I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.

In a work that is so theologically-based, specifically, Christianity-based, it is hard not to think about theological issues, and the idea that popped into my head is the question as to whether corruption is an inevitability without saving grace.

Now the laws of thermodynamics tells us that disorder ever increases, so it would seem that in fact, this is the natural way of things. And yet, human life, and life in general, seems to belie this basic law, and points to the fact that thermodynamics is, at its base, a statistical argument, and cannot easily predict local effects or the ultimate fate of an open system. It cannot be denied that some branches of evolution have led to more and more complex ordered organisms. While we we cannot ever prove that we evolved from primordial slime forming the first prokaryotic cell, we know for a fact that we all start out as a single eukaryotic cell in the womb (or in an egg in some organisms.) We also have a lot of evidence that mitochondria are descended from prokaryotes. In the long run, yes, it is still an increase of disorder because our complexity comes at the price of the creation of our waste products which are incredibly disordered.

My point, however, is that it would seem that it is inevitable that people can start off good and noble, and over the years and the generations, they will definitely be evil and base. Lewis’ commentary on the monarchs of Charn outline this idea and apply it to government, and I can’t help but immediately apply this to the decay of the American Republic.

The interesting thing is the idea of error-correction. This is part and parcel of our modern information culture and economy. The brilliance of the Internet is based significantly on the idea of error-correction. Error-correction mostly prevents the inevitable corruption of ordered information (although we all know nothing is perfect) and better than 99 times out of 100, things turn out O.K. Life itself is pretty good at error-correction—the replication of DNA is wonderfully faithful, although clearly there are errors that are made. (And yet errors are the basis of evolution and increasing complexity and order.)

I think one of the unique things about the American Republic is its basis in a potentially self-correcting document—the Constitution. But, more immediately, the checks and balances established by the Constitution are also error-correcting.

The reason why the Republic is in such crisis is that the Bush administration and their adherents are greatly intent on (1) dismantling these checks and balances and (2) destroying the Constitution. Once these error-correcting mechanisms are disabled, we put ourselves on the fast-track of inevitable corruption, evil, and atrocities and crimes against humanity (and while Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are bad enough, you can be assured that things are bound to get much, much worse. With error-correction disabled in DNA replication, what you inevitably get is cancer. And I tend to think about Empire this way. Empire is analogous to cancer—eventually fatal to its host in the end.

So, if you wanted to be unnecessarily mystical, you can think of error-correction (and selection pressure) as the Hand of God. God® and His Saving Grace™ are the only way to prevent the inevitable corruption and decay of the universe, and the only way to actually increase local complexity and order.

(And by stretching some metaphors, Bush and his cronies are necessarily agents of Satan, who are interested in disabling error-correction.)