Pointing Out the Naiveté of Man's Need for Hierarchical Power: Out of the Silent Planet, chapter 14

 ... Was Oyarsa a god? -- perhaps that very idol to whom the sorns wanted to sacrifice him. But the hrossa, though they said strange things about him, clearly denied that he was a god. There was one God, according to them, Maleldil the Young; nor was it possible to imagine Hyoi or Hnohra worshipping a bloodstained idol. Unless, of course, the hrossa were after all under the thumb of the sorns, superior to their masters in all the qualities that human beings value, but intellectually inferior to them and dependent on them. It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove....

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, Chapter 14 (page 86)

What Ransom expresses here is by no means at all foreign feelings; here, he expresses a general fear of the unknown as he has experienced throughout the many different encounters of the book, and a general questioning of the structure of belief upon the planet of Malacandra.  And to be fair, as a philologist, it's really no wonder he expressed the views he does.  If one were to approach the names involved here -- specifically "Malacandra" and "Maleldil" -- it makes good human sense. From even basic understanding of Latin and Greek etymology, we learn that "mal-, male-" translates to incredibly negative connotation, as "bad," "abnormal," "wrongful," "ill," etc.  Assuming that this is common knowledge for someone of Ransom's academic caliber, I feel it's understandable for him to approach the entire world and all of its contents here with such caution throughout the book.  So, I'll at least give him some credit and leniency on his weariness -- well, for a moment.

At the same time, he has now spent a considerable amount of time learning not just the language, but the culture, economics, politics, and environment of the hrossa which he seems to have developed a strong bond with and appreciation for.  And yet in all of his time breaking the barriers of his distinctly human thought, upon leaving the hrossa he dumbly (yes, I'm judging him some here) returns to those same base assumptions.  He does the dumbly human thing of egocentrically applying human understanding, convention, and definition to everything he further contemplates about the structures of Malacandra.

I'll go ahead and break this down in parts. His initial question regarding the nature of Oyarsa's being, and particularly the sorn's relation to it, goes back to an even more primal and base instinct than anything which (I'm guessing) Ransom himself would have ever experienced -- he makes reference to tribal custom of human sacrifice, to the gods in particular. It is this thought which is his first response to the purpose or design the sorns have for him -- and note that it is not one that typically requires high sophistication, or intelligence, or civilized behavior.  It is something that he would likely deem as 'lesser human,' something already left behind in his more 'civilized' world, something in which only ignoble humans partake.  Here, without much thought, he continues to place his own understanding, his own culture, as dominant.

He then continues to question the nature of Oyarsa, and then specifically moves on to Maleldil, which he equates with the human understanding of God (note that he never really approaches from a perspective outside of that -- never asking if our conception of God is even the right one, or a good one at that). But, he does distinctly allude here (as this is C.S. Lewis, of course, and is familiar with his own works) to the Manicheism, the Dualism, that Lewis debunks in his Mere Christianity (something which even he admits is a tempting and 'manly' theory, but nevertheless goes on to show as insufficient).  He does this here in stating his disbelief that the hrossa -- especially the two he is most familiar with and dare I say 'friends' with -- would worship something/someone that is a "bloodstained idol." Inherent in this statement is that dualistic contention between Good Being and Evil Being, even a throwback to Descartes' experiment in epistemological doubt which gets him to the point of "I Think; Therefore, I Am." (In working backwards to what he can actually state as true here, Descartes questions if God is good, saying he could very much be malevolent and thus all of our experience is just an allusion due to his trickery). Ransom then comes to the conclusion that it can't be possible for his 'friends' to worship such a God, dispelling the idea and thus attaching to Maleldil the same intentions we do to our own conceptions of God (I'm sure it is C.S. Lewis' point to do this, to make some comment that the Malacandrian idea of Maleldil is the exact same as the human conception of God, and that we're just putting two names to the same phenomena... but I'll save that argument and issue for another day). Again, this is an incredibly egocentric thing to do, as he looks for a way to attach and explain everything in a human way, without every questioning whether it's possible (or, for better discussion ethically right) for him to do so.

His most egregious misstep comes in soon after, in looking at the structure of Malacandrian society.  As will become clear when he does finally reach his destination, Meldilorn, there are three distinct sentient, conscious, peoples (or beings, or species, though for me here, I think those three things all mean the same thing). Yet, for Ransom, the immediate and unquestioned assumption is that those three peoples must have some kind of hierarchical structure, and of course he places human value in the equation in order to assign what he believes to be that order; in dealing with the two (well, three including those which are not physical beings, but the eldila and the "gods" here as well) species he knows, he of course assigns the pacifist, crafty, nature-y, artsy hrossa as he says "under the thumbs" of the sorns; he (as an intellectual himself) assumes that intellectual prowess puts them at the top of the physical hierarchy, subordinate only to those spiritual beings of the planet.

I must back up a bit and address something weird he says, though.  He claims that the hrossa are "superior to their masters in all the qualities that human beings value" (in speaking of their position to the sorns) and yet I have a hard time understanding what qualities he means.  Does he mean in their ideas of art? Their philosophical understandings of death? In their concepts of value and worth? Of stoic detachment? In their seemingly superior physical prowess or crafting ability? I have to seriously disagree with him here.  I don't know too many places where these values are dominantly seen as "qualities human beings value" or at least value moreso than the ones which he attaches to the sorn in devaluing in the hrossa as namely "intellectual inferior" and "dependent." If you look at any definition of what makes humans superior species -- be it from ancient times, or more modern, scientific conceptions -- definitions almost always hinge on the idea of superior consciousness, intellect, and independence of will, all of which he's attaching here to the sorn as ranked superior to the hrossa.  While I believe humans think those qualities of the hrossa are noble (and I think should be given more credence than they are, as Ransom I believe correctly points out here), I just don't buy his understanding here. Even chapters later this is refuted, when Weston attaches his own personal views of human intellect above all the species he has met on Malacandra, blindly and foolishly believing in his own intellectual dominance over some of those same kinds of qualities.

What he cannot see in all this, is that his attachment to human constructs and definitions severely limits the open-mindedness he needs in order to truly get a picture of Malacandra -- which, unlike Earth, has a society of peoples who are of different groups, even so far as different species that function far outside the human idea of power, hierarchy, and control.  He fails to realize that things of difference can exist on the same plane, without need to be dominant over each other, or defined in such a way. In fact, defining it in that way would severely diminish the effectiveness of the balance inherent to the Malacandrian way.  Each group provides a necessary and important function, and no function is deemed as more important than any other.  I know this is kind of 'pie-in-the-sky' in terms of vision, especially if you apply it to Earth where only one sentient being exists (well, as far as we as humans define it, again there's that geocentricism), but what a nice idea -- valuing things that aren't just what make us "better" than other beings.  Luckily, Ransom's ignorance here is far overshadowed by the really ignorant, naive, and down-right stupid views that Weston's close-mindedness expresses later on, so he'll eventually get the free-pass as the most intelligent human on Malacandra :)