Writes Ross Douthat in "This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023" (NYT)(the novel is "That Hideous Strength").
[A] typical folly of conspiracists is to leap from a weird pattern... or a scattering of bizarre details to a scenario that requires everyone to be in on the secret, at least aware of the mind-blowing truth if not participating in the plot.
That’s where “That Hideous Strength” feels especially realistic (as fairy tales go), postulating a truly outlandish situation, a literal pact with the devil at the highest reaches of the technocracy, but at the same time a mechanism whereby the larger system remains defiantly bland and normal-seeming, and only a crazy person would ever think there’s anything hidden at the heart.
Posts
32 comments:
"[T]he idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently..."
Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is true in the understanding of time preference, as in taking any group of 100 individuals, a very small percentage will almost immediately begin trying to work out how the magic trick was accomplished, a larger percentage will help after a few minutes or a few hours, the largest percentage will acknowledge it is not magic eventually and wait for the 'pioneers' to come up with the answer, and another smaller percentage will never realize that it was not magic.
Where am I going with this? Guys like Ross Asshat think they're in percentile 1 or begrudgingly 2 when they're actually in percentile 3. Pieces like this are a subtle display of Ross's desire to come off looking like a 1 and not a 3, god help you if you think he's in the last percentile (a possibility as well...).
Most of the online discussion about large language models and AI is 3's trying to look like 1's. Yes, it's not magic [patting them on the head]. Run off and try to convince the last percentile of that while the adults chat.
Power attracts demons like food attracts bears.
'The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven was started in 1922 in Los Angeles. The group’s founder claimed to receive revelations directly from angels, revealing the mysteries of heaven and earth and life and death. In 1929 group leaders were indicted for grand theft.'
Our tech leaders got the money first, then went occult.
"But me, I expected it to happen
I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes"
Matt and Kirn are weekly highlighting old fictional stories that are patently relevant to today’s headlines. It’s uncanny.
I think we are meant to live what we’ve imagined.
There’s no getting around that.
hyper-intelligent, omnicompetent bureaucratic caste granted extraordinary powers by modern science and technology
We’re safe from 2 out of 3. Which is why, in the long run, I’m not too concerned. But the fools will do an awful lot of damage on their way out the door.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The reverse is of course unproven and likely never even tested.
"basically a hyper-intelligent, omnicompetent bureaucratic cast"
It has been awhile since I read the book, but I don't remember the bureaucrats being either hyper-intelligent or competent. They were quite the opposite as I recall. Guess I will re-read it.
Well, it's about Good and Evil, and the resemblances are pretty clear, I would say.
The whole trilogy is worth reading.
Such an interesting novel. Should be better known. A satire of Academia that could almost be a Kingsley Amis novel. A portrayal of how the modern world would look to the medieval mind (Merlin is revived). And a very creepy supernatural/techno thriller. The first time I read it, I was about 13 and staying in a mountain lodge in the middle of nowhere. Scared myself half to death!
That Hideous Strength is one of the only novels I have put down because it was just so bad. It was like Ayn Rand, but for Christians, and with even more caricatured villains. Long stretches of tiresome, laboured, unfunny stuff that maybe was satire. It might have improved by the end -- I think I stopped about a third of the way through. I still remember my disappointment twenty years later. I had loved the Narnia books and got through the first two books in his Space Trilogy. Oh well.
This novel by Lewis deserves a place alongside Orwell and Huxley.
The Christian’s aren’t making up the worship of technology contacting supernatural powers through “ Portals.” Researchers on the CERN initiative are openly dedicated to contacting supernatural powers.
The defeat of Nazi Germany with its literal EVILS was only 78 years ago. The strange powers of Herr Hitler were openly given to the demonic man by the the same believers in the supernatural that were simultaneously the great German scientists and engineers behind German chemical, steel and airplane industries (with a little help from our own Henry Ford who was then the most powerful Jew Hater Extraordinaire.) They were all into worshipping the Odin spirit of their Teutonic ancestors whose blood line they believed had been weakened by breeding with Slavs and borrowing money from Jewish Bankers that were blamed for betraying them.
We can run from Madam Blavatsky’s Nazi ideology but we will face it again. It’s as old as ancient Egypt. And Ukraine is full of it today.
Arthur C. Clarke: "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic." The only difference is, one is real and the other is fantasy and illusion. The creator of the technology or the magic knows the difference but his audience does not. And being passively enchanted by the phenomena being presented by the technology or the magic, the audience does not WANT to know the difference. It wants to be entertained; psychologically subordinated to the Great Oz; told what to do; implicitly or explicitly assured that All Will Be Well.
It's an infantile state but a very real one, a natural response to a world full of wonders and portents. Kinda medieval; a retreat from the Enlightenment.
Technologists with a sideline in the occult is not new. Google on 'Jack Parsons.'
Charlie Stross’s Laundry series of science fiction books is based in the premise that magic is basically mathematical and that the development of powerful computing gives rise to powerful magicians both in this world and entering it from other worlds.
@Balfegor Literally LOL. Tastes clearly differ.
The before after photos from Twitter explains this. Pre-Elon the place was filled with the usual young women who seem to be all about their feelings. Post Elon photos don't show them around. My WAG is those young liberal leftist women are the ones that make up the bulk of the people the article is about.
I've never read That Hideous Strength. But the Lewis novels were always about God in conflict with evil. That makes the novels poor exemplars for our many predicaments. When God is on your side, you can be sure of winning. Our problems stem from our knowledge that we are fighting evil, and our doubts that God will save the day.
I was having trouble with the word "postrationalist". I kept thinking it had something to do with the prostate.
@Balfegor. Try reading "Hideous Strength" again. If you liked the Narnia books, you may find something you missed (but you can't quit in the middle).
Religions authored by mortal gods, goddesses, and experts in nominally secular societies. Throw another baby on the barbie, it's over.
This brings to mind James Lindsay's recent writings and talks about how modern social justice/woke traces back through all these iterations, back to Marx, back to Hegel, and so on...and ultimately back to the heresies of Gnosticism. He posits that Marxism et al not only is LIKE a religion; it absolutely IS a religion and that religion is Gnostic. They believe that they have been made privy to "special knowledge" of the true history and nature of reality and humanity. This world is an illusion and oppressive powers of society hide from us the truth that we are all shards of the mind of God. Thus, when we progress through all the necessary stages of human development, we will burn off the trappings, the prison, of society and we will come to know ourselves truly for the first time. We will become One, in a perfect communism. Bat-shit crazy stuff but they tailor it to fit each new generation so that it sounds good on the surface.
Lewis wrote that That Hideous Strength was a fictional animation of his lecture series that became The Abolition of Man, which is a must-read and must-re-read in our day. 'Here is what he says there about science and 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.
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. 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. "
Balfegor,
And yet those "even more caricatured villains" are alive today; some of them even occupying high government office.
Lewis' novel resembles Kurt Schlichter's more recent work in seeming grossly over-the-top at first glance... and then you discover some folks downtown in the mayor's office, or the CDC, or the UN Secretary General's seat who are working overtime to prove that it's not.
I read That Hideous Strength almost every year. It is one of my all-time favorite novels. It could be summed up in this famous quote by G. K. Chesterton: "When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything."
There are a growing number of Americans who understand that there is more physical evidence for the existence of UFOs than for anything in the christian mythos. Roswell, radar tracks, observations by expert observers, and a growing body of physical evidence support these claims, despite the best efforts of the simpletons who proclaim as TRUTH the moronic Left Behind series.
I worked a contract a few years ago for a medical device manufacturer, and I had the opportunity to speak with a few doctors off the record. When pressed, they told me that they had never seen nor read of any "miracles", despite all sorts of claims to the contrary.
As to Lewis, it really appears that he was quite a degenerate, judging from the Wiki article on him(see Janie Moore). This seems to be typical of far too many christian writers. I tried reading the Narnia series back in high school and a few times later on, but they are far more poorly written than anything of Ayn Rand.
Plague Monk
Pseudonymous substacker N. S. Lyons writes of the superior applicability of both C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy (specifically, That Hideous Strength) together with J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for insight into what Lyons calls “our emerging 21st century dystopia than any other” available up-frontedly dystopian treatments such as 1984 or Brave New World. Recommended.
Utopia always smells like sulfur.
What we are in is the rise of gnosticism, again. It was the basis for National Socialism, but retrenched when that was defeated and marinated in the universities. But the believers didn't go away, just into the woodwork, so to speak.
This video by a very good academic level history video maker, i.e., references and bibliography provided, explores the underpinning. He was informed by Dr. James Linsey who Jordan Peterson just did a 2 hour discussion with that delves a bit into the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb_tJ59bSzg
My wife read the book once and it scared her so much she will not again. I love it, but wrote at length about its weaknesses. "My site: search "surfeit."
Plague Monk. Unable to admit you don't like his ideas, eh? He was not a degenerate. Learn more before making accusations on the basis of your initial prejudices. This is exactly the sort of thing that Wikipedia consistently gets wrong. It's pretty clear in a short comment you had your mind made up.
Ayn Rand plots well but wrote purple prose. Glad you found what you like
There's a great story about a black guy from South Central Los Angeles who moved to San Francisco and then stumbles upon this reality, only to be told it isn't true until no one can deny that it is
Post a Comment