That Hideous Strength Book Review
Most people have the misconception about Clive Staple Lewis that he was a just children’s author who penned the Narnia series. While he did write that excellent series the perception that he was just another young adult writer is as fantastical as those books. C.S. Lewis was one of the greatest intellectuals to come out of Britain in the last 100 years. He was an Oxford Don who is considered in his field to be the one of the greatest, if not the greatest medievalist scholar of all time. In addition to his university work Lewis was an atheist convert who was converted and became a devout Anglican and penned some of the greatest Christian apologetic works. His mission, as he grew into the role of a lay theologian, was to communicate the highly intellectual Christian truth for the average reader. As such his books have a very clear and flowing style. As one reads C.S. Lewis the way he is able to write about very complex and intellectual things in a clear and simple to understand way is a mark of one who has complete mastery over the subject. C.S. Lewis was also a great debater, the president of the Socratic Club, and avid anti-communist. There are stories of him coming to the debate hall and the socialist speakers leaving rather than face him. As such C.S. was an intellectual force to be reckoned with, his connections and academic career provided him with the framework to make keen observations which he presents to us in his work That Hideous Strength.
That Hideous Strength, or THS for short, is a dystopian science fiction and fantasy novel which is the final book in Lewis’ Space Trilogy. It similar to, and more accurate than, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 in that it describes how a one world dystopian government is brought about and rules. Though THS is a science fantasy it is written as grounded in the real world so that when the reader looks past the fantasy he sees the thoughts of Lewis the Oxford Don on the nature of a one world dystopia. Thus, this essay will not focus on the fantasy elements of the story, but on Lewis’ thoughts about how a one world dystopic future will unfold.
The plot of THS follows two people Jane the wife of Mark Studdock, and Mark Studdock a young progressive professor at Bracton College who is selected to join the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, NICE for short (an apt C.S. Lewis Pun on the nature of socialism as will be shown). The book starts with Mark’s recruitment into the NICE (The NICE is later revealed to be a non-governmental organization with immense international power) by showing the inner workings of the college’s progressive element which is full of manipulative, cutthroat and dishonest people who have a deep conviction that their sliminess is a virtue for achieving the greater good of a new social order. One cannot help but think that C.S. Lewis is inserting his own experience as an academic working with these people into the book. Mark is recruited into the NICE by these people promising Mark that the NICE is where the real work of creating a progressive society is taking place, A society of the kabbalistic Adam Kadmon:
“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 one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite” (Lord Feverstone)
“What sort of things have in in mind?” (Mark)
“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 the 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 have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to the biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain. . .” (Lord Feverstone)
“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.”
“That’s my trouble. Don’t think it’s false modesty, but I haven’t yet seen how I can contribute.”
“No, but we have. You are what we need: a Trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write.”
“You don’t mean you want me to write up all this?”
“No. We want you to write it down---to camouflage it.”
In the above passage Lewis’ shows us all the core elements of what a communist dystopia is: The craving of weak men for absolute power, technocracy, racial dysgenics, human experimentation, creation of the new man a slave without free will, how progressives will leap at the opportunity to be evil and stroke their ego’s that they are good people, and of course lying and propaganda which has always been an integral part of the communist plan. Lewis even had the foresight to predict Elon’s brain chips here.
Once Mark arrives at the NICE he is kept in the dark about what he is supposed to do, and he is manipulated along in a process of initiation within its secret circles. Mark quickly finds himself out of favor with the NICE after he tries to find out any concrete details about what it is that they do. The NICE is revealed to be an NGO which is a highly secretive society that operates as a compartmentalized organization. Its members are told what to do at informal social gatherings and are directed by innuendos, intrigue, plots and counter plots. Circles within circles and layers within layers. In this portrayal of the NICE Lewis’ accurately describes how left wing and secret society’s function and operate. Finally, after some time at the institute Mark is given a real task where he is to manipulate the popular opinion through controlled opposition and usher in a power grab by the NICE which uses a false flag event.
“I’ve no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles,” he said. “And if I had, I’d want to know a good deal more about the politics of the N.I.C.E. before I went in for that sort of thing.”
“Haven’t you been told that it’s strictly non-political?”
I’ve been told so many things that I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels,” said Mark. “But I don’t see ho one’s going to start with a newspaper stunt (which is about what this come to) without being political. Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?”
“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “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 are still in the nursery, lovely,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realized that it is 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 Mayfair 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.”
“And all the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riot,” said Miss Hardcastle. “That means it must be handed in to the D.D. by six tomorrow morning, at latest.”
“But how are we to write it tonight if the thing doesn’t even happen til tomorrow at the earliest?”
Everyone burst out laughing.
“You’ll never manage publicity that way, Mark” said Feverstone. “You surely don’t need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it!”
Interestingly in the above passages we glean the gem that it is the educated class that is brainwashed. It reminds us of the great covid scam where people were fiercely arguing over the different biological mechanisms of the spike protein, whether or not it was a bioweapon, vaccines vs. Ivermectin, all the while oblivious to the fact the thing didn’t even exist. Meanwhile the real work of the communist NGO’s, like the fictitious NICE, was advanced.
As Mark initiation progresses, he comes into contact with several characters who are archetypes of various progressive elements. First is the Deputy Director Whither, he is a verbose man who speaks a lot of nonsensical jargon. Whither is the leader of the NICE and he rules the organization through innuendo and subterfuge, never allowing himself to be pinned down by any definitive statement. In such a way do we see how progressive organizations are modeled in the real world. They spam out a lot of nonsense words which if one reads it closely he may find whatever it is that confirms his viewpoint. Yet the real meaning of what is being communicated is always the same: communism. There is a striking similarity between how Whither speaks and the modernist language of the second Vatican Council. Furthermore, as a note in Whither we see the personification of the liberal “NPC” type a man who is not really there and only functions as a sort of ghost, spewing out what he has through years of indoctrination been programmed to believe.
There is professor Filistrano who is a grotesquely overweight biochemical genius. Yet Filostrano only views life as mechanical and his work is dedicated to simplifying life until it at last becomes sterile. He performs ghastly experiments without thought of the pain and suffering which they produce. In him we see progressive scientism which seeks to reduce living to a mechanized technocratic grey existence.
Reverend Straik is a man who is high up in the NICE organization and believes that in every man is God. That our mission like Christ our mission is to become God himself. A new man who will evolve and transcend into Godhood. He is a figure whom C.S. Lewis does a very good job of accurately portraying what the New Age movement teaches, yet at the same time making it sound as ridiculous as it is.
Fairy Hardcastle is the chief of the institute’s police who is of course a lesbian. How Lewis had the foresight to predict lesbians would oversee the police in 1945 England is beyond me, but he did.
Finally, Dr. Frost is a man who is at the very top of the NICE. He is the only other person besides the Whither who is a full initiate. As Whither is effusive, blathering and stretched out Frost is the polar opposite. He is sharpened to a point and utterly logical and reductionist so that his logic has become deeply flawed. Dr. Frost represents the aspect of communism which seeks to eradicate all beauty from the world. In one of the more climactic scenes Frost takes Mark into the “objectivity room” where he is surrounded by paintings that have distorted proportions and are intentionally ugly and confusing. This room has been designed by Frost to destroy the concept of normal and good in people and there is a religious theme to the paintings that is distinctly anti-Christian. In Frost we see a man who as the physical description of an elder Trotsky and a characterization of Adorno, Freud, and Marcuse.
Mark: Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn’t it just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it? I mean-Damn it all if it’s only a bit of wood, why do anything about it?”
Frost: “that is superficial. If you had been brought up in a non-Christian society, you would no be asked to do this. Of course, it is a superstition; but it is that particular superstition which has been pressed upon our society for a great any centuries. It can be experimentally shown that it still forms a dominant system in the subconscious of many individuals whose conscious thought appears to be wholly liberated. An explicit action in the reverse direction is therefore a necessary step towards complete objectivity. It is not a question for a priori discussion. We find it in practice that it cannot be dispensed with.”
Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics: (The point of social theory is to) “Demonstrate the disjointedness, the untruth, of totality.”
Marcuse: “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.”
“The work of art, must at its breaking point, expose the ultimate nakedness of man’s (and nature’s) existence, stripped of all the paraphernalia of monopolistic mass culture, completely and utterly alone, in the abyss of destruction, despair and freedom. The most revolutionary work of art will be, at the same time, the most esoteric, the most anti-collectivist one, for the goal of the revolution is the free individual.” Herbert Marcuse, Art and Liberation
Ironically, we see in the portrayal of Frost that this line of revolutionary reasoning is contradictory because in both he and Whither have both lost their humanity and become will-less creatures. Thus, by destroying everything in a search for objectivity, or transcendence (the revolution in Marcuse’s case), they have destroyed the object i.e. the person, which the revolution is for.
Eventually it is revealed to Mark that the Institute is actually being directed by what are the NICE calls Macrobes: advanced alien beings who have transcended physical reality and exist on a higher plane of reality than humans do. These Macrobes represent the key to unlocking man’s, really the initiates of the institute’s, power to transcend and become immaterial. The NICE recognizes that they are not necessarily good, in the classical sense, but that is because they offer power that is what makes the act of following them good.
Frost: “that is pure Chimera. The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of the mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for the Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.”
Following this revelation it becomes clear that the macrobes are in fact the driving power behind the NICE, coordinating and guiding all the members. That the subtle influence of the macrobes is what gives the members the surety they need to make their increasingly bizarre and contradictory statements. They are the glue which holds the organization together and without which it would fall apart. Eventually at the end of the book it is revealed to Mark that the Macrobes are in fact demons. All the machinisms of the Institute, which has become a global power over governments, are in fact controlled through its members by demonic forces.
Of the whole book this is the keenest insight that international communism is united against the West by supernatural forces. This force transcends their ranks and gives them their purpose and malice towards all things which are good. It is the guiding power behind all their works. It is what binds the liberal and the progressive to their insane and wicked beliefs, without the spiritual element their beliefs would become tribal and fall apart under their own absurdities. The demonic force, its subtle influence, is truly the all-seeing eye which rests atop the mystery pyramid of iniquity.
It would be unfortunate if we did not cover the other half of the book, which deals with the antithesis of the NICE. This is Jane’s story, which this article will not delve too deeply into only to touch upon a few key points. In comparison to NICE, the organization that Jane becomes involved in is strictly hierarchical, there are no secrets, and everyone knows their place and duties. Yet while it seems contradictory it is a very free organization where its members have the right to freely say and do what they want unlike the NICE which is very democratic, yet tyrannical and secretive.
In the final chapter Lewis goes at length to describe what can only be described as the spirit of the country. That each country has a good national spirit, a bad national spirit and the zeitgeist of the real country is caught in the middle between the two. He describes this in his book as Logres (the good mythical Arthurian kingdom), Britain, and England.
“What is a haunting?” asked Camilla.
“How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthus, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney-and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”
Here Lewis makes the observation that when the Left criticizes our countries for the past evils we have done they are critiquing our nations for the evil which on the most fundamental level is the very philosophy of leftism. He then follows up on this observation later in the conversation by writing:
“You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardized- some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus (earth) depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China-why, then it will be spring.”
And I think that is a good place to end this essay.