In 1946, there was an interesting interchange between JBS Haldane and CS Lewis. I’ve excerpted it here in the past…given the current revived interest in socialism and even Marxism these days, this argument is very relevant and I thought the interchange would be worth republishing and rediscussing.
Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.
Haldane’s published a critique which was directed at the series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength. Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many years.
To briefly summarize That Hideous Strength: Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICE–the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation–having as its stated mission the application of science to social problems. (Unbelievably, today the real-life British agency which establishes rationing policies for healthcare is also called NICE.) In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers. It also turns out that the main reason NICE wanted to hire Mark is to get control of his wife, Jane (maiden name: Tudor) who has clairvoyant powers. The NICE officials want to use Jane’s abilities to get in touch with the magician Merlin and to effect a junction between modern scientific power and the ancient powers of magic, thereby bringing about the enslavement of mankind and worse. Jane, though, becomes involved with a group which represents the polar opposite of NICE, led by a philology professor named Ransom, who is clearly intended as a Christ-figure. The conflict between NICE and the Ransom group will determine the future of humanity.
A brilliantly written and thought-provoking book, which I highly recommend, even if, like me, you’re not generally a fan of fantasy novels. I reviewed it here.
With the context established, here are some of the highlights of the Lewis/Haldane controversy:
1) Money and Power
In his article, Haldane attacks Lewis for the latter’s refusal to absolutely condemn usury, and celebrates the fact that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface”…clearly referring to the Soviet Union. Here’s part of Lewis’s response:
The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force?
This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldane’s exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.
2) Centralized scientific planning
Haldane: “Mr. Lewis’s idea is clear enough. The application of science to human affairs can only lead to hell.” While denying that this is a correct statement of his views, Lewis goes on to say:
Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most modern countries respect science and want to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ‘scientific planned democracy’.
and
My fears of such a tyranny will seem to the Professor either insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism. I must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of this; he thinks I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I ‘stand to lose by social change’. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would be likewise easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omni-competent oligarchy. That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.
3) Democracy and conservatism
Haldane accuses Lewis of being anti-democracy, which accusation Lewis denies. He expands on his views:
I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme – whose highest real claim is to reasonable prudence – the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication.
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane’s article. He simply cannot believe that a man could really be in doubt about usury. I have no objection to his thinking me wrong. What shocks me is his instantaneous assumption that the question is so simple that there could be no real hesitation about it. It is breaking Aristotle’s canon to demand in every enquiry that degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not **on your life** to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety. The character in That Hideous Strength whom the Professor never mentions is Miss Hardcastle, the chief of the secret police. She is the common factor in all revolutions; and, as she says, you won’t get anyone to do her job well unless they get some kick out of it.
Professor Haldane’s article can be found here.
Lewis’s response appears in the essay collection Of Other Worlds;, edited by Walter Hooper; excerpts are on-line at this site. There’s also a Wikipedia article on Haldane.
Previous version of this post here.
“…all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story.”
Interesting.
“Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained ‘righteous’, but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for ‘good’, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great).
“Thus while Sauron multiplied [illegible word] evil, he left ‘good’ clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.” — J, R, R, Tolkien
Lewis: ” I might add that it would be likewise easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omni-competent oligarchy.”
I was once in a company management training class in which, in addition to the regular coursework, we had several outside speakers on various subjects. One of them was a Marxist professor who proceeded to inform us that our political & philosophical views were merely manifestations of our economic class interests. I raised by hand and asked him if he’d ever considered the possibility that *his* beliefs were reflections of his own perceived class interests as an academic. He didn’t like that very much–don’t think he’d ever been asked that exact question before.
And, per Lewis, it’s not just *economic* benefit, it is the feeling of being a member of (or a least adjacent to) to Inner Ring. Something that I also think motivates a high % of American journalists.
These were the things that fed me when I was fresh out of college, and needed more than a bit of shaking up. I thought Lewis made some errors then, and I think now that he has made (different) errors. I think the bets should be placed on Jack ultimately being correct. But beyond that, what impressed me was that I found his arguments simple, clear, bracing.
If Haldane had been paying attention to how things really were in the USSR, he’d have realized that, come the revolution, he would be one of the first stood against a wall. Just another example of of a brilliant mind in one small area, hopelessly stupid out of it.
1946, he should have known better by then, then again besides Orwelll in Allegory, maybe some of Muggeridge, Conquest came later into the mix, after some time of the IRD
i’ll grant that Haldane might have been wright about the Orthodox vs the Western Churches but that is all i wlll grant,
I wonder how long it will be, with the development of AI language processing algorithms and construction of proper data sets, before we could see something of a “real-time” interactive debate between Lewis and Haldane. Call it “History Battle Bots” and stream it. Maybe make them part of a quiz show of various historical figures
In fairness to Haldane, in 1946 he could still claim to be ignorant of Stalin’s (and even various Lenin’s crimes as well) What makes Lewis so interesting was that while in 19046 he was equally ignorant of what was going on the USSR, he already knew where it was all headed as depicted in The Abolition of Man
Also in fairness to Haldane’s claim about Lewis, I do believe the application of science to human affairs “does” lead to hell. Haldane’s socialism and Marxism was part of a larger historical trend, of which today’s progressivism and technocracy is part of as well, that sees human reason through Science as not only the superior, but only way of organizing human affairs. That and the idea dating back to Hegel that History is one giant sweep toward bigger and better things, that there are no eternal truths because what is true today can be replaced by something better tomorrow. This applies to human nature as well; the Khmer Rouge were only the more perfect example of this with their “Year Zero” approach
Tradition, family, natural rights, religion… all good for their time, but past their expiration date and impediments to progress.
The Haldane-Lewis debate has immediate ramifications for own time. The Left, even in its “tamer” progressive guise, sees government as a tool to “improve” society through Science and thus must be made more efficient to do so while the American tradition sees government as a tool to protect natural rights, analogous to what Lewis called “Natural Law.” The conflict was reanimated over the past few weeks with recent Supreme Court decisions which the Left found incomprehensible. The key one was Loper in which the Court overturned the 1984 Chevron case which deferred interpretation of statutes to unaccountable bureaucrats due to the latter’s expertise; to the Left why would you let something as trivial as a dictionary reading of the Constitution get in the way of letting the smartest people in room make the decisions?
John Adams once said that our constitution is only for a moral and religious people. I’m pretty sure that Haldane and many today would say that it was made for ignorant fools and we shouldn’t let such things get in the way of History.
We’ve been hearing from educational theorists that correcting minority students’ mistakes is “spirit murder”. Sounds like “Ignorance is strength”. And the talk about civil liberties being an impediment to human rights sounds like “Freedom is slavery”.
“Application of science to human affairs” is a pretty broad topic. I’d think it would include, for example, the British government’s creation of astronomical tables for celestial navigation…the building of dams for flood control…the polio vaccine. Surely these were all *good* things.
The problem is when science, especially social science (such as it is) is applied not to improving the physical circumstances of human life but rather to the top-down reorganization of how society works.
I was thinking about one other moral midget, eric hobshawn, who white washed, the likes of the Holomodor, the one non fiction scribbler Gary Jones who saw through Duranty’s subterfuge, Arendt’s banality of Evil doesn’t quite capture it, as Eichmann was methodical to a fault, then again her connections with Martin Heidegger might have had something to do with her lack of acuity,
Occasionally you have events like Honq quings Taiping Rebellion that registered a bloodprice nearly as high as the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Honqqing a mystic who thought himself a Messiah but thats a rare thing,
When they said “Application of science to human affairs”, they meant a “scientifically” planned society. Not just the economy, though that would have been one of their tools and heavily used. Every aspect of life, such as who could have children and how many and when, just who got just how much education and in what, etc.
A lot of it was an outgrowth of rationing in England in WWII. Food was much more tightly rationed than in the U.S. because there was an actual shortage there, where here it was mostly to free up labor and resources for war production. They noticed that despite rationing, many diseases of malnutrition disappeared. So obviously, everyone would be better off if they were cajoled/encouraged/forced to eat only what was good for them. by extension, if there was only a requirement for 10 physicists, it would be wasteful to train 11. All very rational and “scientific”.
All of that worked so much better in the USSR where things like personal choice or rights were properly superseded by the “science” wielded by omniscient state planners.
The fact that Science has such cachet in our society is so obvious, we don’t even notice let alone comment on it. For people in the street a lot of that comes from the progress it has delivered from iPhones to the man on the moon.
For the upper classes it also signifies progress but for more self-serving reasons in that it signals the historic triumph of reason over superstition, a long historic climb out of barbarism that began when Galileo defied the Church.
COVID brought those trends together in the personification of Fauci when in a time of crisis people turned to Science and the scientists for guidance and others saw the ongoing drama as one long morality play about the MAGA deplorables wanting to drag everyone back to the Stone Age based on some archaic notion “natural rights” and liberty.. Fauci being the smart, grifting bureaucrat knew how to play all of that to the hilt.
The glorification of Science for social reasons predated the 20th Century. Part of the reason Marx had the impact he had was that he claimed he had developed Scientific laws for history and the social world akin to what existed for the natural one. The Progressive era looked to apply scientific principles to societal management; the behaviorists looked to scientific explanations for psychology and social development.
That claim to scientific management is per-eminent today and any canny bureaucrat or political operator knows that the best way to push a desired policy is to get a study (preferably from an Ivy-trained PhD) with lots of numbers supporting it.
Cdr Sal. hits the spot here with his comment “If the demand for brilliant ideas exceed the supply, they are more than happy to tut-tut lesser beings and create Tommorowland out of whole cloth. They are clever imps, and hungry people can be gullible.” That would apply to consultants as well
Another note… listening to a cast the other day regarding hypothesis formation and scientific thinking. The commenter made the remark that much modern scientific work increasingly relies on the creation of hypotheses for scientific explanation which are not based on observation as in the past, but are rather based on a form of imaginative creation in order to test it. Scientific inferences therefore are made from the hypothesis, what you start off assuming is true, and not to the hypothesis themselves. You get what you test for. This is especially true for things that cannot be observed, think of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Unfortunately it can also be true for things like climate change where not only is the inquiry constrained by the initial hypothesis but social pressures incline researchers to cherry pick the evidence.
wells was a precursor to haldane in this notion of technocracy, you see this in particular ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ both the book and the Alex Korda film with Raymond Massey, after a great grinding war, of all and against all,
Orwell seems to have borrowed this trope for 1984,how the three superstates came to be, which he borrowed from Burnham’s the Machiavellians, the notion of Minitrue from the BBC world service,
First, the term “science” to the extent that it even exists as some sort of independent entity is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless. To the extent that it represents either a system of philosophy, a recipe for understanding the universe or just a useful collection of techniques for solving problems, the product of just about every education system is as innocent as a newborn babe. They have been taught that “science” is a collection of facts to be regurgitated on demand. Not very surprising, since schools, up through the bachelor’s level, are in the business of imparting facts to be regurgitated on demand. It’s graduate school where degrees are supposed to be based on advancing the sum of human knowledge by novel and productive research. The cite rate for all these thousands upon thousands of thesi is so close to zero as to call this conceit into question. The non-science student the day after the conclusion of their last science course may, for a time, be able to recall some disconnected facts, such as the distance of the Moon from the Earth, but nothing more. The extent that this scenario resembles the relation of an average congregant to the finer points of theology I leave for the reader to contemplate.
There is nothing impermissible about using informed conjecture in formulating an hypothesis. It is all but essential. The scientific enterprise has been in business for long enough that most things have accepted explanations. It’s when these accepted explanations start to conflict with reality that that the necessity and opportunity for science occurs. An investigator constrained to only what is “authoritative” might as well not start at all. Obviously, losing track of what is proved versus what is believed is fatal to the validity of any conclusions. The trouble is when these invalid conclusions become accepted as true because they advance some external interest as in “climate change” or “infection control”.
Civilians are only recently becoming aware of just how much of “settled science” may be resting on a base of not just error but outright fraud. Not as much of a shock to those of us that have had occasion to read some of this huge pile of verbiage that constitutes “science”. All the incentives are for positive conclusions, so it’s no surprise that positive conclusions are produced whether by happy coincidence or fabrication.