Imagining a 'dialogue beyond death' between JFK, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley
The 60th anniversary of the assassination of president John F. Kennedy fell on Wednesday and there were a few remembrances, with the obligatory new “revelations” about the unresolved questions from the fateful day.
That all belongs to history now, as JFK settles into his place amongst the third-tier of American presidents — neither remarkable nor disastrous, but cut down young and thus written indelibly into the memory for the vigour and glamour of his administration.
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More relevant today are the two great writers who died on that same Nov. 22, 1963, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Peter Kreeft, the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book — Between Heaven and Hell — imagining a “dialogue somewhere beyond death” between the three, with JFK taking the role of the modern humanist, Lewis the Christian theist and Huxley the eastern pantheist. It’s a clever read, and sheds light upon ancient disputes in philosophy and theology. Yet it may be anthropology where their lessons are more lasting.
Huxley is most famous for his 1932 vision of a dystopian future, Brave New World, while Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia continue to fascinate children and intelligent adults with his remarkable re-imagining of the Christian story.
Another one of Lewis’s famous works, The Abolition of Man, published in 1943, can be thought of as a sort of complement to Brave New World. Kreeft called the works “the two most prophetic books of the 20th century.”
Reading those works 80 and 90 years later is a better introduction to what is going on now than much of what is being written now. Both Huxley and Lewis, from rather different premises and perspectives, scout the terrain upon which a new world is being built, a world in which man comes to dominate the physical world by technology and confidently seeks to refashion the spiritual world, too. Both projects were celebrated by the dominant culture as full of promise. The two authors saw the peril.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, warned against the deployment of technology by the totalitarian state. It was Huxley who saw that mass production and mass consumerism were a threat from the other direction, from below rather than above. Brave New World is set in a distant future when the new messiah is Henry Ford — dates are given in the “Year of our Ford” — in honour of the efficiency of assembly-line production.
Mass production of homogenous consumer goods has produced a content and indolent population. Standardization is the order of the day. Huxley did not know about today’s automated dairy farms, where the cattle are kept fat and happy — or at least relieved — by mechanized routines, but he imagined something like that befalling man.
Huxley’s new world breeds by means of artificial wombs, and state education ensures (enforces?) unimaginative cohorts who are content with diversions. It’s the return of the ancient bread and circuses without the adventure of real circuses. In ancient times it was the emperor’s job to keep the masses dulled and docile; today the masses themselves pay for Amazon Prime and Netflix. Ease of consumption and ubiquity of recreation exhaust the limits of human possibility. Huxley would not have been surprised.
Lewis, the great Anglican convert, saw the future unravelling along a parallel spiritual track. If man could dominate nature, even to its detriment, what then would he do to himself? Huxley saw a sort of great banalization of the human project; Lewis warned against it’s very abolition.
The Abolition of Man speaks of the “Tao,” “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Lewis traces the universality of the “Tao” — what is sometimes called the “natural law” — in various traditions: Platonic, Aristotelian, Christian, Hindu and Taoist.
The Tao constrains what man can do in order that he might do what he should do. But what if there is no “should,” if all options are considered to be equally good, or, to be precise, equally indifferent? What if the natural law, the entire patrimony of moral philosophy, is yet another aspect of nature to be modified, altered, subjugated by technology? Lewis saw 80 years ago that a more “efficient” moral framework would subject man to assembly-line criteria. This victory of man over himself is hailed as progress, but is quite the contrary. It is his abolition.
The dangers of eugenics and euthanasia were already known in Lewis’s and Huxley’s time, though they were discredited by Nazi employment of both. Now, at the beginning and end of life, they are back with a vengeance. Lewis did not live to see digital pornography become a bigger business than all of professional sports, but the turning of man — woman, mostly — into an object of technological lust is as clear a violation of the Tao as there is.
JFK’s signature initiative was the “New Frontier,” a fundamentally optimistic view of a future in which technology was harnessed to noble ambition and achievement. The moon landing was symbolic of all that.
In the intervening 80 years our ambitions have shrunk even as our technological power has grown. Our horizons in this brave new world have become limited, so much so that there is often no room left for man himself.
National Post
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