, is Player Piano’s very quality as literature.  It’s well written.  Very well written, at a level that renders its dystopian ending, well … uh … tolerable.  In any event, not only is there no easy way out, there seems to be no way “out”, at all.  And in that sense, another recompense, albeit of a symbolic nature, is that the novel’s ending is realistic and refreshingly non-Spielbergian, characterized by neither an avoidance of reality nor a romanticized view of human nature.  

Examples of cover art for three editions of the book follow below, with quotes interspersed between.  

________________________________________

Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher.
“The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians.
People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world,
more and more of their old values don’t apply any more.
People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves,
or wards of the machines.”

________________________________________

(Here’s the cover of the novel’s first (1952) printing; artist unknown.  Note that the cover shows symbols of science and technology:  An oscilloscope, a diagram of a circuit, and a “man”.  Notably, the man – whether Scribner’s design staff intended so is unknown! – is dwarfed by technology.)       


Paul nodded his thanks.
His skin began to itch, as though he had suddenly become unclean.
These were members of the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps,
in their own estimate the “Reeks and Wrecks”.
Those who couldn’t compete economically with machines had their choice,
if they had no source of income,
of the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.
The soldiers,
with their hollowness hidden beneath twinkling buttons and buckles,
crisp serge, and glossy leather,
didn’t depress Paul nearly as much as the Reeks and Wrecks did. (21-22)

____________________

At one point, Kroner raised his big hand and asked if he might make a comment.
“Just to sort of underline what you’re saying, Paul,
I’d like to point out something I thought was rather interesting.
One horsepower equals about twenty-two manpower – big manpower.
If you convert the horsepower of one of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower,
you’ll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States
at the time of the Civil War could do – and do it twenty-four hours a day.”
He smiled beatifically.
Kroner was the rock, the fountainhead of faith and pride for all in the Eastern Division. (45)

____________________

Kroner smiled, “As you say, like rabbits.
Incidentally, Paul, another interesting sidelight your father probably told you about
is how people didn’t pay much attention to this, as you call it,
Second Industrial Revolution for quite some time.
Atomic energy was hogging the headlines,
and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world.
The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to.
Remember, Baer?
And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.” (46-47)

(…and, rear cover.)

____________________

“Uh-huh,” said Paul, looking at the familiar graph with distaste.
It was a so-called Achievement and Aptitude Profile,
and every college graduate got one along with his sheepskin.
And the sheepskin was nothing, and the graph was everything.
When time for graduation came,
a machine took a student’s grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph
– the profile.
Here Bud’s graph was high for theory,
there low for administration,
here low for creativity, and so on, up and down across the page to the last quality
– personality.
In mysterious, unnamed units of measure,
each graduate was credited with having a high, medium, or low personality.
Bud, Paul saw, was a strong medium, as the expression went, personality-wise.
When the graduate was taken into the economy,
all his peaks and valleys were translated into perforations on his personal card.  (65)

____________________

“That’s pretty strong.
I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them.
When I had a congregation before the war,
I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives,
and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison.
Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy,
in the market place, and they’re finding out
– most of them
– that what’s left is just another zero.
A good bit of enough, anyway.

My glass is empty.”

Lasher sighed.  “What do you expect?” he said.
“For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market,
productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men
– and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them.
They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more.
Their whole culture’s had been shot to hell.

My glass is empty.”

“I just had it filled again,” said Finnerty.
“Oh, so you did.” Lasher sipped thoughtfully.

“These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them
– or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers.
The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible.
The people say it isn’t enough, and I suppose they’re right.”

“If they were so fond of the old system,
how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?” said Paul.

“Oh, this business we’ve got now
– it’s been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war.
Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people,
but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was.
Go to the library sometime,
and take a look at the magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II.
Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production
– know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines.
And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true.
Even then, half the people or more didn’t understand much about the machines they worked at
or the things they were making.
They were participating in the economy all right,
but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego.
And then there was all this let’s-not-shoot-Father Christmas advertising.”

“How that?” said Paul.

“You know – those ads about the American system,
meaning managers and engineers, that made America great.
When you finished one,
you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything:
forests,
rivers,
minerals,
mountains,
oil
– the works.”

“Strange business,” said Lasher.
“This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers,
the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy way:
all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men
hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days,
which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning.
Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts
the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them.
Yesterday’s snow job business becomes today’s sermon.”  (78-79)

____________________

And the personnel machines saw to it
that all governmental jobs of any consequence were filled by top-notch civil servants.
The more Halyard thought about Lynn’s fat pay check, the madder he got,
because all the gorgeous dummy had to do
was read whatever was handed to him on state occasions:
to be suitable awed and reverent,
as he said, for all the ordinary,
stupid people who’d elected him to office,
to run wisdom from somewhere else through that resonant voicebox
and between those even, pearl choppers.  (104)

(The novel’s first paperback edition (November, 1954) published by Bantam Books under the title Utopia 14, with cover art by Charles Binger.  The cover scene is so general as to be unrelated to any specific event in the novel.  On one side and receding into the distance, an ambiguous mass of struggling humanity, with no individual distinct from another.  On the other, a man stares forward contemplatively; indifferently.  The backdrop?  Towers, buildings, platforms, and perhaps a factory: A vague metropolis against a sunset.)  

____________________

“Um,” said Mr. Haycox apathetically.
“What [sic] do you keep working so smoothly?”
Doctor Paul smiled modestly.
“I spent seven years in the Cornell Graduate School of Realty
to qualify for a Doctor of Realty degree and get this job.”
“Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?” said Mr. Haycox.
“I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree,” said Doctor Paul coolly.
“My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year
– eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins.”
“Real-estate salesman,” said Mr. Haycox.
He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond,
waiting for them to say something worth his attention.
When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go.
“I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, chickenshit,” he said.
“When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me in the barn shoveling my thesis.”  (133-134)

____________________

He tried again:
“In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect,
traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them
– the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”  (151)

____________________

“That’s just it: things haven’t always been that way.
It’s new, and it’s people like us who’ve brought it about.
Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work
or something he could trade for what he wanted.
Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer.
All most people can do is hope to be given something.”  (159)

(And, the rather simple rear cover.)

____________________

“But he was great, and nobody’d argue about that,
but do you think he could have been great today, in this modern day and age?
Wheeler?  Elm Wheeler?
You know what he would be today?
A Reek and a Wreck, that’s all.
The war made him, and this life would of killed him.”

“Used to be there was a lot of damn fool things a dumb bastard could do to be great,
but the machines fixed that.
You know, used to be you could go to sea or a big clipper ship or a fishing ship
and be a big hero in a storm.
Or maybe you could be a pioneer and go out west and lead the people
and make trails and chase away Indians and all that.
Or you could be a cowboy, or all kinds of dangerous things, and still, be a dumb bastard.

“Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs,
and the dumb bastards get tucked away in big bunches of prefabs
that look like the end of a game of Monopoly, or in barracks,
and there’s nothing for them to do but set there
and kind of hope for a big fire
where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody
and run out with a baby in their hands.
Or maybe hope
– though they don’t say so out loud because the last one was so terrible
– for another war.
Course, there isn’t going to be another one.

“And, oh, I guess machines have made things a lot better.
I’d be a fool to say they haven’t,
though there’s been plenty who say they haven’t,
and I can see what they mean, all right.
It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs,
where a man could be true to himself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones.
And I guess I’m just about the end of a race, standing here on my own two feet.”  (178-179)

____________________

“Paul, your father tells me you’re real smart.”
Paul had nodded uncomfortably.
“That’s good, Paul, but that’s not enough.”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t be bluffed.”

“No, sir, I won’t.”

“Everybody’s shaking in their boots, so don’t be bluffed.”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per-cent of what he knows in six weeks.  The other ten per cent is decoration.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Show me a specialist,
and I’ll show you a man who’s so scared he’s dug a hole for himself to hide in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul.
It’s enough to make you cry to see how had most people are at their jobs.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Want to be rich, Paul?”

“Yes, sir – I guess so.  Yes, sir.”

“All right.  I got rich, and I told you ninety per cent of what I know about it.
The rest is decoration.  All right?”  (198)

(One of the several paperback editions published by Dell, this copy is a 1980 imprint.  Hard to tell if the cover design is a painting, or, a sculpture or casting; I think the latter.  Faces – similar faces – embedded in clear acrylic or glass.  Looks like a human pinball machine, where the pinballs are frozen in space.)

____________________

And as Paul said these things to himself,
a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand.
He was understanding now that no man could live without roots
– roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street.
In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet,
every man had his roots down deep – his home.
A lump grew in his throat, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
Doctor Paul Proteus was saying goodbye forever.  (205)

____________________

“Public relations,” said Halyard.
“Please, what are public relations?” said Khashdrahr.
“That profession,” said Halyard, quoting by memory from the Manual,
“that profession specializing in the cultivation,
by applied psychology in mass communication media,
of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions,
without being offensive to anyone of importance,
and with the continued stability of the economy and society its primary goal.”  (209)

____________________

“…  He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry.
That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it.”
“I don’t follow.  Isn’t his brother happy?”
“Utterly and always happy.
And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted;
that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are,
where they’re going,
and why they’re going there.
That was the trouble with his book.
It raised those questions, and, was rejected.
So he was ordered into public-relations duty.”  (212)

(And, rear cover.)

____________________

Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher.
“The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians.
People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world,
more and more of their old values don’t apply any more.
People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves,
or wards of the machines.”  (251)

The Revolt of the Masses, by José Ortega y Gasset – 1950 (1930) [Robert Jonas]

A very colorful cover by Robert Jonas, for a very serious work…

“…experimental science is one of the most unlikely products of history.
Seers, priests, warriors and shepherds have abounded in all times and places.
But this fauna of experimental man apparently requires for its production
a combination of circumstances more exceptional than those that engender the unicorn.”

“The civilisation of the XIXth Century is, then,
of such a character that it allows the average man to take his place in a world of superabundance,
of which he perceives only the lavishness of the means at his disposal,
nothing of the pains involved. 
He finds himself surrounded by marvelous instruments,
healing medicines,
watchful governments,
comfortable privileges. 
On the other hand,
he is ignorant how difficult it is to invent those medicines and those instruments
and to assure their production in the future;
he does not realise how unstable is the organisation of the State
and is scarcely conscious to himself of any obligations. 
This lack of balance falsifies his nature,
vitiates it in its very roots,
causing him to lose contact with the very substance of life,
which is made up of absolute danger,
is radically problematic.”

Reference

Jose Ortega y Gasset photo – Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)

Astounding Science Fiction – July, 1947 (Featuring “With Folded Hands…”, by Jack Williamson) [William Timmins]

William Timmins’ straightforward and somewhat uninspiring covert art, though visually consistent with and appropriate for “With Folded Hands…”, belies the depth, power, and literary quality of Jack Williamson’s 1947 story. In 1954, it was expanded as Galaxy Science Fiction Novel number 21, under the title The Humanoids, with cover art by Edward Emshwiller.      

I discovered Williamson’s tale years ago, within “Volume IIA” of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

The story was one of fifty science fiction stories adapted by Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts for the NBC 1950-1951 radio program Dimension X, and broadcast on April 15, 1950.  You can listen to the program here, at the American Radio Classics YouTube channel, where, oddly, it’s listed under the category of “comedy”.

“Comedy?!”  Nooo…  No.  It’s not a comedy.

I was reminded of Williamson’s story in the mid-1990s after reading Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, which I found to be eerily – nay, chillingly! – prescient (albeit now, 69 years too early…), imbued with a sense of compassion, and, composed with an almost poetic sense of language (though obviously not poetry, per se!).  Above all, the “tone” of the book is one of deep humility, and, a profound, refreshing absence of the ideologically motivated hubris that passes for intellectuality, so characteristic of the current age.  In this, the book’s resemblance to Sir Roger Penrose’s works on the origin and nature of consciousness is striking.

Anyway…  I read With Folded Hands once again, and found that Williamson’s story had lost neither its depth nor its impact despite the passage of time.  (Other science fiction stories?  Not always so much.)

It’s interesting that Williamson’s story and Wiener’s book appeared within three years of one another.  This may attest to a commonality of thought about the implications and effect – viewed from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, the Second World War having ended only a few years earlier – of the intersection of and anticipation of several technological and social trends: Automation, the eventuality of artificial intelligence and machine learning (though I doubt those phrases were conceived of as such, at the time), and computer networks (the humanoids are in constant real-time communication with one another, after all), upon the economic and social “place” of men, both individually and collectively.  

Excerpts from Norbert Wiener’s book (1973 Discus edition) follow, a little further down this post..

“At your service,” Mr. Underhill.”  Its blind steel eyes stared straight ahead, but it was still aware of him.  “What’s the matter, sir?  Aren’t you happy?”

(Since creating this post in May of 2019, I’ve acquired a copy of the July, 1947, Astounding, in much better condition than the original – which is displayed at the “bottom” of this post.  The “new” copy, minus chipped edges and missing corners, is shown below…)

Underhill felt cold and faint with terror.
His skin turned clammy.
A painful prickling came over him.
His wet hand tensed on the door handle of the car,
but he restrained the impulse to jump and run.
That was folly.
There was no escape.
He made himself sit still.

“You will be happy, sir,” the mechanical promised him cheerfully.
“We have learned how to make all men happy under the Prime Directive.
Our service will be perfect now, at last.

Even Mr. Sledge is very happy now.”

Underhill tried to speak, but his dry throat stuck.
He felt ill.
The world turned dim and gray.
The humanoids were prefect – no question of that.
They had even learned to lie, to secure the contentment of men

He knew they had lied.
That was no tumor they had removed from Sledge’s brain,
but the memory,
the scientific knowledge,
and the bitter disillusion of their own creator.
Yet he had seen that Sledge was happy now.

He tried to stop his own convulsive quivering.

“A wonderful operation!”
His voice came forced and faint.
“You know Aurora has had a lot of funny tenants,
but that old man was the absolute limit.
They very idea that he had made the humanoids,
that he knew how to stop them! I always knew he must be lying!”

Stiff with terror, he made a weak and hollow laugh.

“What is the matter, Mr. Underhill?”

The alert mechanical must have perceived his shuddering illness.

“Are you unwell?”

“No, there’s nothing the matter with me,” he gasped desperately.
“Absolutely nothing!
I’ve just found out that I’m perfectly happy under the Prime Directive.
Everything is absolutely wonderful.”
His voice came dry and hoarse and wild.
“You won’t have to operate on me.”
 The car turned off the shining avenue,
taking him back to the quiet splendor of his prison.
His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees.

There was nothing left to do.

( – Jack S. Williamson – )

____________________

Illustration by Hubert Rogers, for Jack Williamson’s story “And Searching Mind” (Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1948 – Part III of III) (p. 118)

______________________________

The Human Use of Human Beings
by Norbert Wiener
Avon Books – (1950) 1973

In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children
we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life,
such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle,
it had better be left there;
that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife
will end up exactly where he started;
that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for.
These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life
which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess,
and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.

“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal,
or to those machines of flesh and blood

which are bureaus
and vast laboratories
and armies
and corporations,

we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”

I have said that the modem man,
and especially the modern American,
however much “know-how” he may have, has very little “know-what.”
He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions
without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.
In doing so, he will put himself sooner or later in the position of the father
in W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, who has wished for a hundred pounds,
only to find at his door the agent of the company for which his son works,
tendering him one hundred pounds as a consolation for his son’s death at the factory.
Or again, he may do it in the way of the Arab fisherman in the One Thousand and One Nights,
when he broke the Seal of Solomon on the lid of the bottle which contained the angry djinnee.

Let us remember that there are game-playing machines
both of The Monkey’s Paw type and of the type of the Bottled Djinnee.
Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions,
if it does not possess the power of learning,
will be completely literal-minded.
Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct,
unless we have previously examined the laws of its action,
and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us!
On the other hand,
the machine like the djinnee which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning,
will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made,
or will be acceptable to us.
For the man who is not aware of this,
to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine,
whether it can learn or not,
is to cast his responsibility to the winds,
and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.

Reference

Bova, Ben (Editor), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame – Volume IIA, Avon Books, New York, N.Y., 1973

____________________

Original cover image, from May of 2019…

Regeneration, by Pat Barker – 1991 (April, 1992) [Robert Clyde Anderson]

“Robert, if you had any real courage you wouldn’t acquiesce the way you do.”

Graves flushed with anger.
“I’m sorry you think that.
I should hate to think I’m a coward.
I believe in keeping my word.
You agreed to serve, Siegfried.
Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions,
or even to keep quiet about them,
but you agreed to serve,
and if you want the respect of the kind of people you’re trying to influence –
the Bobbies and the Tommies –
you’ve got to be seen to keep your word.
They won’t understand if you turn round in the middle of the war and say
“I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.”
To them, that’s just bad form.
They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman –
and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.”

– Pat Barker –