CHAPTER 1

THE FUNERAL OF A GREAT MYTH

On May 13, 1901, three months after joining Parliament, twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill rises to deliver a rebuke to his Conservative Party colleagues in the House of Commons. Anxious about German designs in Europe, some British politicians are demanding that the government develop an army capable of defeating a European foe. Such a war, most believe, would be limited and decisive—and immensely beneficial to the victor.

But Churchill has racked up battle experiences in India, the Sudan, and the Boer War in South Africa. He realizes that the nature of warfare is changing; a conflict in Europe would be nothing like the colonial wars of the previous century, which were fought by small professional armies against ill-equipped foes, and brought to a swift conclusion. “I have frequently been astonished to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war,” he says. Such a conflict, he warns, would end “in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.”¹ It would not be the last time Churchill found himself out of step with conventional political wisdom.

By the start of the twentieth century, attitudes about war and what it could accomplish were bound up with a singular, overarching idea. Let’s call it “The Myth of Progress.” Perhaps the most widely held view in the years leading up to the Great War was that Western civilization was marching inexorably forward, that humanity itself was maturing, evolving, advancing—that new vistas of political, cultural, and spiritual achievement were within reach. The Renaissance message of Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), in which the Creator extols mankind’s fearsome possibilities, fairly captures the mood: “We have made you a creature neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”²

The thinkers and writers who informed the generation of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were certain which direction mankind was headed. Their confidence in human progress led many to believe that, with the help of modern technologies, wars could be fought and won with minimal cost in life and treasure.

The argument is straightforward: Rational Europeans would no longer indulge in the kind of extended and brutal campaigns of previous years. The days of religious wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War—these were relics of a bygone era. Short, tidy wars would be the norm, with healthy economic and political outcomes. “The concept of states waging war to the point of absolute exhaustion,” concluded a German author in 1908, “is beyond the European cultural experience.”³ A few years before the outbreak of World War I, when Germany was agitating for a confrontation with Britain and France over a port on the Moroccan coast, an anti-war leader in the German Parliament was shouted down with these words: “After every war things are better!”⁴

The belief in progress led others to argue that the West would soon dispense with war altogether as the remnant of a primitive, unenlightened epoch. British writer Norman Angell, in his book The Great Illusion, explained that the great democracies of Europe were coming to realize that war would produce severe economic hardship and losses, and would take all measures necessary to avoid it.

According to Angell, the Industrial Revolution—by establishing a pattern of economic growth and interdependence—had changed the dynamic among nation-states. The great industrial nations of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States were “losing the psychological impulse to war,” he wrote, just as they abandoned the impulse to kill their neighbors over religion. “The least informed of us realizes that the whole trend of history is against the tendency for men to attack the ideals and the beliefs of other men.”⁵ In the new age of international commerce and communication, nations would naturally devote infinitely more resources to peaceful endeavors than to preparations for war. “How can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities,” he asked, “when all our interests and activities—all our environments, in short—are peace-like?”⁶

First published in 1909, The Great Illusion became a runaway bestseller. It was translated into French, German, Italian, and Russian, and within a few years went through more than ten printings in English. The book seemed to speak to a deep and widely shared aspiration: the “perpetual peace” imagined by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Science fiction writer H. G. Wells recalled the mood: “I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation—in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilized world—thought that war was dying out. So it seemed to us.”⁷

It is a view that was especially congenial to religious leaders, even on the eve of the conflict. Britain’s National Peace Council, a coalition of religious and secular peace organizations, foresaw a new era of international harmony. The 1914 edition of its Peace Yearbook offers this astonishing prediction:

Peace, the babe of the nineteenth century, is the strong youth of the twentieth century; for War, the product of anarchy and fear, is passing away under the growing and persistent pressure of world organization, economic necessity, human intercourse, and that change of spirit, that social sense and newer aspect of worldwide life which is the insistent note, the Zeitgeist of the age.⁸

This “change of spirit,” this faith in progress that would render war an anachronism, had found a champion in Victorian England. In the waning years of the nineteenth century—the decade into which both Tolkien and Lewis were born—Great Britain was at the apex of its political, economic, and cultural achievements. Its parliamentary democracy was the oldest and most stable in all of Europe, its colonial holdings were the largest, it controlled a quarter of the planet’s land surface, and its Navy ruled the seas. In short, the British crown reigned over the most extensive empire in world history.⁹ Despite its imperialist excesses, argues historian Niall Ferguson, “no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.”¹⁰ Tolkien and Lewis were part of a generation of Britons who equated their nation’s growth and prosperity with the progress of civilization itself.

THE PROMISE OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE

And why wouldn’t they? As the leader of the Industrial Revolution, England had pioneered the technological advances that were sweeping Europe. Its dominance was unquestioned at the first World’s Fair, held in London in 1851, “at the zenith of Britain’s imperial pomp.”¹¹ An enormous glass and cast-iron monument was built to house the Great Exhibition. Known as the Crystal Palace, it was the largest glass structure in the world and a symbol of Victorian England’s cultural triumphs. On display were roughly one hundred thousand exhibits, spread across ten miles of floor space, and grouped into four main categories: raw materials, machinery, manufacturers, and fine arts. Of the fifteen thousand contributors, Britain claimed half the display space. Queen Victoria declared the opening day of the fair “the greatest day in our history.”

Even greater days seemed to lie ahead. Railway engines, steam engines, blast furnaces, textile plants, coal and iron mines were turning nature into the handmaiden of humanity. As historian Roger Osborne explains, science-based technology was improving life for ordinary people, making it easier and safer. And healthier: the principles of science were producing better sanitation and living conditions, and enabling new strides in medicine and the treatment of diseases. The new technologies, the explosive growth of cities, the productivity of industry—all these forces were changing the physical nature of European life.¹²

It was this encroachment of technological life into rural England that Tolkien came to resent. Born in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien developed a deep attachment to his home in West Midlands, a county that was already a mix of rural countryside and urban development. Tolkien spent his early years in “a pre-mechanical age,” and regarded growing up around Birmingham—a hub of the Industrial Revolution—as one of the “really significant” facts of his youth. Today, West Midlands is one of the most heavily urbanized counties in Great Britain.

“How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree,” Tolkien wrote scornfully. “Poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!”¹³ Tolkien’s love of the English countryside, his attachment to nature, rebelled against the chaotic industrialization of his day. His dissent found an imaginative outlet: the bucolic world of the hobbits, the region of Middle-earth known as the Shire.

Biographer Humphrey Carpenter believes that the mechanized disruption of the world Tolkien loved “defined the nature of his scholarly work,” motivating him to create the Shire and its homely inhabitants.¹⁴ As Tolkien once told his publisher, the Shire “is based on rural England and not any other country in the world.”¹⁵ The house of his famous hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, takes its name—“Bag End”—from his aunt’s farm in Worcestershire. “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he admitted. “I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.”¹⁶

In contrast, Tolkien viewed the overreliance on technology, “the Machine,” as a step toward dominating others. The act of “bulldozing the real world,” Tolkien wrote, involves “coercing other wills.”¹⁷ Hence, the hateful realm of Mordor is sustained by its black engines and factories, which Sauron introduces as his forces invade the Shire. This theme would absorb Tolkien for much of his career.

Writing in the 1940s, Tolkien lamented “the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare.” The tragedy, as he saw it, was the attempt to use technology to actualize our desires and increase our power over the world around us—all of which leaves us unsatisfied. Tolkien attached a spiritual significance to the problem: “And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil.”¹⁸ It surely was this view that caused him, in The Lord of the Rings, to portray the enemies of nature in the darkest of terms. Saruman the Wizard “has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment,” he wrote. “And now it is clear that he is a black traitor.”¹⁹

Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898, just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. The family moved to Little Lea, on the edge of suburbia, a town surrounded by green hills. From his house he could watch ships of all kinds navigate in and out of Belfast Lough. “The sound of a steamer’s horn at night,” he wrote, “still conjures up my whole boyhood.”²⁰ Within a mile of his home was “indisputably open hilly farmland,” which Lewis and his brother Warren explored by bicycle.²¹

Lewis became as dubious as Tolkien of the promises of industrialization to uplift the human condition, a skepticism that he would carry throughout his life. “Near here they are about to demolish part of a lovely beechwood in order to straighten the main London Rd, drat them,” he wrote a week before his death in November 1963. “There are times when I wonder if the invention of the internal combustion engine was not an even greater disaster than that of the hydrogen bomb!” Modern assumptions about “progress” that disregard the rhythms and traditions of the past will come under attack. “I care more how humanity lives than how long,” he wrote. “Progress, for me, means increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible idea.”²²

It is a conviction that appears often in his writing, where he lampoons the growth of technologies and bureaucracies at the expense of human freedom. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian tangles with slave traders who, with statistics and graphs, try to justify their operations as “economic development.” Caspian wants the trade ended:

“But that would be putting the clock back,” gasped the governor. “Have you no idea of progress, of development?”

“I have seen both in an egg,” said Caspian. “We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia. This trade must stop.”²³

Both authors regarded twentieth-century modernization as a threat to human societies because they viewed the natural world as the handiwork of God and thus integral to human happiness. As such, nature was an essential ally in the struggle against these dehumanizing forces.

Though hoping to avoid the War of the Ring, Treebeard and his companions can no longer tolerate the atrocities committed against them and the forest. As the wizard Gandalf explains, they finally decide to march against Sauron—“the last march of the Ents”—and play a decisive role in his defeat. “But now his long slow wrath is brimming over, and all the forest is filled with it . . . its tide is turned against Saruman and the axes of Isengard. A thing is about to happen which has not happened since the Elder Days: the Ents are going to wake up and find that they are strong.”²⁴

Lewis likewise viewed nature as an intrinsic part of human life. This is why the Narnia novels give such a prominent role to its animals. Even the smallest of creatures—Reepicheep the mouse, for example—can display the greatest of human virtues. As biographer Alister McGrath writes, Lewis understood humanity’s relationship with animals, and with the rest of the natural world, as potentially ennobling and fulfilling. “Lewis’s portrayal of animal characters in Narnia is partly a protest against shallow assertions of humanity’s right to do what it pleases with nature.”²⁵

In Prince Caspian, the character Trufflehunter explains to Caspian why it will be difficult to wake the spirits of the trees in the battle against Miraz, the unlawful king of Narnia, and his Telmarine army: “We have no power over them. Since the Humans came into the land, felling forests and defiling streams, the Dryads and Naiads have sunk into deep sleep.”²⁶ Nevertheless, the war cannot be won without their help, and Aslan summons them to join the crusade: the “woods on the move.” In a scene reminiscent of the “last march of the Ents,” trees from every direction converge like stormy waves upon the battlefield: “But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter’s army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines.”²⁷

It is Nature’s revenge against Man: the industrialized exploitation of the physical world cannot go unpunished. This judgment against man’s assault on his environment could only have been deepened by the experience of the Great War. Never before in the history of warfare had technology wrought such physical devastation: an industrialized holocaust as terrifying in its effects on nature as on men. What a regimental historian said of the Battle of the Somme could be applied to many of the battles from 1914–18 that defaced the European landscape: “In that field of fire nothing could live.”²⁸ Writing three years after the conclusion of the war, author Vera Brittain described the scene near Amiens, as she drove to find the grave of her fiancé. She witnessed “a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man.”²⁹

THE MASTERY OF NATURE WITHOUT GOD

As we’ll see, Tolkien and Lewis imported these images, sometimes quite directly, into their works of fiction—a quiet protest against the march of progress. Nevertheless, by the time they entered adulthood, the preindustrial past had given way to a present enthralled with science and technology. “Between 1900 and 1914, technological, social, and political advances swept Europe and America on a scale unknown in any such previous timespan,” writes historian Max Hastings, “the blink of an eye in human experience.”³⁰

Just consider the breakthroughs that appear at the turn of the century. In 1900, as if to symbolize man’s evolutionary ascent, Charles Seeberger invents the first modern escalator. The next year, Marconi delivers the first transatlantic radio signal, while Hubert Booth invents a compact vacuum cleaner. In 1902 there appear the first air conditioner, lie detector, and neon light. In 1903 the Wright brothers successfully test the first gas-motored and manned airplane; the first steam turbine generator appears the same year. In 1904 the tractor is invented. In 1905 Albert Einstein stuns the scientific community with his theory of relativity. Sonar is developed in 1906 and the first air-conditioned hospital appears in Boston. In 1907 color photography is invented. In 1908 Henry Ford produces 10,660 Model T automobiles in his assembly line, making cars affordable for large numbers of people. Instant coffee is invented in 1909 (modern-day coffee snobs view this as a sign of the decline of the West). In 1910 Thomas Edison unveils the first talking motion picture, while physicist Marie Curie successfully isolates radium, a feat that will make her the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize.

All this self-generated progress, this mastery of nature, was occurring without the help of religion. For many Europeans and Americans, Christianity seemed irrelevant to the insights and blessings of the new technologies. “Using his own natural intelligence, and without the aid of Holy Scripture’s divine revelation, man had penetrated nature’s mysteries, transformed his universe, and immeasurably enhanced his existence,” writes Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind. “Man was responsible for his own earthly destiny. His own wits and will could change his world. Science gave man a new faith—not only in scientific knowledge, but in himself.”³¹

The newfound faith in humanity, however, did not imply contentment with man’s place in nature. Many began to wonder if the same scientific principles that were so drastically transforming the physical world might be used to improve its most important inhabitants: the human species. If science could be so effective at probing and improving the natural world, couldn’t it do the same for human society?³²

Thus, it was not only technological innovations that were emboldening the believers in progress. Scientists and social thinkers were also transforming the way Europeans and Americans viewed human nature and the cosmos. Charles Darwin, of course, paved the way with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) seemed to explain scientifically, for the first time, how organisms change, adapt, and become more complex. It was intended as a theory of biology.

Yet Darwin himself suggested that the idea of natural selection, the struggle for existence of the most fit and capable, might be extended to other areas. Thanks to Herbert Spencer, a British social theorist, Darwin’s theory was reinterpreted as a doctrine of unremitting progress—and applied to society at large. Every realm of human endeavor, from politics to economics to ethics, fell under its refining influence. Humankind, Spencer wrote, was in a long process of adaption and self-improvement: “And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.”³³

The impact of Spencer on Anglo-American thought can hardly be exaggerated. In the decades leading up to the First World War, it was virtually impossible to undertake any intellectual work without mastering Spencer.³⁴ His “towering influence” would have been inconceivable had he not arisen in an age of steel and steam engines, competition, exploitation, and struggle.³⁵ US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes doubted that “any writer of English except Darwin has done so much to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe.”³⁶

Thus, Spencer’s social interpretation of Darwinian science energized the most powerful narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Myth of Progress was not just one story among many. It was the story, the metanarrative of all the stories about our mortal lives, a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of human existence.

The Myth of Progress was proclaimed from nearly every sector of society. Scientists, physicians, educators, industrialists, salesmen, politicians, preachers—they all agreed on the upward flight of humankind. Each breakthrough in medicine, science, and technology seemed to confirm the Myth. Every invention and innovation was offered up as evidence: whether it was Marconi’s radio messages or the Maxim machine gun, such advances were ordained by the gods of progress.³⁷ Thus, what began as a theory about biological change ripened into an assumption—a dogma—about human improvement, even perfection.

Or so it seemed to C. S. Lewis and many of his generation. “I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt—I still feel—its almost perfect grandeur,” he wrote. “To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.”³⁸

The Myth of Progress proves to be irresistible, especially to those repelled by traditional Christianity and its unpleasant doctrines of guilt, judgment, and repentance. Indeed, the triumph of science and technology seemed to leave no meaningful role for religion or the supernatural. Science, not religion, was driving human achievement. Its new dominance left many believers struggling for resources with which to shore up the credibility of their faith. “Looked at with the cold eye of empiricism,” writes historian James Turner, Christianity’s claims to knowledge about the cosmos “stood naked as a babe.”³⁹

By the end of the nineteenth century, theologians and social reformers were frantically recasting Christianity as a “social gospel” of human advancement, perfectly in step with the zeitgeist. Although many of these efforts were laudable in their intent—programs to alleviate poverty, provide for orphans, reduce alcoholism, improve working conditions—they, too, got swept up in the Myth. Pastors such as Lyman Abbott, author of The Evolution of Christianity, predicted steady moral development: “There is a God in history, as there is a God in nature—a God who is working out some great design among men, as there is a God who is working out great designs through all material and mechanical phenomena.”⁴⁰ The Christian religion, declared social gospel leader Washington Gladden, “must be a religion less concerned about getting men to heaven than about fitting them for their proper work on the earth.”⁴¹

THE GOSPEL OF EUGENICS

In an age of technological triumphalism, “fitting” people for their “proper work” in the world meant applying scientific methods to improve the species. In a word: eugenics. Coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, the word comes from the Greek, meaning “good birth.”

Speaking to a learned society in London in 1909, Galton explained how the tools of evolutionary science could be used to better the human race. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he said. “As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.”⁴² Armed with statistical research documenting Britain’s genetic decline, Galton envisioned a massive societal investment in eugenics programs. “If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!” he said. “We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.”⁴³

Galton’s gospel of eugenics found fertile soil in Britain, in the intellectual salons of Europe, and in the United States. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, eugenics scientists called for programs to manipulate human reproduction. They advocated for laws to segregate the so-called feebleminded into state colonies, to live out their lives in celibacy. They led the drive to restrict immigration from countries whose citizens might pollute their national gene pools. And they supported sterilization laws aimed at men and women whose “germplasm” threatened the eugenic vitality of the nation.⁴⁴

In Britain, the Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 to take up the cause. By 1913, the American Genetic Association was established in the United States to promote the doctrines of racial purity. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Beginning in 1912, a series of International Eugenics Conferences were held in London and New York, creating a global venue for eugenicists and their supporters. “It [eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion,” Galton explained. “It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics cooperates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.”⁴⁵

Religious leaders, especially those in the liberal wing of the Christian church, would answer the call. Ministers in the Church of England held a Church Congress in 1910 in Cambridge, inviting several members of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded to participate. Attendees that day were treated to “brilliant” addresses urging the clergy to promote the eugenics agenda at every turn. The National Church had “a very great responsibility towards the race,” according to one speaker, and “the future belongs to those nations whose religious leaders realize this responsibility.” An American observer at the Congress concluded, with apparent envy, that the Church of England “was ready, in matters of social action, to ‘think biologically.’ ”⁴⁶

Two years later in London, the Anglican bishops of Birmingham, Oxford, and Ripon were among the vice presidents of the First International Eugenics Congress. Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, was the presiding officer—illustrating the intellectual bond between Darwinism and eugenics. That same year, the influential Protestant minister F. B. Meyer, author of Religion and Race-Regeneration (1912), warned that the high birthrates of Catholics, Jews, and the feebleminded presented a collective menace to society.⁴⁷

For Tolkien and Lewis, all of this represented a frontal assault on human dignity: a reduction of the individual to mere biology. In their imaginative works they invariably depict their characters as physical and spiritual beings, responsible for their souls even as they are constrained by their earthly nature. Their fictional worlds are filled with nonhuman races—elves, dwarves, hobbits, centaurs, etc.—who nonetheless all share this fundamental attribute. For each of them, virtue and corruption are equally plausible.⁴⁸ As Tolkien insisted, even the dreadful orcs are presented as rational beings, “though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.”⁴⁹

This helps to explain the bitter conflict between the forces of slavery and liberty that runs through their stories: no creatures are born for captivity, and none have a birthright to oppress others. In The Lord of the Rings, the followers of Sauron, the Dark Lord, serve him out of fear; they are no more than slaves in his realm. Thus we see the use of genetic engineering—the creation of robotic orcs—to extend the dictatorship of Mordor throughout the world. At its heart, the War of the Ring is a struggle to preserve the essential freedom and humanity of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. “It would be a grievous blow to the world,” says Gandalf the Grey, “if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind . . . became enslaved.”⁵⁰

For his part, Lewis warned against the bondage imposed upon humanity when, under the guise of scientific progress, men and women are regarded as “patients.” In Perelandra, the second in his Space Trilogy, we meet Professor Weston, a famous physicist and devotee of the new science. Weston is an advocate of “emergent evolution,” a process by which the human species is “thrusting its way upward and ever upward” toward new heights of achievement. He boasts that his new beliefs have swept away all his old conceptions of our moral obligations to others. “Man in himself is nothing,” he explains. “The forward movement of Life—the growing spirituality—is everything.”⁵¹ Weston emerges as an essentially satanic figure.

For both authors the “conquest of Nature” would prove catastrophic. In the name of progress, a handful of elites would dominate the lives and destinies of millions. As Tolkien wrote in Mythopoeia: “I will not walk with your progressive apes / erect and sapient. Before them gapes / the dark abyss to which their progress tends.”⁵² Likewise, Lewis warned that the final stage of this process would arrive when human beings achieved full mastery over themselves. Eugenics, prenatal conditioning, education, and psychology would all play a part in “the abolition of man,” the surrender of our essential humanity. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”⁵³

Bizarre as it may seem, the “scientific” manipulation of human beings, all under the banner of progress, became the consensus view of the academic communities in England, Germany, and the United States, just as Tolkien and Lewis were launching their careers. Serious efforts were underway to identify biological “defectives” so they could be incarcerated and sterilized. Marriage laws were seen as ineffective, while immigration restrictions couldn’t stop defective people who were already here from procreating. Incredibly, forced sterilization—considered cheap, safe, and permanent—became the stated goal of the eugenics movement. Beginning in 1907, states such as Indiana passed sterilization laws “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” The United States acquired the noxious distinction of being the first nation in the West to legalize compulsory sterilization.⁵⁴

Catholics and conservative Protestants resisted these laws, but the eugenic tide appeared to be turning against them. By the 1920s, hundreds of American churches participated in a national “eugenics sermon contest.” As the Rev. Kenneth McArthur, a winner from Sterling, Massachusetts, put it in his sermon: “If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.”⁵⁵ Oliver Wendell Holmes was an apostle for the new science, having authored the 1927 Supreme Court opinion upholding Virginia’s sterilization law. “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” he wrote. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”⁵⁶

THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT

Here, on shameless display, is the crisis of faith at the start of the twentieth century. Historians tend to interpret Darwin’s influence as the essential solvent that destroyed belief in God: the laws of natural selection required no Law-Giver. Thus, evolution made God redundant, the Bible irrelevant, and salvation a state of mind. The story of the decline of vital religion, however, is much more complex.

As Darwin’s popularizer, Spencer and his allies benefited enormously from The Myth of Progress that already had captured the Western imagination. There were many secular-minded thinkers and activists in the eugenics movement, but they received great moral support from religious leaders: ministers and others who discarded the historic teachings of the church and became beguiled by the Myth. At the same time, they eagerly enlisted the Bible to portray eugenics as a mandate from heaven. “The evidence yields a clear pattern about who elected to support eugenic-style reforms and who did not,” writes Christine Rosen in Preaching Eugenics. “Religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets.”⁵⁷

This weakening of Christian belief occurred at the moment when Tolkien and Lewis were developing their own intellectual lives. They began their educations when The Myth of Progress was at a fever pitch, when it was widely believed that science—the science of eugenics—could perfect human nature and thus human societies.

It’s important to remember that eugenicists thought of themselves as reformers, committed to improving the human condition. They endorsed the idea of state action to achieve their goals. “They were dedicated to facing head-on the challenges posed by modernity,” writes Rosen. “Doing so meant embracing scientific solutions.”⁵⁸ Animated by the Myth, they emphasized the collective destiny of the human race, at the expense of the individual. The conceit of the intellectual elites of the day was that science, and the technology it underwrites, could solve the most intractable of human problems.

As we’ll see, this frankly religious doctrine—the biblical fall—was confirmed by their experience of war. It would supply the moral architecture for their stories, giving them an enduring sense of realism and relevance. “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” Aslan tells Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”⁵⁹ Tolkien wrote that the idea of “the Fall of Man” lurked behind every story, and that “all stories are ultimately about the fall.”⁶⁰

THE MERCILESS MACHINERY OF WAR

The deep moral conundrum of The Lord of the Rings, of course, involves a weapon: a powerful Ring that could overcome the forces of evil arrayed against Middle-earth, yet which threatens to corrupt anyone who tries to use it, even those whose motives are pure. When Frodo is reunited with Bilbo at Rivendell, for example, he encounters an individual momentarily distorted by his lust for the Ring. “To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands.”⁶¹

In the opening pages of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we meet Jadis, “the last Queen,” a woman of immense wickedness. She holds the secret of “the Deplorable Word,” a force that can destroy entire worlds, a power too terrible to contemplate. “What was it?” asks Digory. “That was the secret of secrets,” says Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. . . . I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it.”⁶²

Perhaps this was the most terrifying result of The Myth of Progress: it inspired great advances in military technology, but failed to advance any new theories of warfare to address the consequences of this technology on the battlefield. The years leading up to the First World War initiated a new era of military planning, for example, in which the modern European rail network enabled the swift mobilization of troops and armaments. This by itself amounted to a revolution in how the next conflict would be fought.

Yet when war arrived in August 1914, hardly anyone grasped what the human costs would be. Observes historian Niall Ferguson: “Suddenly, the vast resources of the European industrial economies were diverted from production to destruction.”⁶³

Ironically, among the fruits of industrialization were rising health and living standards, which allowed for rapid population growth—and larger and more destructive armies. There were millions more young men available for military service than ever before. At the outbreak of the war, Germany would quickly mobilize 715,000 men, Austria 600,000, France 400,000, and Russia more than a million. Even Great Britain, with its all-volunteer army, would call up 165,000 troops.

Now, thanks to science and technology, soldiers could be shuttled into war zones—ten times faster by rail than by horse and foot—on a timetable as precise as a Swiss watch. In England, in the space of five days, eighteen hundred special trains ran south to Southampton, one arriving every three minutes for sixteen hours a day. Fourteen French railways carried fifty-six trains a day. Trains could deliver men to and from the front lines as if they were shift-workers in a factory.⁶⁴ By an “inflexible calculation,” writes John Keegan, military planners would dictate how many troops could be carried at what speed to any designated border zone. “Trains were to fill the memories of all who went to war in 1914.”⁶⁵

On June 28, 1914, an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo set a vast political-military machine into motion. By midnight on August 4, five empires were at war: the German Empire against Britain, France, and Russia; the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Serbia; the Russian Empire against Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the British and French Empires against Germany. Each side was confident, supremely confident, of swift victory. Just as French troops expected to reach Berlin before the fall, so the Germans believed they would parade down the Champs-Elysee in Paris in six weeks. Observes historian Martin Gilbert: “It was a careful, precise, and comforting calculation.”⁶⁶

The Myth of Progress that made such calculations conceivable also created the instruments of war that would render them horribly obsolete. Neither the generals nor the politicians were thinking in moral terms about the consequences of mechanized warfare.

Battleships, submarines, the motorized transport of troops, the heavy siege howitzers, the machine guns, tanks, barbed wire, poison gas, flamethrowers, the thousands of miles of trenches—all of this awaited the soldiers of the Great War. The mass production of artillery became a kind of holy grail throughout the conflict. Advances in the destructive power of explosives and in the size, mobility, and accuracy of artillery meant that shocking numbers of men could be killed from long distances, without ever seeing what hit them. Hence the construction of trenches along the Western Front and the beginning of a war of attrition. Almost immediately the war was described “like a colossal machine, chewing up men and munitions like so much raw material.”⁶⁷

“There was every expectation that the conflict would be brief, that the latest military technology would limit the scale of damage on all sides,” writes W. M. Spellman. “Indeed many viewed the prospect of a general war as cathartic and cleansing. War would renew each nation’s sense of purpose while liberating factory workers, farmers, office clerks, and students from their dull workaday activities, the complacency of bourgeois existence.”⁶⁸

Instead, the war would last longer, and be fought with greater savagery, than anyone dared to imagine. The mutilated bodies of numberless millions of factory workers, farmers, clerks, and students would be consigned to graves scattered throughout Europe. The smallest villages, with their proud and austere cemeteries, still bear witness to their own part in the conflict. In the main piazza in Bitritto, where my grandfather Michele was born, there is a memorial to the caduti, the fallen in battle, Even my grandfather Giuseppe’s home of Ventotene—a tiny and obscure island in the Tyrrhenian Sea—has a monument in its piazza to those who perished “nella grande guerra.”

“Progress, visible in every facet of life and ruling as the governing force behind existence, brought order to a world of change and moral purpose to a universe otherwise disturbingly random and meaningless,” writes historian Richard Gamble. “This faith in progress anchored the soul.”⁶⁹ A generation later, the leaders of England and the rest of Europe assumed that their science, education, philanthropy, gentility, and religion represented the future of Western civilization. Even war would serve to advance the destiny of humanity. “Their confident belief in progress and the idea that enlightened self-interest would bring harmony to the whole world was, in retrospect, an illusion,” concludes Roger Osborne. “By the end of the nineteenth century Britain and Europe were heading not to a better society, but towards the catastrophe of mechanized warfare.”⁷⁰

Two of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian writers were caught up in this illusion, their lives transformed in its wake. Much of their literary output would be a response to the assumptions that not only made the Great War possible, but added mightily to its destructive and vindictive power. The long shadows cast by this conflict do not fail to touch the borders of the Shire and of Narnia.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”⁷¹