Healthcare Passports, Technocracy - CS Lewis and the Abolition of Man

This is a long winded response to a parishioner who enquires as to why I am recoiling at healthcare passports when so many folks seem either broadly happy or nonchalant?

Every culture has its sacraments. These are the things which manifest the great inner truths of our lives. Until recently I would make a stab that for us this has been the movies. The movies and the whole cinema experience lends itself to a near liturgical and operatic experience. When the film ends we leave the theatre enthralled and glowing from an encounter. Maybe we even learnt something about ourselves.   The afterglow remains for a short while and then life continues in whatever guise.  Honestly, it is really fascinating to wait for people outside the cinema and look at their happy faces after the film is finished. There is a kind of cathartic release and euphoria. 

Could we be entering a new culture which will have new priorities and new sacraments?  I think so. I have written before that the pointers are that the “new normal” will be more authoritarian but less in a Orwellian Nineteen Eighty Four mold and more akin to Huxley’s Brave New World.  The difference is that in Huxley’s dystopia the population chooses to embrace their totalitarianism. As Mustapha Mond (the World Controller) reminds John Savage (the uncivilised hero of the novel) this regime does not need to burn books because people no longer read them. In Brave New World the global system manages all risk out of life. If you feel unhappy then you can pop your Soma pill to instantly cure any trace of melancholy or anxiety. Everyone is safe.  Risk is banished. The logical progression is that relationships are banned. You can have endless sex with whoever you want but “the risk” of love or affinity is to be avoided as almost criminal and obscene. The point of life is to be happy right up until the moment you as a loyal citizen walk (to applause) into a clinic at your allotted happy death hour.  The sacrament of Brave New World is clearly Soma. 

Now until recently I did not realise there was a third possible dystopia. It is not really in our cultural imagination so perhaps this is why we may be sleepwalking into it. However, it has by comparison probably the deepest of intellectual investigations. This is CS Lewis’s essay, The Abolition of Man. Lewis is surely one of Britain's most prolific intellectuals of the Twentieth Century as well as a Christian apologist. Along with his friend JR Tolkien he remains a household name.  

Lewis wrote the Abolition in 1943 worried about what was being taught about the nature of humanity in secondary schools. It would seem some new textbooks were gaining ground that alarmed him. He could see a trend. Subsequently his essay was the basis for the final piece of his science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength. The story is set in our time and imagines a scientific corp called ‘The NICE’ rapidly taking over the world in the form of a technocracy.    

Lewis foresaw that in such technocracy we are told that humanity is transcending its limits, coming of age. Man has conquered Nature.  Even the raw material of humanity itself is to be overcome. Nature is subjugated in the name of progress.    In Lewis’ dystopia most people embrace it. Who doesn’t want progress? Who doesn’t want to be safe and healthy? Yet the cost of this is that men and women must relinquish their traditions, their cultural memories, their great truths, and primarily their freedom. Only “the science“ of the NICE can be trusted and anyway most people have little time or inclination to unpick the dictums of experts.  It is much easier to bask in the sunlight of progress and all its promises.  

Of course the personal cost of  this kind of progress is to reduce humans to a commodity, to a material thing. Man becomes the last thing to be conquered.  

“Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won… But who, precisely, will have won it?  For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Lewis indicated that though this has always been the case in this new scenario, in this new age, 

“The man-moulders will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can out all posterity in what shape they please.”  

In other words societies have always had bossy leaders and despots but we are fast approaching a dramatic change of scale. The powerful were in those days only as powerful as the people around them. Stalin and Hitler never had the internet and they never had an Alexa in every home. This tech (as we are finding out in China) is a dictator’s dream toy. So like Tolkien’s terrifying Eye of Sauron the technocrats now have the technology to implement surveillance and coercion at an unimaginagle level. 

How did we come to this point? Though Lewis does not talk about human rights per se, I am going to employ this because it is easier to translate to 2021. The first lock that would need to be broken is the link that human rights exist on their own independent of humans.  If you believe in God then this is the idea that human rights are rights because they are forged in the mind of God, they are part of the DNA of the Universe. However if we stop believing in God or that rights are somehow quasi-mystical then on what foundation do rights exist? A technocracy can only operate if rights are seen as the sole gift of the State.  The former supreme judge Lord Sumption has stated this and worries that at present the Lockdowns may have done serious damage to our sense of liberal democracy and the inherent freedoms of Man. 

Furthermore a technocracy can be helped if we rubbish the idea of Tradition (cultural memory). Lewis calls this Tao. This Tao, this deep shared memory, has to be dislodged for a dystopian society to be born.  The past has to be rewritten so as to portray it as primitive and even oppressive. Thank God we don’t live in the past. We would be taught in our schools and the media that our ancestors are to be pitied or cancelled. Indeed, to succeed the technocracy could find allies in those who would say that believing in the past and the values of the past makes them feel ‘unsafe.’ This is because once the revolution is in full swing all the populace possess in terms of truth are “feelings” (or quote Meghan Markle "lived experience"). Scientific truth is far too complicated for ordinary people so that area is left to the new priestcraft of experts. 

This had been brewing since the Enlightenment but it boiled up the 1960s with the Boomer sexual revolution.  It also helped that God as an idea has to be shoved out of the way.  So although people have a sense of ‘rights’ they have no idea where they came from? The new technocracy now supplies all the answers anyway. The reason “why” you exist and “how” you can exist is given by “the Science”. To oppose this is to be labelled unscientific, a new kind of luddite. You may even be told that this new knowledge is given in the name of making a more loving, diverse and inclusive society.  How could anyone oppose any of that?  Well if you do, then you have committed a new crime, a hate crime. 

All that is left is power to a few and (to quote Huxley) “feelies” for the rest.  Sometimes this raw power is garnished to make it look benign. “We are here to keep you safe.” CS Lewis’ voice warns us not to be deceived. We are being robbed not only of our freedoms but our humanity.  Lewis predicts that scientism (that is the belief that science holds all answers) has become the new Magician's Apprentice. This is paganism in a different guise. 

So what could be the new sacraments of a technocracy? Clearly the smartphone is the outward visible form of (the ‘accidents’ to use a scholastic term) while surveillance apps are the inward property. China’s Social Credit system demonstrates what this would be like. Hundreds of millions CCTV cameras follow citizens around awarding them points for supporting the technocracy. Points are detracted for antisocial behaviour or political incorrectness.  Get too low a score and you will forfeit the right for your kids to go to that nice school, or to travel, or go to the gym, etc.  Persistent re offenders would clearly need to go on a course of re-education, perhaps even a special camp to facilitate this. 

The anecdotal evidence is that the CCP’s citizens are mostly complicit if not excited about this. A good social credit gets you rewards, cinema tickets, first class flights, prizes, treats, etc. Those on low credit are the new lepers, the dissidents who are spoiling the fun. They are to be despised and shunned. 

In the light of this could an electronic healthcare passport (especially an internal one) be the gateway to much wider surveillance and the amplification of the State’s power over our liberties? The potential  scale is quite breathtaking. An app could decide not only whether you are a fit person to go abroad but whether you can even enter the supermarket, the gym, and the local deli, the parish church. Dating apps are apparently already talking of having this inbuilt. Schools are mulling over whether this will be prerequisite to entering the campus.  The reality is that individuals without this app would be under house arrest. Piers Morgan in one of his rants is said to have cheered this and expressed his desire that the selfishly unvaccinated should bugger off to rot in the Outer Hebrides. At least in Brave New World dissidents got Iceland. 

In the epistle to the Hebrews the writer reminds us that Christianity is about being freed from the slavery of the fear of death. The Romans were SO overly anxious about death that they performed and paid for all sorts of exotic rituals to please the city gods. The fruit of upsetting the gods would be  plague, pestilence, invasion and so on.  Christianity with its carefree notion of life seemed to them perverse and ‘unsafe’. Believers in the Crucified god had to be eliminated to keep the spiritual order in balance, to placate and appease the divinities. 

Technocracy is akin to a return to paganism because it rids our culture of its deepest memory, the victory of Christ over death. Christianity  by contrasts encourages us to see our citizenship elsewhere.  This heavenward gaze is not escapism but a means to root even deeper into the created order. Technocracy folds humanity into self. Death and aversion to pain and suffering become the ultimate horizon.