Deep Thoughts

Sleeping With The Enemy – Updated

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Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.

The United States today is in a crisis of civilizational self-confidence, as are Western societies generally. That crisis is the real subject of Arthur Koestler’s 1950 novel Age of Longing,  Koestler being the author of the much-better-known Darkness at Noon.

Age of Longing  is set in a Europe which is facing the very real possibility–indeed the likelihood–of a Soviet invasion, but does not want to face that reality.  Hydie Anderson, living in Paris with her father (an American military attache) was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection.

Through her friend Julien DeLattre, Hydie is introduced to a number of Paris intellectuals and East European emigres. Members of the former group are mostly in denial about the danger of a Soviet attack…many of them have indeed convinced themselves that Communist rule wouldn’t be all that bad. For example, there’s Professor Pontieux (modeled on Sartre)…”He did not believe that the Commonwealth of Freedomloving People had solved all its problems and become an earthly paradise. But it was equally undeniable that it was an expression of History’s groping progress towards a new form of society, when it followed that those who opposed this progress were siding with the forces of reaction and preparing the way for conflict and war–the worst crime against Humanity.”  Vardi, another intellectual, says that if he had to choose between the (American) juke box on one hand, and Pravda on another, he isn’t sure which he would pick.

Madame Pontieux, modeled on Simone de Bouvoir (with whom Koestler had a brief affair) is less ambiguous about her choice among the alternatives. “You cannot enter a cafe or a restaurant without finding it full of Americans who behave as if the place belonged to them,” she complains to an American official. When the Russian emigre Leontiev suggests that France would not survive without American military support, pointing out that “nature abhors a vacuum,” she turns on him:

“I am surprised at your moderation, Citizen Leontiev,” Madame Pontieux said sarcastically. “I thought you would tell us that without this young man’s protection the Commonwealth army would at once march to the Atlantic shore.”

“It would,” said Leontiev. “I believed that everyone knew that.”

“I refuse to believe it,” responds Madame Pontieux. “But if choose one must I would a hundred times rather dance to the music of a Balalaika than a juke box.”

(The French intellectuals Koestler knew must have really hated juke boxes!)

Julien is romantically interested in Hydie, but she is not attracted to him, despite the fact that he seems to have much to recommend him–a hero of the French Resistance, wounded in action, and a successful poet. On one occasion, she tells him that she could never sleep with him because they are too similar–“it would be like incest”..on another occasion, though, she tells him that “what I most dislike about you is your attitude of arrogant broken-heartedness.” Parallel to Hydie’s loss of religious faith is Julien’s loss of his secular faith in the creation of a new society. He does not now believe in utopia, or any approximation to same, but he does believe in the need to face reality, however unpleasant it may be.  Hydie argues that the Leftists of their acquaintance may be silly, but at least they believe in something:

“Perhaps they believe in a mirage–but isn’t it better to believe in a mirage than to believe in nothing?”

Julien looked at her coldly, almost with contempt:

“Definitely not. Mirages lead people astray. That’s why there are so many skeletons in the desert. Read more history. Its caravan-routes are strewn with the skeletons of people who were thirsting for faith–and their faith made them drink salt water and eat the sand, believing it was the Lord’s Supper.”

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Julien tells her, as does her father the Colonel, that nothing can be done about Fedya because of diplomatic immunity and because the French government does not want to create an international incident by deporting him. Refusing to believe this, Hydie arranges a meeting with a senior French security official. The improbably-named Jules Commanche (who, like Julien, is a hero of the French Resistance) also tells Hydie that nothing can be done, and that if she attempts to make an issue of it, the Soviets and their fellow-travelers will simply paint her as nothing more than a hysterical jilted lover.  Hydie remains unwilling to accept the conclusion that Fedya must be left alone to continue his activities:

“How can you, a Frenchman, say that it is not a crime when a man walks around marking down your compatriots with a pencil–like a man branding cattle for the slaughter-house? Don’t you see–don’t you see what is waiting for you?”

Commanche, who had half risen, let himself slump back into the chair. He no longer tried to conceal his exasperation.

“Are you really so naive, Mademoiselle, as to imagine that we know less about these things than you do?  Do you think that we were unaware of Monsieur Nikitin’s activities, or of your affair with him, if it comes to that? And as for your somewhat patronizing remark about what is ‘waiting for us’–myself, my family, my friends, in short, the French people–allow me to refuse to discuss it, in order to avoid embarrassing you.”

“Me? I don’t understand?…”

“Well, we both know what is waiting for you.  A comfortable airliner, when things get hot–and some nostalgic regrets for the sunny cafes on the Champs-Elysees…”

For his own part, Commanche plans a heroic but militarily-futile death in resisting the coming Soviet invasion: he does not wish to survive what he sees as the inevitable destruction of European civilization. After sharing his own sense of hopelessness with Hydie, he asks her for a date, which she rejects.

In an anguish of anger and despair, Hydie buys a gun and goes to Fedya’s apartment. After asking him for a drink, she get out the weapon and tells him why he must die.

He summoned all his patience and self-discipline for a last attempt to bring her back to reason. He forced himself to make his voice patient and gentle; and, after the first few words, its sound made him indeed regain his calm–and even feel a kindly pity for the unhappy fat-legged girl.

“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty. As Jules Commanche explains to Hydie:

“You cannot cure aberrations of the political libido by arguments…Now the source of all political libido is faith, and its object is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lost Paradise, Utopia, what have you. Therefore each time a god dies there is trouble in History. People feel that they have been cheated by his promises, left with a dud check in their pocket. The last time a god died was on July 14, 1789, the day when the Bastille was stormed. On that day the Holy Trinity was replaced by the three-word slogan which you find written over our town halls and post offices. Europe has not yet recovered from that operation, and all our troubles today are secondary complications. The People–and when I use that word, Mademoiselle, I always refer to people who have no bank accounts–the people have been deprived of their only asset: the knowledge, or the illusion, whichever you like, of having an immortal soul. Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains. And this longing, Mademoiselle, can express itself in beautiful or murderous forms, just like the frustrated sex instinct…Only the longing remains–a dumb, inarticulate longing of the instinct, without knowledge of its source and object. So the people, the masses, mill around with that irksome feeling of having an uncashed check in their pockets and whoever tells them ‘Oyez, oyez, the Kingdom is just round the corner, in the second street to the left,’ can do with them what he likes.”

A few thoughts on Commanche’s speech and its applicability to our times…

First, I think I disagree with Commanche/Koestler that loss of belief in personal immortality is of the essence here. Indeed, Fedya is an atheist, but his faith is strong. What matters more (from a societal standpoint) is the belief in the society’s moral authority, in its future, in its system of symbols. And it is specifically these things that have been systematically undermined by so many forces in our society and especially in academia. (When people with PhDs are willing to accept the idea that gravity is a “social construct”–see The Sokal Hoax–is it any wonder that many ordinary people feel disoriented?)

Second, I think that while our present problem does involve people chasing new gods and promulgators of new faiths…see Tara Isabella Burton’s book Strange Rites for a description of some of them…our more serious problem involves those who are no longer seeking and have abandoned themselves to cynicism. I find Hydie, as drawn by Koestler, to be a fairly appealing person, despite her naivete and self-centeredness. I suspect that a present-day Hydie would be much less likeable.

I’m reminded of some lines from Kipling, in which he describes the fall of a soul into Hell:

The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell:
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again

There are probably more people now at the clinkered sin that cannot burn again stage than there were when Koestler wrote.

Julien, in explaining to Hydie why he cannot write anymore, says:

Fallen angels don’t write poems. There is lyric poetry, and sacred poetry, and a poetry of love and a poetry of rebelling; the poets of apostasy do not exist.

The book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness:

Her thoughts travelled back to Sister Boutillot standing in the alley which led to the pond…Oh, if she could only go back to the infinite comfort of father confessors and mother superiors, of a well-ordered hierarchy which promised punishment and reward, and furnished the world with justice and meaning. If only one could go back! But she was under the curse of reason, which rejected whatever might quench her thirst without abolishing the gnawing of the urge; which rejected the answer without abolishing the question. For the place of God had become vacant and there was a draught blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.

70 years later, I think we now begin to see who the New Tenants might be, and it is not comforting knowledge.

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Freedom, the Village, and Social Media (updated)

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To what extent are ‘cancellation’ campaigns against people expressing unpopular opinions (unpopular, at least, in the view of some substantial number of people)–now a regular and unpleasant feature of social media sites–really a new phenomenon, rather than being just a modern incarnation of a kind of behavior which has long existed?

Hans Fallada’s novel  Every Man Dies Alone, is centered on a couple who become anti-Nazi activists after their son Ottochen is killed in the war;  it was inspired by, and is loosely based on, the true story of a real-life couple  who distributed anti-Nazi postcards and were executed for it.  I thought the book was excellent.  The present  present post, though, is not a book review, but rather a development of some thoughts inspired by a particular passage in the story.

Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works.  But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground work, made even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the cell and she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.

After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town where, they believe, life will be freer and calmer.

Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way  such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.

Reading the above passage, I was struck by the thought that if we are now living in an ‘electronic village,’ even a ‘global village’, as Marshall McLuhan put it several decades, ¦then perhaps that also means we are facing some of the unpleasant characteristics that, as Fallada notes, can be a part of village life. And these characteristics aren’t something that appears only in eras of insane totalitarianism such as existed in Germany during the Nazi era. Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society, wrote about the tension between liberty and community:

Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idylic. However, the community in rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive.  And that explains why, for millennia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city.  ‘Stadluft macht frei ‘ (city air frees) says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century.

Consider: Going way back to 2013,  an assistant manager at a Wal-Mart store lost his job because of a post he put up on his Facebook page, in which he made some negative and slightly obscene comments about Muslim women wearing niquabs. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained, and the man was fired. (Having demonstrated their power, CAIR then kindly asked that he be rehired  (I don’t know whether he ever was.)

If, in the pre-social-media era, a Wal-Mart manager living in a large city had made negative comments about some group to friends in person, the odds that it would have resulted in his firing would have been pretty low. On the other hand, if a store manager living in a village were to repeatedly express opinions hostile to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the villageers–say, if a rural store manager in 1955 became well-known as hostile to religion,  it might well have had an adverse effect on his employment. The electronic village has to some extent re-created the social pressures of the traditional village.

Of course, the village culture doesn’t always reinforce and serve the values of the politically dominant . During WWII, for example, the people of  Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town in the France’s  Massif Central Range, saved more than 5000 Jews from the Holocaust. The village community can act as a bulwark for civil society against the over-reaching power of distant tyrants, and in some cases, as with Chambon-sur-Lignon, “the community culture will be of a nature that can accept, respect, and help  people whose beliefs from their own.

Certainly, the ability of the Internet to facilitate the distribution of information and opinion, beyond the control of the media gatekeepers, has been and is of tremendous value in preserving liberty. Without it, we as a society would be in even more trouble than we currently are. But the erosion of privacy, and the resultant fear of expressing oneself or acting in ‘unapproved’   ways that might harm your Permanent Record (to use the phrases with which teachers and school administrators used to threaten students) are factors whose influence in undeniable.

The widespread distribution and sharing of information enabled by technology becomes particularly dangerous when the national government is in the hands of people who lack respect for individual liberties and when the administrative discretion granted to individual bureaucrats is high. Can anyone doubt the high likelihood that information from Electronic Medical Records which were pushed as part of Obamacare will at some point be used to destroy political opponents of whatever Administration is in power at the time? (If, indeed, these records have not already been so used.)  Can anyone doubt that, with the ideology of  ‘progressivism’  becoming increasingly intolerant, ever-larger numbers of people have been and will continue to be denied jobs, promotions, college admissions, and tenure based on opinions that they have expressed in a Facebook or Twitter post or a blog post at some point in their lives? (and, quite likely, the other way around as the political winds shift and the ‘progressives’ themselves are under attack)  and that expressions of opinion will unless the climate changes markedly,  tend to become much more guarded, just as a village merchant might be reluctant to say anything to offend the small group of people on whose goodwill he is permanently dependent for his livelihood?

Special musical bonus

I (still) haven’t read it, but Roger McNamee’s book Zucked is subtitled Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.  The author is a well-known VC and was himself an early investor in FB.  (Although some have asserted that on-line cancellation campaigns have been largely a Twitter phenomenon, the early phases of this phenomenon predated Twitter popularity and used Facebook and other early social media as vehicles.  This all accelerated considerably with Twitter under its previous ownership; I’m hopeful that it may be damped down somewhat under Musk leadership, especially with the introduction of the Community Notes feature.

As an overall conclusion, I think that electronic cancellation in the global village is indeed the modern manifestation of behavior patterns that have long existed–but enabled by technology to operate both more rapidly and with much wider geographical scope.

Your thoughts?

Of Leadership and Courage

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In the wake of the Trump assassination attempt,  I’ve run across a few posts that raise some…psychopolitical and psychosocial…issues which I think are worthy of thought and discussion.  I don’t have time to think through and write a proper post right now, so will just put some excerpts and links out here and see what develops–I’ll probably add some commentary later.

Claire Lehmann at X:

What if the motive is Incel-related and Trump wasn’t a target because of his politics, but because of his status and success with women

My immediate reaction was, well, aren’t personal issues and demons often a major factor in why someone gets involved with an ideology, especially an extremist ideology?  But OTOH, there’s a difference between someone who acts through an ideology on behalf of his demons and someone who doesn’t even bother with much of an ideological shield, or indeed any ideological shield.  We don’t know which type this character was, yet.

Also from Claire:

The irony is that in trying to assassinate Donald Trump, Crooks inadvertently provided Trump with an opportunity to display the very qualities that have already made him a cult icon. Trump’s immediate reaction—standing up and raising his fist to the crowd despite the clear and present danger—exemplified the kind of raw, physical courage that our evolutionary programming associates with effective leadership and high status.

She has followed up with a post at Quillette:  Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania…the post and discussion are worth reading.  I have posted some not-fully-baked thoughts in the comments.

Comes now Stepfanie Tyler at X:

graduated in 2012 w a degree in Women’s Studies
cried in 2016 when Trump got elected
lost touch w the dems somewhere around MeToo
discovered entrepreneurship
updated my voter registration in 2018 but didn’t tell anyone
told myself i was a ‘single-issue-voting Centrist’
the last 6-12 months i’ve believed i was going to abstain from voting in the upcoming election because the options are equally terrible
but watching Trump survive an assassination attempt and act like a total fucking savage just shifted me into some strange, patriotic gear that my fancy-feminism-white-men-bad infected brain never showed me
like, the dude took a bullet and stood up with blood dripping down his face, and rallied a fucking crowd while fist pumping, yelling “FIGHT!”
sorry, but i’m voting for that. and saying it out loud feels so freeing

And, finally, a response to Stepfanie from I/O:

“I experienced a sudden political transformation because I liked that after he got grazed by a bullet he stood up and pumped his fist” is just another way of saying “I prefer to base my politics on primal animal instinct,” which I’m pretty sure is a non-ideal way to do politics.

Your thoughts?

Transmitting the Passwords – or Not

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I ran across a poem, said to have been written by the French aviator/writer Antoine de St-Exupery.

I don’t think St-Ex wrote this poem: I’m pretty familiar with his works and haven’t seen this poem in any of them, and it also doesn’t seem stylistically quite right.  I do, however, recognize the book and the passage that were surely the inspiration for the poem,  That would be his unfinished novel of ideas Citadelle, published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands.  (The reason the novel is unfinished is that St-Ex disappeared in 1944 while flying recon missions in a P-38 with the American forces)

Citadelle represents the musings of a fictional desert prince: on society, on government, on humanity.  Here are some excerpts from the relevant passage:

“Nevertheless,” I mused, “these men live not by things but by the meaning of things, and thus it is needful that they should transmit the passwords to each other, generation by generation.  That is why I see them, no sooner a child is born, making haste to inure him in the usage of their language; for truly it is the key to their treasure.  So as to be able to transport him into this harvest of golden wonders they have reaped, they spare no toil in opening up within him the ways of portage.  For hard to put into words, weighty yet subtle, are the harvests it behooves us to transmit from one generation to another.”

“..But if the new generation lives in houses about which it knows nothing save their utility, what will it find to do in such a desert of a world?  For even as your children must first be taught the art of music, if they are to take pleasure in playing a stringed instrument; even so, if you would have them, when they come to man’s estate, capable of the emotions worthiest of man, you must teach hem to discern, behind the diversity of things, the true lineaments of your house, your domain, your empire.

Else that new generation will but pitch camp therein, like a horde of savages in a town they have captured. And what joy would such barbarians get of your treasures?  Lacking the key of your language, they would know not how to turn them to account….(the barbarian) throws down your walls and scatters your possessions to the winds.  This he does to revenge himself on the instrument which he knows not how to play, and presently he sets the village on fire–which at least rewards him with a little light!  But soon he loses interest, and yawns. For you must know what you are burning, if you are to find beauty in its light.  Thus with the candle you burn before your god. But to the barbarian the flames of your house will say nothing, for they are not a sacrificial fire.”

“..This, too, is why I bid you bring up your children to be like you.  It is not the function of some petty officer to hand down to him their inheritance,; for this is something not comprised in his manual of Regulations..You shall build your children in your image, lest in late days they come to drag their lives out joyously in a land which will seem to them but an empty camping place, and whose treasures they will allow to rot away uncared-for, because they have not been given its keys.”

It strikes me that most of the institutions of America today–and also, I think, throughout much of the West–are acting, unconsciously or with intention, to inhibit the kind of password-transmission about which St-Ex wrote in the above passage.

I’m also reminded of something CS Lewis wrote, which I quote very loosely:  “If you want to destroy an an infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units.  If you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its adjoining generations.”

Two earlier posts inspired by Citadelle:  When Sleep the Sentinels and Of Springs and Cables

Lewis vs Haldane: Another Look

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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.