“Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin.”
--Karl Krauss
Satan presents himself as an angel of light; or, as Elder Anderson has warned us, beware the evil behind the smiling eyes. Many things presented to us in the postmodern wreck of our society seem, at first blush, as virtuous, lovely, and of good report. And yet, they are rotten inside, hiding depravity, debauchery, and worse. Freedom, at least how freedom is understood these days, is one of those ideas. Modern freedom hides a dark and insidious evil. It hides a triumphant will that leads us down the path to darkness. To see why, let us begin our journey with a brief detour and later take with us a familiar Virgil: C.S. Lewis.
In 2017, Samuel Harris Altman, of OpenAI fame, wrote an article called “The Merge” in which he suggested what the future of humanity would look like. Humanity as we know it would be replaced with human beings that have merged with AI. He thinks it's already begun– with all of us, me included, glued to our phones. And he thinks we will be the first generation to be able to design our descendants. This, he describes, is our best case scenario. [1] How comforting.
So what does this have to do with C.S. Lewis? He wrote the most prescient books on the ideology that Altman espouses and that now reigns supreme among the Silicon Valley elite: transhumanism, though he did not use that name. This ideology holds that human beings should redesign themselves to turn themselves into posthuman beings, just as Samuel Altman suggested. It believes that mankind must make itself its own gods and work to achieve immortality through science and technology. It is Prometheus searching for fire, the snake whispering in the garden that “we shall be as gods,” or the promises of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century to redesign mankind and usurp Deity. It is a frightening ideology. And the ideology is not confined to OpenAI. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and other Silicon Valley luminaries subscribe to it as well. Long before our era, C.S. Lewis saw it coming. He wrote two books, That Hideous Strength, and The Abolition of Man that examine the transhumanist agenda and expose its moral and intellectual failings. These books provide important insights for avoiding the pitfalls of this modern ideology. To begin our exploration, let us turn to first understanding That Hideous Strength.
Introducing the N.I.C.E
That Hideous Strength narrates a group of fictional scientists attempting to redesign the human race and create a new, godlike being. Indeed, the whole work highlights how these scientists create what is, in effect, a replacement religion for Christianity. The main characters of the novel are a married couple Jane and Mark, with Mark working at the fictional University of Edgestow. A new institution is coming to town–the N.I.C.E–and Mark, as a sociologist and a member of the progressive element at the university, supports it wholeheartedly. The N.I.C.E is well, to quote the novel:
“I should have thought the objects of the N.I.C.E.were pretty clear. It’s the first attempt to take applied science seriously from the national point of view. The difference in scale between it and anything we’ve had before amounts to a difference in kind. The buildings alone, the apparatus alone! Think what it has done already for industry. Think how it is going to mobilise all the talent of the country — and not only scientific talent in the narrower sense. Fifteen departmental directors at fifteen thousand a year each! Its own legal-staff! Its own police, I’m told! Its own permanent staff of architects, surveyors, engineers! The thing’s stupendous!” (HS 31)
As Mark is pulled into the center of the N.I.C.E, he finds an increasingly frightening institution. Nothing is as it appears. As Filostrafio, an Italian physiologist explains, “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” (HS 202).
Mark journeys to the heart of the institute, and finds a severed head of a recently guillotined French scientist that has been kept alive. The Head is the true head of the institute, and the scientists believe they have returned it to life by their own efforts. Straik, a deranged ex-clergyman, explains the head like follows:
“There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. And there are no reservations. The Head has sent for you. Do you understand — the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: tonight you shall see what it symbolised. This is real Man at last, and it claims all our allegiance (HS 203).”
Something the reader should keep in mind is the religious quality of the N.I.C.E. These secular ideas draw from the Christian tradition. The idea of overcoming death, as explained by Straik, obviously alludes to the resurrection and the belief that science can replace the resurrection and allow mankind to achieve immortality by its own ends. And then the idea of the destruction of nature and its transformation into something else alludes to the idea of a New Heaven and a New Earth, the apocalyptic remaking of the world. In this case, nature will be replaced with a new, technologically created anti-nature. The N.I.C.E is expounding a secularized, heretical version of Christianity. In the contemporary world, a similar idea can be found in the writing of Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google and a leading transhumanist exponent. He believes that the singularity, when humans merge with technology and turn into godlike beings, is just around the corner, allowing humanity to expand into the cosmos. [2] Like Kurzweil, the founders of N.I.C.E dream of giving humanity godlike powers. This deification also recalls religious rhetoric. Deification, despite the protests of evangelical Christians, exists throughout the history of Christianity. “God became man, so that man might become a God,” says Athanasius. And of course, it parallels the thought of Joseph Smith which held that our destiny was to become as our Heavenly Parents are now.
So, why care about this? Why care about all the quasi-religious rhetoric and the desire for the unlimited power of humanity to remake itself? Silicon Valley billionaires tend to be egomaniacal and dream for total power. What’s new? All billionaires for that matter tend to imagine themselves as omnipotent, old news, we should laugh and move on. On one level, this is right. Nature and Nature’s God have a way of making fools of our vain delusions. Great and spacious buildings without foundations fall, and as all the old Jewish saying goes “man plans and God laughs.”
Obviously, I don’t agree. What interests me is how the desire to become as gods and transcend human limitations intersects with broader American culture. I believe that what is striking about the transhumanist rhetoric is not how distinct it is from modern America but how similar. But to understand why, we have to turn to one of the great essays of the 20th century, also by Lewis: “The Abolition of Man.”
Freedom and Moral Subjectivism
“The Abolition of Man” was written around the same time as That Hideous Strength. “The Abolition of Man” was published in 1943, That Hideous Strength published in 1945. Both clearly involve the same ideas. “The Abolition of Man” functions as a guide to That Hideous Strength and helps us understand Lewis’ concerns and themes. As nonfiction, it explores what happens when all moral norms are abolished for the sake of reason and how radical subjectivism leads to tyranny.
The essay starts by considering a seemingly innocuous textbook, The Green Book. Lewis reflects on a short comment made by the authors that “when the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word.” [3] Lewis considers the schoolboy who has read that passage. And he remarks that “The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him (AM 2).”
Lewis thinks that the school boy is being taught that all feelings are irrational. They are not connected to any objective reality, but part of the pure, expressive aspect of the self. It is silly to judge anything on the basis of this emotional reaction. This contrasts with the ancient view that “believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt” (AM 14). Lewis refers to the broad sense, across cultures, that man must conform to the order of nature, the Tao. In essence, he argues there is a crosscultural sense that moral standards exist outside of ourselves, and that humans must conform their lives to such standards. And he argues there is enough concordance between cultures to suggest that such standards really exist. This is his idea of the Tao. With modern, rationalist critique, the heart is severed from the head, and our judgements and emotions are no longer tutored towards proper ends.
The consequences of this education are people who have no heartfelt belief in virtue. As Lewis puts it, “But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest— the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (AM 24).
In order to be virtuous, we can’t convince ourselves on a purely intellectual level. We have to feel it in our hearts, while at the same time knowing it in our heads. Otherwise, our base appetites will dominate our intellect, preventing us from mastering ourselves and conforming our lives to moral law. As Lewis will discuss later, the rationalist critique of sentiments means that instead of being more rational, we will be more base. We will simply conform our lives to our passions and appetites.
America the Wretched
I would like to pause now and pull us out of 1943 and consider the wretched state of our souls in the year 2025. I say wretched because modern America is a society well on the path that Lewis laid out. Americans no longer conform to the moral order of the universe, but instead believe that all values are self-created. The self transcends any attempt to constrain it, discipline it, or suggest that its appetites may be less than wholesome.
Consider how the debunking of the moral order has proceeded in American society. Let us start with the principle of non-discrimination. In the original sense, nondiscrimination focused on undoing the appalling treatment African-Americans received in this country. But since then, it has evolved into a general climate of opinion. In 2019, the Supreme Court ratified the Bostock decision, adding homosexuals and transgenders to the Civil Rights Act, ratifying the legitimate public interest to prevent society from discriminating (in other words, passing judgement) on individuals sex lives. The current accepted philosophy is that people need to be free, and their decisions in their personal life cannot be judged one way or another. Hence, discrimination and judgement go hand and hand, and so judging them would be discriminatory and wrong. Here, the visceral emotions that Lewis describes are seen as mere results of social conditioning. Your feelings on this matter are irrational, and you need to tolerate anything as all such values are merely empty vessels of your personal idiosyncrasies. Say a grandmother were to discover that her grandson was engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior, and she, being a Bible-reading, God-fearing Christian, objected to this behavior. Likely she would be ridiculed, but also her judgement would be seen as intolerable and awful. From non-discrimination, we get the constant drumbeat of inclusion that serves as a debunking of traditional values. Everyone needs to be included. And again, to a certain extent, this is true. It should give us no pleasure to watch people humiliated and cast out. That being said, the demand for inclusion is also a demand for recognition, and for accepting individuals on an equal footing, regardless of their moral character. And that requires us to concede that our feelings on this subject have no actual bearing on the reality of moral judgement. All values must go, and be replaced with personal self-expression.
Which leads me to the largest problem of America: the ideology of freedom. Americans love freedom. We are great because we are free. And freedom means the ability to do whatever we want, exalted by the whim of our passions and desires. When modern people speak of freedom, they mean the unfettered ability to do whatever they want. No one, not the government, not their parents, not their society, not their religious authorities, can tell them what to do. Freedom is the pure, spontaneous exercise of the will, the pleasure of extending oneself and acting upon other things, of exercising dominion. Freedom means to be a tyrant unto oneself. Choice is exalted above the heavens, and all duties must be chosen, not thrust upon us. When desires come, a modern person follows them. When others try to constrain them, they assert their rights. When they vote, they vote for the person on the side of liberty. Modern freedom really means power.
Likely, many modernists and liberals will object to this characterization. There are still people who fight for causes beyond themselves. Environmentalism is all the rage, and the campaign against Israel rages. True. But this does not disrupt the fundamental points. These protests can be viewed as more matters of personal self-expression, of showing how virtuous and wonderful the protestors are. They do not come from command or obedience. Modern man has turned moral rigor into personal expression.
As David Bentley Hart said: “This is not to say that—sentimental barbarians that we are—we do not still invite moral and religious constraints upon our actions; none but the most demonic, demented, or adolescent among us genuinely desires to live in a world purged of visible boundaries and hospitable shelters. Thus this man may elect not to buy a particular vehicle because he considers himself an environmentalist; or this woman may choose not to have an abortion midway through her second trimester, because the fetus, at that point in its gestation, seems to her too fully formed, and she—personally—would feel wrong about terminating “it.” But this merely illustrates my point: we take as given the individual’s right not merely to obey or defy the moral law, but to choose which moral standards to adopt, which values to uphold, which fashion of piety to wear and with what accessories.” [4]
(As an aside, religious believers should be wary of the alleged tolerance that secularists offer them. Often, they are sincere when they say that everyone should be tolerated in doing what they want. However, this subtly redefines religion along secularist lines. Religion is seen as a matter of personal self-expression, freedom, and choice but not of duty and command. It involves you and what you like, and the transcendent God is cut out. This is antithetical to Christianity and specifically the Restored Church. We believe in duties and commandments.)
The Conquest of Nature and The Conquest of Mankind
Lewis does not explicitly say that freedom is the problem. But his views certainly imply it, at least with regards to the freedom of America in 2025. Thus, Lewis inquires what will happen now that traditional values have been debunked. It is not a pretty sight, and it will lead, paradoxically, to a regime of total control.
Lewis sees that morals themselves will collapse when the rationalist debunking occurs. No appeal to instinct will work, nor will any appeal to benevolence. You cannot get anywhere without a proposition that states you ought to do something when we know all such propositions are simply personal self-expression. Drawing on the broader triumph of the natural sciences to “conquer nature,” he suggests that “many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants. Why not this? …You threaten us with some obscure disaster if we step outside it: but we have been threatened in that way by obscurantists at every step in our advance, and each time the threat has proved false. You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao. Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them . . . “ (AM 43).
Here is the triumph of the will. Here is the final dream of humanism and modernity. Dostoevsky referred to atheism as a collective project of human self-deification. And so, the conquest of nature, that perhaps started innocuously enough with a program of understanding nature through the application of calculus, has reached a culmination in the idea that our own values can be created at will. And so, we will step into the realm of the Gods and make of ourselves what we will. Or, as Straik, the former clergyman in That Hideous Strength, puts it, “Don’t you see…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” (HS 205).
I mentioned the transhumanism of Silicon Valley and the nihilistic obsession with freedom and nondiscrimination on the other hand. The two are connected; transhumanism is simply the end result of the cult of freedom. After all, becoming gods through technology is imagined as the final liberation from all constraints. And over the past few years, the connective tissue has been built, often by the LGBTQ+ movement. The legalization of gay marriage, for example, transforms an institution based on restraint and sacrifice into an institution based on satisfying adult desires unconstrained by objective, external moral standards (the Tao) [5]. And furthermore, gay marriage eviscerates the moral and spiritual reality of marriage, that has existed for thousands and thousands of years, and redefines it at the whim of a democratic majority or a judicial diktat. Humanity can redefine any institution at will, for all institutions are merely expressions of human power.
More importantly, the mainstreaming of transgenderism serves as an obvious gateway to transhumanism. Martine Rothblatt, a man who has undergone surgery to appear as a woman, explicitly writes in the manifesto From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form [6] essentially that. After all, if feelings triumph biological reality when it comes to sex, why not for species or any other physical characteristic? If a man feels like a woman, then let him be a woman. Even more, he could decide to be a cat, a dog, or anything at all. There’s no limiting principle stopping transgenderism from evolving into transhumanism.
The trouble is that the Tao, as Lewis argued, is innate. And to get rid of it and create our own values takes breaking a few eggs. An example of this is found in one scene in Lewis’ book That Hideous Strength. The N.I.C.E attempts to make Mark “totally objective” by putting him in a room where hideous, distorted paintings fill the walls. Here Mark realizes “Frost was not trying to make him insane: at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto given to the word ‘insanity.’ Frost had meant what he said. To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity — the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes [demonic entities that control the N.I.C.E.]. Higher degrees in the asceticism of anti-Nature would doubtless follow: the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities. They were, in a sense, playing quite fair with him — offering him the very same initiation through which they themselves had passed . . . “ (HM 295) It takes a sustained campaign, forcefully applied, to rid people of the values that are innate to their lives and replace them with new ones. And usually, these projects don’t last particularly long.
To use a modern example, activism in the West has for the past few years insisted that “trans women are women.” They have shouted down, coerced, and bullied anybody who would dissent. And yet, they still haven’t managed to convince the majority of the population to agree with them, which is why they need such coercive tactics. The truth is that when you meet a person who has tried to transition sexes, you can immediately see there is something... off. They are not the opposite sex, but a mere simulacrum of the opposite sex. In fact, the people most likely to believe that “trans women are women” are highly educated elites in enclaves like Boston, New York City, or LA. Lewis charmingly explains this phenomenon in the novel by one of the evil characters remarking “the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything” (HS 108). The educated have usually internalized the authority of modern institutions like academia, and so they will obediently do what they are told (which begs the question of what the real purpose of a college degree is).
If I may make a quick, Freudian observation on those who march under the banner of modern freedom. Such people hysterically insist upon their right to do what they want– and are furious at any who attempt to question it. And such advocates of freedom are insistent on imposing their ideology on the population. Hence, religion has to be thrown out of the public square, conservative intellectuals hounded out of their jobs, and all dissent silenced. After all, you can’t be truly free to express yourself if someone is criticizing you. Ironically, freedom becomes coercive.
But let’s follow Lewis further into the heart of darkness. The growth of science, particularly eugenics, leads to humanity’s power over nature, but what does that mean? Lewis considers that “unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones” (AM 53).
The power to remake humanity will never be shared by everyone. The technology will exist in the hands of experts and corporations and governments, and it will be used at their discretion. They will have opinions about how the technology should be used. Even if they believe that everyone should be totally free to do whatever they wish, that is still a view that must be instantiated by force and power. Which leads to Lewis’ chilling conclusion:
“The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car” (AM 54).
As Lewis observes, when all traditional values have been debunked, no constraints will be placed on the scientific planners who will give in entirely to their nature and follow their every whim. Nature triumphs, as only its implanted desires of the atheistic elite will determine the fate of humanity. This truly would be the triumph of the will, and it would be a domination unsurpassed in the history of man. It starts with unlimited freedom and concludes with unlimited despotism.
Satan versus Christ
As members of the Restored Church, this dream, this idea, should ring familiar. It takes after Satan’s plan for the human race. If we consider the grand council in heaven with our Heavenly Parents, two plans were presented to us. The first, from Christ, involved a Savior who would “prove them herewith” to show whether they would keep the commandments of the Lord their God. But a second plan was presented by which Lucifer would save all of us, save us in our sins. All of us would return to our Heavenly Parents but there would be no cost borne, no moral rigor, no risk, no death. Eat, drink, and be merry. Satan would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. We often, however, mistake this view as an idea that Satan would coerce us all to make the right choices. That he wanted unlimited power over all of us. The insight of Lewis’ analysis is that it implies that the first, the dream of total, nihilistic freedom and tolerance, leads to a society of total domination. It fits with what the Book of Mormon warns us about that Satan presents himself as an angel of light. This kind of libertarian freedom seems warm and inviting and seems to correspond to moral agency. Yet, it is subtly different from moral agency, and as freedom is pursued at all costs, the difference between freedom and moral agency comes more into focus.
At the core of the debate over the two plans are two different visions of godhood. Consider the account in Moses 1 of Satan: “And it came to pass that when Moses had said these words, behold, Satan came tempting him, saying: Moses, son of man, worship me.” The god of this world demands worship and recognition, to provide power and authority over all. And consider the case when Satan comes to tempt Christ in the desert. He takes him up to the temple and offers him all the kingdoms of the world. Christ, of course, refuses. Yet Satan’s vision of divinity could not be clearer. It is the vision of unlimited power and wealth. It is to get all to bow down to him.
Contrast this with Isaiah 53, and its description of Christ. We find a God who is “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” Add to this our Lord’s submission in the Garden of Gethsemane when he says that “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” A radically different vision of godhood is on display than the transhumanists desire. One of total submission and the other of radical power. The transhumanist vision is a Satanic parody of the Plan of Salvation. And Lewis sees it as such, as he makes clear that the N.I.C.E is actually controlled by demonic entities.
Science and Magic
How can we use Lewis’s insights to help us navigate our world and its current problems? First, we should beware of the worldly temptation to worship science. It is not that science doesn’t reveal extraordinary truths about the natural world, nor that it does not have extraordinary predictive capacity. But I can’t fail to notice the extent to which secularists cling to science and exult in science. Why? Lewis again provides an answer to this: “the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak...For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead” (AM 55).
Thus, Lewis argued that, historically speaking, science was part of a larger attempt to subdue the reality of the natural world to our wishes and desires. Although science has blessed us enormously in various ways, there can also be a secularist aspect to it which denies that there is a God-ordained order to which our wishes and desires themselves should be subject. The desire of science to return us to Eden (Bacon said as much) is opposed to the theology of the Restored Gospel. We had to leave Eden, the Fall was fortunate. Death is a blessing, so that we do not live forever in our sins. Deification comes by way of the Cross, not by the application of science and technology. Sacrifice does bring forth the blessings of heaven. Consider one of the areas where technology has most upended our lives: sex. Promiscuity used to be widely discouraged. No longer, and this largely occurred due to technology. First, by the use of contraception, and much more insidiously by the simple and efficient killing of the baby, euphemistically referred to as abortion, or even worse, “reproductive care.” Chastity is irrelevant; technology triumphs. But consequences remain, despite the alleged technological solutions. Without sexual constraint, stable families never form. Wisdom is still necessary, but the technological solutions have clouded our vision.
The broader use of science to gain power over nature turns our minds away from heaven and towards the prosaic material world. Those in humble circumstances are more open to the gospel. They are not distracted and insulated from the travails of life. The pampered think now of careers and going from power unto power ceasing only in death. This wealth and insulation are not possible without science and the Industrial Revolution that science birthed.
However, even within the material world, science has not made us more secure. Several examples make the point. Firstly, the invention of nuclear weapons has decreased our safety. The United States, Russia, and increasingly China have the power to destroy the whole world and all life on it with the click of a button. If rumors are to be believed, a confrontation over Taiwan is looming between the United States and China. And what once would have been a tragic war between two great powers may lead to a thermonuclear exchange that will kill hundreds of millions of people, if not more. AGI also presents existential threats to humanity, or at least presents the ability to develop a total surveillance state. And finally, there is a high probability that Covid-19 was invented in a lab. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the great Islamic thinker, rightfully (and dismissively) observed that “modern man has destroyed his natural environment so as to live a bit longer on the surface of the Earth in forgetfulness of God… [7]” There may be a day when we aren’t even living longer, given the terrors science has created.
Am I only emphasizing the negative? Yes, I am. There are positive things to be said for science: women surviving childbirth, vaccination, clean water, etc. But our society so glorifies science that an emphasis on the downsides, on the frightening elements, and on the moral problems is needed. Science and the power science gives humanity is the one, uncontested value in our society, and I think that it deserves some contestation. At least in the back of our minds, we should ask whether all the growth of power that science has wrought is a blessing or a curse.
Politics and Religion
A second observation: secularization makes political solutions impossible. All politics involves the exercise of power by some people over others. Even modern liberal democracies require an elite who will make decisions on behalf of society and who often make decisions for themselves. Additionally, as Michel Foucault extensively documented in Discipline and Punish [8], liberal societies use coercive power through a variety of institutions from the clinic to the military to the schools and prisons. Power always exists, and it must be directed to proper ends. Proponents of secularism obfuscate this fact by asserting humanity as the standard. Lewis exposes how there is no strict humanity, at least not once the Father of the human race has been left out. All political decisions involve some humans exercising power over other human beings.
If there is no Tao, no moral standard that however imperfectly we may apprehend, then all power exercised becomes entirely arbitrary. There is no possibility of the just use of power, as this is simply the exercise of power by one group of human beings over another. Secularists tend to fall back on a claim that there is such a moral standard: human rights, i.e. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. But this is nonsense. What gave the UN the right to legislate the metaphysics of morals? What we can say is that there is no way to observe the existence of human rights, nor is there any way to ascertain what would be on the list of such rights. Such rights, on the secular account, would merely be shaped by whatever special interest group gained power over the process of drafting. We have gone nowhere and achieved nothing.
Religion is indispensable to build a political settlement. There must be some order to the universe to understand the just use of power that underlies all political regimes. A religion may not be strictly theistic but would still require at the minimum an impersonal moral order, akin to the Mandate of Heaven. We can’t finally separate religion from politics, as religion concerns the ultimate order of the universe. This does not mean that religion and politics are the same activity; clearly, they are not. Nor does it require a sectarian state, at least I hope not. However, religion, or at least a comprehensive worldview, will by necessity dictate the rules and ends of power. There is no neutrality.
Feminism and the Abolition of Man
My final point involves a character in That Hideous Strength I have not yet mentioned. Jane, the wife of Mark, also goes on a spiritual journey from her agnosticism to playing a crucial role in the fight against the N.I.C.E. Initially, she sees herself as a modern, empowered woman forced to become a housewife. Over the course of the novel, she learns the importance of obedience and submission to her husband. Through her journey, Lewis suggests that feminism promotes the abolition of man and the overturning of the moral order.
Now, this teaching by Lewis does not exactly align with the teachings of the Church which are based on equal partnership in marriage. However, Lewis is on to something when he speaks about gender roles and norms. In fact, he sees the abolition of gender norms and the attempt to turn women into something approximating men as part of the broader abolition of man. Jane is paralleled by another female character, the Fairy, who works as the head of police for the N.I.C.E. Gruff and masculine (and likely a sadomasochistic lesbian), the Fairy represents the inversion of normal femininity, and hence she works for those who wish to abolish nature.
Consequently, I would be remiss not to mention feminism as part of the abolition of man. Or at least the current vogue in American feminism. There is a side of feminism, a positive side, that critiques the abuses men have wrought against women and insists on the equal standing before the law (and God) of men and women in human society. But there is another side of modern feminism that wants women to embrace the idea that unlimited freedom is the highest end of life. Hence, these feminists call for more abortion, liberating women from all sexual norms, and for women to forego families for their careers. This, I think, is why suggestions that a woman's highest calling is to be a mother (though not necessarily her only calling) is met with such wailing and gnashing of teeth in certain quarters. It suggests that identity and choice are restrained by objective moral principles. I don’t mean to place this burden entirely on women. For women to be mothers, it requires that men accept their highest role as being fathers and to live worthy of that high calling, renouncing domestic tyranny, pornography, infidelity, and many other practices that are all too common. However, if we can frame the church’s critique of modern identity politics as a critique of self-expression versus moral duty, I think we will have won half the battle in beating back secularism.
And of course, the failure of societies liberated from gender norms (and slaves to modern capitalism and corporations– but that’s another essay) to reproduce and flourish suggests what we should already know: man can only best half imitate the Creator.
But finally, are those who embrace identity politics or more broadly who pursue their total personal freedom really more free? No, they are not. Take it as an observer of the Ivy League. The students dream of expanding their wills and freedom through money and status and power and sex. And yet in my observation they are some of the most conformist people in society. No dissent reaches their lips– too much is on the line. As our circle of desire expands, so does our number of pressure points. If we consistently let our appetites and desire for power (freedom) expand, we become easier and easier to control. The martyrs, about to be eaten by lions or killed by mobs in the 1830s, were more free than any of those who campaign only for freedom. When they renounce their desire to do as they wish and submit to the will of God, they are difficult to control and totally inwardly free. Submission is the road to freedom.
Conclusion
I began this essay with a discussion of transhumanism and its extraordinary influence in Silicon Valley. I believe the idea of having a handful of billionaires redesign the human race and turn us into gods in their own image is self-evidently repulsive. What I don’t think is self-evident is how the ideology of transhumanism very closely mirrors mainstream opinion in America. And we Latter-day Saints in America would be foolish to believe that we are not influenced by these trends. It already appears in our willingness to conflate moral agency with modern freedom. Latter-day Saints love to be loved, but our ability to articulate a critique of the transhumanist vision depends on our willingness to oppose what modern America has on offer. And as I tried to sketch out near the end, if we follow the train of logic contra transhumanism, it may lead all of us to positions even more at odds with mainstream American culture, whether that be about the value of science, the separation of church and state, or modern feminism. Oh well. As our Lord said, “If the world hates you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.”
Lewis has given us a guide, a clear and prescient picture, of some of the frightening undercurrents of modernity and science. He has sized up our bargain with Mephistopheles and found it wanting. For that, we should be grateful and use him, combined with modern revelation, to navigate our turbulent times. If we intend to challenge Satan’s domain, we must not only be harmless as doves, but wise as serpents as well.
NOTES:
[1] Sam Altman, “The Merge,” Sam Altman’s Blog, December 7, 2017, https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge --- [Back to manuscript].
[2] Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking. [Back to manuscript].
[3] The author read the essay online, and all quotes are taken from: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/The_Abolition_of_Man-C_S_Lewis.pdf --- [Back to manuscript].
[4] David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” *First Things*, October 2003, https://firstthings.com/christ-and-nothing/ --- [Back to manuscript].
[5] It is striking how many of the transhumanists are homosexuals. Sam Altman and Peter Thiel both are. Additionally, one of the leading prophets of the movements, Yuval Noah Harari, is as well. [Back to manuscript].
[6] Martine Rothblatt, *From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form*, expanded ed. (self-published by Martine Rothblatt, May 19, 2011) [Back to manuscript].
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag-fIBXfnxo --- [Back to manuscript].
[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Strong, Ryan (2025) "Triumph of the Will, or Some Reflections on C.S. Lewis," SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 2025), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleStrongTriumphofWill.html, accessed <give access date>.
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