Davis Aurini - Fight Club & CS Lewis

Aug. 21, 2012 - Davis Aurini

19:16

Fight Club & CS Lewis

Professor John Robson on Medieval History: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS9ECV_E8Vc Yes, that is a picture of Satan on my t-shirt. The God of Sex, Drugs, & Rock 'n' Roll. www.staresattheworld.com

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	Once we killed bad men.
	Now we liquidate unsocial elements.
	Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism.
	And boys likely to be worthy of a commission are potential officer material.
	Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance and even ordinary intelligence are sales resistance.
	That's a quote from the book The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.
	And it has the exact same flavor as the speech in Fight Club about how we are a generation of boys raised by women, about how the world has no place for us, about how we've been reduced to numbers and effects, how we're nothing more than our Ikea furniture and data on a spreadsheet.
	Both the movie Fight Club and this book, The Abolition of Man, are focused upon that, about how the individual is being degenerated into an object, how they're being alienated into an object, how society only uses people for what they can produce at the end of the day, how they have no inherent value in the individual person.
	But here's the interesting thing: Fight Club was a celebration of nihilism, while this book by C.S. Lewis is an attack on it.
	Now we need to do a brief aside.
	Brief aside.
	One of the interesting arrogances of the modern era is how it dismisses all non-scientific knowledge, how it regards the myths and superstitions of prior errors as just myths and superstitions.
	They've become prejudicially bad things.
	If you actually study the occult at all, you'll see a lot of sense in that, a lot of parallels to what we're learning about humanity nowadays.
	One example, and I believe this comes from Taoism initially, but it was probably present in a few more cultures, that the left side of the body is the feminine side, and the right is the masculine side.
	Of course, we know today that the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side, is the analytical, and the right, the emotive-intuitive side.
	And the particular one that comes up in this instance, which is why I want to go aside here, is, well, what it reminded me of was the chakras.
	In Indian, supposed to call it mysticism, Indian mysticism, there's the seven chakras of the body, but you can boil them down to three particularly important ones.
	The head, the heart, and the gut.
	And again, C.S. Lewis, this time, quoting Plato, not an Indian source, from the Republic, by the way, says as follows.
	As the king governs his executive, so reason and man must rule the mere appetites by means of the spirited elements.
	The head rules the belly through the chest, the seat, as Alanis tells us, of magnanimity.
	And even today, in our common language, we still talk about getting a feeling from the gut, going with your gut sense.
	and that quote the bit where he quotes plato is in a chapter men without chests and this is what he argues that there's now there's two types of men in society those dominated by the intellect the the intellectuals that think they have such big brains because their chest is just so small
	and those guided by low base instinct, guided by the gut, the groin, the pickup artist that never considers the consequences of their actions, the degenerate overweight person.
	That there's a lack of chest.
	And chest is where you find this combination of the higher intellect, but the purposefulness of the gut.
	And so this is where you get stuff like love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, all those positive elements that truly make us human.
	Not mere number crunchers and not mere animals, but something that's a combination of both.
	And we see this exact progression in Fight Club.
	In Fight Club, the narrator starts out as a man dominated by intellect.
	He works as an insurance claim adjuster.
	He counts numbers all day, reducing people down to little facts and figures.
	He collects all the garbage that he's supposed to collect in society.
	And it finally drives him mad.
	And so then he goes from the mind down to the gut, to the groin.
	He starts Fight Club, starts having extremely hard sex with Marla, if I'm getting the character's name correctly.
	Becomes just a visceral being rejecting the empty world of pure intellectualism.
	And then the book and the movie diverge.
	In the final act, we see the nihilism present.
	But in the book, he discovers the abyss.
	And in the movie, he becomes the ubermensch.
	Let's consider the book first.
	So in the novel, he decides to target the Museum of Natural History to try and destroy the past.
	When both the intellectual and the gut fail him, he tries to destroy history, basically causing civilizational suicide.
	He fails.
	His friends from the counseling groups show up, but their love isn't enough.
	He winds up in a mental hospital, and the evilness that he has wrought is still present in the world.
	he falls into the abyss, losing all faith, falling apart, losing all hope.
	Now to go back to C.S. Lewis for a second here.
	C.S. Lewis, that is what he is writing about in this book.
	He's talking about the necessity of theology.
	That theology is a filter to view the world.
	It's a heuristic that lets you see what's important and what's not.
	And he points out that something without this filter, that if you can know everything in the universe, if you can perceive everything, you perceive nothing because nothing has any significance.
	In regards to science, he says, It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth, but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour.
	Its triumphs have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price.
	Reconsideration and something like repentance may be required.
	See, what he's getting at here is the same thing that I've said about atheist cult before.
	See, what they do is they use the scientific method of questioning things to question things that they consider enemies.
	So they'll use this analytical method to break down, for instance, arguments against abortion, or they'll break down maybe communism or whatever.
	Whatever they label as the enemy, they'll start breaking down using the scientific method.
	But they never seem to realize that that scientific method can also be applied to the things that they believe in.
	Their ethics and their theology, which is largely, if not entirely, derived from Christianity.
	And C.S. Lewis criticizes contemporary intellectuals of his, this was written in 1944, for doing the exact same thing.
	These intellectuals were trying to teach schoolchildren how to see through bullshit propaganda from advertisers.
	Except the problem was that the methods they used to break down these advertisers could equally as well be applied to beautiful poetry or a celebration of national history.
	And so the comment that history, or that rather science, was born at an inauspicious hour can't help reminding me of Professor John Robson.
	And a link below to his one-hour lecture.
	Robson argues that how it's typically taught, how history is typically taught, is that the Renaissance was the beginning of the modern era, and that the medieval dark ages and the Roman period before that were part of the same dark history of long ago.
	Robson thinks it's the opposite, that the modern era began with the collapse of Rome and the rise of Christianity.
	And I mentioned some of this in my last video about how it was Christianity, the concept of God being a vulnerable baby that could be killed, about God suffering that led to the conception of slavery being morally wrong.
	And so to go back to science for a moment, science was developed during the Renaissance era, and the Renaissance era was a rediscovery of Roman thought.
	And so when C.S. Lewis talks about science being born at an ill hour under ill conditions, you can't help drawing a bit of a connection there between the Roman self-alienation and the way that science alienates us from ourselves.
	When you apply science hard and fast, you get the concentration camp.
	We become nothing more than blind products of our genetic code.
	Nothing has an essence inherent to it that's worthy of anything.
	It becomes nothing but the raw data that builds it up.
	And this is why C.S. Lewis says that we need theology.
	Because he somewhat foresaw the world of Fight Club leading to this nihilistic abyss.
	But something tell tale at the end, near the end of the book, he says, perhaps I am asking impossibilities.
	Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.
	There might be a possibility, he says, that the analytical nature of science is inevitable to science.
	He claims not to be an obscuratist, not to be anti-science, not to be a primitivist.
	He hopes that science can somehow be not analytical and not destructive.
	I don't think he has much hope finding a non-corrosive science, I'm afraid.
	So, is the abyss inevitable?
	If Fight Club the movie celebrates nihilism, why is C.S. Lewis so desperately attacking nihilism?
	Well, C.S. Lewis is an amazing theologian.
	He is not the greatest historian, however.
	And this book, remember, was written in 1944.
	He considered the Nazis more dangerous than the communists.
	Here's the thing about nihilism.
	It does involve fundamental questioning.
	It does involve corroding away your every element, your every bit of faith.
	And it comes with a great risk of an abyss.
	But there's also the Übermensch.
	In Fight Club the Movie, rather than attacking the Museum of Natural History, rather than trying to destroy himself, to destroy history, to destroy humanity, he attacks the financial centers.
	He attacks the buildings that devolve us into mere numbers.
	And through putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, he doesn't wind up in a mental hospital.
	He finds transcendence.
	In this book, C.S. Lewis actually discusses an early version of transhumanism.
	Of course, he's talking about eugenics.
	It hasn't quite got the.
	It's 1944, okay?
	He's not thinking about encoding an emulation of a brain on a computer.
	He's talking about eugenics, how eventually science will get to the point where we can breed a man with his own ethics.
	We can recreate the ethics of man.
	He acknowledges that biological science will get this powerful.
	Although in the present era, it looks like it's probably going to be artificial intelligence research that does that before biology does it.
	It's a moot point.
	The point is that science will eventually allow ourselves to rebuild what a mind is, to rebuild ourselves.
	And he sees nothing but the nihilistic void.
	He points out that a race selected by humanity will be a race limited by humanity.
	The more technology we have, the more power we have, the less power our descendants have, because we have made choices for them as to how they will live.
	And he only sees the abyss.
	There's also the ubermensch.
	The fact that we can rebuild ourselves.
	The fact that we can go out naked into the void and recreate ourselves.
	We can achieve transcendence through this.
	Whether you're talking about the singularity or you're talking philosophically for yourself.
	C.S. Lewis looked at the Marxists and mistook them for nihilists.
	The Marxists have fallen into the void.
	They have thrown away objective natural law and replaced it with no other objectivity.
	All is subjective to them.
	There is no inherent value in anything.
	Everything is just a number on a spreadsheet.
	And this is why their ideology, their cult, is a cult of death.
	All they have is power over one another.
	That's all that matters to them.
	And that blind search for power will result in extinction sooner or later.
	The nihilist recognizes the flawed theology that theology will eventually be corroded by mathematical reality.
	That we are deterministic, that we are part of a universe that doesn't care about us, but that we can build ourselves to be something greater.
	Nihilism and Christianity aren't quite as deeply opposed as most Christians seem to believe.

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