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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Totalitarian Novels: Science and Bureaucracy in That Hideous Strength
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- [00:11]
Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:15]
Juan Davalos
And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with totalitarian novels, Lecture 8, that Hideous Strength, Science and Bureaucracy.
- [00:23]
Jeremiah Regan
In Lecture 8, we turn back to Dr. Arne having a discussion with his students. And one of his students highlights a passage that's very interesting and has a great question about it. We find two of our characters who are in the Nice and are trying to deceive the people of England by writing two op EDS in preparation for a riot that they are about to perpetrate. These op EDS describe the riot, and of course, they're being written in advance. One is for the popular newspaper, which has kind of plain language and plain expressions and common sense in it. And the other op ed is for the sophisticated newspaper. It features jargon and highfalutin language and abstract concepts and is really much less weighty than the popular sentiment. These opinion pieces are written by Mark Studdick, who's a junior writer in the Nice and Fairy Hardcastle, who's the head of the secret police. And Mark says, it's really hard to convince these intelligent, well educated people of the regime's priorities, the institute's priorities, and very hard. Casel says, oh, no, it's much harder to deceive the common people. These educated folks will believe anything we put in front of them as long as we make them feel smarter.
- [01:39]
Juan Davalos
And you can see that this question actually hits closer to home. We've seen this in the universities across the United States today where they've become sort of centers of propaganda. And it makes you question, are the quote, unquote, educated people more susceptible to believing propaganda? And I think as long as that education is devoid from nature and from reality, I think that that is true because you start building these ideologies that are separate from nature, that don't listen to common sense, and therefore you are capable of believing crazy things.
- [02:23]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Yeah.
- [02:23]
Jeremiah Regan
If you go onto our website and look at the study guide for this lecture, you'll see in this question we have educated in scare quotes. That's because we are trying to point out what Lewis is pointing out in that hideous strength. Much of what is called education is not actually education. It doesn't acquaint you with reality, with truth, with the beauty that God reveals to us through nature. And we see numerous examples of this on colleges, but also in the mainstream media. How often have you heard the phrase believe the science repeated, though that is kind of in a little bit of disrepute now. The idea was science is a concrete set of permanent conclusions instead of a process by which we investigate the natural world. And yes, those people who believe all science are susceptible to anybody who claims something in the name of science. It's a new type of religious idolatry. And this book goes a long way in proving that it's a bad source of truth.
- [03:19]
Juan Davalos
I think that's something that's great about liberal education. Classical liberal education, the type that we do here at Hillsdale and that we try to do through the online courses, which is that it always tries to go back to nature and to reality. How does this relate to real life? How are these ideas? How do they play out in your daily life? Because if you're not connected to nature, then ideology can lead you in some really strange ways.
- [03:49]
Jeremiah Regan
We see that Lewis shows us those who are resisting the nice spend most of their time doing ordinary and natural things like eating together with their friends, talking, praying, singing hymns and songs, gardening, cultivating their marriages. They do, of course, pursue intellectual excellence. They do prepare themselves for the tasks that they have in front of them. But Lewis is pretty subtle in showing us that a lot of that preparation comes from doing the regular, normal, ordinary responsibilities of human life. And through that reveals the greatness inherent in those things.
- [04:28]
Juan Davalos
I hope you've enjoyed this course and I hope you're enjoying it and you enjoy this last lecture because it is one of the great ways of learning, I think, is reading novels. It just gives you a perspective on the ideas. That really drives the point home. So if you have been enjoying it, I encourage you to go and get the novels. Go to Hillsdale Edu course. We have a shop there, Hillsdale Edu Course. And you can get all four novels and start reading them because it is one of the best ways to learn about these totalitarian regimes.
- [05:05]
Jeremiah Regan
We love teaching you. We love that you are learning with us. One of the greatest measures of success in what we're doing is if you watch or listen to our course, learn from it, and then are inspired to go read the books yourselves, which will give you a lot more than we can in a few short hours. So please do get those books. Read them now that you've heard them explained, and profit from what they've taught you.
- [05:28]
Juan Davalos
Now let's turn to the last lecture in totalitarian novels. Lecture 8. That Hideous Strength, Science and Bureaucracy.
- [05:43]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Now we're gonna talk about that hideous strength. And I have my four kitties here, and they're laying for me. That means this is gonna be fun and I'm going to destroy them. Why not? Okay, what have you got to say?
- [06:00]
Guest Speaker / Family Counsel Expert
Okay, I want to read a passage from the Eddie strength. And it's Mrs. Dimple or Mother Dimple talking to Jane and she says, my dear, the director is a very wise man, but he is a man after all, and an unmarried man at that. Some of what he says or what the masters say about marriage does seem to me a lot of fuss about something so simple and natural that it oughtn't to need saying it all. But I suppose there are young women nowadays who need to be told it. I would like your position on marriage within this book because I don't find the resolution at the end to be a compelling view of what marriage should look like. I think that at the end of the book we see Jane go in and it seems to be a very self sacrificing love. And she realizes it's her duty as a Christian and as a wife to go into Mark and to sort of train him to love her. Well, but I don't feel compelled that Mark is in a similar state of being willing to receive it.
- [06:52]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Well, I think that this is so first of all I want to tell our fellow students what's going on with these two girls here. What they think is, I wouldn't marry this guy. I got a better one. So Mark has not met their standard. And so first of all, Mother Dimble. The Dimbles are part of the San ann's crowd. And Mr. Dimble is a great knower. He's a scholar from the other. One of the two other colleges in Edgestow, not Bracton where Mark Studdick is, but North Hampton, I think it's called Northumberland. Northumberland, another English county. And he knows the old languages and he's an important guy. He can help Ransom because he knows those things. And he's a scholar of the lore that informs their activities which has to do with British history and Arthurian legend, which they treat as history. So the Dimples are important and they're a Christian couple, couldn't have any children, regret that fact. And they are married and their ways are charmingly described. And it's a division of labor. Marriage is a mutual obedience. Right. The Bible says you become one person. You do. And it isn't about what you get from the marriage. You don't think of it that way. I think that passage you read, Mother Dimble says Ransom is a bachelor. How can he know? You know, until late middle age Lewis was a bachelor. And I have said before that I think he gets some things about that wrong. And I think he gets very little wrong in his career. But this at the end, this seems perfect to me. But because a man should look upon his wife as a graceful and blessed thing and look up to her. And I'm not so much an expert on how the woman should think, except that I marvel that my wife is devoted to me. So I think they reached that here. And I have passages. Mark has been. He describes himself at one point as a clod. She says in the opening scenes of the book that they used to talk and pay attention to each other and enjoy each other, and now they hardly see each other. It's like he discarded her after he married her. And then he thinks of himself after his conversion. And his conversion is on many levels, by the way. And so Mark is. He's put in what they call the objective room, which is, you know, just like that thing that runs right through modern social science and bureaucratic government. We're going to reduce everything to the scientific method. I had a certain scholar say to me one time, the only certain knowledge we can have, the only real knowledge we can have is that demonstrated by the scientific method. And I said, did you demonstrate that by the scientific method? Because for one thing, it involves proving a negative. How would you do that? You know, a lot of experiments, an infinite number, and you still wouldn't be done. So it's that he likes this talk of. He is one of the most wicked at one point because a lot of them running around there at the Nice are busybody social scientists. We're going to be conducting experiments all the time and we're going to have some big board up and they call it a pragmatometer. And the results of the experiments are going to be assembled in real time. So we can, I guess, look at the board and see the state of the truth. It's kind of dumb, isn't it? And Mark sees, and it means he's more serious and more wicked than the average there. He sees that. That's not the point. The point is we're going to affect policy. That's use force. We're going to experiment on the society, which is what we do now. And Churchill said when he was 27 years old, expert knowledge is narrow knowledge. And no one can be an expert on the range of things that have to inform every practical decision, common sense, the judgment of the plain man who only knows what hurts is a better guy. Right. Well, that's a lot of people at the NICE don't see the force they're going to use. Mark does. And that Means he's. Not only do we know that he is treating his wife abominably and her attitude about their marriage is not right. They didn't have a good marriage. He learns at the end here, he had decided to give her her freedom on the ground that he was unworthy of her. That's not. Not caring about her. He'd made a promise when he married her. She says at one point that she hadn't been to church for years and years and then she went and got married in the church. Right. That means they made the promises and you keep them. You know, you guys will see your parents. I've met your parents, but I don't know them. Depending on what they must be, because I know you. The point is here, you. You're all 21, you're 14, and your parents are deeply interested in you. If something bad happens to you, it will compromise their lives, right? In other words, they made a promise, you are the fruit of it. Their lives hinge upon it. Of course, they're one. Right now I have grandchildren better than any other grandchildren. But the eldest is three years to go. Gotta help those kids, Penny and me. See, and that requires obedience from both. I didn't realize that this was a course on family counsel. Now we've got it. And it's because of Addie, who's, you know, kids have characteristics, right? They have mixture of them. Eddie is a wonderful young woman. She's just contrary.
- [14:20]
Guest Speaker / Family Counsel Expert
But you know what? I'm convinced.
- [14:22]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Are you?
- [14:22]
Guest Speaker / Family Counsel Expert
I am.
- [14:22]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
You proved this to me. Wow. There we go.
- [14:25]
Guest Speaker / Family Counsel Expert
I told him that I was wrong.
- [14:26]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Yeah, that. See, and just think, by the way, both parties in that marriage will be stronger now that they have learned to obey each other. I don't mean the couple. They will be stronger. They'll be a couple. They'll each be stronger. You see, that's what happens, I think, in a good marriage.
- [14:54]
Student / Participant
So my question kind of maybe bounces off of saying that we were wrong and having an understanding of that we don't know everything. But early on, in Mark's experience at Nice, he's talking to Fairy Hardcastle. Fairy Hardcastle works for Nice and she is the head of the police, for.
- [15:12]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
She's the secret police.
- [15:13]
Student / Participant
The secret police. She's an interesting lady. But they're talking about the upcoming riots that they are going to perpetrate in the coming weeks and that they're going to write newspaper articles about it. And Mark is kind of pushing back on that, saying, well, why are we writing articles about that? We're not journalists. And so they're having a conversation. And this is what Hardcastle says when Mark brings up papers are only read by educated people. She says, why, you fool. It's the educated readers who can be gold. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to reconcile him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything. And so I wonder, as someone who has gone to college, as a Hillsdale College student, is there a fear the more that you're educated, that there can be an increase in pride and thinking that you don't need to critically think about the things that. That you're being told that, oh, well, I already know everything. And so that we are more susceptible to the things that the NICE was trying to perpetrate in the community.
- [16:37]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Well, that's not, first of all, common sense. For all the fundamental things in life, raising children right and wrong, common sense needs to be enough or else we're all incompetent to live. But that's a contradiction because we're made to live. We're born to live. We grow. We want to know. So Lewis is mounting a defense which is common in him, of ordinary people thinking. And you can tell this by the way, in Western movies and history of movies, even used to be little towns were scenes of decency. And the people in them were mostly good. And they often need a champion, somebody of exceptional virtue. But they hearkened to those people. Well, there's a turn, right? Little towns now are dark places where evil things happen. And so CS Lewis is on the side of ordinary people. Remember, this is a brilliant and extremely well educated man. He got his formal first at Oxford. He was a don at Oxford and Cambridge. He wrote all these books. These books sold millions and still do. They're being read by ordinary people and it's so great that they are. And that's what I think. I think we're all made to learn now. The fairy, she's called, she's talking about the staff of the nice. Right people are in the know, people who follow the right newspapers and watch the right television shows. PBS used to be all classical music and it became activism as a will It's a fundamental paper that's been published. Somebody wrote an article about it. I read a long time ago that they decided that it wasn't going to just be passive anymore. Now we're going to be activists. That means that they announce a cause and you're supposed to get into the cause. Everybody's supposed to be on the side of the cause. There's signals running everywhere in the society that you got to be for this. You know, I mean, and there are waves. I mean, you guys are young, but you're old enough to remember several waves of these things that seem to just come out of nowhere. And then there's another one after that fairy's saying, it's those people. Those people are very responsive. Yeah. So I think Lewis is standing up for common sense. And if the common sense of the people is intact, that says something about the future of the country. And if it can be compromised, that says something too.
- [19:48]
Podcast Announcer
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- [20:28]
Podcast Promoter / Hillsdale College Representative
Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale.
- [21:01]
Student / Participant
Edu.
- [21:02]
Podcast Promoter / Hillsdale College Representative
That's Podcast Hillsdale. Edu. Or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio.
- [21:14]
Student / Question Asker
My question has to do with nice and specifically when Frost is interrogating and kind of re educating Mark. He talks about objectivity, and it seems like he's talking about it in a different sense than what we've heard about it from the other novels. This is Mark's thoughts on the interrogation. Mark thinks to sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity, the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious Society of the macro. Higher degrees in the asceticism of anti nature would doubtless follow the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities. My question is, is this objectivity in any way connected to the objectivity that o' Brien wants Winston to kind of remove from himself in 1984? Or is it a different sort of.
- [22:07]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Objectivity which unique in these novels in 1984? I think it's unique. I'm thinking while I'm saying that that is the novel in which the abnegation of human reason and the law of contradiction is a theme. That theme is not in this book. At least not to that with that clarity. Right. But it is true that the theme in this book is a form of that, a version of it, less stark, I think. I think that's a greatness in 1984. Double speak. You know, this theme is we have to reject all the old standards, all standards really, except standards we make in Abolition of Man. And remember, he. He states in the preface to this book that that's a partner to this book in Abolition Man. He thinks that this abolition man will result in the rule of one person. And that's stated in this book several times. Right. It's going to come down to one. And in the end that means that they're all waiting to turn on each other. In the Screwtape Letters by Lewis, Hell is described as a. A bureaucracy. And in this bureaucracy is described as hell. And they're all at odds with each other. Everybody suspects each other. I mean, I think that that's prevalent in colleges today, and I think not in ours. I pray not, feel responsible to see, not best I can. But I think what dispels that is clarity. Say first, we all know why we're here, set up a long time ago. We've chosen it. I have to obey it. Everybody else does too. Right. And then if you find out, somebody needs to know something. Tell them, tell them before you find out, if you can. But this is not like that. I always like to say lines of authority have to be clear and then you can violate them. Right. In other words, they shouldn't be formal and strict, but it should be plain. In the event of a dispute, here's how we settle it. If we don't know what to do, here's how we reason about it. If we still can't figure out what to do, then that's when I decide. I often say we don't know what to do. So let's try this. Then we all try that for a while, right? In other words, in this, everybody suspects everybody all the time. Everybody's jockeying for power all the time. And that means that it's unhappy for everyone, right? And this theme of the inner ring. Lewis actually published an essay called the Inner Ring. He says, we all want to get on the inside. We want to be on the ones on the in, right? And so we're corrupted by that. And Mark is. He calls him at one point a spaniel, you know, a little dog that's at your feet all the time. Somebody who cringes for others and seeks favor. And Mark is like that. That is actually his driving force. And in the course of his conversion to the straight and the Normal, they appear with capital letters, straight and the normal, not the crooked and the strange, right? And the objective room. He's taken in this room by Frost and Wither, the two main guys, the knights. Wither is vague and talks in great swirls of language that confuses the devil out of everybody and never says anything. He says to Stone, one, there are only two things to be avoided at all cost. The first, any approach to an unauthorized action. And the second, any failure of initiative. See, what does that do? That puts Wither in a position so he can do anything he wants to to Stone, and Stone knows it. Stone's afraid when he hears that. And he knows. People get killed around this place, you see? Whereas a better thing would be, here's what we're. You know, I mean, I have opinions about this kind of thing very much. Here's how you get something done. How you work with people to get something done. You reach an understanding with them of what it should be like, you know, what would good look like here? You usually don't have to talk about it and then say, okay, go do that best you can. Heck of a mess. And this is the opposite of that. If you do it the right way, everybody has authority to accomplish their responsibilities. And those two things always go together, right? In fact, I have authority around here. It all comes from my responsibilities. If something bad goes wrong here, it's my fault. And so ultimately, you know, as I say, if we don't know what to do, then I decide what to do. But if we do know what to do, you hardly even need to talk about it. So this is not that kind of regime. It's hell. It's hell. And that's a form of human rule. And it's a bad form. It's the worst form. It's wherever it appears it's related to arbitrary rule. Cause that's what Wither has. Frost is the opposite of Wither. Frost is narrow. His physical features are precise and tight. Wither's kind of vague and flowing all over the place. And Frost speaks in little bullets. There are no adjectives in Frost, you know, it's a. And they are in the end, by the way, they have the same effect. And the secret police lady is very self indulgent, cruel. Another excellent calculator of how things will play out. And seeker of advantage. And see at the top it's Frost and Wither. And then the fairy is just underneath them. But they all know, and it's explicit that they all know, that the day will come when they will turn on each other. At one point, Frost and Wither are having a discussion that turns into something of a disagreement. And Wither makes it explicit. He says it's not for we two to use the indirect forms of. Of discipline that we deploy upon others. That's him saying, okay, we're not going to fight like that. That's what we do to other people. But also carries the realization the day will come when we will fight like that.
- [29:49]
Student / Question Asker
My question, Doctor, actually comes from the moment you described earlier where Mark is in the room that Frost has carried him to. That's sort of one of his last rites of passage before he's initiated. And it describes a scene like this. Long ago, Mark had read somewhere of things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew. He turned his back on the pictures and sat down. He understood the whole business now. But after an hour or so, this long high coffin of a room began to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated. The built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before of this room's opposite. As the desert first teaches Mendel of water, or his absence first reveals affection. There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else, something he vaguely called the. The normal apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. I see a lot of similarities between Mark and Rubachev. They're both members or aspiring to become members of this inner sanctum that has a lot of power. They both have sort of internal struggles in their journeys dealing with that inner sanctum and that inner power. But Mark makes the full leap of conversion as we read here, Rubachev doesn't quite do that. What do we make of this? How should we compare Rubachev and Mark?
- [31:31]
Course Instructor / Lecturer
Well, first of all, Rubachev is an old man, and he has done many terrible things, and he can't escape them. He sort of wants to, but he can't. If Mark had stayed at Balberry, he would have become Rubachev. Right? But if you hold to the belief or the argument, Aristotle's argument is you are the most substantial force in the making of yourself, and you make these choices. You're always any difficult choice. You are, of course, of divided mind. I want this. Should I do it? You know, you're debating with yourself, and there's some information coming from above and outside you that will lead you, if you will hear it. It's not always wrong, by the way. Maybe even it's mostly right to do what you want, because your wants are a reflection of your needs. But your wants have to be disciplined and guided by something that's good objectively. And you know that, and you have a sense of that. And the point is, do you listen to it? Which do you listen to? Those Bolsheviks, they grew up in a hard world. The tsar was not a good ruler. They heard these doctrines, and these doctrines are intoxicating. They can make everything right. We can perfect the world, but we're going to have to hurt some people to do it. And they. That's an inner ring. And Rubachev became a leader in that. He was not Mark. He was Frost and Wither. Frost and Wither. There's some description in the novel of their own gradual corruption. Gradual, though. See, it begins with an idea and an inclination. In one case, it was some delicacy, not liking things that were messy. And then they trained themselves. And just as it's true in this novel that God, as he appears in this novel, works through us, but he won't harm us. That's why they needed Merlin. It wouldn't harm Merlin. It would even redeem him because he'd already exposed himself to powers like this, seeking them for himself when he ought not to have. Ransom says to him at one point. It wasn't wholly right back in your day either, was it? You see? So an instrument that's good, but not too good, God needed, because God wouldn't do anything wrong. Well. Well, these guys went through a process like that too, except they gave themselves to the corruption. And these Bolsheviks, that's what they did, right? They adopted doctrines of power to banish the evils they saw around them. And they understood that that would require ruthlessness. And they applied it for a long time. And some of them got doubts about it, but they couldn't get out after all that time, you see, that's what happened to them. And, you know, human beings are interesting things, because when you hear an argument like that, which Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, it changes you. You know, a new thing now, it might make systematic some things that you. That he claims all human beings do. And you might get better at it. And that means another instance of the fact that we are the chief human instruments in the making of our own characters. Like my wife, the kindly woman, talks to the dogs, talks to them just like their children. Doesn't have the same effect on the dogs. It does on its children. You know, you give a child, my granddaughter and grandson, give them a reason, they're going to remember it and repeat it to you in a different context. The dogs don't do that. And that means that they are internalizing. They're adopting and changing and adapting the things they hear that are claims about the good. And these guys have destroyed themselves. Both Frost and Wither destroy themselves at the end of the book. And see, you don't get a big close picture of the Macrobes, who are just imps of the devil in this book, but you do in the Screwtape letters. And that the macros caused the destruction of Frost, one of their two chief agents. They discarded him and killed him because they'd hated him all along anyway. See? And the good angels don't do that. This is a heroic novel. If you want to sort this stuff out in your mind, this is a delightful place to start because I think it's a very good novel. It's not. I'm trying to think of something your age. It's not a Sylvester Stallone movie, you know. In other words, the heroes don't come wading in and do it all themselves. And that's actually what things are like. I'm saying this is a realistic kind of hero. Okay, this concludes our course. I think these novels are fun. Isn't that odd? And I think that they're instructive, too. And it's a good place to start if you want to figure out the ways of government. Because they're fun. I think they're novels. Millions of people have read them, found them engaging, but then also they invite you to think further. And if you read two or three of them and compare them, you'll be seeing aspects of a thing that is a terrible thing. But remember this. Finally I figured out why. Because I'm trying to explain all this to you. And with you, I figured out one reason why I like them. It's that argument that Mark Stuttick makes when he's put in a room where everything is crooked and what it shows him is what straight is like. You see, there's a lot in these novels that's crooked and they show you what is straight.
- [39:16]
Juan Davalos
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