Visual torture in the real life Objective Room
Modernia as a vast moral brainwashing experiment
“You think, then,” said Mark, “that there would be no sense in asking whether the general tendency of the universe might be in the direction we should call Bad?”
“There could be no sense at all,” said Frost. “The judgment you are trying to make turns out on inspection to be simply an expression of emotion…”
That Hideous Strength; the shadows of technocracy
When I first started reading C. S. Lewis as an adult, his short novels and especially essays, I remember being shocked at how incredibly detailed was his understanding of the modern world and the human soul. He had an uncanny knack for describing situations and character traits with which I felt intimately and uncomfortably acquainted. I don’t remember exactly when was the first time I read That Hideous Strength, but it was certainly long before I knew the word “technocracy”. For a book published in the 1945, it was clear that his critique of the direction of the modern world was uncannily and disturbingly prescient.
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As everyone who has read the book will remember, a stand-out feature is Lewis’s motif of the Objective Room, a metaphor for the mental, emotional and philosophical distortions that we now take for granted as the basis of Modernia.
A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once that the room was ill-proportioned, not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike. It was too high and too narrow. Mark felt the effect without analysing the cause and the effect grew on him as time passed.
The Objective Room is an immersive environment designed to undermine or destroy a person's natural responses to disorienting, grotesque, disgusting or repellent things. In the novel, the sinister National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, (NICE) are indoctrinating the main character - a weak young man named Mark Studdock - by leading him through a series of exercises in the Objective Room intended to break his psychological and emotional ties with all that is holy and human - decency, kindness, honour, love and loyalty - and transfer them to the NICE.
Mark, the young modern fool, thinks he is entering into an inner circle. In reality, he is descending into hell:
“And that,” continued Frost, “is why a systematic training in objectivity must be given to you. Its purpose is to eliminate from your mind one by one the things you have hitherto regarded as grounds for action. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, æsthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.”
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it
The novel’s NICE represents the convergence of scientific rationalism with darker, occult forces; something we can see happening now right out in the open, nearly 80s years after the novel was published.
In the novel, the institute's putative pursuit of scientific inquiry and technological advancement is really just a front; its real aim is a ravenous quest for power and control that transcends the mere material realm. While the Objective Room and other ostensibly scientific endeavours within NICE’s Belbury institute initially appear grounded in rationalism, they eventually become vehicles for something more sinister. The institute's leadership, particularly figures like Wither, Frost and the literally mad scientist Filostrato, are involved in occult rituals and practices aimed at summoning dark entities and harnessing mystical powers.
How does it work?
By, as our current film producers like to put it, “subverting expectations”:
Sitting staring about him he next noticed the door—and thought at first that he was the victim of some optical illusion. It took him quite a long time to prove to himself that he was not. The point of the arch was not in the centre; the whole thing was lop-sided. Once again, the error was not gross. The thing was near enough to the true to deceive you for a moment and to go on teasing the mind even after the deception had been unmasked. Involuntarily one kept on shifting the head to find positions from which it would look right after all.
The thing about the character of Mark Studdock that people miss, especially when they complain that he’s just a fool, is that he has been made a fool by the society he lives in, the society that expects from him nothing serious, nothing adult. His head is filled with nonsense by an already deeply subverted culture; he’s been made into prey for the NICE’s predators.
And what the NICE tries to do to him is quite precisely what the “sacred art” of our current era is trying to do to us.
The Catholic New Paradigm: breaking down the sacred Real
Since the 1960s we’ve had the Objective Room’s paradigm inserted into the realm of the sacred specifically to desacralise, literally to desecrate. Let’s look at the figures in this photo from San Giovanni Rotondo, the tomb of Padre Pio:
In real Byzantine sacred art, nothing is ever randomly shoved in for no reason. Not one single thing in a Byzantine icon doesn't have specific symbolic meaning. Everything; all the forms, all the colours, the placements, the figures, even the odd style of perspective (called "reverse"...or Byzantine perspective) has a very specific meaning. Every element is a symbolic phrase or a whole sentence.
These forms, whatever they're supposed to be, create no space, indicate nothing of spiritual reality. These huge, heavy monochromatic blocks "feel" oppressive and obstructive in the way of Brutalist architecture. They obscure the heavenly figures, rather than showing their context or meaning. There isn't anything in the vocabulary of traditional Byzantine art that is anything like them.
The anti-natural, anti-rational, anti-real New Paradigm
Byzantine and other traditional forms of Christian sacred art are indeed "abstract", meaning not naturalistic in the sense of Renaissance illusionism. But it's not abstract in the way of secular Modernist art like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko where it's just meaningless shapes. Byzantine sacred art, as I’ve said, is extremely specific and so deeply infused with meaning that it is literally held by Eastern Christianity as equal to Scripture. The abstraction of traditional sacred art has a purpose; it’s necessary to convey the meaning with precision and clarity.
That's why the liturgical artwork the western Church has been bludgeoned with for 60 years, is obviously deliberately transgressive. Its intention is to distort, to de-clarify, to muddify and create confusion. Ultimately the goal is despair. And this is the essence of the western Church’s so-called “New Paradigm” in which random change, chaos, disorderliness, and above all, empty, nihilistic meaninglessness, is the overarching message.
The Modernists’ message is not that the human being is made in the image and likeness of God, that creation and man’s existence in it makes sense, but that nothing makes sense, least of all God. Do you still hold fast to your belief? Curse God and die! They abhor the idea that God is reasonable, consistent and benevolently orders the universe for us as a reflection of His divine goodness. The Modernist “worships” chaos and randomness, things not making sense, things falling apart, corners not meeting up, not creating an orderly picture.
A curious case: that time Communists used modern art to psychologically torture people
Alphonse Laurencic was a French modernist painter and architect. In 1938, he was hired by the communists in the Spanish Civil War to design jail cells intended to torture captive Nationalist supporters. These, he said, were based on paintings by surrealist Salvador Dalí and Bauhaus1 artist Wassily Kandinsky. About 65 years later, historian Jose Milicua discovered references to these “modern-art cells” among court papers from Laurencic’s 1939 trial by a Francoist military court.
The six-by-four-foot cells (the photo above is of a re-creation, which featured “sloping beds at a 20-degree angle that were almost impossible to sleep on,” “irregularly shaped bricks on the floor that prevented prisoners from walking backwards or forwards,” walls “covered in surrealist patterns designed to make prisoners distressed and confused,” and lighting effects “to make the artwork even more dizzying.”
Nationalist prisoners were forced to watch Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalou, particularly a graphic sequence of an eyeball being cut open. In the Laurencic cells prisoners were also forced to listen to an amplified metronome at different speeds and were kept within sight of a clock that ran too fast.
Laurencic was executed July 9th, 1939 after a trial by a Nationalist military court. Records from his trial came to the attention of journalists in 2003.
Meanwhile, in the Objective Room…
“On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. “We have half an hour to pursue our exercises,” said Frost looking at his watch. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways. Now whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first time that there might conceivably be something in it.
I’ll spoil the ending: Mark Studdock refused to desecrate the crucifix and escaped, and the forces of the NICE were defeated by a combination of divine intervention, the appearance from the deep past of the magician Merlin and Mr. Bultitude the bear.
He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before. For the moment he hardly cared if Frost and Wither killed him.
“And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him — something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.”
Remind me to put Bauhaus on the list of things we should talk about.
Here's an article that contends that Left and Right agree on what Modernism is doing; they just disagree on its value: https://selvajournal.org/article/chaos-of-total-decay/
"The historical paradox one encounters in reading Sedlmayr today is that of a reactionary anti-modernist whose thought reflects a certain tendency in Marxist aesthetics that runs from Theodor Adorno to Hal Foster; namely, his contention that the distortions and fragmentations of modern art constitute a mimetic response to the real historical fragmentation of the human relationship to the world.14 As Christopher Wood aptly notes, Sedlmayr offers “a mirror image of the avant-garde myth. Revolution and reaction agree on the meaning but not the worth of modern art.”15 This is why Adorno was willing to engage with his thought. Adorno observed in 1958–59 that “my work on the ageing of modern music… paradoxically, runs parallel to the work of Sedlmayr.”
In addition to Sedlmayr, Rookmaaker is another antimodernist of note:
https://artway.eu/content.php?id=3355&action=show&lang=en
Thank you for your post, which sparked many questions for me.
Do you see any value at all in modern art? Why do you think it happened? I also notice you talk about a deliberate coordinated abandonment of meaning- by who? Do you think this is unintentional or that there is someone or something behind it?
I don't ask because I am any defender of modern art- otherwise I probably wouldn't be subscribed to this lol. I ask more bc I've also had this narrative about just everything falling apart in a darkly intentional way told to me since I was a child as a Catholic homeschooler and on one hand, I see what you're seeing- things get ugly and disordered- and on the other, I tend to feel like it's described like a weather event- like this all just happened and it's so terrible but I never have any sense as to who, what or why. Like if everything was so much better before why would people have felt the need to depict both secular and profane subjects in such a radically different way? Or if it wasn't a legitimate need, why tear things down?
If art responds to the world it is in (big if, maybe it shouldn't- interested in your thoughts), how should artists have responded to modernity? Or is it simply that modernity (however we're defining it- also up for debate) should never have occurred?
Hope it's clear the questions are coming from a place of genuine curiosity.