Recently John West talked with Eric Metaxas about the amazing prescience of C. S. Lewis. What Lewis foresaw about the rise of scientism — i.e., the idea of putting scientists in charge of our lives because no way of knowing other than science really counts — truly is eerie. It was a Socrates in the City conversation at Seattle’s Rainier Club, focused on a book that Dr. West edited, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society.

That book came out in 2012 and, speaking of prescience, itself foreshadowed developments in the era of Covid lockdowns. Lewis warned of trends in elite thinking that embrace using the prestige of science to enable a soft, or not so soft, totalitarianism. A theme in the interview with Dr. West is the dubious role of elites, who stand out for their readiness to surrender their critical faculties when Science Says to do so. On that point, Metaxas reads a passage from Lewis’s science fiction novel That Hideous Strength (1945) that could have been written yesterday: 

[I]t’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. … He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.

It’s a remarkable statement in a fascinating dialogue, covering Francis Collins, the urgent need for open debate, intelligent design, what linked C. S. Lewis with Sigmund Freud’s grandson, and much more. Metaxas is, of course, dryly hilarious as always. You can watch it all here now: