C. S. Lewis Is, Indeed, a Prophet (But We Knew That Already)

He predicted postmodernism in his musings on the medieval cosmos. He foresaw the meltdown of the neat scientific constructs of Newtonian physics and the origins of life. Now from yesterday’s newspaper comes new evidence of C. S. Lewis’ remarkable prescience.

I know that Jack did not dabble in ouija boards and crystal ball-gazing; that would be contrary to his Christian faith and his good sense. I do not believe that he received visions of the future; that would be to demean his remarkable intellect and imagination. It’s more like Brother Eusebius, the fictional second century pastor and narrator in Calvin Millers’ hillarious book The Philippian Fragment. After hearing a narrative of how several previous ministers left after they ran afoul of a powerful congregant, Eusebius guesses that his immediate predecessor also tangled with this man. His informant, impressed, asks if he has the gift of prophecy. “No,” Eusebius replies, “but I can sometimes see trends.” Jack Lewis was a man who could see and extend trends.

Perpend: The New York Times for Wednesday, December 3, contains an article detailing the case of a British citizen who needs a particular cancer treatment. It won’t save his life but will extend it. British health authorities, however, have decreed the drug too expensive. Twenty-two grand American for an additional half-year’s survival isn’t considered a sound investment. The game, in short, isn’t worth the candle.

Now here’s the payoff: the agency that makes such rulings, and whose decrees influence other socialized health care systems world-wide, is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, more frequently referred to by its acronym: the NICE.

Lewis buffs are already way ahead of me on this one. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned that “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” He fleshed out this thesis in narrative form in his science fiction novel That Hideous Strength. In this story, Lewis imagines a government-funded agency designed to bring the power of science to bear on the messiness of humanity. This British Babel goes by the name of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, or, for short, the N.I.C.E.

Now, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that the actual NICE goes about vivisecting bears or playing mind-games with prisoners or re-animating the heads of executed uxoricides to use as the mouthpiece of Hell. That’s as may be. But it does strike me as a little chilling to find such a real-time cognate to the fictional construct of a government agency that decides whose life makes financial sense, and that makes such decisions based on financial, not human considerations. To paraphrase Wordsworth,

LEWIS! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee

To say nothing of the rest of us.

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