The History of our Future
An adventure that occurs early in The Magician’s Nephew, the first of the seven novels in C. S. Lewis’s wonderful series, The Chronicles of Narnia shows us a picture of our future, reflected in the faces of several generations of rulers as the spirit that forms the features gradually rots from the pleasure of power.
The principle is like that Percy Shelley described in his great sonnet on imperial pride, “Ozymandias” where the passions of the long dead tyrant “yet survive” in stone. The “sneer of cold command,” the ever-tighter smile of the consciously corrupt and cruel will mark our days. So the tale of Lewis bears an admonitory lesson.
Back to the novel. While exploring the attics that adjoin their families’ town houses, young Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke find themselves in the room of Digory’s eccentric Uncle Andrew. Like many of our own rulers, it is said, Uncle Andrew’s mother and aunt dabbled in the occult and in a feckless way he does too.
One thing leads to another. Digory and Polly, who are about eleven years old, pick up a couple of Uncle Andrew’s colorful rings and before long they are traveling through the pools that connect the worlds in time and space. It’s exciting at first, then a bit spooky, then terrifying, rather like the trajectory of Romantic and Modernist culture…
After emerging into an enchanting wood that conduces to drowsiness, the children wade in and the next thing they know emerge in the ruins of a vast city at night. Or maybe it isn’t night but just dark because the enormous red sun is so cold and dead.
As they explore the ruins filled with bone dry fountains and fossilized plants, they make their way into an enormous palace where they discover “hundreds of people, all seated and perfectly still…not a breath or sound among them.” Their clothes were “rich and magnificent,” the colors still vivid and the fabric rich amid the emptiness and dust. It was as silent as a wax museum. They were like spirits that a charm, some forgotten word might restore to life.
The figures at the beginning of the row “certainly looked nice. Both the men and women looked kind and wise… But then the faces looked different: very solemn faces” that would be quite stern about what’s correct and incorrect for if things got out of line, well…
When they had “got about to the middle of the room the faces looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel”; they must have known and been used to power and satisfaction, been selfish about it and hard in defense of it. “A little further on and the [leaders] looked crueler. Further on again they were still cruel but no longer happy. There even were despairing faces as if the people had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things.”
Are we starting to recognize the character of our times, and of those who tell us what the issues are and set the terms of the ‘debate’? One feels like one’s reading a description of the faces of the great and powerful on one of the news networks. “But the last figure was a woman dressed more richly than the others… and with a look of such fierceness and pride that it took your breath away.”
It turns out that this is Jadis and that her face expressed her heart: she had murdered her sister and destroyed her own city, state and planet rather than let anyone else rule it. Because the center of her being was will and enforcing her will regardless of results.
Digory becomes enchanted by a lovely little golden bell and golden hammer with a rhyme inviting the stranger to strike a tone. Like any number of Romantic seekers, be they scientists, artists, corporate pirates attempting an unparalleled venture, he strikes the bell and Empress Jadis awakes and shows them what it means to rule…
And then it’s 2008 and Americans primed by mass media bought up a century ago by J.P Morgan and John D. Rockefeller interests have a choice between Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice with the bland cyborgs, Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger waiting in the background for the chime that will loose them from their shells.
For a culture assiduously addicted to comfort and pleasure above all, comforts for which they would sacrifice anyone and everything will find themselves confronted with very bad choices and becoming capable of monstrous cruelties. And ironically, they will become more and more poor, more and more expendable to the leaders who lie to them to serve their own lust for power, their own demonic pride. The insurance industry and ministries of multicultural propaganda (schools) will swallow everything, medicine, savings, homes, property. The police will serve the state and anything that is not mandatory will be forbidden.
Lewis warned us; it’s only elaborated here: barring a major awakening, Jadis will be president in November 2008 and a state of perpetual terror, a World Security State will be here to take insure the correct quality of life. Progressivism is a managed reversion to the beast, to the dominion of the senses. There is no future without conservatism and honor to our roots. It’s the only way we ever will approach again “the apple of life.”