https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/12/medical-mandates-a-hideous-strength-n1477878
One recalls C.S. Lewis’ dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a longtime favorite of mine, where he speaks of “false writings” and “men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries.” Lewis held to an apocalyptic vision of moral and intellectual surrender to the idols of mere self-sufficiency and hedonistic indulgence, of a time characterized by the death of meaning and the weakening of belief in a just and merciful God. “The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus,” the human spirit is being progressively “enclosed,” as he describes it. There is not much of the Rapture here, little indication of the new Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation.
David Marshall, also a devoted reader of Lewis, regards the novel as “a profound and prescient vision of institutional evil, of a sort that is all too recognizable in our time…fus[ing] political power, technology, and the occult.” Of course, Lewis was not thinking of a biovirus closing down the planet but of the relentless slide toward totalitarian governance everywhere he looked, especially in the democratic West, much as Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and José Saramago forecast in their signature works. Lewis was more preoccupied with the eclipse of faith, which he saw as undermining the integrity and cohesion of the great Judeo-Christian experiment to establish a system of individual liberty and rule of law, grounded in natural and divine justice.
The belief in such principles ensured and sustained a viable culture, which was inevitably fragile and always susceptible to the incursion of the “demonic” in one form or another. He would not have been surprised at the current pandemic of lies, political demagoguery, and the recruitment of a public devoid of the moral strength to resist an orthodoxy of deception—the sway of the sons and daughters of the Father of Lies.
For COVID has provided the pretext to inaugurate precisely such a declension as Lewis feared. Our public institutions are engaged in establishing a virtual medical dictatorship mandating masks, lockdowns, contact tracing, curfews, business closures, excessive police powers, and more. And now we have the vaccine passports, predicated on a quasi-theological division between the saved and the damned, or in current terms, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.