Modern ideologies do not like the Old Man—the human nature that all women and women inherit at birth, the handiwork of Mother Nature and God’s design in creation. They have invented the New Man who does not have to conform to his God-given sex, nature, or destiny. The New Man can remodel himself in any number of ways and force himself to be bisexual, transgendered, neutered, or infertile. These ideologies reject the “givenness” of the nature of things in the name of autonomy, individualism, and choice for man to be anything or do anything he wishes with no moral inhibitions or second thoughts. Implicit in all these radical ideas is the view that man is god and determines his own nature, morality, and purpose. No external, higher standard exists which man is bound in conscience to obey. Absolute and unlimited freedom of expression and behavior define the New Man. Many twentieth century classics foreshadow the appearance of the New Man and warn of the diabolical agenda that informs it.
In 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith hears these threatening words from a leading member of Big Brother’s Party: “You are imagining there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” While Winston struggles to uphold his humanity and to respect his human nature, he learns that the New Man will soon replace him and everyone else who believes in the so-called Old Man—the one the Greeks defined as a rational animal and Christians defined as the image of God: “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone?” By indoctrination, propaganda, torture, and behavior modification the Party reduces man to a creature of the state with no inalienable rights, no human dignity, and no spiritual destiny. Neither man’s body nor soul matters.
In Huxley’s Brave New World the New Man comes to birth in the Fertilizing Room in the Central London Hatchery, is transferred to the Social Predestination Room, and receives his education and destiny from the social engineers who “predestine and condition.” The New Man will suffer an indoctrination that will extinguish all natural human instincts: “They’ll grow up with what psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers.” Government, not Nature or God, will determine the human population and replace marriage, procreation, and the family because “fertility is a nuisance.” The scientific, political control of human life will create the New Man and replace mothers, fathers, and families. They will replace romance, monogamy, and family with a worldview in which promiscuity replaces love: “everyone belongs to everyone else.” The Controllers will suspend all of Mother Nature’s laws and interrupt the entire cycle of birth to death, using selective breeding to determine the birth rate and the heredity of the young. They will alter human destiny by administering euthanasia at age sixty to produce “a soma holiday” and to celebrate that “ending is better than mending.”
In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength the New Man is bodiless, a floating face without a head and nothing above the eyes, “a head (the rest of the head) which had the top part of the skull taken off.” While appearing to float, it is attached to a bracket with a neck and a collar “but nothing below the collar; no shoulders or body.” The head belongs to an executed criminal with tubes to produce some new version of life and chemicals to create artificial intelligence. The New Man devised by the Institute of the intellectual elite (N.I.C.E.) embodies their version of “objectivity,” pure thinking without the influence of the emotions or the interference of the body’s five senses. The experiment of the New Man reverts to “the old dream of Man as God.” The New Man is the advanced stage of evolution, producing “a new species,–the Chosen Heads who never die.” The New Man is not the child of Mother Nature or God the Father but the product of human science—their version of a purer race of man separated from organic life: “The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.” The New Man, then, will not be born, inherit a body, live a mortal life, and die: “Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?”
All three versions of the New Man find human nature problematic for their ideological purposes. Winston Smith yearns to embrace Mother Nature’s plan of love, marriage, and children rather than devote his life to the Party by rewriting history at The Ministry of Truth to conform to Big Brother’s propaganda. The Controllers in Brave New World, finding Mother Nature’s ways too copious and fertile and too random and unpredictable, impose population control and equate human progress with birth control in every form: “Civilization is sterilization.” The members of the Institute in That Hideous Strength devoted to the New Man despise the body and the organic cycles of living things because they equate life with dirt and filth: “all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it . . . . Learn to make our brains live with less and less body.” In1984 Winston describes the Party’s agenda as a determination “to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it or dirty it.” In Brave New World promiscuity has replaced marriage, and the government distributes free contraceptives to promote its policy of sterilization. Population control and eugenics are foremost in the agenda of N.I.C.E. that advances the idea of the bodiless New Man. Their idea of progress holds that “Man has got to take charge of Man,” a doctrine that means “sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding.”
Instead of accepting the rational order of the universe with its self-evident truths that Winston Smith refuses to deny—the fact that rocks are hard, water is wet, and 2+2=4—all the social and political orders that champion the New Man see no intelligible design or divine wisdom to the structure of reality. Men and women are not to marry and be fruitful and multiply. These ideologies view the human body with contempt, reject the knowledge of the five senses as sources of truth, and recoil at the thought of organic life with its cycles of birth and death. As they deconstruct the Old Man and reinvent the New Man, they detach him from the family. Winston Smith is forbidden to marry because he owes his allegiance to the state and to Big Brother. No one in Brave New World views marriage or the family as natural to man: “they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about.” The bodiless scientifically engineered New Man in That Hideous Strength is made of chemicals, tubes, and artificial intelligence, not the child of Mother Nature or the fruit of human love.
The evolution of the New Man depends upon the deconstruction of the family, separation from Mother Nature’s fertility, and renunciation of God’s design of fruitfulness. The emergence of the New Man demands a culture of death to advance its progress. In 1984 all who do not conform to the Party’s orthodoxy of political correctness suffer torture, purges, and the “vaporization” that leads to an “unperson.” In Brave New World the citizens undergo death conditioning at eighteen months to prepare them for euthanasia at age sixty: “They learn to take dying as a matter of course.” In That Hideous Strength the invention of the New Man who will never die because he is free from Nature’s process of birth and decay threatens the human race itself with annihilation. In short, the diabolical agenda behind the New Man is the hubris that man creates man, not God; that man’s science possesses a higher knowledge than Mother Nature’s wisdom; and that man’s socially engineered and politically controlled world has created a greater and more perfect form of happiness on earth than God’s promise of eternal life and infinite joy in Heaven beholding the Beatific Vision.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
