Joe Rogan’s podcast—The Joe Rogan Experience—has been one of, if not the most, famous podcast on the planet for quite some time. With a library of over 2,000 episodes clocking in at 2–3 hours each, and with millions of views per episode, Rogan’s influence is doubtlessly far-reaching. And many are seemingly drawn to the podcast because of Rogan’s long-form interview style where he sits down with famous and controversial guests to discuss the day’s hottest topics. For example, on April 19th, 2024, Rogan aired episode #2138, where he interviewed the comparably well-known Tucker Carlson. Notwithstanding the relative fame of these two men, or even whether you agree with the sorts of views they regularly espouse, this well-downloaded episode contained yet another example of what I’ll hereafter refer to as Rogan’s Cocoon Hypothesis—a view that the podcast’s host has personally endorsed and has often defended in previous episodes and interviews:[1]
Joe: My belief is that biological intelligent life is essentially a caterpillar. And it’s a caterpillar that’s making a cocoon, and it doesn’t even know why it’s doing it; it’s just doing it. And that cocoon is gonna give birth to artificial life—digital life. It’s gonna give birth to a new life form. I think we’re real close to that. I think we’re way closer to that than most people would ever want to admit.
Tucker: I agree, I agree. But can we assign a value to that? Is that good or bad?
Joe: That’s a good question. Universally, I think it’s the path—I think it’s what happens. I think, what this thing is, if you extrapolate, if you take the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence that has the ability to utilize all the information that every human being has on Earth at a level of computing that’s far beyond the capabilities of the human mind, and all of our supercomputers that currently exist because it’ll design much better computers, it’ll use quantum computers, it’ll have the ability to recode things and change things. It’ll make better versions of itself. So, instead of biological evolution, which is very slow, it takes a long time—relatively—it’s pretty quick, really, when you think about it. It’s not that long to go from being a single celled organism to being a human being flying a plane. Really, relatively, over the course of a billion years, if you think about how long the universe has been around. But it’s slow compared to technological evolution. I mean, 100 years ago we didn’t have anything. And now we can send videos from your phone and it’ll hit New Zealand in a second.
Tucker: For sure.
Joe: It’s crazy. The stuff we have now is beyond imagination. It’s essentially magic for people 100 years ago. If that keeps going, it’s ultimately going to lead to a life form. And if that life form has now untethered, it doesn’t have any problems with biological evolution, now it’s just about information and implementing the technology that’s available and increasing that technology and making it better and better. It essentially becomes a god because, if you give it enough time, it has the ability to make better versions of itself, which will, in turn, make better versions of itself. It has the ability to utilize everything. It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe—black holes, dark matter—everything. And it probably has the ability to harness that or even reproduce that. So if you take artificial sentient intelligence, and it has this super accelerated path of technological evolution, and you give artificial general intelligence (sentient, artificial intelligence far beyond human beings), you give it 1,000 years alone to make better and better versions of itself, where does it go? It’s close to a god. I don’t create universes.
Rogan’s Cocoon Hypothesis can be roughly summarized as follows: he believes that biological intelligent life is analogous to a caterpillar that is, by nature, unconsciously “making a cocoon” in order to give birth to a higher form of artificial or digital intelligent life by utilizing advancing information and technology to enhance and transcend its otherwise limited biological nature. Rogan sees this process of moving beyond the comparably inefficient mechanisms of biological evolution to what he calls technological evolution as an inevitable process that all of life universally seems to follow until it becomes—as he says—a god.
Now, consider for a moment that Rogan’s controversial views on the fairly complex topics of, e.g., bioenhancement, transhumanism, technology, and human evolution are being publicized to—and therefore likely ingested by—millions of his faithful viewers. Of course, reaching a mass audience with a particular message is not inherently wrong or problematic. But the situation with Rogan involving such controversial and complex topics raises an important question for us to consider: what if an influential message is false or wrong in important ways? If we, as Christians, believe that problematic yet far-reaching views about complex and controversial topics are taking hold in a culture, how should we then respond? In other words, Christians would do well to consider not only what to say in response to views like Rogan’s Cocoon Hypothesis but also how to say it—and how to do so in a way that rivals the influence of your opposition. In what follows, I hope to approach this very task of evaluating Rogan’s hypothesis through the examination of works written by the celebrated wise guide and apologetic forebearer to many—C. S. Lewis.
Many have before affirmed what seems to be an increasingly uncontroversial thesis—namely, that the ever-masterful C. S. Lewis can serve as a much-needed wise guide for how we should apologetically interact with the complex and controversial topics of one’s day. Indeed, central to Lewis’s apologetic genius is his noteworthy ability to interact with such topics not only at a deeply philosophical level, but also at a more accessible, fictional level. Lewis’s example to us, then, is one where he does not merely pursue the truth and appeal to one’s mind; he also knows how to write beautifully and appeal to our imaginations. Echoing this point, Alister McGrath writes that “one of the most distinctive features of Lewis’s approach to apologetics is to affirm the importance of both reason and imagination in commending and defending Christianity. They play different roles but serve the same purpose.”[2] Thus, McGrath highlights the fact that Lewis never saw “the important role that an appeal to the human imagination through fiction could play in Christian apologetics . . . as displacing or subverting his more rational approaches to apologetics; rather, he saw them as complementing each other, and extending his range as an apologist.”[3] Reason and imagination are, therefore, collaborative and complementary—not competitive—as reason “without imagination is potentially dull and limited [while] imagination without reason is potentially delusory and escapist.”[4]
For Lewis, apologetically responding to the likes of Rogan might therefore involve not simply proving conclusions by reason but also showing them by imagination. After all, “human beings need to be able to visualize things, however inadequately, if they are to make sense of them or relate to them.”[5] Building upon this point, McGrath argues that, “while the intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith can be rationally analyzed, Lewis hints that it is best imaginatively communicated.”[6] So, not only did Lewis see reason and imagination as “operating at different levels, and potentially appealing to different audiences,”[7] he also seemed to think that communicating by way of the imagination was arguably better. Just consider, for example, how Lewis concludes his aptly titled essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said”—namely, with the assumption that the inhibitions that stories “overcome in a child’s mind . . . exist in a grown-up’s mind too, and may perhaps be overcome by the same means.”[8] He notes that the “Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers” and possesses the power to “generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies.” At its best, such a mode can, Lewis argues, “do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.”[9] His more imaginative apologetic may also better reach people simply by translating the complex language of the elite into a vernacular that can be understood by the average man and by appealing to the narrative-oriented nature of humans who make sense of the world and our place in it through myths, stories, tales, and the like. Either way, “it was thus natural and reasonable,” concludes McGrath, “for Lewis to turn to literature as a means of engaging the imagination and helping his readers grasp the deeper reality that lay beyond reason.”[10]
One of the best examples of Lewis’s multifaceted apologetical approach is arguably found in his critique of Modernism in both The Abolition of Man and the third entry of his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Indeed, in critiquing many of the fruits of Modernism in these two works, Lewis somewhat surprisingly anticipates views like Rogan’s—responding to them with his trademark incision and care, as we will soon see. But, for our present purposes, it is important to note that the philosophical argumentation of Abolition is fictionalized by Lewis in Strength for many of the same reasons that were mentioned above. For example, in the preface to Strength, Lewis writes that “this is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”[11] Thus, we see Lewis appealing to our reason with his philosophical critiques of Modernism in Abolition while appealing to our imaginations with his fictionalization of these points in Strength.
My specific goals moving forward are, therefore, twofold. My first aim is to demonstrate just how Lewis responds to contemporary, Rogan-esque challenges in the arena of bioenhancement, transhumanism, and the like. My first hope is to illustrate Lewis’s masterful apologetic by looking at how he critiques Modern man’s attempted conquest of Nature, human nature, and God in the above works—juxtaposing his more philosophical critiques in Abolition with his more imaginative fictionalizations in Strength. My second aim will be intertwined with the first: not only do I hope to show how someone like Lewis might respond to such challenges, I also hope to articulate what Lewis says about views like Rogan’s Cocoon Hypothesis as well. And we can do this because, as noted above, Lewis seems to prophetically anticipate views like Rogan’s almost an entire century earlier—providing us with keen insight and wisdom to many of the issues at the heart of contemporary bioenhancement debates. So, in maintaining an appropriate measure of humility, I argue that we would do well to learn as much from the wise guidance of Lewis as possible in both content and form as we attempt to likewise faithfully navigate the complex and controversial debates of our own day.
One of the first principles of Modernism that Lewis scrutinizes is man’s attempt to conquer the Nature that it once stood in harmony with—that is, man now stands with an adversarial relationship toward Nature as a conqueror does toward its conquered. For example, in Abolition, we read:
“Man’s conquest of Nature” is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science. “Man has Nature whacked,” said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context, the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. “No matter,” he said, “I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.” I have chosen this story as my point of departure in order to make it clear that I do not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial as “Man’s conquest,” much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?[12]
In this quote, Lewis highlights the tragic case of a man dying of tuberculosis who nevertheless interprets his death as an inevitable loss in the larger war against Nature. Of course, the immediate context concerns mankind’s discovery of a possible cure for tuberculosis, but the larger theme that Lewis is gesturing toward here is that of man possessing increasing power over Nature in order to overcome natural limitations like sickness and disease. Yet, the underlying principle is not limited to merely overcoming just sickness and disease: it can be plausibly extended to man’s increasing power over Nature to overcome the limitations of other natural things in life, such as death itself as well.
This more abstract, philosophical theme of Modern man’s attempt to conquer Nature may admittedly remain fairly obscure even after the example of the suffering patient. So, to further illustrate, we can turn to an example of Lewis imaginatively describing this philosophical theme in the fictitious work Strength:
At dinner [Mark Studdock] sat next to Filostrato. . . The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds. “Why have you done that, Professor?” said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. “I shouldn’t have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I’m rather fond of trees myself.” “Oh, yes, yes,” replied Filostrato. “The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminum. So natural, it would even deceive.”
“It would hardly be the same as a real tree,” said Winter. “But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place—two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.” . . . “It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.” “And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?” “Go on,” said Winter. “And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.” “That’s true.”
“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms—sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.” “What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.” “I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”[13]
“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” Mark stared. Filostrato’s conversation appeared so disjointed and his manner so unusual that he began to wonder if he were quite sane or quite sober.[14]
As noted above, we see in these dinner conversations the more philosophical theme of man’s conquest of Nature from Abolition being imaginatively portrayed. The fictitious conversation begins with the Italian scientist Filostrato defending his orders to cut down some fine beech trees against the confused objections of a Mr. Winter. Filostrato responds by calling these trees uncivilized weeds in comparison to his more favored, analogous metal trees that mankind can do whatever they want with. For example, these analogous metal trees can be moved, would not die or shed leaves, would not house birds, and would produce no muck or mess. Mark Studdock then insightfully points out that Filostrato’s position seems, at base, to reject the “organic” as bad—something to be done away with and overcome. Surprisingly, Filostrato wholeheartedly endorses this claim, arguing that our modern conception of “impure” and “organic” are, in fact, “interchangeable conceptions.”
Gould then responds with apprehension over Filostrato’s idea because we humans are, as he points out, “organisms ourselves.” Thus, Filostrato’s views are being subtly charged with a reductio ad absurdum: if he thinks we should abolish and overcome the organic, and yet agrees that humanity is organic, does this not imply that human life would be included in this overcoming and abolishment? Once again, we see Filostrato shockingly agreeing with preposterous conclusions—“I grant it,” he says. He explains that overcoming and abolishing organic life is actually “the point”—the very aim of the Mind that is produced by organic life. In other words, once organic life produces Mind (or conscious biological life), Filostrato argues that its aim is to then learn how to overcome the very Nature or organic structures that produced it. In the end, he concludes, this process will inevitably end with Mind overcoming all of the limits of Nature and the life-cycle processes associated with our bodies—such as procreation, birth, and even death itself. And insofar as Filostrato openly waxed poetic about this possible eschatological state, Mark could not help but wonder if the Italian scientist was sane or sober.
At the end of the second chapter of Abolition, Lewis entertains the following thought experiment in order to tease out its implications in the third and final chapter of that same book:
Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.[15]
What we see here is what Lewis believes to be the next step in Modern man’s attempt to conquer Nature—namely, Modern man’s attempt to further conquer human nature. Not satisfied with conquering the natural world around them, man is then driven to conquer the human world within them as a sort of logical next step. And to do this, Lewis envisions mankind pridefully throwing off the restraints of the Moral or Natural Law—or what he also calls the Tao—setting aside any notion of obligation or value in order to “start doing what we like” and “decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that.” Lewis sees the rejection of objective morality and the resultant moral blindness as the inevitable consequence of Modernism’s eventual endorsement of emotivism—that is, as Alasdair MacIntrye describes, the view that “all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”[16] Alongside Lewis, MacIntyre also laments that “emotivism has become embodied in our culture”—“not merely contending that morality is not what it once was, but also and more importantly that what once was morality has to some large degree disappeared and that this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss.”[17] Thus, our culture’s endorsement of emotivism has been met with the simultaneous and equal rejection of an objective moral law.
Michael Ward nicely summarizes the above point—which is arguably the central claim of Abolition—in his excellent book After Humanity:
Lewis gave the book as a whole and its third chapter the same title, thereby focusing attention on the unattractive destination to which he believes that radical and persistent subjectivism inexorably leads. Although Lewis has plenty to say about education, although he writes almost lyrically about the beauty of the Tao, and although he mentions a number of potential corrections to subjectivist tendencies, the overall thrust of his argument is not positive and practical, but negative and philosophical. The book is a warning. Lewis is saying, in essence, “We are on the wrong path, and this is where it will take us, to self-destruction.” How we might change track is not his principal concern.[18]
Thus, Lewis sees man’s conquest of human nature as the next step after man has rejected objective morality. Without the Tao or the Natural Law providing us with moral limits, we are left to “decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such.” Being no longer preoccupied by whether or not we should do something, we now push without restriction toward what could be. Possibility now supersedes morality.
With the Natural Law officially ignored and suppressed, and emotivism reigning supreme, Lewis opens up the third and last chapter of Abolition with his famous definition of what he takes “man’s power over Nature” to now mean:
What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by . . . what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.[19]
Elaborating upon this definition, Lewis continues:
In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men really means, we must picture the [human] race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.[20]
The real picture is that of one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation . . . the power will be exercised by a minority still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. . . . The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall . . . be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means . . . the power of some men to make other men what they please.[21]
In the above excerpts, we begin with Lewis redefining Man’s power over Nature merely as the power exercised by some men over other men, with Nature as its instrument. To illustrate and substantiate this somewhat abstract claim, Lewis has us imagine a sort of master or dominant generation of humans who attain, “by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases” such that “all men who live after it are the patients of that power.” And he calls this generation of humans the master or dominant generation because they are the one generation who “resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species.” Yet, Lewis points out that, even within this master generation, power “will be exercised by a minority still.” Thus, Lewis alarms us to the conclusion that “if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized,” a few hundred men within this master generation will end up ruling billions upon billions of other men—exercising their control over the rest of us by way of “eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology.” Therefore, as Lewis initially claimed, the power of Man over Nature will turn out to be the power of some men to make other men what they please, using Nature as their instrument.
In keeping with the theme of Lewis’s dual method apologetic, we once again see his more philosophical (and in this case, arguably prophetic and dire) claims come to life in his works of fiction. Consider, for example, the following three conversations in Strength—the first between Mark and Lord Feverstone, the second between Mark and Filostrato, and the third between Mark and Professor Augustus Frost. In the first conversation, Lord Feverstone is trying to pitch the actual work of the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to Mark and seduce him into the inner ring of the organization. In the second conversation, we find the Italian scientist Filostrato once again waxing poetic about the work of the N.I.C.E. while quite literally espousing Rogan’s Cocoon Hypothesis nearly a century before him. And in the third, we see Professor Frost further echoing and endorsing this same hypothesis to Mark:
“the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years.” . . . “Go on. This interests me very much.” “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest—which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of.” “What sort of thing have you in mind?” “Quite simple and obvious things, at first—sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain. . .” “But this is stupendous, Feverstone.” “It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”[22]
[These new kinds of men] “. . . have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic. . . . They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their canaglia [scoundrels] do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with—a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. . . . They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord. . . .This Institute [the N.I.C.E.] . . . is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”[23]
“The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the Macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.”[24]
Finally, we arrive at what Lewis takes to be one of the final fruits of late Modernism: namely, Man’s attempt to conquer—or become—God Himself. When mankind finds themselves unsatisfied with conquering the natural world around them and the human world within them, they have nowhere else to turn but to the divine world above them. Indeed, Lewis sees those few scientific planners compromising a minority within the master generation as exercising a sort of divine power over the rest of humanity. Such “man-moulders of the new age,” Lewis predicts, will only add to their nearly divine status by being uniquely “armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique” as well.[25] These god-like masters of the rest of humanity—or “Conditioners” as Lewis calls them—have, nevertheless, “sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.”[26] Not even the subjects of the Conditioners are seen as men insofar as they are creations or artifacts of the masters as well. Hence, this explains why Lewis famously concludes in the last chapter of Abolition that “Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”[27] Neither the Conditioners nor the conditioned are men any longer—either because they strive to become gods or else are the products of these gods. And in leaving humanity behind, Lewis surmises that a god-like figure might even emerge from among the ranks of the Conditioners as one who successfully leaves Nature behind with all of its limitations and inefficiencies in order to pursue the panoply of divine attributes.
Once again, we see Lewis fantastically bringing these themes to life in Strength—but this time through the mouth of a man with a tragic face who was once good, Reverend Straik. “The Mad Parson” speaks with all the fervor and zeal of a prophet for the N.I.C.E. as he preaches about immanentizing a liberating eschaton to anyone who might give him their ear:
“For, mark my words, this thing is going to happen. The Kingdom is going to arrive: in this world: in this country. The powers of science are an instrument. An irresistible instrument, as all of us in the N.I.C.E. know. And why are they an irresistible instrument?” “Because science is based on observation,” suggested Mark. “They are an irresistible instrument,” shouted Straik, “because they are an instrument in His hand. An instrument of judgment as well as of healing. That is what I couldn’t get any of the Churches to see. They are blinded. Blinded by their filthy rags of humanism, their culture and humanitarianism and liberalism, as well as by their sins, or what they think their sins, though they are really the least sinful thing about them. That is why I have come to stand alone: a poor, weak, unworthy man, but the only prophet left. I knew that He was coming in power. And therefore, where we see power, we see the sign of His coming.”[28]
“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.” “At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number—a small number—of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.” “And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?” “No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature—Man in the abstract—is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man—it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”[29]
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.” “God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.” “But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?” “Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man—or a being made by man—who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.”[30]
Remember that, in response to hearing the first articulation of Rogan’s hypothesis, Tucker Carlson asked: “But can we assign a value to that? Is that good or bad?” Perhaps surprisingly, Rogan’s response to what seemed to be an otherwise straightforward question was to re-emphasize the purely descriptive nature of his views rather than accepting Carlson’s invitation to offer a prescriptive analysis of them. In other words, Rogan simply reaffirmed that his hypothesis merely describes how he believes things, in fact, are (or will be) instead of attempting to evaluate the events described by his hypothesis as either good or bad. But it is this very evaluative question, posed by Carlson, that arguably lies at the heart of this controversial and complex topic and thus demands an adequate answer. As Christians, therefore, it seems proper to explore not only how, but what we should say in response to the Cocoon Hypothesis. And so, to help us provide such an important evaluation, we can once again turn to Lewis as our wise guide.
Lewis’s Abolition concludes with a critique and a plea—a critique that we can likewise leverage against the likes of Rogan and the N.I.C.E. and a plea that we, as Christians, would do well to heed. In the end, Lewis contends that the very logic of the Conditioner’s position implies that “they must just take their impulses as they come”—i.e., from Nature instead of the Tao.[31] And if this is correct, then, “of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses.”[32] Thus, it turns out that “Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity.”[33] In a cruel twist of fate, therefore, Lewis shows us that “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”[34] What began as mankind’s attempt to conquer Nature inevitably and ironically devolves into Nature’s conquest of mankind as Nature ends up controlling the very men who control the rest of humanity.
Lewis explains that we “reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them”—but notes that the price of this conquest is “to treat a thing as mere Nature.”[35] This is why Lewis believes that “every conquest over Nature increases her domain.”[36] He elaborates:
The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. . . . But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed [by reducing it to mere Nature] are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity.”[37]
In other words, once we reduce mankind down to “mere Nature”—or down to the mere biological or organic—we essentially surrender ourselves over to Nature. The same mankind who stood to gain by trying to conquer Nature was absurdly the same mankind eventually sacrificed to Nature in their attempted conquest. And only mankind is capable of such irony insofar as it is “in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will.”[38] Therefore, when mankind “chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of the de-humanized Conditioners.”[39]
With this final reductio against Modern man’s attempted conquest of Nature in place, Lewis then offers a final plea to those of us trying to navigate the waters of Late Modernity—or to those of us inhabiting a world shaped by emotivism and podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience. His plea is fairly simple, all things considered, as he encourages us to not only refrain from viewing ourselves as mere nature but also to retrieve the Tao that humanity so carelessly cast aside in the first place. His proposed solution to these quandaries is, therefore, to retrieve a proper—and, indeed, arguably premodern—anthropology and morality. Lewis explains:
Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own “natural” impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.[40]
In this quote, Lewis lays out his final plea in the form of a dichotomy: either we understand ourselves as “rational spirit” obligated to obey the objective morality of the Tao, or else we understand ourselves as “mere nature” destined to be ruled by the natural impulses of our masters. We either take the route Lewis is prescribing for us or else we succumb to the damning inevitabilities predicted by Rogan, Straik, Filostrato, Frost, and the rest. The way forward, then, seems to involve retrieving a proper anthropology and morality as we continue the Modern enterprise of scientific innovation and technological advancement. Yet, it is also clear that Lewis believes we must not simply recover a proper anthropology and morality: we must also effectively reeducate future generations in these lost views as well if we hope to build a bulwark against many of the Modern problems facing us today.
In fact, Lewis envisions this sort of educational corrective as reversing many of the problems festering at the very heart of Modern miseducation first caused by “amateur philosophers”—which may bring to mind the sort of philosophizing that we have seen so far from Rogan and those at the N.I.C.E.[41] As noted, this corrective would plausibly involve returning to the old way of educating future generations with a proper anthropology and morality instead of the more Modern way of educating them without such views. Lewis elaborates upon the difference between these two ways of education:
Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.[42]
As Lewis makes clear, the Modern way of education—full of mere conditioning, propagandizing, and forming children the way poultry-keepers raise young birds—stands in sharp contrast to the way of education under the Tao with a full and complete view of human nature. In light of this contrast, Lewis argues that the task of contemporary educators is, therefore, “not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”[43] In other words, the noble educators among us today must not, as some have done, cut down the jungles of emotions and sentiments altogether in an effort just to cut out the bad or false ones. They must resist the prevailing naturalistic anthropology and emotivist morality surrounding us and instead focus on cultivating proper emotions and sentiments in their students. By embracing Modern views and “starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”[44] Such contemporarymiseducation has, Lewis argues, simply left us to be “Men without Chests”—forming us to reject a proper emotionalism and trained sentimentality altogether in favor of a poisonous emotivism and downgraded anthropology.[45] The Modern educator is, unfortunately, stuck with the view that emotions and sentiments cannot properly respond to the world as it is (or is not) through proper education, upbringing, and training—and thereby surrender their chest-less pupils to propaganda.
In the end, Lewis’ solution against the impending consequences of the Cocoon Hypothesis involves rescuing and restoring education. And perhaps the most important place where this educational battle must be fought and won is in the arena of Modern science. This is because, as Lewis believes, only science done under the Tao is truly humanizing: that is, only the Tao can provide us with a common law that stands above both the Conditioners and conditioned alike—serving as a check on the tyranny of the former and the slavery of the latter. Walking the other path, with its more naturalistic anthropology and emotivist morality, is a process that will surely abolish mankind and “goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists.”[46] Only when we remain within the Tao, argues Lewis, do “we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human.”[47] The dehumanizing alternative, as we have seen, begins when we step outside the Tao and regard it as “a mere subjective product.”[48] In such a world, “Man’s conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”[49]
Lewis’s response to the complex, Rogan-esque challenges of our day in the arena of bioenhancement, transhumanism, and the like is, therefore, to finally advocate for a new approach to science altogether that operates under the Tao; he is calling for an altogether new way of education and doing science whose boundaries are determined by a proper anthropology and morality. As noted above, it seems as though fellow Christians would do well to support what Lewis here advocates as doing so may turn out to be our best defense against the grim futures predicted by Rogan and the N.I.C.E. Lewis concludes Abolition with just such a call and hope for the future that we would do well to likewise mimic:
Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the “natural object” produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for. . . The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole . . . In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life.[50]
[1] Joe Rogan, “#2138—Tucker Carlson,” The Joe Rogan Experience, April 19, 2024, 28:50–32:15, https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ThIfbGXWTxBITTsj18aBw.
[2] Alister E. McGrath, “C. S. Lewis: Imaginative Apologetics of a Reluctant Convert,” in The History of Apologetics: A Biographical and Methodological Introduction, ed. Benjamin K. Forrest, Joshua D. Chatraw, and Alister E. McGrath (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 608.
[3] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 609–10.
[4] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 610.
[5] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 610.
[6] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 611 (emphasis added).
[7] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 612.
[8] C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2017), 60.
[9] Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories,” 60.
[10] McGrath, “C. S. Lewis,” 611.
[11] C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Day Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (New York: Scribner, 2003), 7.
[12] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 53–54.
[13] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 169–70.
[14] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 171.
[15] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 51.
[16] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 11–12.
[17] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 22.
[18] Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 43.
[19] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 54–55.
[20] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 56–57.
[21] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 58–59.
[22] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 39–40.
[23] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 173–74.
[24] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 256.
[25] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 60.
[26] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 63.
[27] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 64.
[28] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 77.
[29] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 175.
[30] Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 176.
[31] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 67.
[32] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 67.
[33] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 67–68.
[34] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 68.
[35] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 71.
[36] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 71.
[37] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 71–72.
[38] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 72.
[39] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 72–73
[40] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 73.
[41] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 12.
[42] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 23.
[43] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 13–14.
[44] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 14.
[45] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 25.
[46] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 73.
[47] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 74–75.
[48] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 75.
[49] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 75.
[50] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 78–79.
Joseph M. Dunne, “Of Caterpillars and Cocoons: Bioenhancement in Lewis’s Abolition of Man and that Hideous Strength,” Dignitas 31, no. 1–2 (2024): 14–21, www.cbhd.org/dignitas-articles/of-caterpillars-and-cocoons-bioenhancement-in-lewiss-abolition-of-man-and-that-hideous-strength.