C.S. Lewis and the fiction of science

In preparation for the Science vs Religion in Dystopia panel at Convergeance, I’ve been reviewing the stories of C.S. Lewis.

It seems to me like the common impression of Lewis is that he wrote speculative fiction with heavy Christian themes in part due to his own conversion from agnosticism. Nobody preaches the gospel like a former doubter or “methinks the preacher doth protest too much”.

As with almost everything, the closer you look, the more complicated the story is.

Lewis’ conversion was not form agnosticism directly to the Episcopal church, at least not in his writings. If you take a look at Out of the Silent Planet, what we get is not Christianity, but one of the great heresies: Manichaeism. Or something similar to Manichaeism. Lewis build a universe in which every world has its own divine ruler with (at least) one ruler over them and a hierarchy of lesser beings reporting to them, ending with the mundane inhabitants of the worlds.

Our world is the Silent Planet, because our world-god rebelled and we have been cut off from the eternal light which is all that is good and divine. This ties pretty well with the general definition of Manichaeism – “Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness”.

Lewis develops the theme of a battle between the word of the divine and the world of the material in the next two books of the trilogy, commonly called the Ransom Trilogy after the eponymous main character. The third book, That Hideous Strength, takes Manichaeism to the institutional level, pitting the gentle folk of St. Anne’s (with a veneer of Arthurian titles and symbolism) against the degenerates at The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). And it has Merlin. Not a reincarnation or a code-named character, but the actual Druidic magician revived from his slumber. And he’s great. It’s worth reading the series just so you can see Merlin give his smackdown.

C.S. Lewis was not a simple writer of Christian allegory. He was a writer who spent the last half of his life trying to figure out a spiritual approach to the world. The Narnia books are clearly religious and, at the end of his life, Lewis said that he was leaning very heavily toward Catholicism. At different points in his life, his struggle with religion was reflected in his books.

So what was his beef with science? After all, science is clearly the bad guy in the Ransom Trilogy. In The Magician’s Nephew, it is Uncle Andrew, in his attempt to combine the scientific method with magic to give him access to other realms, who risks the lives of Polly and Diggory and ultimately brings evil to the pristine creation of Narnia. Why did Lewis use science as the exclusive tool of evil in his fiction?

It seems that Lewis was writing primarily in reaction to two things, a romanticized view of science as a tool of manifest destiny and the very real technological terrors of World War I.

Scientific and technological advancement beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing through the 1930s when Lewis began the Ransom series gave Europe and North American an advantage over the rest of the world and the ability to press that advantage. Many voices were celebrating science as both a means to conquer and colonize other nations but also a sign of that rich white people had an obligation to do so. This is the position of the villainous scientist and businessman in Out of the Silent Planet when they encountered native Martians. And some voices were attempting to turn science inward to change societies – in much the same way that the social engineers at N.I.C.E. were proposing in That Hideous Strength.

At the same time, the very advances that were celebrated as a sign of divine favor were producing a complete and terrible change in warfare. World War One saw the introduction of airplanes, submarines, tanks, modern artillery, and poison gas. In the Franco-Prussian war, a total of just over a million troops were mobilized. In the 5 months of fighting during World War I, over 1.6 million people were killed. More people were killed in 5 months in World War I than fought in the previous European War. By the end of the War over 10 million members of the military and 7 million civilians were dead. And they died horribly. Oftentimes because of some technological advance.

Against those two factors, Lewis argued that science is not a civilizing force, but rather it is a brutal tool of domination. When you look at the battle between science and religion that he sets up, that is what you are seeing. Not an argument about whether it is better to discover the secrets of the universe, but an argument about whether a better understanding and better tools give people the right to oppress others.

Science and religion are not the real factors in C.S. Lewis’ books. They are strawmen who stand in for a wider cultural question about how we treat other people.

Data Driven Decisions from the other side

Last week, I presented a short talk about Data Driven Decision Making at Skepticamp Chicago. The presentation, "I'm not sure I believe your numbers", was about the issues that corporations have in following a process of making decisions based on analysis rather than instinct, tradition or "common sense".  Essentially, DDSM should force an organization to use Kahneman's system 2 thinking instead of system 1 thinking.

The bottom line of that presentation was that the fault lies with corporate leaders who don't understand big data, statistics, and analysis. Using a series of quotes that I have had the pleasure to hear in person, I called out some of the errors and assumptions that executives make when being presented with a model or analysis. These errors undercut their attempts to make data driven decisions.

What I did not have time to do in that presentation was to peel back one more layer of cause to show that the executives are as much victims of a poorly constructed system as they are perpetrators of bad decisions.

Let me illustrate by relaying what actually happens in meeting with a chairman, presidents, and senior vice-presidents.



You have these key players together for about 2 hours. During which time each of them will receive somewhere around 200 emails updating them on various initiatives, projects, and ongoing concerns. Somewhere in the email will be a handful of requests asking them for permission to start some new project or spend some amount of unplanned money because of a change to the industry that requires an un-looked for response.

While they are sitting there with phones vibrating softly to let them know that the business is falling apart without their immediate attention, the other executives are asking for their partnership ("please share my costs") or alerting them that there have been changes to an ongoing program ("the sky is falling") or asking them for updates ("who should I blame for the drop in profits").

Into this mix of divided attention, blame-shifting, and contextual negotiation walks an analyst who needs to provide the results of a test and ask for a decision. The analyst has been told that these are important people with very little time and that they can only have a 3 page presentation with fewer than 3 bullets on each. And throw in a chart to make it colorful. The result is a vague, high-level description of something that is detailed and complex.



Some background on being an executive: no one ever comes to you with a bad idea, but some ideas are bad. After about 32 seconds of being a vice-president, you realize that some of the glowing recommendations that you are being provided have to be false. You can't tell which ones are false, because they are all 3 pages with 3 bullets per page and a pretty chart, which is not enough detail to do a reality check. So you develop the habit of asking what you hope are penetrating questions to get to the heart of the matter, or you make summary statements to see if you are understanding the material. When we talk about "good executives", typically we mean people who can scape off the icing to see whether there is cake or mud underneath with just a few questions. "Bad executives" scrape off the icing and find that there is icing underneath. "Geed news, the future is filled with delicious icing for ever!"

Back to our analyst. He's got his 3 slides and 3 bullets per slide. He has spent the last 6 months working on this project and is pretty pissed that it all comes down to five minutes in front of people who can't even be bothered to put their phones down.

And then someone asks him a question.

Joy! They care about his work. They want to know more. The question was kind of off-target, but it gives him a chance to tell them about the next layer of detail that they really need to understand. He answers. A few of them look up from their phones and seem non-plussed. Someone asks a follow up question that seems just like the first one to the analyst. He gives them more detail.

To the executives, someone walked in with a pretty presentation and a rosy recommendation. They asked a couple of questions ("Will this margin drop to the bottom line as profit? If the projections are off by 10%, how much does that impact the projected results?"), and the simple presentation has turned into a crazy Rube Goldberg machine.

It would be easy to say that the problem with Data Driven Decision Making is that we are not training our executives. In fact it was easy to say. I said it last Sunday, and I didn't break a sweat. But that is an oversimplification.

The next layer of cause is that we are relying on a handful of people to be experts in everything. If it makes you feel any better, we have only been struggling with this problem since, you know, forever. Ask Sargon how he made decisions about palace construction and you will see what I mean.

How do we fix it? What's the solution? The only thing that I can see is that we abandon "leaders" in favor of "facilitators". Move decision making down to the level of expertise and charge executives with bringing the right experts together and ensuring that projects have appropriate support, don't charge with making the actual decision. Will that happen? No. It would take a core change to human nature. We would have to be willing to say that the president of the company can't be held responsible for the company's decisions. We aren't ready to say that Obama isn't really in charge and that a couple of hundred health care analysts are actually responsible for the Affordable Care Act.

There's your happy thought for the day!