I wouldn’t describe myself as a “fan” of science fiction. I shrug my shoulders at Star Wars and Star Trek, and became so frustrated with Frank Herbert’s Dune that I barely finished it. Nevertheless, I confess a certain guilty fascination with futuristic dystopian works.
The imagery of the Australian bush and the attendant storyline of the revised Road Warrior series haunted my imagination for weeks. Much the same happened with the Blade Runner revamp. Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. I gobble up such books up and wonder: How could human society become like that?
Surely escapism explains much of this, but there is also a human desire to imagine, even anticipate, what the future holds for us and our descendants. It’s a means of grappling with the most acute moral and political questions of our time, but with a certain personal and emotional distance. It’s not us or our children suffering at the hands of post-apocalyptic Australian motorcycle gangs or humanoid robots with automatic weapons.
This much, and far more, can be said of Ross McCullough’s The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster, an enchanting book that straddles a variety of genres: epistolary novel, pastoral handbook, and theological science fiction.
A sort of sci-fi Screwtape Letters, the reader cannot help but be drawn into McCullough’s dystopian (if frighteningly imaginable) world, in which the vestiges of liberalism accommodate an ascendant global Islam, while humanity escapes deeper into an all-consuming artificial intelligence called “IR.” Yet like C.S. Lewis’s classic, it’s also a text bursting with spiritual and theological insight.
The letters of the late archbishop certainly paint a sobering picture of a future in which the Church’s influence has waned. Citizens’ behaviors are carefully documented beginning in school to exert maximum control over the populace. Technological firms promote transhumanism and “transfiguration procedures” to “transfer consciousness from brain to brain.”
The underlying irony is that in “metamodernity,” the modern Baconian quest to control the natural order is realized by fleeing nature.
Priests have accommodated themselves to the new reality, leveraging IR in order to visit with more of the faithful, even if the bishop admits “there is little friendship with someone who is in IR, whether they are in the withdrawn catatonia of passive consumption or the excited catatonia of erratic and unexplained motion.”
It’s an admirable description of the dehumanizing tendencies of social media. Or how about this:
Think only of how much more control the government has over us on these platforms. Think only of those who control the platforms themselves. This is the problem when reality itself goes up for sale, when we place ourselves in a marketplace of realities. For we are not the hunters in the marketplace but the hunted.
The archbishop’s reflections on sexuality are equally incisive. One letter argues that AI-generated porn – presented as a means of protecting the human participants from degrading behaviors – only further encourages dehumanizing tendencies, because users of such material are free to do whatever they want within the “safe” world of IR. It’s not real, though the effects on the human brain and character certainly are.
Elsewhere, the archbishop describes a “second Pill” that was developed to allow sexual partners to not feel any attachment to one another. In a twisted way, that makes sense. Obviously, a baby complicates sex, but so does the unitive quality of the sexual act, which binds people together in complicated ways, even if both tried to keep things “casual.”
McCullough hints at a panoply of terrifying future possibilities. He describes a procedure ironically titled “transfiguration” that involves removing the patient’s eyes and entering the orbital cavities, which subjects “generally come to approve of.” The result is “lobotomized rebels” similar to what (lapsed Catholic) Anthony Burgess describes in A Clockwork Orange.
Elsewhere, McCullough presciently describes “immersive simulations” of the dead that fail to ask permission of family or friends, because the data used to construct the dead person are in the public domain.
The text presents not only an all-too-familiar dystopian future, but our immediate present. “Your own position is caught in a certain irony,” the bishop writes to one interlocutor, “defending the tradition that exalts the rejection of tradition. And it has failed to triumph over its opposite irony, a rebellious submission.”
In a later missive to the same individual, the archbishop astutely argues that utopian-inspired regimes attack the family because it perpetuates social classes, and parents protect and further the well-being of their children over others. “The only way to slot everyone into their role in the social order is to destroy the social order,” he warns.
Yet McCullough’s work is far more than a cautionary tale regarding a world our children and grandchildren may inhabit. It’s also filled with beautiful reflections on eternal truths.
For example, the archbishop argues that the point of St. Augustine’s Confessions “is that there is wisdom in being easily dissatisfied. . . .Our desires do not disappoint us, but their objects: the love of God has no measure. . . .There is no temperance to charity. Only intemperate men are saved.”
In another letter, he preaches: “Only by loving others more deeply will you convince yourself that you might be loved in that way as well.”
Rarely have I read a book as captivating as The Body of This Death, which succeeds not only as a work of dystopian fiction but also of profound theological insight that reminds us of God’s sovereignty amid suffering. Such as this: “Do you know, Christ is not nailed to the cross; the cross is nailed to Christ.”
McCullough deftly provokes questions that demand answers. The book, in a sense, is dissatisfying in all the ways that define a true work of art, leaving the reader disquietingly contemplative.
Perhaps that’s what our post-Christian world needs, so incapable of perceiving the person of Christ, that many speak of a generic appreciation for “Christian civilization.” As the archbishop of Lancaster puts it: “To appreciate Christianity for its contribution to Western civilization is like reading Dostoevsky to increase one’s vocabulary.”
