Read an Excerpt
Question One
How Do You Justify Your Life?
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) captured one of the axioms of modern public life when he said that “everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.” A generation later, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro articulated something similar with his spunky battle cry: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
At first glance, the idea strikes us as eminently reasonable: Insofar as our feelings or biases reflect our volatile passions, they can distort our grasp of reality. We should try to tune out that volatility, then, and base our judgments on the real truth of things, which can be found in cold, hard facts: calculations of gross domestic product, crime statistics, medical data, indubitable historical events, not to mention the findings of basic science.
Scratch beneath the surface of what seems like common sense, however, and you will find a philosophical claim that by no means is beyond doubt: namely, that truth is limited to these facts—in other words, to only that which can be observed with our senses, measured with our instruments, and generally expressed in mathematical language. All other claimants to the name truth, in this view, amount to less-than-trustworthy “values,” opinions, myths, emotions, or superstitions.
This way of strictly equating truth with “facts” is a relatively recent development in the history of ideas. It emerged roughly four hundred years ago out of the natural sciences but soon came to color most people’s approach to life as a whole. This scientific outlook isn’t itself a scientific claim, mind you, yet it rests on the prestige of natural science and commands the allegiance of many top scientists and science popularizers.
Granted, the same four centuries have seen advanced, technological societies make tremendous strides in mastering the physical workings of nature. But the downsides should also be obvious by now: The reduction of truth to facts has degraded many of our public debates to rancorous and tiresome contests over who can marshal the most data, or who can best shoehorn political or philosophical claims into pseudo-factual statements (“Brexit Spells Disaster, Experts Say”). The great war of facts entrenches us in a narrow range of issues and statistics, and we don’t step back from it to examine our political systems as a whole. Our discourse rarely even reaches questions about what ought to be the shape, nature, and goal of our society.
When we talk about beauty, love, grace, the virtues, and so on—the things that give life meaning and make it worthwhile—we are dealing with the seemingly nonfactual. These things are real enough, to be clear, but they can’t be rightly understood using the scientific method. Therefore, academic disciplines that treat such topics are held to be somehow provisional or second-rate; the quest for “real” knowledge, in this view, takes place nearby in the engineering, chemistry, biology, computer-science, physics, and astronomy departments.
But if love, grace, and other “subjective” experiences of the kind are as unreliable as proponents of the scientific outlook claim, then what is left to help us keep going? Can facts tell us why we should continue living when faced with moments of existential despair? Can scientific inquiry answer why, for humans, being is preferable to nonbeing? Why should my children think that life is worth passing on? Why should you and yours? In short, can the language of “facts” justify our lives?
“The Good of Humanity and All That”
On a walking tour of England, Elwin Ransom, a scholar of languages at the University of Cambridge, comes across an eerie-looking, seemingly deserted country estate. The gate is locked. But the hour is late, Ransom is thirsty and exhausted, and besides, an old woman he met earlier on his journey had implored him to find her intellectually disabled son, who works as a servant at the estate.
No one answers when Ransom rings the bell, and he would soon leave—but for a sound of men struggling and shouting that suddenly crashes from somewhere behind the house. He races to follow the sound to its origin and finds three men fighting outside, though in the darkness he can barely tell what the silhouettes are up to. One of the voices screams: “Let me go! I’m not going in there!” Ransom figures that must be the old woman’s son, the one she asked Ransom to fetch. The two other men, one brawny and the other less so, seem to be bullying the boy somehow.
When the professor introduces himself as Ransom, he utterly surprises the smaller of the boy’s two bullies, a man named Devine, who turns out to be a fellow alumnus of the professor’s prep school. Ransom never liked the knave. Devine and the other bully, named Weston, drop whatever they were up to and invite Ransom over to the estate for a rest and a drink. They then proceed to drug him, huddle him into a spaceship hidden in their yard—and lift off.
Destination: the planet Malacandra.
So begins C. S. Lewis’s 1938 science-fiction classic, Out of the Silent Planet. The novel, and The Space Trilogy it launched, showcased speculative fiction’s power to explore philosophical ideas and critique real-world trends. In the hands of Lewis, science fiction was no longer boyish schlock but serious literature in service of serious thought.
Lewis began developing the story in the late 1930s, with the encouragement of his friend and fellow Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien. The science fiction of the time promoted the enthusiastic and uncritical view of science then in vogue. Writers like H. G. Wells “used fictional narratives to argue that science is both prophet and saviour of humanity, telling us what is true and saving us from the human predicament,” as the Lewis biographer Alister McGrath has written. Wells, for example, imagined an extraterrestrial utopia where widespread scientific education has rendered government, politics, and faith entirely obsolete (Men Like Gods, 1923). Wells also wrote a fictional “history” of the future, in which an enlightened, science-worshipping world state delivers humankind from war and chaos by abolishing all organized religion, including by shuttering Mecca and other Muslim holy places and gassing the pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy (The Shape of Things to Come, 1933).
Lewis worried that science fiction “exaggerated” the benefits of science and was “naïve concerning its application,” that the “triumphs of science might have run ahead of necessary ethical developments that could provide the knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue that science needed.” If a novel could push science boosterism, Lewis wondered, couldn’t it also be used to cast doubt on the science triumphalism then gathering strength in the West?
Out of the Silent Planet and its two sequels were his answer to that question. The book’s villain, Weston, is the very type of the 1930s scientist-ideologue. His sidekick, Devine, introduces him as “the Weston. You know. The great physicist. Has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrödinger’s blood for breakfast.” Devine is just a sort of crude profiteer: “I am putting a little money into some experiments he has on hand. It’s all straight stuff—the march of progress and the good of humanity and all that, but it has an industrial side.” Weston is far more sinister. He believes sincerely that scientific facts, the kind produced by repeatable experiments, are the only kind of knowledge worth seeking—indeed, the only kind of knowledge worthy of the name. And he is thoroughly and coldly amoral.
Once Ransom recovers from his drug-induced haze aboard the spaceship, Weston lets his prisoner in on his plans. The ultimate goal, he tells Ransom, is nothing less than the total conquest of time and nature through space exploration and colonization: “Infinity, and therefore eternity, is being put in the hands of the human race.” And if the conquest demands the death of one or even a million innocents—so be it. Weston and Devine thus have no compunction about kidnapping Ransom and taking him on an involuntary journey to another planet.
There, the professor begins to gather, he is to be sacrificed somehow, to appease the planet’s terrifying native inhabitants, called sorns, with an eye toward ultimately colonizing their world and extracting its mineral resources. If Ransom hadn’t fallen into the duo’s hands, they would have instead taken their servant boy. “In a civilized community,” Weston coolly declares, such boys “would be automatically handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes.”
But doesn’t a moral law, the kind recorded in the ancient books Ransom studies for a living, prohibit such inhumanity? Not for Weston, and not, he suggests, for the scientific-philosophical elite he represents. “All educated opinion—for I do not call classics and history and such trash education—is entirely on my side.”
