Science as a Threat to Freedom in Modern Society
C.S. Lewis expressed concern about how the modern state could undermine human freedom and dignity if policymakers adopted the approach of modern social science. At the same time, Lewis also doubted the ability of any government to permanently reshape and subordinate a nation’s citizenry. Here then is what Lewis viewed as the major threats to human freedom in modern society.
Edward J. Larson, University of Georgia and Discovery Institute
"Every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires."
Among other things, C. S. Lewis considered modern science a threat to freedom in modern society. In order to understand how modern sciences is a threat to freedom, we have to consider Lewis’ view of modern science. Lewis lived at a time when science was emerging as the dominate system of thought in the Western world, when the technological spin-offs of that intellectual activity were fundamentally transforming every aspect of life. Lewis reflected on this in his 1954 inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, when he declared: "The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man’s blood. All through the eighteenth century, . . . science was not the business of Man because Man had not yet become the business of science. It dealt chiefly with the inanimate; and it threw off few technological byproducts. When Watt makes his engine, Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of Man, and Freud with his soul, then indeed the lion will have got out of its cage."
As we know from the Narnia tales, a free lion does not pose a threat so long as it is true — like Aslan. But Lewis did not view science as a source of neutral truths about nature. For example, in The Discarded Image, Lewis wrote about the differences between the medieval and modern model of nature.
The most spectacular differences between the Medieval Model and our own concern astronomy and biology. In both fields the New Model is supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. But we should misrepresent the historical process if we said that the irruption of new facts was the sole cause of the alteration. The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, ‘refuted’ by the telescope. . . .
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