Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
I’ve been a lifelong fan of science fiction stories. Two of my favorites are classic novels by H.G. Wells (d. 1946), The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Both were twice produced as movies. Both make great reading even today. Not everything he wrote had such lasting success, though. Another Wells-inspired movie, Things to Come starring Raymond Massey in 1936, is far more obscure today. Yet I’ve always found it just as intriguing as his other work, for reasons that have nothing to do with Martians or underground monsters.
The film Things to Come is based on Wells’ 1933 novel – he called it a “future history” – entitled The Shape of Things to Come. The film version is mildly interesting. The original novel is massive, turgid, rambling, and in the end, mind-numbing. Both works imagine a future world-war that drags on catastrophically for decades, decimates the population, unleashes a terrifying plague, and results in the collapse of civilization and the rise of petty warlords. In the nick of time, amid the chaos, a community of advanced scientists emerges from a secret enclave to impose a benevolent dictatorship and lead humanity to an era of recovery, progress, unity, peace, and plenty, guided by science and technology.
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The most interesting thing about the two works is a plot element missing from the film but quite central to the novel. To secure their utopia, the scientists in The Shape of Things to Come find it necessary to exterminate all religious leaders and stamp out organized religion, with the Catholic Church their last and most tenacious opponent. Only then in the novel, thanks to this regrettable mass murder, can mankind reach its full maturity and march into the sunlight of knowledge and freedom.
It’s a familiar kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning – in this case, on steroids.
Today, 85 years after the Wells novel first appeared, the world is both very different from, and uncomfortably similar to, the content of his imagination. In many places around the globe, religious faith is not just alive but growing rapidly. The great ideological dictator states are dead. Science and technology have brought about great improvements in the material quality of life and the reduction of disease and poverty.
But in the so-called developed nations, science and technology have also, too often, fostered an approach to life based on utility and efficiency, and a disdain for religious faith and believers. The calculations of a culture ruled by the computer leave little room for the heart – which is why the philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw technological civilization as dogged by a chronic temptation to totalitarianism. The math of microchips has no tolerance for error or imperfection, and that intolerance can easily transfer to a culture and spread like a virus.
That’s bad news for human beings, who are frequently neither useful nor efficient nor perfect, but rather weak, suffering, flawed and dependent. For Christians, this “weakness” subtracts nothing from their humanity. Such persons are brothers, not failures, and every needy person is a child of God worthy of love and support.
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That includes infants struggling to survive a life-threatening illness like Alfie Evans. As we see every day now in the news from Britain about baby Alfie Evans and the efforts by his parents to get him medical help outside the country, “civilized” courts of law can be utterly callous, stubborn, driven by utility, resistant to humanitarian appeals, and brutish in interfering with a child’s right to life and his parents’ right to fight for that life.
And before we applaud ourselves for how much better things are here in the United States, we may want to read David French’s April 23 coverage of the growing anti-religious nature of recent California proposed legislation (see it here). As French argues, elements of the California bill amount to a “dramatic infringement on First Amendment rights, rendered even more pernicious by [the bill’s] functional declaration of certain kinds of religious speech and argument as the equivalent of consumer fraud.”
Whether the California bill is as drastic in its implications as some critics claim is open to debate. But no one disputes that it’s just one more example of efforts to interfere with Christian belief, teaching and practice now being pursued around the country. There are many others.
The point of my column this week is simply this. The real “shape of things to come” is never completely in human hands. The future will be shaped by many different facts and forces, many of which we do not and cannot control, not least the will of God. But neither are we helpless. Quite the opposite: History is filled with the reality of one person or groups of persons fighting for what they believe, and thereby changing and channeling the course of events.
Our lives make a difference. We’re here for a purpose. That purpose includes defending the weak and the suffering, and also defending the freedom of the Church to preach, teach and speak the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a privilege, not a burden, and we need to treasure it for the sake of our own humanity and the humanity of those we love.
I presume your plea for religious freedom includes the right of Jesuit priests to pray for social justice in the US Congress and to resist the prejudice and bias of “Ayn Rand” style far right conservatives like Paul Ryan?
Wells promulgated his own theology in God The Invisible King (1917).
I would second Pope Francis’s repeated recommendations of another futuristic science fiction novel which includes the concerted attempt by a technically sophisticated world government to exterminate all Catholics: Lord of the World (1907) by Robert Hugh Benson (variously available free online).
Pope Pius XII cast science in the role of enemy:
“The roots of modern apostasy lay in scientific atheism.” – Pastoral Conference 1958
With respect, you are conflating scientific atheism with the natural sciences.
The Holy Father was speaking in opposition to the evils of Scientism, not the exercise of right reason in the pursuit of theories about those aspects of the material world that the natural sciences are competent to formulate. Two rather different things.
“Pope Francis embraces science as an instrument to inform the Catholic moral conscience”
I would say more correctly that if one accepts some statements as probably true, and furthermore trusts in the predicted outcomes, that one can make a statement based in Catholic teaching about our moral obligations in that instance.
That said, the proper policy is not specified by our certainty about our moral obligations. One could rightly argue for multiple different, many mutually exclusive courses of action based on the same moral law. For example, the Holy Father was equally clear that any course of action aimed at climate change must not disproportionately impact the poor, the weak, the old, or the young, right?
Such a policy is more difficult to craft than it first appears, and in truth, the Catholic answer is always predicated in the choices of individuals to submit themselves to the moral authority of Holy Mother Church in their personal lives.
Which is why the Holy Father speaks about such things as “air conditioning”, yes?
The current administration is not anti-science. It does have different ideas about how much trust should be given to some areas of scientific inquiry, a healthy appreciation of the side effects and negative consequences of certain actions, and a better feel for the limits of law and the proper exercise of their office than the previous administration had, especially on balancing the obligations and duties of such offices as the head of the EPA or the DOE. There is a moral difference between being a servant of the people, and attempting to establish rule over them.
We should not place too much trust in men or systems of government, and we must be careful not to paint those simply who disagree with us about policy as persons who are intrinsically evil or automatically wrong headed. It could be us that is in error, or who has lapsed into the sin or pride.
Read Joseph Ratzinger’s book “Values in Times of Upheaval” to fully understand the present global situation re: technology and religion. Excellent and timely.
My two thoughts: this reminds me of the film titled “The Book of Eli” and it means that someone should take up making a [better] version of the movie of this Wells book. Thank you Your Excellency.
Generously not mentioned in the article was the costume of the scientific overlords of the middle third of the movie Things to Come. To say that it was fascist (SS) deco would be an understatement.
And then there was that great piece of dialogue wherein one of the New Order welcomes the chance to try out the “gas of peace” on a recalcitrant warlord and his entire village.
I also have read and admired much of Well’s writings, but at heart, he saw no problem with coercing people into his idea of freedom. And there was the rub.
“…[S]cience and technology have also, too often, fostered an approach to life based on utility and efficiency, and a disdain for religious faith and believers.”
Your Excellency fails to make a distinction between secularism and science. When you examine secular culture, much of what is most inimical to religion has no scientific basis and is in fact the opposite of science: consumerism, individualism at the expense of community, mindless entertainment, unfettered capitalism, self-realization unrestrained by moral obligation. The list could go on. None of these hallmarks of secularism, all of which are corrosive of Catholic Faith and Morals, can be laid at the door of science. Rather, they represent the triumph of the Id over the Super-Ego, to use the terminology of The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, a social commentator that Your Excellency has cited approvingly in a prior column. The irrational, the impulsive, the self-indulgent, the hedonistic, the most popular categories on the Internet, are antithetical to the methodology of rational inquiry characteristic of the scientific method.
Your Excellency seems closer in spirit to Pope Pius XII, than our current beloved Pontiff, Pope Francis.
Pope Pius XII cast science in the role of enemy:
“The roots of modern apostasy lay in scientific atheism.” – Pastoral Conference 1958
Pope Francis embraces science as an instrument to inform the Catholic moral conscience:
“Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.” – Address before the Pontifical Academy of Science 2018
The current Presidential Administration is repressing environmental science just as surely as the Roman Inquisition repressed the heliocentric theory of Galileo. The same Presidential Administration is the sworn enemy of Medicaid expansion, SNAP and housing vouchers. Narrow-mindedness in conjunction with mean-spiritedness. Coincidence, or the outcome of cynical people who have given the world the concept of “alternative facts.”
Science and technology are not the enemies of Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church does have enemies. Its important to acknowledge who they are.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s closing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” Matthew 7:15
@Vincent Tkac – Scientific Atheism = a Communist doctrine and philosophical science formerly promoted in the Eastern Bloc.
As always, Archbishop Chaput is on target.
God Bless.