C.S. Lewis, when writing the final book of his interplanetary science fiction series, decided on a name for his climax book based on a poem by sixteenth century Scottish poet David Lyndsay. In this poem, Lindsey referenced the shade of the biblical Tower of Babel as “the shadow of that hideous strength.” When Lewis wrote his book That Hideous Strength, he had already faced a tumultuous twentieth century. Two world wars had torn through the world and the hearts of thousands of battle-worn soldiers across the globe. The twentieth century also brought about a significant rise in industrialization and technocratic society which dehumanized society in ways that were new and disturbing. Politics became controversial as totalitarian measures like emergency private property seizures were taking place and a new technological reproduction preventative called contraception was on the rise. Dictators like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler dominated the national picture of the century with the mass killing of millions.
As Lewis predicted, man’s technological advances took on a dramatically different result than its original intent. Technology was supposed to make life easier, provide additional protections for national security, and improve the health and quality of life for all humanity. Thankfully, many of these advances did result in a better livelihood for millions of people across the world. On the other hand, technological advances, in many ways, have resulted in the loss of understanding of what it means to be human. As ethics and morality, stemming from Christianity, have been set aside for secularism and postmodernism, the advances that were supposed to advance and help humanity have also dehumanized it. This can be seen in the advancement of radical abortion as a form of birth control and transgenderism as a way to express yourself, ignoring biological reality.
In his new book The Desecration of Man, Dr. Carl Trueman describes this radical drifting away from God when he writes, “We have desecrated that which should be sacred and yet failed to fulfill either the Marxist goal of true liberation or the Nietzschean goal of creating our own rich, sacred meanings to replace those we have destroyed.” In other words, secularism, postmodernism, Marxism, and other false ideologies failed humanity and dehumanized it in the process. Only a return to Christianity and what built the West will direct humanity in the right direction again. This is a return to truth worth fighting for.
