Biden Is the Unman on the Debate Stage

For years, Joe Biden has reminded me of someone else, but it’s been difficult to place my finger on who exactly that is. No face comes to mind — or rather, variations of different faces come to mind — nor...

The post Biden Is the Unman on the Debate Stage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

For years, Joe Biden has reminded me of someone else, but it’s been difficult to place my finger on who exactly that is. No face comes to mind — or rather, variations of different faces come to mind — nor does any name spring readily to hand. Earlier this year, I finally figured it out, and Thursday night’s debate only confirmed it: Biden is C.S. Lewis’s Unman.

Although best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis was a prodigious cultural critic and almost abnormally prescient thinker, enabling him to correctly anticipate many of the difficulties and evils we face in this 21st century. Two of his works in particular are worthy of the description “prophetic,” his Space Trilogy (better termed the Ransom Cycle), and the nonfiction treatise The Abolition of Man. Coupled together, these works predict and — almost a hundred years in advance — describe the inner workings and motivations of those who today champion evil in the Western world.

The Unman Is Born

Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of the Ransom Cycle is a straightforward enough story about a trip to Mars, born of a contest between Lewis and his Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien to see who could write a better science fiction story. The story explores themes of language, communication and community, morality, and the inkling (no pun intended) of what we today call progressivism, and also serves to introduce the principal character of Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge professor, as well as the antagonists Edward Weston, a noted physicist, and Dick Devine, who later becomes Lord Feverstone.

It isn’t until the second book, Perelandra, that Lewis introduces a more-than-merely-human villain: the Unman. Having been sent to the Paradise of Venus, Ransom finds himself confronted by Weston, his old nemesis. But this time, Weston claims to have adopted and (more alarmingly) further developed Ransom’s Christian beliefs, arguing that God and Satan are, in fact, one and the same person. “I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that force into me completely,” the scientist cries out, before beginning a series of horrific convulsions. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History)

The next time Ransom meets Weston, still on Venus, there has been a distinct and definitive — even a diabolical — change, though Ransom initially finds it almost impossible to identify precisely what that change is. “Something which was and was not Weston was talking: and the sense of this monstrosity, only a few feet away in the darkness, had sent thrills of exquisite horror tingling along his spine, and raised questions in his mind which he tried to dismiss as fantastic,” Lewis writes. Ransom then discovers Weston mutilating, with his bare hands, a little frog he has found and the two make eye contact:

If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” … And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in [Venus] by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone.

Lewis and Ransom dub this iteration of Weston, the Unman. Much the same might be said of Biden, the Unman in the White House, the Unman on Thursday night’s debate stage. (READ MORE: Nine Takeaways From the Trump v. Biden Debate)

When the Unman squats on the ground, Lewis writes, “The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human.” Ransom describes it as “watching an imitation of living motion which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow lacked the master touch.”

Could the same not be said of Biden? The decrepit old man stands, walks, talks, waves, shakes hands, and scratches his nose or his ear the same as you or I might, but that spark of humanity is missing. His face does indeed resemble the face of a corpse, as though some puppeteer had attached strings to make the President smile or frown or scowl. It would all be a brilliant technical achievement as far as imitation goes, but it would still be mere imitation. In fact, it is mere imitation. I’ll come back to this point shortly.

The final installment in the Ransom Cycle, That Hideous Strength, introduces a shadowy cabal of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists, police officers, and sexual deviants allied with the Unman whom we might be excused for comparing to the Democratic Party, although Lewis refers to them as the Belbury group. The characteristics of the Belbury leaders are not unlike those of prominent Democrats. Lord Feverstone is charismatic, charming, and fairly good-looking, although the noble characters describe him as having “a mouth like a shark.” The aged civil servant John Wither is a master of speaking loquaciously and even eloquently, but only making matters more and more vague and obscure, even seemingly contradictory; he might be said to be a personification of relativism. The psychologist Augustus Frost is almost the opposite, cold and calculating, precise to the point of becoming somewhat nihilistic. The physiologist Filostrato is morbidly obese, the police chief Hardcastle is a butch lesbian, and the “mad parson” Straik is a bitter heretic.

A Prescient Comparison to the Democrat Party

These inane and increasingly disturbing figures are a perfect parody — almost a perfect replication — of the Democratic Party of today. It is little surprise to discover that the Belbury folk are directly beholden to demons, whom they call “macrobes,” devoted as ever to their scientific jargon. Given its rabid, almost religious promotion of abortion — a scientific jargon name for the horror of child sacrifice — and all manner of sexual, psychological, ideological, and spiritual depravities, it would be equally unsurprising to find that the Democratic National Committee was taking its orders straight from the mouth of Satan.

Abortion is a prime indication of this demonic bent. Abortion itself is referred to by Democrats as a positive good — that is, a good in and of itself, not merely the imperfect or morally questionable means to a good end. Those who threaten access to child sacrifice are accused of threatening democracy, which is more and more frequently and openly referred to as “sacred.” Biden himself used that word in Thursday night’s debate. The use of the term “sacred” is no mere accident. Lewis describes this marriage between modern science and a warped, inverted awareness of the spiritual world in That Hideous Strength:

A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. … The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the results. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. … It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they disregard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe … would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.

We now return to Biden. The Catholic priest and exorcist Malachi Martin discussed a concept he called “perfect possession,” which is not the typical form of possession, whereby a demon takes control of a human individual’s body, essentially doing things against that individual’s volition — but is instead when an individual bends his volition so repeatedly, so concertedly, and so completely in line with the will of Satan himself that the two become, in a very real sense, indistinguishable. (READ MORE: Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy)

Hell itself, I believe, necessitates an annihilation and absence of distinctions and distinguishing features, so that for such an individual, Hell on earth might be a reality. It is possible that Biden, who was raised a Catholic, has so abandoned the faith of his fathers, so rejected and repudiated God Himself, so embraced the will of Hell, that there is now no distinction between “Biden” and whatever demon he has modeled himself after. That Biden’s soul may now be in Hell, having invited Hell into himself so unreservedly, and his body might be kept walking and talking and (barely) undecaying here on Earth by demonic forces. Biden may be, in fact, the Unman.

The post Biden Is the Unman on the Debate Stage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.