Not-so-N.I.C.E.

The lazy blogger's last resort is publishing (slightly emended - especially if there were any egregious spelling errors) letters to the editor. So, here I go:

Dear Mr. Taranto,

Don't know what you think of C. S. Lewis, but today you mentioned Britain's "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence," or, "N.I.C.E." There is already a precedent for a sinister organization called N. I. C. E., dating from around the same time Orwell was writing, and that is C. S. Lewis's "National Institute for Coordinated Experiments," a sort of genetic engineering center cum Frankenstein's lab cum Faustian summoning chamber that houses the bad guys of That Hideous Strength, the final installation of Lewis's space trilogy. The three novels have much more religious than governmental overtones. Out of the Silent Planet portrays a trip to Mars, a sort of mature Eden, where the inhabitants have gone on to procreate but still live in harmony with God, each other, and nature; Perelandra tells of a trip to Venus, where the inhabitants are only two - a Venusian Adam and a Venusian Eve, both subject to temptation from a visiting demon; That Hideous Strength is one I've not read as recently as the other two, but I know it is set on earth - the "silent planet," due to its sinful state - and has, if I remember, its conflict as the efforts of the hero from the first two books, Professor Ransom, to prevent the members of N.I.C.E. from bringing to life a corpse that most of them think they are reanimating through scientific means, but which they are actually making ready for demonic possession.

If, again, I remember correctly, Lewis's essential criticism is similar to what he writes of in The Abolition of Man, which is that there is a certain breed of utopian in this world that thinks he could solve all our problems if only he could extirpate just this or just that imperfection, whether by means of eugenics, biological engineering, different governance, or different education. Being a Christian who took seriously the existence of the devil, Lewis believed this tendency a mistake and associated it with a demonic desire to remake mankind, thus perverting (though in his - the devil's - mind, perfecting) God's creation. By opening mankind to reanimation through ungodly means, one was not rescuing from death the soul of the man so affected, but opening his body up to be enslaved by evil. Hence Lewis's "men without chests" in The Abolition of Man, and hence his Professor Weston in Perelandra, essentially a automaton acting not out of his own free will, but because he (it) is enslaved, or possessed. Anyway, this is becoming a bit of a digression, but Lewis distrusted big, unaccountable, elite-staffed bureaucracies trying to remake the world by removing what they see as the sources of human evil. It's kind of shocking - or perhaps it's not - that the British bureaucrats and scientists are so ignorant of the writings of one of their most famous 20th century authors that they would use an ironic and previously used name for their big, unaccountable, etc.

Sincerely,

Jay Hawking

P. S. Hope you don't mind, but I'll probably post the text of this letter in my infrequently-updated and less-frequently-read blog. When I actually get around to writing something, I might as well publish it.

Another point to make, that I won't get into now: Lewis uses Perelandra to posit a solution to the free will vs. predestination debate, suggesting that they are somehow one in the same. In Perelandra, Professor Ransom goes to bed one night conflicted about how to act, and wakes in the morning knowing precisely what he will decide to do. Lewis's narrator (can't remember if it's Ransom himself) suggests that perhaps there is no true difference between these. Lewis was of course trained in the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox, so perhaps he's being more credulous than he should be, but I'm also not phrasing my point quite as eloquently and subtly as he did (sorry that I don't have the time or text handy to quote him on this). Also, not meaning to demean "the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox," as I myself am one of its pupils, but phrasing something as a paradox doesn't, of course, make it true.