I must confess that I did not enjoy this book so much as its predecessors in the Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, but then, I was not expecting to; it is, as indeed it was presented to me, a much darker and weightier book for the most part, in argument and tone.
Of course, I am sure some of my readers, knowing my ongoing interest in transhumanism and progress scientific and technical would have expected me to dislike the book, given its common reading against those. In actuality, this is not the case: while, obviously, I am philosophically at considerable variance with Lewis, I find much value in this book’s warnings against technocratic hubris, pragmatism overriding ethics, power-lust, subjectivism and gnosticism – consider this excerpt, for example, from p. 200 of my edition:
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.
[…]
You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
And indeed, for the warning against foolish notion, albeit one all too easy to fall into, that possession of, or the quest for, increased power and control over the physical universe should or does exempt one from the laws of ethics, or of morality. From the same page:
Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.
I also, quite naturally given my ethical philosophy, sympathize with Lewis’s objections to philosophy that degrades the value of the individual in its pretensions to objectivity of everything but ethics (and does, I might add, not inconsiderable violence to epistemology in the process); excerpting again, here from p. 293 and the mouth of one villain:
In reality the question is meaningless. It presupposes a means-and-ends 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 obtained 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.
In short, a valuable cautionary tale for all those of us would-be Daedalians and Prometheans interested in stumbling towards apotheosis. Recommended.
