5 ms·

I think C.S. Lewis is right in a lot of this. How much of ourselves do we give up in pursuit of being "in the circle", "in the know", "with those important folk

I think C.S. Lewis is right in a lot of this. How much of ourselves do we give up in pursuit of being "in the circle", "in the know", "with those important folks"? He extends this philosophy in science-fiction/novel form in _That Hideous Strength_[1]. [1] https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD

johngossman 3y ago
“That Hideous Strength” is also a good takedown of Longtermism (and its predecessors).
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  That Hideous Strength is a good book, but it's just bizarre compared to the previous two books in the trilogy (and admittedly Perelandra gets pretty bizarre in the final 20% or so of the book). But my favorite lesson is from Perelandra: Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
  - graemep 3y ago
    There is a discontinuity between the books because he started writing it as SF, realised it was a mistake, and then switched to pure fantasy. Like many of his books this series is misunderstood, I think deliberately. A lot of people (including Brian Aldis, and BBC continuity announcers) think the first book is anti-science because the two baddies are scientists. In fact the one who invents the new kind of spacecraft is a physicist (which is necessary) but the other (the worse one) is "something in the City" (i.e. a banker, broker, or possibly businessman depending on whether usage had shifted at the time he wrote it) and later becomes a politician. It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists - the sociologist in the That Hideous Strength is gullible because of the nature of his "glib" subject unlike people who study humanities and hard sciences! > Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death. I like that too. It gives it a lot of visceral impact.
    - johngossman 3y ago
      CS Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur C Clarke in which he said: I don't of course think that at any moment many scientists are hidding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane's Rosetta Worlds and Waddington's Science & Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of it own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe.
      - n4r9 3y ago
        I suppose he actually means "Star Maker". I'm not sure what he means by devil worship, though. And given how irrational I find his Christian apologetics to be, I'm not sure I care to find out.
        ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I haven't read the book Lewis is talking about so I have little to say about what exactly he means by devil worship, however as someone quite familiar with his work, though long since having left religion myself, I can say that he is not one use a phrase like that merely out of petty spite or to be pejorative, but rather because he thinks it's the best technical description, at least that would fit into two or three words, that reflects this is analysis of the book's themes. Lewis was a medieval and renaissance English scholar before he was a Christian, and his professional work is far the greater portion of his writing and bears at leaat as much on his thinking as did his popular apologetics. Lewis's model devil, both by his own description and by its depiction when he uses such a character in his fiction, is a kind of well mannered bureaucrat who just happens to be made of such a nature that his sustenance must come from feasting on human souls, and the more miserable his victims are by the experience of being utterly deprived of their individuality by complete and permanent dissolution into the self of this demon, the more pleasure it derives from consuming them. It is essentially inhuman but has no connection with the conventional idea of a monstrous man-bat scampering around with pitchforks and goat themed headgear. Lewis even pointed out, in case anyone missed the allusion, that selfishness of this complete and all-encompassing sort is a territory adjacent to that of sexual desire and conquest, and shares some of its traits. Love becomes a demon when he becomes a god, etc. The reason this is worth pointing out is that Lewis is reliably consistent with his basic criticism of the modern world as tending toward an excessive and unhealthy elevation of monumental individuality, to the point that some individuals who are in advantaged circumstances to assert their individuality at the expense of others', by outright dominating them, or depriving them of opportunity, happiness, or satisfaction, will certainly do so. and if unchecked will grow just like a cancer, for that's what they are: apex parasites grooming their hosts, suppressing their spirit(ual) energies and curiosity by anesthetizing them with banal distractions this decade, only to drive them into bloody trenches the next. All so that a few can live impossible, unsustainable existences at the pinnacle of human society, of a culture they literally cultivate to keep themselves in rareified and thoroughly selfish power. The portrait Lewis draws of Mr Savage in the Pilgrim's regress is probably the most thorough exploration of this idea, and Lewis in the voice of a character (drudge) who is given one of the more sympathetic, clear eyed and and omniscient perspectives (i.e. the authors own voice) in the book, speaks of him with admiration and even goes off to join his massing armies of Swastici and Marxomanni, "who are all alike vassals of Cruelty."
  - johngossman 3y ago
    I thought Perelandra was bizarre, almost hallucinogenic towards the end. And the bit with the devil could be read as “He’s right, so I have to resort to physical violence to win.” I found it funny, but a strange take for an author known for making intellectual arguments for Christianity.
    - cvoss 3y ago
      Ransom doesn't concede the Un-man is right. Rather, he concedes that the Un-man has unlimited intellectual stamina, so in any debate with a human, the human eventually succumbs to his persuasion because humans reason imperfectly.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Published in 1943, when the cultural milieu of Britain had had to process the results of appeasement and was forced to fight Hitler - a leader many of them actually not-so-secretly admired. For British intellectuals, WWII in many ways meant conceding an ideological point to Nazism (when chips are down, all that matters is actual raw strength, rather than the post-WWI rhetoric of peace) while fighting to defeat it.
    - topynate 3y ago
      Perelandra's devil – the Un-Man – struck me on first reading as an excellent early depiction of a hostile, alien form of intelligence, superior but purely instrumental. Lewis was very early in working out the implications of that – nowadays the Rationalists and a lot of others would agree that there can be entities with superhuman intelligence that don't intrinsically value their intelligence, and that such beings would have almost irresistible persuasive ability if given the opportunity. (Lewis differs in also giving the Un-Man genuinely supernatural abilities with which it attempts to overawe the protagonist.) "it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon… Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason… externally and inorganically…"
  - yterdy 3y ago
    I question the wisdom of belief in the existence of the devil - at least in a form that can be beaten to death. "Ultimate evil" and "susceptibility to haymakers" seem mutually exclusive. This sounds more like the confluence of blind hope that cosmically-horrifying things can be defeated and rationalizing murdering another person.
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      In the particular case of Perelandra, without too many spoilers, the devil possessed a man from Earth and was using him to try and tempt the Venutian equivalent of Eve into causing another Fall. How sometimes killing evil instead of arguing with it might apply to more practical religious and moral situations in real life is left as an exercise to the reader.
- tomcatfish 3y ago
  Explain?
cratermoon 3y ago
Isn't posting and commenting on HN, at least in part, a product of longing to be part of an Inner Circle of hackers and Silicon Valley elites?
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  No. I mean, maybe for some people. Some of us just enjoy talking about tech stuff online.
  - flatline 3y ago
    He named it, so is ever so slightly wrong - but all of us who have been around for a while and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned are in. Relative to the global online population this is still a very small group.
    - andrewflnr 3y ago
      I don't think that's quite right. In Lewis's thesis, you only really encounter the in/out question by interacting with people who are in. By your definition, interacting on HN puts you in already. And "and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned" is a much lower bar than anything Lewis is talking about. You'd have a much better point w.r.t. lobste.rs or other invite-only forums, but the whole concept is dubious without private discussions.
      - cratermoon 3y ago
        The forum itself enforces a level of in/out. There's the green text for new users, then karma thresholds gating some actions.
        andrewflnr 3y ago
        Still a ludicrously low bar. Doesn't change much (again, compared to Lewis's inner ring).

johngossman 3y ago

“That Hideous Strength” is also a good takedown of Longtermism (and its predecessors).

HideousKojima 3y ago
That Hideous Strength is a good book, but it's just bizarre compared to the previous two books in the trilogy (and admittedly Perelandra gets pretty bizarre in the final 20% or so of the book). But my favorite lesson is from Perelandra: Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
- graemep 3y ago
  There is a discontinuity between the books because he started writing it as SF, realised it was a mistake, and then switched to pure fantasy. Like many of his books this series is misunderstood, I think deliberately. A lot of people (including Brian Aldis, and BBC continuity announcers) think the first book is anti-science because the two baddies are scientists. In fact the one who invents the new kind of spacecraft is a physicist (which is necessary) but the other (the worse one) is "something in the City" (i.e. a banker, broker, or possibly businessman depending on whether usage had shifted at the time he wrote it) and later becomes a politician. It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists - the sociologist in the That Hideous Strength is gullible because of the nature of his "glib" subject unlike people who study humanities and hard sciences! > Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death. I like that too. It gives it a lot of visceral impact.
  - johngossman 3y ago
    CS Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur C Clarke in which he said: I don't of course think that at any moment many scientists are hidding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane's Rosetta Worlds and Waddington's Science & Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of it own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe.
    - n4r9 3y ago
      I suppose he actually means "Star Maker". I'm not sure what he means by devil worship, though. And given how irrational I find his Christian apologetics to be, I'm not sure I care to find out.
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I haven't read the book Lewis is talking about so I have little to say about what exactly he means by devil worship, however as someone quite familiar with his work, though long since having left religion myself, I can say that he is not one use a phrase like that merely out of petty spite or to be pejorative, but rather because he thinks it's the best technical description, at least that would fit into two or three words, that reflects this is analysis of the book's themes. Lewis was a medieval and renaissance English scholar before he was a Christian, and his professional work is far the greater portion of his writing and bears at leaat as much on his thinking as did his popular apologetics. Lewis's model devil, both by his own description and by its depiction when he uses such a character in his fiction, is a kind of well mannered bureaucrat who just happens to be made of such a nature that his sustenance must come from feasting on human souls, and the more miserable his victims are by the experience of being utterly deprived of their individuality by complete and permanent dissolution into the self of this demon, the more pleasure it derives from consuming them. It is essentially inhuman but has no connection with the conventional idea of a monstrous man-bat scampering around with pitchforks and goat themed headgear. Lewis even pointed out, in case anyone missed the allusion, that selfishness of this complete and all-encompassing sort is a territory adjacent to that of sexual desire and conquest, and shares some of its traits. Love becomes a demon when he becomes a god, etc. The reason this is worth pointing out is that Lewis is reliably consistent with his basic criticism of the modern world as tending toward an excessive and unhealthy elevation of monumental individuality, to the point that some individuals who are in advantaged circumstances to assert their individuality at the expense of others', by outright dominating them, or depriving them of opportunity, happiness, or satisfaction, will certainly do so. and if unchecked will grow just like a cancer, for that's what they are: apex parasites grooming their hosts, suppressing their spirit(ual) energies and curiosity by anesthetizing them with banal distractions this decade, only to drive them into bloody trenches the next. All so that a few can live impossible, unsustainable existences at the pinnacle of human society, of a culture they literally cultivate to keep themselves in rareified and thoroughly selfish power. The portrait Lewis draws of Mr Savage in the Pilgrim's regress is probably the most thorough exploration of this idea, and Lewis in the voice of a character (drudge) who is given one of the more sympathetic, clear eyed and and omniscient perspectives (i.e. the authors own voice) in the book, speaks of him with admiration and even goes off to join his massing armies of Swastici and Marxomanni, "who are all alike vassals of Cruelty."
- johngossman 3y ago
  I thought Perelandra was bizarre, almost hallucinogenic towards the end. And the bit with the devil could be read as “He’s right, so I have to resort to physical violence to win.” I found it funny, but a strange take for an author known for making intellectual arguments for Christianity.
  - cvoss 3y ago
    Ransom doesn't concede the Un-man is right. Rather, he concedes that the Un-man has unlimited intellectual stamina, so in any debate with a human, the human eventually succumbs to his persuasion because humans reason imperfectly.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Published in 1943, when the cultural milieu of Britain had had to process the results of appeasement and was forced to fight Hitler - a leader many of them actually not-so-secretly admired. For British intellectuals, WWII in many ways meant conceding an ideological point to Nazism (when chips are down, all that matters is actual raw strength, rather than the post-WWI rhetoric of peace) while fighting to defeat it.
  - topynate 3y ago
    Perelandra's devil – the Un-Man – struck me on first reading as an excellent early depiction of a hostile, alien form of intelligence, superior but purely instrumental. Lewis was very early in working out the implications of that – nowadays the Rationalists and a lot of others would agree that there can be entities with superhuman intelligence that don't intrinsically value their intelligence, and that such beings would have almost irresistible persuasive ability if given the opportunity. (Lewis differs in also giving the Un-Man genuinely supernatural abilities with which it attempts to overawe the protagonist.) "it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon… Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason… externally and inorganically…"
- yterdy 3y ago
  I question the wisdom of belief in the existence of the devil - at least in a form that can be beaten to death. "Ultimate evil" and "susceptibility to haymakers" seem mutually exclusive. This sounds more like the confluence of blind hope that cosmically-horrifying things can be defeated and rationalizing murdering another person.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    In the particular case of Perelandra, without too many spoilers, the devil possessed a man from Earth and was using him to try and tempt the Venutian equivalent of Eve into causing another Fall. How sometimes killing evil instead of arguing with it might apply to more practical religious and moral situations in real life is left as an exercise to the reader.
tomcatfish 3y ago
Explain?

cratermoon 3y ago

Isn't posting and commenting on HN, at least in part, a product of longing to be part of an Inner Circle of hackers and Silicon Valley elites?

andrewflnr 3y ago
No. I mean, maybe for some people. Some of us just enjoy talking about tech stuff online.
- flatline 3y ago
  He named it, so is ever so slightly wrong - but all of us who have been around for a while and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned are in. Relative to the global online population this is still a very small group.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    I don't think that's quite right. In Lewis's thesis, you only really encounter the in/out question by interacting with people who are in. By your definition, interacting on HN puts you in already. And "and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned" is a much lower bar than anything Lewis is talking about. You'd have a much better point w.r.t. lobste.rs or other invite-only forums, but the whole concept is dubious without private discussions.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      The forum itself enforces a level of in/out. There's the green text for new users, then karma thresholds gating some actions.
      - andrewflnr 3y ago
        Still a ludicrously low bar. Doesn't change much (again, compared to Lewis's inner ring).