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Eric Knickerbocker
February 16, 2005

Ellison, Huxley, Lewis: Knowledge Without Wisdom

A common thread throughout the three works we’ve read thus far—Ellison’s “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Tickertockman,” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength—is what might be termed the Modern “cult of efficiency.” The Harlequin, for example, disrupts the machine-like proficiency with which the Tickertockman runs his world, Mustapha Mond keeps an almost airtight operation continuing in the Brave New World, and the N.I.C.E. have similar plans for reconstituting the world in That Hideous Strength. The question then becomes, is this premium placed on efficiency and progress a good thing or perhaps more implicitly, “How (or why) is this bad?” It seems to me that Lewis is not so far off base when he writes that our increase in scientific knowledge will sometimes benefit and sometimes harm, “mending one thing and marring another, removing old miseries and producing new ones, safeguarding ourselves here and endangering ourselves there.”[1] Our task, then, will be to see what we might uncover (if anything at all) about how these particulars arrange themselves—or even if they are the right set of questions to ask.

Of the three readings, Huxley’s Brave New World strikes me as the most articulate in its attempt to help us assess contemporary society.[2] Like Nozick with his “experience machine”[3] (and to a lesser degree Ellison with his Tickertockman[4]), we are presented with an elaborate scenario by which to evaluate some of our basic assumptions about society and the relative rightness or wrongness thereof. Perhaps one of the first obstacles of critically examining what we find within these writings is getting past their contrived natures. Put another way, as credible as these scenarios may seem at first blush, we have to ask ourselves if these carefully bleached and manicured models are adequate enough to pose productive queries. Are they truly helpful, or are we merely asking “what if” questions about scenarios that have no practical implications and never will precisely because they are imaginary? If we can successfully answer the question about whether we stand to profit from these works (and I believe the answer is that we indeed can), we now need to see what it is that we might uncover by doing so.

Perhaps one of the first lessons to emerge from our accounts is the recognition that our knowledge is limited, the solutions unclear. The problem, then, with being so forward looking and elevating progress to the preeminent pinnacle is that it refuses to acknowledge the limitations of the so-called knowledge upon which it rests. Modern man scorns metaphysical answers because they cannot be tested (but what of his own assumptions?), thus forming a rift between his ability to know with empirical certainty on the one side and his intuition and longings on the other. It seems to me that we are most productive (if we assume productivity is indeed a worthwhile virtue) when we can conceive of something greater than ourselves; we are most creative when not everything has to be empirically tried and tested before it is to be believed.

Let’s try to draw an even finer point if we can. The central concern that seems to emerge before all others in our readings is the apprehension that we are somehow losing our humanness. And it strikes me that this is a very valid concern: one about which we feel rightly justified in posing. The day we stipulated that only that which can be tried and tested can be true, we dispensed with the whole realm of wisdom and intuitive understanding. We decided that emotions interfered with the pursuit of the testable and we scorned them, thinking that in a perfect world, they would bind us no longer. What we did not bank on, being the emotive creatures that we secretly are, is that the things that most matter to us and give life its greatest meaning happen to be matters of the heart. What is more and most important, the ultimate limitation of all of our philosophy and all of our science and all of our progress is death. As the years begin to draw to their inevitable conclusion—for without exception all die—we begin to have second thoughts and perhaps the beginnings of regret. We ask: “All of this after which I have chased, all of this for which I have worked so hard: to what does it all amount? Is it not a chasing after the wind?” And now that I have become so self-sufficient and have no need of a God, what a huge hole is left behind. What meaning does my life now hold? There is perhaps some hope in my progeny—if I wasn’t too busy to bother with producing any or too caught up to love those whom I did—but what hope is that? They will merely live to die—and what will they be doing while they yet live? Carrying on the same experiments that I once performed to in turn pass along to their offspring? Is this cycle the only permanence in the universe; is life naught but eternal transience—one life traded for another traded for another with no continuity save an endless succession of lives: sperm, ovum, life, death, sperm, ovum, life, death?

It seems turning our backs on metaphysical questions has left us impoverished in terms of lending significance to our transient lives: that in turning our backs on emotions and intuition in the name of objectivity, we have become more object-like, not less—mere marble statues standing as some kind of perverse memorial to a past that once was but nevermore shall be, a tribute to a fading humanness. So then, we have achieved a great amount of progress in terms of knowledge but at what cost? There is, of course, within us all the healthy desire to know more but what of the desire to love more? Did we neglect it along the way? Ah yes, to love more and to know more; perhaps Evelyn Underhill says it best:

Now the unsatisfied psyche in her emotional aspect wants, as we have said, to love more; her curious intellect wants to know more. The awakened human creature suspects that both appetites are being kept on a low diet; that there really is more to love, and more to know, somewhere in the mysterious world without, and further that its powers of affection and understanding are worthy of some greater and more durable objective than that provided by the illusions of sense. Urged therefore by the cravings of feeling or of thought, consciousness is always trying to run out to the encounter of the Absolute, and always being forced to return. The neat philosophical system, the diagrams of science, the “sunset-touch,” are tried in turn. Art and life, the accidents of our humanity, may foster an emotional outlook; till the moment in which the neglected intellect arises and pronounces such an outlook to have no validity. Metaphysics and science seem to offer to the intellect an open window towards truth; till the heart looks out and declares this landscape to be a chill desert in which she can find no nourishment. These diverse aspects of things must be either fused or transcended if the whole self is to be satisfied; for the reality which she seeks has got to meet both claims and pay in full.[5]

But what reality is there that can “meet both claims and pay in full”? (The answer to this particular question, it turns out, may be the most profitable one for us to seek.) The desire to know more does little to satisfy the desire to love more. Both claims, as Underhill writes, must be paid in full. Surely these desires are not illusionary. Surely the same universe that spawned us has within it—or perhaps beyond it—the capacity to meet both desires and pay in full.

It strikes me that all of our readings point to the inevitable impoverishment of the human soul when it turned its back on love in the nearly exclusive pursuit of knowledge. Of course, love still lives on, but it has been given secondary place. This concept is aptly illustrated in my recent viewing of the movie Ray about the late musician Ray Charles. The ultimately sympathetic portrayal of his character left one with the impression that a large part of what motivated him to come off heroine was love for his wife and son, even if he was ultimately unfaithful to them both. Curious to verify this account with the facts, the online biographies I referenced had at most a sentence-long blurb about his wife; in fact, his own site (www.raycharles.com) is no better. The focus is almost exclusively on his musical evolution and the albums he has produced. In much the same way, one would never get the impression that Modern man had any family ties whatsoever—to say nothing of his metaphysical affiliations. To the alien who happened by from a far distant galaxy, he might very well leave never knowing that humans have souls. All that gets recorded in the textbooks and the halls of fame are the accomplishments of man’s knowledge or the fruit that it has borne; far, far rarer are the Sadhu Sundar Singhs and the Mother Teresas, one-sentence blurbs passing by in the stream of Modern history.

The fault, as I see it, is not with the desire to know more. It is rather when the desire to know more has been taken to excess, becoming unbalanced in its exclusivist pursuit. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and yet lose his soul? What is all the knowledge and the wisdom in the world worth if it effectively eviscerates the essence of our humanness? After fighting our way through dungeons and darkness and enduring days of famine and plague, we finally come to hold our beloved princess in our arms only to find that we have grown cold: breath no longer fills our lungs and blood no longer courses through our veins. Of what value are we then to ourselves, much less to her?

Lewis is correct, however. Our technology has as much capacity to solve a problem as to create one. Just because the world in which we live has sold its soul does not mean that we have to do so as well. In fact, we might very profitably benefit from its lopsided pursuit to know more. Does the Preacher[6] of old not say: “When there is a man who has labored with wisdom, knowledge and skill, then he gives his legacy to one who has not labored with them at all”? Why could not we, yet alive, profit from the legacy of those already dead?

There is, of course, a side to the desire to know more that does not produce soul sickness, but I would daresay that the only way this is possible is when the conscience is clear and the heart is allowed to sing from its depths. Nonetheless, even when the heart sings sweetly and the conscience smiles at the sight, death is the great equalizer, rendering the whole of a man’s existence bittersweet, whether one believes in an afterlife or not. Transience always brings sorrow by its very nature and I would daresay that the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of the Eternal thinly disguised in beggar’s clothing. And if we are to believe the Preacher on the one hand and Modern man on the other, death is indeed the final cruelty, for “God hath set eternity in the hearts of men.”[7] What an irony: the restless brooding creature man ensnared in a decaying shell only to die with eternity trapped in his heart. Perhaps Lady Wollstonecraft was on to something when she observed in 1792:

The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason; for, were man created perfect, or did a flood of knowledge break in upon him, when he arrived at maturity, that precluded error, I should doubt whether his existence would be continued after the dissolution of the body. But, in the present state of things, every difficulty in morals that escapes from human discussion, and equally baffles the investigation of profound thinking, and the lightning glance of genius, is an argument on which I build my belief of the immortality of the soul.[8]

So then, if the Preacher, Wollstonecraft, Lewis, and the pre-Modern thinkers be correct, perhaps Modern man has gone wrong mostly because he has given up his pursuit of metaphysical questions and believed in folly—a fallible, pitiable creature that cannot even solve his own problems much less create the stars in the sky—believing that he has somehow created his Maker rather than the other way ’round (and thinking himself greatly wise in so saying). Perhaps that is the real reason Lewis’s Hideous Strength seems more theological than anti-technocratic: perhaps Lewis caught a glimpse of something many of us miss: perhaps he recognized that our only hope lies in metaphysical intuitions and not in the empirical reality right in front of our faces. Didn’t Mustapha Mond also inquire about what use God would be in a world in which death and sickness were no more? What did Huxley mean? Are these the intuitions that the mighty god Man can barely wipe his own butt much less effect lasting change by his own finite power?

Maybe all the metaphysicians and theologians are right after all: maybe this life is some kind of experiment in which man has been placed in a world to see how he will get on with his fellows before the day in which he will be called forth to give a reckoning to the One far greater than himself. Then again, maybe the answer is yet to be found in science and technology and we simply have not pursued the matter far enough. If there is no God, then we are probably better off without Him. But like all metaphysical questions, we are still left with that nagging doubt, that great, unanswered question, “Yes, but what if?” What if there really is a God that we just can’t see: an Unmoved Mover, Who, unlike Aristotle’s conception of the same, sits astride both ends of time and space, the Cause and the Effect, the Alpha and the Omega? Mightn’t it then turn out that we’ve been asking all the wrong questions all along? Might we then find that in all our forward looking we’ve inadvertently shucked the pod and chucked the seeds? Perhaps you said it best in your lecture,[9] Dr. Kaufman: perhaps we have lost our wisdom in the pursuit of knowledge. Great knowledge with little wisdom is a very dangerous thing indeed.[10]