July 29, 2025

"A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight." — That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

Lewis’s insight in That Hideous Strength—“A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight”—pierces the heart of modern anxieties. It's a grim, almost dystopian declaration that presses us to wrestle with real questions: What is intelligence? Who counts as “intelligent”? And in an age of AI that doubles in power seemingly overnight, how do we, as a civilization, navigate this tension without sacrificing meaning, belonging, or dignity?

⁂ Deadweight in a Chemically Accelerating World

In Lewis’s fictional society, the “large, unintelligent population” isn’t necessarily malicious or malevolent—but rather burdened by inertia, incapable of discerning true good, or merely drifting along with the currents of technocracy. Today, as AI systems evolve exponentially, automating tasks, thinking faster, calculating more accurately, we’re faced with a question: will the majority—those not fluent in coding, advanced mathematics, or data science—become sidelined? Might “unintelligent” (which we must carefully resist equating with “unworthy”) be reduced to spectators in an arena increasingly dominated by silicon logic?

But this is precisely where Lewis’s Christian wisdom—or at least the shadow of it—offers salvation. Human value isn’t bound to intelligence. Nor is our dignity measured in algorithmic benchmarking. Even as AI reshapes industries and cultures, each person—curious child, contemplative elder, gardener, or teacher—has intrinsic worth not dictated by IQ or computational skill.

⁂ Resonances with Our Moment of AI Acceleration

1. Technocratic Displacement of the Many As AI can now write, design, diagnose, and counsel, there's risk that those without technical literacy will feel marginalized. Call centers vanish, content jobs shift, and decision-making might be outsourced to black-box systems. There’s a danger that the “weight” our society carries becomes skewed: those who can’t keep pace grow invisible.

2. Cognitive Hierarchies and Spiritual Despair Once we prize cognition above all—pattern-recognition speed, predictive modeling, optimization—we subtly swallow the lie that humanity is reducible to information processing. That breeds despair in those who don’t see their thinking as “advanced.” Lewis would warn: such one-note valuation corrodes hope and wonder.

3. The Lure of a Two-Tier World If intelligence becomes synonymous with algorithmic sophistication, we risk forming a society divided—“bright” technocrats feeding the machine, and those declared “deadweight” consigned to lesser status. Yet Lewis repeatedly reminds us: faith, moral imagination, creative suffering—these are not inferior modes of being; they are often deeper.

⁂ A Christian-Philosophical Remedy, Softly Offered

Deep down, there’s a Christian nuance embedded in Lewis’s voice: intelligence is not the heart of human significance. The “foolishness” of the Cross overturns worldly metrics of power, status, and even brainpower. In Christ’s economy, the lowly, the suffering, the seemingly ignorant can be bearers of profound light.

So, as AI doubles its capacities—stepping into roles we once thought uniquely human—what if our answer is not to train everyone to “keep up,” nor to write off the slow or the contemplative, but rather to re-anchor value in something deeper:

• Communities that celebrate narrative, art, caregiving, friendship, and conscience—domains that overflow machine logic even when they cannot be fully explained.
• A pedagogy that honors wonder, not just utility, inviting people to ask not only “What can you do?” but “What do you—to your neighbor, to the world—mean?”
• A humility that says: even the “least among us” embodies the image of God, mysterious and irreducible.

⁂ Toward a Gentle Reclamation

Let us imagine a world—strained by doubling AI power—but where “intelligence” is plural, not hierarchical: logical, emotional, spiritual, imaginative. A society that values the slow gardener’s wisdom as much as the data scientist’s code. A culture that resists reducing human beings to productivity or neural efficiency.

In Lewis’s fictional voice, the mass that becomes “deadweight” needn’t remain in that posture. It can awaken, not necessarily by becoming brilliant in the technological sense, but by reclaiming vision: vision of what we’re for, not just what we output. Vision that sees human destiny as rooted in goodness, beauty, and love—qualities beyond silicon’s reach.

⁂ In Closing

Lewis’s sharp sentence is a warning: when population outpaces intelligence, civilization shifts, and danger looms. But in our moment—when AI bulks and accelerates—let it also be a summons: to disentangle human worth from narrow definitions, to reaffirm the worth of each soul, and to cultivate a world where intelligence is broad, and love wide, and wonder the foundation upon which we stand.