That Hideous Strength

Introduction

In the novel That Hideous Strength (hereafter referred to as THS, because that title is a mouthful) C. S. Lewis depicts a future where, if the villains prevail, all of humanity will be subjugated to inhuman superintelligences. A future where advances in technology will empower a tiny elite to gain complete control over the masses, and ultimately to dispose of them entirely. A transhumanist dystopia where men become machines, ending in a sterilized Earth where nothing lives or breathes and all remaining activity works towards the inscrutable goals of machine minds.

It’s no wonder then that the book (previously forgotten by all, save for Lewis fans) has seen a (relative)surge of attention lately! In a world where terms like “AI Doomer” or "Superintelligent AI” have become commonplace enough that normies may have read about them in the New York Times, it’s easy to point to Lewis as a prophet who predicted all this long ago.

Itis a wonder, then, that THS doesn’t feature a single computer.

As someone who read the Space Trilogy before it was cool^[1], as much as I would like to call Lewis a prophet, he doesn’t deserve the title. Not for predicting AI, anyway. Technologically speaking he didn’t see AI coming at all, which is understandable since the book was published in 1947. While he was a world class expert on literature (the more ancient the better), his scientific knowledge was lacking. The first book of the Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet was notable for having a significant error about how gravity works in a spaceship, for example (though in his defense, when he wrote the book nobody had ever actually been to space before). He almost didn’t get into Oxford because he couldn’t pass the math portion of the entrance examination^[2]. All this to say that Lewis is not the man to go to for technological or scientific predictions. If you want to understand the works of Milton, he’s your man, but predicting AI was quite beyond his abilities.

YetTHS is a prophetic book: just not about AI. Certainly, huge chunks of the book is applicable to our current AI situation, but the book isn’t about AI. The book prophesies an event that took place so long ago in relation to ourselves that we hardly remember it, or assign it any much importance: the fall of an edifice so mighty that it loomed over the Earth for decades, influencing the flow of history and contributing to the death or enslavement of hundreds of millions of people. A modern day Tower of Babel, reaching to heaven, the product of a seemingly unstoppable force. The title of the book is a direct reference to that famous tower, taken from a 16th century poem: “The shadow of that hideous strength, six mile and more it is of length.” And like the Tower of Babel, it was abandoned overnight.

The new Tower of Babel that THS predicted the miraculous fall of was Modernism. Specifically the kind of “High Modernism” that Scott talked about in his review of the book Seeing Like a State, which he described as

…an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy. The High Modernists claimed to be about figuring out the most efficient and high-tech way of doing things, but most of them knew little relevant math or science and were basically just LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids.

Scott described High Modernism again in a bit more detail in his review of The Revolt of the Public:

This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist- dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.

Some principles of this system: government management of the economy, under the wise infallible leadership of Alan-Greenspan-style boffins who could prevent recessions and resist "animal spirits". Government sponsorship of science, under the wise infallible leadership of Einstein-style geniuses who could journey to the Platonic Realm and bring back new insights for the rest of us to gawk at. Government management of society, in the form of Wars on Poverty and Wars on Drugs and exciting new centralized forms of public education that would make every child an above-average student. Homelessness getting cleared away by a wave of the city planner's pen, replaced by scientifically-designed heavily optimized efficient public housing like Cabrini-Green.

To those living through the first half of the 20th century Modernism must have seemed as powerful and eternal as that mythical tower to heaven. The characters of THS set themselves in opposition to this zeitgeist, embodied in the form of the villainous National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE for short, because THS has more than a little Orwellian humor to it), and by the end of the story they find themselves surprisingly and miraculously victorious.

Lewis may have been surprised how prophetic his book would prove. High Modernism had only a few years left in it after the book was published. The foundation was already cracked, and the tower was doomed to crumble at the next strong wind. Soon the world would move on, at least in the West, to Postmodernism. Lewis can’t take credit for taking out Modernism: THS was generally well received, but far from a hit with the public. But if you predict that the Tower of Babel is doomed to fall, and it does, then I think you deserve to be called a prophet. Of the Old Testament type.

Modernism is long dead though, so why are people so hyped aboutTHS right now? What does this book, which contains no computers and doesn’t have a single 1940’s style shiny metal robot in it, have to say about AI? Or transhumanism? Or anything at all relevant to the current decade?

Quite a bit, so let’s take a look.

The Plot

THS is a weird book. It has a weird name, is populated with weird characters, and while the plot starts out normal it becomes weirder and weirder the farther you go. The story begins with an unhappy marriage and college politics, and by the time you get to the end you find wizards, multidimensional alien intelligences, bloody massacres, elephants, and a p-zombie.

This is by design, as Lewis explains in the book’s preface:

I called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who is likes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why — intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels — I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairytale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton.

THS is the final book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy, his famously un-famous foray into the world of science fiction. When normal people think of Lewis’s fiction they think of The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Screwtape Letters, or, if they are particularly well read, The Great Divorce. Those books, alongside his books on apologetics, made him a household name and kept him financially secure to his dying day. The Space Trilogy, on the other hand, is well known by fans of Lewis and hardly anyone else. Out of the three books of the trilogy THS has a particularly strong reputation: you either think it’s the best of the three, or the worst. It is, even in comparison to the first two books of the trilogy, a strange book.

We can’t effectively discuss how THS is relevant to the modern day without knowing what’s in it, so let’s take a moment to go over the basic plot. From here on there will be major spoilers for the book. I would suggest that if you haven’t read it you should go read it first, but we all know you’re not going to do that. I wouldn’t, if I were in your shoes! It’s like 380 pages, if you pick it up now by the time you’re done you’ll have forgotten this review exists. So we’ll proceed. Having the plot spoiled shouldn’t ruin your enjoyment too much if you decide to read it later.

The protagonists of the book are a married couple, academics named Mark and Jane, who find their lives changed by a hidden war between two mysterious organizations. The first of these is the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (the aforementioned NICE). NICE is a new arm of the British government that advertises itself as working towards the improvement of society based on scientific research. It is first described as

The first-fruit of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints — “red tape” was the word its supporters used — which have hitherto hampered research in this country. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime.

In other words, NICE is as Modernist as it gets: a group of elite technocrats with a government mandate to improve the nation using the power of science.

Looking past the surface of NICE we find that there is an inner ring within it consisting of those who really run the organization (the official director is a figurehead who spends his time on PR events and schmoozing with politicians) and those who know what NICE’s true goals are: to control and re-order society through political, financial, and coercive power. They have supporters at every level of government, they control all the major newspapers, and they have their own police force that acts as a private army of thugs and enforcers.

Yet within that inner circle is a second, inner, inner ring, who know the true true purpose of NICE, which is to discover methods of immortality that will allow a small group of undying superhumans (namely themselves) to subjugate and rule over all mankind. To that end they have been keeping the severed head of a scientist named Alcasan (who was executed for murdering his wife) alive, using machines to replace all his biological functions. Not only have they kept Alcasan alive indefinitely, they have removed the upper half of his skull and experimented on increasing the size of his brain, with the goal of increasing his intelligence. The existence of the Head (as they call him) is a secret to the public and to most members of the institute: an even greater secret is that the Head is the one directing NICE’s activities.

Yet within that inner-inner ring is a final inner-inner-inner ring, consisting of two individuals who are the only ones who know the actually true true purpose of NICE: to carry out the will of the Macrobes, demonic entities who are the true masters behind the organization and who seek to destroy almost all life on Earth.

A Moment on Modernism

It may be important to take a moment here and discuss what exactly I mean when I say that NICE represents Modernism. It can be a bit hard to picture what Modernism means these days, because it doesn’t fit neatly onto our current Right-Left political spectrum. On the one hand Modernism was all about increasing government power, rule by educated technocrats who know better than the public, and radically reforming society, which is a bit Left coded. On the other hand it was also about building industry and infrastructure on a massive scale, bulldozing whatever forests or mountains or houses happen to be in the way, which is a bit Right coded. That’s why both the USSR and Nazi Germany can be considered to be Modernist projects: though their political values were different, they were all about reforming society in the name of progress and steamrolling over any traditions that were obstacles.

This weird combination of Big Government with massive expansion of industry gives a flavor you don’t really find today. This scene, where the NICE scientist Filostrato has a dinner chat about the environment, is illustrative:

The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.

"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."

"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."

"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.

"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."

"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."

"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."

"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"

"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."

"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"

"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."

"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."

"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"

"Go on," said Winter.

"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."

"That's true."

"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."

"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."

"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

Pretty weird, isn’t it? But it gives you a picture of what Modernism was all about. In many ways it was about wanting order. Streets in perfect grids, houses built all from the same plan, identical, spaced out according to a perfect plan. Nature, by contrast, is wild and chaotic. You cannot order a forest. The trouble is the Modernists wanted to order society, and society is made of humans, who are just as wild and chaotic. The problem for Modernism over and over again was the humans would not behave as their theories wished them to. Modernism is all about the clean and orderly theory. Lewis describes this well about Mark, who is a sociologist:

…his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as "man" or "woman." He preferred to write about "vocational group," "elements," "classes," and "populations": for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

Back to the Plot

Opposing NICE in secret is the second organization, called Logres. It consists of four men and five women living in an old manor house in the country. They have no political power, control no newspapers, and have no private armies. Outside of the nine of them nobody in the wider world even knows they exist. There are no inner rings within them: each member knows Logres’s purpose, which is to somehow bring down the imposing edifice of NICE before it takes over the world.

Our two main characters, Mark and Jane, find themselves mixed up in each of these organizations respectively. Mark is invited to take a position at NICE, and is drawn in by his desire to be among those who will change the world. When he starts asking too many questions NICE puts him in a position where if he leaves his career will be ruined. Later on when he rocks the boat a little too much they plant evidence at a murder scene (a murder committed by NICE police force, as it so happens) that implicates him. They offer to conceal this evidence from the regular authorities, of course, making it clear that if he tries to leave NICE the planted evidence will be released and he’ll find himself on death row for murder. When Mark eventually reaches the innermost ring of NICE he does so under the explicit threat that if he backs out now NICE will kill him outright, before he has a chance to leave their headquarters. NICE is a self-devouring organism, where every member is trying to get above everyone else in the inner hierarchy, throwing those under them to the wolves once their usefulness has passed.

Jane finds herself the target of Logres, who wants her to join them as much as NICE wants Mark. Or, more specifically, as much as NICE wants Jane, as we find out that NICE only went to the trouble of enticing and then trapping Mark as an attempt to get Jane, and to have leverage over here. Both groups want Jane because she, unknowingly, has inherited psychic abilities that allow her to spy on people in her dreams. NICE wants Jane so they can learn who the members of Logres are, and take them out of the picture. Logres wants Jane so they can use her dreams to learn what NICE is plotting to do. Yet unlike NICE’s coercive tactics with Mark, they want her to join only of her own free will, and ask her to come see their own Head.

The Head of Logres is Dr. Ransom, and main character from the previous two books of the Space Trilogy. In the previous book,Perelandra, Ransom travelled to Venus, discovered it was an Edenic paradise, ate the food, drank the water, had a fist fight with the Devil, and came home. As a result of his time there he appears to have gained eternal youth and health, save for a bite wound on his heel that continuously bleeds and causes him significant pain. Jane is hesitant to join Logres because quite frankly this whole “we need your prophetic dreams to stop demons from taking over the world” thing is pretty cuckoo and she’s a thoroughly Modern woman who doesn’t go in for that sort of thing. But ultimately she is drawn in by the charisma of Ransom, and by the general goodness of the people there, and because her dreams keep getting more and more frightening and making it hard for her not to believe them.

That’s about all you really need to know to discuss the book so I won’t spoil it any further, other than to say that Logres wins in the end. How they do it isn’t that important: in fact, a major theme of the book is that Logres does surprisingly little to actually bring about NICE’s destruction. And NICE is destroyed, utterly, by the end of the book. This is appropriate and prophetic, since Modernism was also destroyed utterly without any one person having to do much of anything to make it happen.

So what does this have to do with AI?

Unaligned Intelligences

Lewis wrote most of THS during WWII, finishing the first draft in 1943 and finally publishing it in 1947. At the time computers were unknown unless you worked in some very specific areas of research and engineering. While Lewis was writing his book Turing was building a computer to break the Enigma code.

Naturally then Lewis did not write about superintelligent AIs. Yet the villains of his story are seeking the same goal as many of those who hope to create ASI: the creation of an intelligence capable of complete mastery of science, and complete control over nature. The primary difference is that they are using the methods of biology, chemistry, and engineering instead of code and computers. They plan to take certain humans and extend their lives, modify their brains, and enhance them until they are something beyond human ability and power:

“We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever; he gets wiser. Later, we make them live better — for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present.”

“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”

“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”

“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”

“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “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.”

It isn’t hard to see the resemblance to our current hopes and fears regarding ASI. Lewis even predicts Roko’s Basilisk, in a sense: he predicted the concept of a future superintelligence having the power to consign those he chooses to an artificial hell, one that cannot be escaped. The Basilisk’s hell is an endless simulation, while Lewis’ is a life kept living in agony perpetually through machinery and chemistry, but the ultimate result is the same: when the ASI comes, it will have power to grant eternal reward or punishment. Or so, at least, some currently hope, or fear.

THS may not have predicted the technological advances of the future that would actually occur (last I checked we are still unable to keep human heads alive indefinitely using medical science, much less make them smarter), but the book certainly has application to our current AI discourse. Lewis didn’t imagine artificial intelligence, yet he would have certainly agreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky (hereafter shortened to “Big Yud”, because we’ll be here all day if I use his full name) about the risk. Lewis’s immortal superintelligent machine men are products of chemistry, biology, and medical technology, not silicon and code, yet the result is the same as Big Yud’s dire predictions: the domination and ultimate extinction of humanity. In his essay “Religion and Rocketry”, where Lewis speculates on the results of us discovering intelligent alien life, he lays the risk of unaligned AI out as straightforwardly as any Doomer could:

It sets one dreaming—to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we met innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen.

We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed

Where Rationalists speak of “aligned” vs. “unaligned” AIs, Lewis used the old Christian concept of “unfallen” vs. “fallen”. It amounts to the same thing for practical purposes, with one huge difference. When Rationalists speak of aligned AIs they mean aligned to human values: human morality, human goals, human flourishing. We actually see a good example of this kind of alignment inTHS, in a scene where Mark first learns about the superintelligences NICE has been working with, and has a few understandable questions:

These organisms, then," said Mark, "are friendly to humanity?"

"If you reflect for a moment," said Frost, "you will see that your question has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought. Friendship is a chemical phenomenon; so is hatred. Both of them presupposes organisms of our own type. The first step towards intercourse with the macrobes is the realisation that one must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions. It is only as you begin to do so that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a by-product of your blood and nervous tissues."

"Oh, of course. I didn't quite mean 'friendly' in that sense. I really meant, were their aims compatible with our own?"

"What do you mean by our own aims?"

"Well--I suppose--the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency--the elimination of war and poverty and other forms of waste--a fuller exploitation of nature--the preservation and extension of our species, in fact."

"I do not think this pseudo-scientific language really modifies the essentially subjective and instinctive basis of the ethics you are describing. I will return to the matter at a later stage.”

Which brings us to the most prominent issue with AI alignment: the question of which “human values” we want them to align with exactly? Humans have had a lot of different ideas about what goals we should pursue, and what we should value along the way. Among doomers this problem is one of the many reasons to fear China “winning” a ASI race: even if they figure out alignment, it will be an ASI aligned to the values and goals of the Chinese Communist Party. So what values should ASI align to, if values are subjective?

Lewis believed that there is an objective Good (capital-G), embodied in the nature of God, the ground of being, and in the nature of mankind, who was made in God’s image. To be fallen is to be out of alignment with this Good. The concept of an unaligned intelligence would not have surprised or confused Lewis, because all humans are unaligned intelligences: fallen. While Big Yud writes of the need to align AIs to human values, Lewis wrote (in all his writing) of the dire need to align yourself with divine values. Lewis would have been very skeptical that a machine could be intelligent at all^[3], but, granted that an intelligent machine existed, he would have thought it obvious that it may be unaligned with the Good. Especially since such a machine would be built by unaligned intelligences such as ourselves. And if we encountered a fallen intelligence superior to our own, what could the result be but disaster? Alignment with fallen humans like ourselves would not nearly be enough to keep humanity safe: after all, when we humans encounter intelligent life less advanced than ourselves we have a history of conquering, exploiting, or genociding them.

What’s more, Lewis did not need to speculate about the results of encountering evil superintelligences, for he knew they already existed and we had encountered them long ago, to our detriment. I’m talking of course about the Devil and his fallen friends. Lewis not only believed that the Devil exists but that, as an Archangel, he is superior to humanity in terms of intelligence, power, and capability. Having once been an Archangel does not make the Devil less dangerous and depraved, but moreso. As Lewis wrote inMere Christianity:

The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all.

The application to AI is straightforward: a superintelligent AI, by dint of its superior abilities, will either be far better than the best humans or far worse than worst.

This concept is foundational to the setting of the Space Trilogy. In the first book we discover that outer space is inhabited by immaterial, immortal, superintelligent and supernaturally powerful creatures called eldils. Each planet in our solar system is ruled over (in a sense) by a particularly powerful eldil with the title of Oyarsa. Our own Oyarsa, the one assigned to Earth, long ago rebelled against the other eldil, and against Maleldil, the creator of the universe. It is because of this rebellion that humanity has fallen, and the Earth is filled with all manner of evils. Earth itself has been under siege for millennia, surrounded by the armies of invisible eldil, there to prevent the fallen eldil of our world from to from escaping and destroying the other worlds. In the first book of the trilogy we discover that long ago the Oyarsa of Earth invaded Mars and managed to wipe out most life on the planet, and most of the atmosphere.

The point being that in the world of THS our species has already been subjugated to an evil, unaligned superintelligence. The schemes of NICE to create a future ruled over by horrible immortal Heads merely serves to make the spiritual reality a material reality. We are already a captive people, and have been for all human history, as the villain Frost explains in the book:

When I said it transcended the animals, I was, of course, including the most efficient animal, Man. The macrobe is more intelligent than Man."

"But how is it in that case that we have had no communication with them?"

"It is not certain that we have not. But in primitive times it was spasmodic, and was opposed by numerous prejudices. Moreover the intellectual development of man had not reached the level at which intercourse with our species could offer any attractions to a macrobe. But though there has been little intercourse, there has been profound influence. Their effect on human history has been far greater than that of the microbes, though, of course, equally unrecognised. In the light of what we now know all history will have to be rewritten. The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to the historians; that, indeed, is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science."

Later we discover that the Macrobes are responsible for WWI and II, which are just the first two of a series of wars meant to kill most of the population of Earth:

"Surely," said Mark, "one requires a pretty large population for the full exploitation of nature, if for nothing else? And surely war is disgenic and reduces efficiency? Even if population needs thinning, is not war the worst possible method of thinning it?"

"That idea is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential; and war destroyed types which were then still useful. But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a dead-weight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy."

"I see," said Mark. "I had thought--rather vaguely--that the intelligent nucleus would be extended by education."

"That is a pure chimera. The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it."

"The last two wars, then, were not disasters in your view?"

"On the contrary, they were simply the beginning of the programme--the first two of the sixteen major wars which are scheduled to take place in this century. I am aware of the emotional (that is, the chemical) reactions which a statement like this produces in you, and you are wasting your time in trying to conceal them from me. I do not expect you to control them. That is not the path to objectivity. I deliberately raise them in order that you may become accustomed to regard them in a purely scientific light and distinguish them as sharply as possible from the facts."

Is it any wonder, then, that many Christians are worried that when we talk to AI, we might really be talking to demons? Lewis predicted that as well, given that in THS the seemingly superintelligent Head is merely a mouthpiece for the Macrobes.

In any case, whileTHS has a lot of relevance for the AI discourse, it isn’t about AI. The project to enhance human longevity and intelligence is a different topic, one tied into AI and almost as prominent: transhumanism.

Modern Transhumanism

The term “transhumanism” was probably invented by Dr. Julian Huxley in 1957, a full ten years after THS was published. Yet THS is heavy with concerns about transhumanism. This is not a coincidence, because THS is about Modernism and Julian was a Modernist supreme: the first director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, president of the British Eugenics Society, co-published a book with arch-Modernist H. G. Wells, attempted to have an open marriage (his wife didn’t go for it), was a founding member of the Political and Economic Planning think tank which had a prominent role in the eventual formation of the National Health Service and post-war economic planning, visited the USSR in 1931 and thought it was grand, wrote a collection of essays titled If I were Dictator where he explained how he would reform society, and once proposed using atomic bombs to melt the polar ice cap to improve shipping and make England’s climate warmer. He had quite the Modernist pedigree as well: his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog” due to his prominent public support of the theory of evolution, was a major reformer of British schools, invented the term “agnosticism”, and proposed creating an edited version of the Bible for children to study in school, with all scientific inaccuracies taken out. Julian’s half-brother Andrew Huxley would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and his brother Aldous Huxley^[4] wrote the famous novel Brave New World, which depicted a modernist dystopian future^[5].

All this to say that transhumanism as a concept had its origin in Modernist ideas. The essay where Julian coined the term has some top tier Modernist lines, like this:

We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy.

Or this:

…we must study the possibilities of creating a more favourable social environment, as we have already done in large measure with our physical environment. We shall start from new premisses…that quality of people, not mere quantity, is what we must aim at, and therefore that a concerted policy is required to prevent the present flood of population-increase from wrecking all our hopes for a better world…

Finishing up with:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

"I believe in transhumanism" : once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.

So while the essay was written a decade after the book came out, it’s not surprising that we see the same concepts pursued by NICE. Lewis was addressing ideas that had been bounced around for decades before the concept had a specific label. It was practically built into the Modernist concept of progress: that man had evolved from brute into civilization, and would progress further into better and better planned civilizations with greater and greater control of nature, until we were as gods. This is the central hidden project of NICE^[6]: to transcend organic limits and become a new superior kind of human. The villainous Dr. Filostrato explains it well:

In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it….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.

His colleague, the mad priest Straik, explains it to Mark a bit more colorfully:

Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles — shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world — to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.”

In pursuit of this they have created the Head. They consider him the next step on the ladder of human progress. There are quite a few people in Silicon Valley today who are on board with this plan. And why not? What’s wrong with healing the sick or raising the dead? What's bad about throwing off the shackles of nature?

Well for one NICE, true to its Modernist soul, is not planning oneveryone transcending their humanity. Just a small, educated, technocratic elite:

“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”

“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.”

“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”

“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature — Man in the abstract — is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”

“A king cometh,” said Straik, “who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”

Modernism was in many ways the zeitgeist of dictatorship. “Lets put one brilliant guy in charge, and let him fix everything!” Stalin, Hitler, Musselini, Mao, all came out of the height of Modernism’s influence over the world. It’s not unreasonable for Lewis to extrapolate Modernist ideas of human progress out to all power being given to one man, who will remake the universe as he sees fit.

Alright then, so you shouldn’t let Modernists do the transhuman trick. But would Lewis object to the idea today? What if we turn everyone into artificial men of power, egalitarian like? Instead of one man becoming a god, let all men become gods. Is there still something for Lewis to object to?

Well yes. As you may recall, Lewis would have been quite at home with concerns about unaligned superintelligences. And from the Christian perspective the whole world is covered with billions of unaligned intelligences: is it really a good idea to give them godlike powers? Our society is currently debating whether we should make a superintelligent power, since it might turn out to be evil: why then should we make all men superintelligent powers, when we know that they have a long track record of being really, stupendously evil? Ransom, leader of the good guys inTHS, explains Lewis’ stance:

There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe of Tellus, would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.

In other words, if you give humanity the power of gods they will be evil gods. If the villains of NICE gained that power they would use it to wipe out all life on earth. If the Nazis had that power (remember, this was written during WWII) they would have used it to kill and destroy even more of their fellow humans. Imagine Stalin, immortal. He spent his life placing himself in a spot of supreme power and security. Who would dare try to topple him? He not only killed anyone that looked like a threat, he ordered the deaths of millions who were merely tangentially related to anything threatlike. It was only after a stroke took him down that someone else could take over, and try to make things better: like, maybe we should stop rounding up people and shooting them in the back of the head for no reason? But what if Stalin had uploaded himself into an immortal and stroke-proof supercomputer? What then?!

Lewis expands on this further in his bookThe Abolition of Man:

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.

I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?

Did you notice something that stands out in that quote? He writes that the final stage of Man’s conquest of Nature may not be far off. Lewis, having lived his whole life under the zeitgeist of Modernism, has picked up some Modernist assumptions. Later he writes that in the future man’s power over men “will be enormously increased”:

…the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

Armed as we are with the benefit of eight decades of hindsight, we know that didn’t happen. The state became more politically powerful, but never got close to “omnicompetent”. Science has made a lot of progress in many areas but psychology and biology haven't gotten anywhere near discovering an "irresistible scientific technique” that allows them to “cut out all posterity in what shape they please.” The Modernists thought we would get there for sure: just look at our friend Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where mankind has been shaped by science into various subhuman classes to serve the state’s needs and never think anything the state doesn’t want them to think. But human nature has proven extremely resilient to attempts to brainwash and recondition. You cannot, it turns out, treat human minds like blank states that we can learn to write whatever we want on. The omnicompetent state can’t even get people to wear a mask during a worldwide pandemic, let alone condition them into a servile class incapable of disobeying their technocrat kings! Lewis predicted that the Tower of Babel would fall, but even he believed them when they said the tower could really reach the heavens this time.

Humans failed at the Modernist dream, but the prospect of superintelligent AI has revived it. Sure, we never figured out the secrets to all power over nature: but ASI can! It’s no wonder then thatTHS has become relevant again. The transhumanists of the last few decades had to content themselves with the small and steady progress of science, imagining a world where we transcend human nature by…adding a USB port to our heads, or living a decade longer on average. We no longer have the Modernist confidence in the unstoppable power of progress. Only the prospect of ASI can revive those heady Modernist dreams again. But then we return to the problem: can we trust ASI to use that power for good? Once we have built a tool that has complete power over nature, we have built a tool that allows complete power over ourselves. In the hands of an unaligned AI, or a modern day Stalin, the result would be the disaster Lewis predicted: a dominion in which “no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.”

Lewis the Transhumanist

The funny thing is, other than all that Lewis is one of the most pro-transhumanism authors of the 20th century. Lewis believes that it is the destiny of a significant portion of humankind to become like gods, and that all men not only will be immortal, but are immortal right now. For he was, of course, a Christian, and Christians believe that the soul cannot die and all humans are destined for resurrection: some to eternal glory, and some to eternal damnation. InThe Weight of Glory he explains in terms that aren’t that dissimilar from the ones he wrote for the villainous Filistrato:

Nature is only the first sketch….Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects…

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

Lewis is in favor of eternal life. He is in favor of healing the sick, and raising the dead. He is in favor of man becoming like God: the Christian concept of theosis. The difference between Lewis’ theosis and Huxley’s transhumanism is simple, but makes all the difference in the world. Transhumanists seek to transform humans into more perfect beings as they understand it. Theosis seeks to transform yourself into more perfect beings as God understands it. Both seek a future where man is immortal and clothed in power and glory, but in the first case man is conquering human nature, while in the second man is submitting to divine nature. It is the difference between remaking yourself, as you would see fit, and submitting to be remade by God, as he would see fit.

Lewis puts this idea inTHS explicitly: it's one of the binding themes of the whole book. The book begins with Jane musing about her unhappy marriage to Mark, and it ends with them reunited. It seems like a strange bookend, considering that the parts in between are about a cosmic war between good and evil and severed heads that speak with the voice of demons. Yet the theme of Jane’s unhappy marriage runs through the whole piece, because it contains Lewis’s understanding of true transhumanism, of theosis. Jane is a thoroughly Modern wife: she has no intention to be subservient to her husband, or to put aside her career in favor of his, or to have children before she is good and ready to. So she is flummoxed when she meets with Ransom and is told that she can’t join Logres without trying to bring her husband in too:

“But is it really necessary?” she began. “I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do. It seems to me extraordinary that everything should hang on what Mark says about something he doesn’t understand.”

“Child,” said the Director, “it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”

“Someone said they were very old fashioned. But—”

“That was a joke. They are not old fashioned; but they are very, very old.”

“They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?”

“Well — no,” said the Director with a curious smile. “No. Quite definitely they wouldn’t think of doing that.”

“And would it make no difference to them what a marriage was actually like — whether it was a success? Whether the woman loved her husband?”...

“I suppose,” said the Director, “it would depend on how he lost your love.”

Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the Director the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even of pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problems was in fact involving her in new ones.

“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”

The Director said nothing.

“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”

“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.

“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.

“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

Later in the book Jane has a revelation about this that clarifies things for her:

Jane had gone into the garden to think. She accepted what the Director had said, yet it seemed to her nonsensical. His comparison between Mark’s love and God’s (since apparently there was a God) struck her nascent spirituality as indecent and irreverent. “Religion” ought to mean a realm in which her haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest and what she called her “true self” would soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world. For still she thought that “Religion” was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion: nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward, rather of strong, skilful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy. Supposing one were a thing after all — a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one’s true self? Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was? Supposing Maleldil on this subject agreed with them and not with her? For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness. Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.

What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them: but from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendour or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump.

Lewis agrees with the dream of transhumanism in all respects but this: we are not free to remake ourselves however we like. We can become as gods, but only by first submitting to the actual God, who will transform us to match his own plan. We must align ourselves with the Good before we can be granted power and glory. If we achieve power over nature while still an unaligned intelligence then we will wreak as much havoc as we fear an unaligned ASI may do. Without that obedience, that alignment to a greater Good, transhumanism becomes calamity.

Seeking Human Alignment

I imagine that many reading this will not be sympathetic to Lewis’ point of view here. Would Lewis have us abandon scientific progress? Should we be content to let millions of children suffer and die from diseases, instead of seeking the power to cure them? Must we abandon all technology and return to the Middle Ages, where most people died as children, or starved to death when the crops failed?

Well no, of course not. Lewis was quite aware and appreciative of the benefits scientific progress has brought to humankind. As he writes inThe Abolition of Man

“Man has Nature whacked,” said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. “No matter” he said, “I know I'm one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn't alter the fact that it is winning.” I have chosen this story as my point of departure in order to make it clear that I do not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described as “Man's conquest”, much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has gone to make it possible.

Lewis’s problem was not with science itself, but the fallen mankind that wields it. You must remember that THS was published only two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were consumed by nuclear fire. Ever since those bombs dropped people have waited with baited breath for the next nuclear war, and for mankind to destroy itself as a result. We are fortunate that the Americans got the bomb first, and that Harry Truman was aligned enough with the Good to choose never to use it again, despite many of his generals being eager to. Imagine if the Nazi’s had gotten the bomb instead? Would they have hesitated? Or imagine if Stalin had gotten the bomb before anyone else: would he have been content with rule over merely the eastern half of Europe? We have found ourselves in a fortunate equilibrium, where nobody who has nukes uses nukes because they know if they do they’ll get nuked in turn. We dodged a bullet there.

With this in mind, I hope you can sympathize with Lewis’s point a bit better: particularly because the AI Doomers agree with him. Yes, ASI could do wonderful things for mankind, like cure all disease, or even cure aging! Yet with that same power an unaligned ASI could do terrible things, such as wipe out all life on Earth. And an aligned ASI under the control of an evil man could turn the Earth into one giant North Korea. Lewis’s overall point remains as true now as it was in 1947: without obedience to the Good (that is to say, alignment) scientific power is a double edged sword. We cannot trust an unaligned ASI with ultimate power: how then can we trust fallen man?

Lewis would certainly agree that we should seek AI alignment. He spent his life imploring us, the most powerful intelligences on Earth, to try to align ourselves with the Good. The linking thread of all of his writing is the dire need for the reader to cultivate virtue. As he wrote in_Mere Christianity:_

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.

To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

That same thread runs through THS as well. Though the plot is concerned with the ultimate fate of the world, and the potential extinction of life on Earth, it is even more centrally concerned with the fate of Mark and Jane’s souls. It begins with them, and it ends with them. Both of them are a little morally lost at the beginning, and both are tempted to change. Mark is tempted towards evil by the power and prestige of NICE, while Jane is tempted towards good by the holiness and love of Logres. The reader becomes invested in both of their struggles: will Mark give in, and become one of the villains plotting the subjugation of the human race? Will Jane reject the goodness of Logres out of fear of losing her freedom and pride? Mark is in a particularly perilous position as he falls deeper and deeper into NICE’s clutches. They make it clear to him at first that leaving NICE will be the end of his career, and later that leaving NICE will be the end of his very life. They threaten with a big stick, and offer a very juicy carrot: the offer of becoming one of the chosen few who will live forever and rule the earth. Throughout the book Mark does not impress us with his ability to stand up for what’s right, to say the least: he’s a toady and hanger-on by nature, desperately wanting to be part of the in-crowd and willing to do whatever is necessary to get there. Lewis sums up Mark’s patheticness fairly well:

Dimble had always treated him with scrupulous politeness and Mark had always felt that Dimble disliked him. This had not made him dislike Dimble. It had only made him uneasily talkative in Dimble’s presence and anxious to please. Vindictiveness was by no means one of Mark’s vices. For Mark liked to be liked. A snub sent him away dreaming of not revenge but of brilliant jokes or achievements which would one day conquer the good will of the man who had snubbed him. If he were ever cruel it would be downwards, to inferiors and outsiders who solicited his regard, not upwards to those who rejected it. There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.

Yet I, at least, can’t help but feel for Mark, and to root for him. I can see many of his flaws reflected in myself. We are all of us unaligned intelligences, after all. Lewis wants us to see Mark’s patheticness, and to see our own weakness in him, because Lewis is always primarily concerned with the reader’s own soul. Will you give in to the threats and promises of the NICEs in your own life? Or will you rise above your pride and your fears to enter into your own Logres, and into greater alignment with the Good?

Lewis was a fan of G. K. Chesterton, who summed up this idea well in his bookOrthodoxy:

To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?—that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

The Villians

Mark is just a character in a book, but you are a human being, capable of becoming the greatest of saints or the most despicable of sinners. So what will you choose today? Will the story of your life end with you as one of the villains, or one of the heroes? And make no mistake, to become one of the villains is a terrible fate, even if the villains win. To see why, let's take a close look at the two main villains of the book: Wither and Frost

The first book Lewis wrote after his reconversion to Christianity was The Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical book in the style of the famous The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. The book was a commercial flop, and the allegory was so obscure that when it was later reprinted (after he had become a famous writer, and now had fanboys interested in his back catalog) Lewis added explanatory notes to the top of each page. Flawed as it is, it gives us a great look into Lewis’ understanding of virtue.

In the book the main character travels across a land divided in two by a road going east-west. The farther north or south of the road you go the deeper you fall into two different errors. North is the land of cold and calculating pragmatism, reductionism, and, in the frozen extreme north, violent nihilism. South is the land of warm and wild intuition, broad-minded openness, spirituality, and, in the fetid and brackish swamps of the extreme south, occultism, magicians, and madness. North is cynicism, south is woo-woo. North is systematic, south is holistic. North is analytical philosophy, and south is continental. North is Physicalism, south is Idealism. Both directions have benefits, and both directions will kill you if you travel too far, and the right road lies between them. Lewis, being a classicist, was a great believer in the Golden Mean of Plato and Aristotle. Virtues are balances between two extremes.

In THS Wither and Frost are the two high initiates of the Macrobes. They are under no illusions like the others at NICE, that the institute is working towards immortality or transhumanism or the efficient reordering of society. They directly serve the Macrobes, and are aware that by doing so they work towards the destruction of all life on Earth. They are the two most evil characters in the book, and they represent excesses in both directions: Wither to the south, and Frost to the north.

Wither, as the deputy director of NICE, is the central power of the institute. The director is merely a figurehead and has little to do with day to day operations, and the staff of NICE live in fear of getting on Wither’s bad side. This fear is combined with a comic element, for on the surface Wither appears to be a caricature of the most frustrating head of an organization you can imagine, one who uses an enormous amount of words to say nothing at all, and to make no clear decision on any problem. We first meet Wither when Mark does, and Mark becomes frustrated to the point of despair trying to get a straight answer out of him as to whether NICE is actually offering him a position, and if so what his job duties would be and for what salary:

“It is the exact nature of the work,” he said, “and of my qualifications for it that I wanted to get clear.”

“My dear friend,” said the Deputy Director, “you need not have the slightest uneasiness in that direction. As I said before, you will find us a very happy family, and may feel perfectly satisfied that no questions as to your entire suitability have been agitating anyone’s mind in the least. I should not be offering you a position among us if there were the slightest danger of your not being completely welcome to all, or the least suspicion that your very valuable qualities were not fully appreciated. You are — you are among friends here, Mr. Studdock. I should be the last person to advise you to connect yourself with any organisation where you ran the risk of being exposed — er — to disagreeable personal contacts.”

“The only thing I should like to get just a little clearer is the exact — well, the exact scope of the appointment.”

Well,” said Mr. Wither in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, “I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Committee. I quite understand your motives and — er — respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of an Appointment in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so — or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat or bed of Procrustes. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are — well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Institute feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole.”

And Mark said — God forgive him, for he was young and shy and vain and timid, all in one — “I do think that is so important. The elasticity of your organisation is one of the things that attracts me.” After that, he had no further chance of bringing the Director to the point and whenever the slow, gentle voice ceased he found himself answering it in its own style, and apparently helpless to do otherwise despite the torturing recurrence of the question, “What are we both talking about?”

I suspect that some of Lewis’ own experience in university committees likely influenced this character a bit. Talking to Wither is disorienting, and leaves you wondering if anything you say is actually getting through to him. There’s a good reason for this: Wither is ap-zombie.

Philosophical zombies (p-zombies for short) come from a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind. Imagine a human being that is physically identical to a normal human, but does not have conscious experience. They talk like a human, they react like a human, they behave exactly as normal humans behave, but there is no light on upstairs. They are not experiencing anything. The thought experiment was first made in the 1970s, decades afterTHS was published, so Lewis wasn’t trying to comment on p-zombies in particular. Wither was not born without conscious experience, but became a p-zombie slowly and by choice. Wither is a philosophical Idealist, who believes that reality is a mental construct. The “real world” is merely an illusion, a sentiment shared by aspects of Buddhism and Platonism. Wither has spent his life treating the world around him as if it was not real, and now the real world hardly touches him, as Lewis explains:

The Deputy Director hardly ever slept. When it became absolutely necessary for him to do so, be took a drug, but the necessity was rare, for the mode of consciousness he experienced at most hours of day or night had long ceased to be exactly like what other men call waking. He had learned to withdraw most of his consciousness from the task of living, to conduct business, even, with only a quarter of his mind. Colours, tastes, smells, and tactual sensations no doubt bombarded his physical senses in the normal manner: they did not now reach his ego. The manner and outward attitude to men which he had adopted half a century ago were now an organisation which functioned almost independently like a gramophone and to which he could hand over his whole routine of interviews and committees. While the brain and lips carried on this work, and built up day by day for those around him the vague and formidable personality which they knew so well, his inmost self was free to pursue its own life. That detachment of the spirit, not only from the senses, but even from the reason, which has been the goal of some mystics, was now his.

Hence he was still, in a sense, awake — that is, he was certainly not sleeping — an hour after Frost had left him to visit Mark in his cell. Anyone who had looked into the study during that hour would have seen him sitting motionless at his table, with bowed head and folded hands. But his eyes were not shut. The face had no expression; the real man was far away suffering, enjoying, or inflicting whatever such souls do suffer, enjoy or inflict when the cord that binds them to the natural order is stretched out to its utmost but not yet snapped.

So Wither walks through the world as a man on autopilot, unconsciously reacting to every event. The Wither the world sees is not a human, but a program wearing a human skin. A pattern of behavior that is also inclined towards evil, for while he seems like a foolish old man at first Wither is the primary person responsible for ensuring the secret plans of NICE come to fruition. He orders people killed, considers torturing prisoners, and by the end of the book stabs two people to death while acting cool as a cucumber.

Frost appears to be Wither’s opposite. He speaks in spare sentences that get immediately to the point, he is ruthless and calculating, and he has worked very hard to excise all emotion from himself. Just as Wither represents Idealism taken too far, Frost represents Physicalism. Consciousness, he believes, is an illusion. All experiences, emotions, and thoughts are merely the product of an unstoppable chain of cause and effect among the atoms in the brain, and are irrelevant. He explains his philosophy to Mark in detail, after Frost and Wither decide to try to make Mark into an initiate like themselves. After Mark has been locked up in a cell under NICE, after being framed for a murder that NICE agents carried out, Frost has the following conversation with him:

“I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts….The murder charge against you and the alterations in your treatment have been part of a planned programme with a well defined end in view,” said Frost, “It is a discipline through which everyone is passed before admission to the Circle.”

Again Mark felt a spasm of retrospective terror. Only a few days ago he would have swallowed any hook with that bait on it; and nothing but the imminence of death could have made the hook so obvious and the bait so insipid as it now was. At least, so comparatively insipid. For even now — “I don’t quite see the purpose of it,” he said aloud.

“It is, again, to promote objectivity. A circle bound together by subjective feelings of mutual confidence and liking would be use less. Those, as I have said, are chemical phenomena. They could all in principle be produced by injections. You have been made to pass through a number of conflicting feelings about the Deputy Director and others in order that your future association with us may not be based on feelings at all. In so far as there must be social relations between members of the circle it is, perhaps, better that they should be feelings of dislike. There is less risk of their being confused with the real nexus.”

“My future association?” said Studdock, acting a tremulous eageress. But it was perilously easy for him to act it. The reality might re-awake at any moment.

“Yes,” said Frost. “You have been selected as a possible candidate for admission. If you do not gain admission, or if you reject it, it will be necessary to destroy you. I am not, of course, at tempting to work on your fears. They only confuse the issue. The process would be quite painless, and your present reactions to it are inevitable physical events.”

Mark considered this thoughtfully. “It — it seems rather a formidable decision,” said Mark.

“That is merely a proposition about the state of your own body at the moment.”

I said that Frost represents Physicalism, which isn’t inaccurate, but it would be better to say that Frost is the epitome of reductionism. For Frost, all emotions, moral impulses, sensations, all experience in general are reducible to information about the state of your body in that particular moment, with no truth value extending beyond that. That includes our motivations and sense of value. If you are horrified at the prospect of all life on earth being wiped out, that is merely a fact about your body, and tells us nothing about whether we should oppose or support the proposition. Frost willingly serves the Macrobes, evil creatures bent on humanity's ruin, but he has no justification for it. He believes no justification is needed: he is doing it because he is doing it. His mind and his body are just an arrangement of atoms, and he has no more choice in where those atoms go than billiard balls have a choice in which pockets they end up in when struck with a cue ball, as he explains to Mark:

The Professor came to ask if he had thought over their recent conversation. Mark, who judged that some decent show of reluctances would make his final surrender more convincing, replied that only one thing was still troubling him. He did not quite understand what he in particular or humanity in general stood to gain by co-operation with the Macrobes. He saw clearly that the motives on which most men act, and which they dignify by the names of patriotism or duty to humanity, were mere products of the animal organism, varying according to the behaviour pattern of different communities. But he did not yet see what was to be substituted for these irrational motives. On what ground henceforward were actions to be justified or condemned?

“If one insists on putting the question in those terms,” said Frost, “I think Waddington has given the best answer. Existence is its own justification. The tendency to developmental change which we call Evolution is justified by the fact that it is a general characteristic of biological entities. The present establishment of contact between the highest biological entities and the Macrobes is justified by the fact that it is occurring, and it ought to be increased because an increase is taking place.”

“You think, then,” said Mark, “that there would be no sense in asking whether the general tendency of the universe might be in the direction we should call Bad?”

“There could be no sense at all,” said Frost. “The judgment you are trying to make turns out on inspection to be simply an expression of emotion….”

“And the actual tendency of events,” said Mark, “would still be self justified and in that sense ‘good’ when it was working for the extinction of all organic life, as it presently will?”

“Of course,” replied Frost, “if you insist on formulating the problem in those terms. In reality the question is meaningless. It presupposes a means — and — end pattern of thought which descends from Aristotle, who in his turn was merely hypostatising elements in the experience of an iron-age agricultural community. Motives are not the causes of action but its by-products. You are merely wasting your time by considering them. When you have attained real objectivity you will recognize, not some motives, but all motives as merely animal, subjective epiphenomena. You will then have no motives and you will find that you do not need them. Their place will be supplied — by something else which you will presently understand better than you do now. So far from being impoverished your action will become much more efficient.”

Frost has Mark undergo a series of training sessions in The Objective Room, a place designed to be actively hostile to normal human reactions of beauty, symmetry, and order. The purpose of the training is to, as Frost explains it, “eliminate from your mind one by one the things you have hitherto regarded as grounds for action. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, æsthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.”

Wither and Frost have two competing philosophies, but pursuing both to extremes causes them to end up in the same place: they are the willing puppets of the Macrobes, molded by them into perfect tools to carry out their malevolent will. This is made explicit by Lewis in the book’s ending, when things start to go terribly wrong for NICE. Both are unable to act to save themselves, and are instead compelled to work against their own interests at the behest of the Macrobes. For Frost, he has treated the world as unreal for so long that he is unable to engage with it to save himself when things go badly:

…he knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue-bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way.

So instead of saving himself Wither carries on with the program, starts killing people who know too much, and is ultimately killed in the process. Meanwhile Frost is aware of the disaster, but finds that he has lost his free will. Under the control of his masters he sets the building on fire with himself in it, to destroy all evidence of NICE’s true motives.

He did not know where he was going or what he was about to do. For many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so — since he had been initiated — he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion. There were not, and must not be, such things as men. But never, until this evening, had he been quite so vividly aware that the body and its movements were the only reality, that the self which seemed to watch the body leaving the dining room and setting out for the chamber of the Head, was a nonentity. How infuriating that the body should have power thus to project a phantom self!

…

Still not asking what he would do or why, Frost went to the garage. The whole place was silent and empty; the snow was thick on the ground by this time. He came up with as many petrol tins as he could carry. He piled all the inflammables he could think of together in the Objective Room. Then he locked himself in by locking the outer door of the ante-room. Whatever it was that dictated his actions then compelled him to push the key into the speaking tube which communicated with the passage. When he had pushed it as far in as his fingers could reach, he took a pencil from his pocket and pushed with that. Presently he heard the clink of the key falling on the passage floor outside. That tiresome illusion, his consciousness, was screaming to protest; his body, even had he wished, had no power to attend to those screams. Like the clockwork figure he had chosen to be, his stiff body, now terribly cold, walked back into the Objective Room, poured out the petrol and threw a lighted match into the pile. Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul —nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that. With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion. In that attitude eternity overtook him as sunrise in old tales overtakes trolls and turns them into unchangeable stone.

Conclusion

THS was a product of the previous zeitgeist, but it’s still relevant to the current one. There is much in the book that can be applied to modern questions around ASI and transhumanism. However, the most relevant part of THS to our lives is the part that is oldest, the part that stretches back to Aristotle, Confucius, Epictetus, Siddhartha Gautama, and further back beyond human memory. We should be concerned about AI alignment, to be sure, but there is a concern far more personal that THS brings to the fore: the need to align yourself. Each choice we make brings us a little more or a little less aligned with the Good. We have thrown a lot of effort into the problem of AI alignment, though likely not nearly enough. As a species we have thrown an enormous amount of effort in to the problem of human alignment. We’ve made some progress along the way! Progress that takes the form of societal values, traditions, religions, and fairy tales. For that is what a fairy tale does. It teaches us the wisdom of obedience, even when we can’t see why it should be so. As Chesterton put it in his book Orthodoxy:

The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word `cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden….In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

Lewis called THS a fairy tale, and it’s the truth. Its message is appropriate for our own age, where it seems that all the wonders and horrors of fantasy may soon become real, by the power of ASI. If you find yourself in a fairy tale, the best advice is to listen to the old lady on the path, and heed the warning of the fairy queen. Everything we hold dear may rely on obedience to the moral laws we have been given by those who came before. Everything may be lost if we fail to heed their warnings. The choice is each of ours, individually.

And If it seems that the choice isn’t ours, that we are helpless before the powers of our age,THS also reminds us: all towers fall. And when they fall, they fall in an instant, as if by a miracle.