I recently finished reading C.S. Lewis’ famous book, The Abolition of Man. I will admit that while Lewis is one of my favorite Anglicans, I have not yet read as much of him as I would like. My encounter with this book reaffirmed Lewis’ status as the preeminent Christian intellect of the twentieth century. Picking up a C.S. Lewis work is in one sense like picking up a wet sponge – each page is so saturated with eloquent truths that they practically drip out onto your hands.
The Abolition of Man, written by Lewis in 1943, is a thoroughly prophetic defense of objective truth and Natural Law (the good order of creation as designed by God), rightfully hailed as one of the most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Though volumes have already been written to dissect Lewis’ work, the astonishing relevance of his writing to our lives over 80 years later compelled me to share a few of my thoughts from reading it. With The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis gives us words to describe the insanity and instability we feel in a world that has kicked Natural Law and absolute truth to the curb.
Men Without Chests
Lewis begins by using a recently published primary school textbook on poetry, sent to him by the authors for a review, as a springboard into his discourse on Natural Law and objective values. He immediately takes issue with the authors’ pitting of personal emotions against objective reality.
The example Lewis gives from the textbook is a well-known story of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge meeting two tourists by a waterfall. When asked their impressions of the waterfall, “one called it ‘sublime’ and the other called it ‘pretty;’ and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust” (Lewis, 2). The textbook authors would go on to comment that the tourists’ remarks about the waterfall were not really about the waterfall itself, but rather a remark about their own feelings.
Here Lewis brings to light the postmodern rejection of the correspondence theory of truth – the idea that anything which is true must necessarily relate to an objective reality. For the textbook authors, to see something as beautiful does not affirm the presence of objective beauty, it only describes an experience of “beautiful feelings.”
“We appear to be saying something very important about something,” the textbook says, “and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings” (2).
In his criticism of the poetry textbook, C.S. Lewis makes a prescient warning about the present decay we see in modern, Western public education generations later. Whether out of malice or ignorance, the educators teach a relativistic worldview which rejects not only objective truth but the greatest Good, the Creator responsible for it. In this worldview, value is divorced from concrete reality, the heart is divorced from the head, and education can teach no higher truth than what is contrived by the educator.
Without an objective reality and corresponding morality, one is forced to conjure up new sentiments and attribute them to existing objects. This results in a form of education which Lewis likens to poultry keepers of their young chickens, “making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing” (23).
Interestingly, Lewis’ concern at the time was over this worldview training children in cynicism and cold rationalism, raising them to be dullards. In contrast, I would cautiously propose (not presuming to possess even a fraction of Lewis’ intellect!) that we face an opposite problem stemming from the same cause: we have raised generations of people held captive by their own emotions.
Without objective truth undergirding our experience of the world, our emotions have become the only things that are real, and therefore matter more than anything else.
What we end up with, Lewis writes, are “men without chests,” men devoid of virtue. Here, Lewis broadly voices his concern about men lacking true passion and emotion. Of our twenty-first century contemporaries, we especially lack passion for the good, the true, and the beautiful – because those three goods can only be appreciated if one accepts the Creator’s good designs which bring them forth. What remain are men without chests, absent virtue and courage, because they are enslaved to their emotions and the passions of the flesh.
The Problem of “Ought”
Having thoroughly exposed the destructive folly of moral relativism on the surface, C.S. Lewis continues to dissect its deceitful internal contradictions. At the center of his argument is the problem of what people “ought” to do.
Lewis quickly points out that the textbook authors irrationally affirm both ends of the same contradiction. On the one hand, they hold objective values in contempt, and on the other hand, insist that it is objectively good for people to debunk and deconstruct anything traditionally understood as beautiful, true, or good.
Herein lies the contradiction. How can you have a moral imperative for moral relativism? Such an assertion is insanity. Lewis posits the textbook authors could get around this by explaining their cause as “necessary” or “progressive” or “efficient,” methods often employed by today’s opponents of traditional Christian morality who insist on the need to dismantle it.
Moral progressives, then, must necessarily hold some values of their own which are immune from being debunked. Debunking is only for other people’s values. Otherwise, their assertions would be pointless.
It is also the case that the worldview held by the moral relativists is as equally uncritical as it is contradictory. While the textbook authors criticized by Lewis champion skepticism of all traditional moral values, they do not apply the same skepticism to their own beliefs. Lewis writes:
“In actual fact, [the moral progressives] will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars… And this phenomenon is very usual” (29).
This phenomenon is just as true today, especially among the mainline Protestant denominations which have so quickly dumped the teachings of orthodox biblical Christianity in favor of popular (and radical) left-wing social causes. (And sadly, the same dynamic can be found creeping across all Christian denominations, though to different extents and at different speeds.) In the name of “tolerance,” all the most challenging Christian teachings on ethics and morality must be challenged and thrown out, to be uncritically replaced with a worldview which just so happens to be the most celebrated and widely accepted of the day.
C.S. Lewis proposes that which the moral relativists can no longer explain by Natural Law they must instead explain by animal instinct. This strategy, of course, will be inadequate, because instinct inherently describes that which we do not fully understand, and it does not escape the dilemma of “ought.” For instance, laying down one’s life in defense of one’s friends, family, or country does not provide any base satisfaction for the individual, because he is dead. Why then would he do such a thing, if love is only the effect of hormones and synapses firing in the brain? Without appealing to virtue, we are left to say it is a matter of instinct, that instinct is something we “ought” to obey. And why “ought” we obey a particular instinct? Surely there is an infinite regress of instincts behind it to explain.
Even if we concede that human beings are subject to certain natural instincts, what does one do when faced with two competing instincts? Lewis points out that we cannot discern between instincts without an appeal to something higher than an instinct – when two instincts hit at the same time or in contradiction to one another, we choose based on an external knowledge of their value or utility.
In other words, you cannot move beyond the realm of the subjective to the realm of an “ought” without the traditional values upheld by objective truth and Natural Law. “Natural Law,” Lewis writes, “is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.” Our rebellion against Natural Law is like the branches of a tree rebelling against the trunk.
The Abolition of Man
Lewis then shifts his focus from the arguments made by the moral progressives to the logical end of their arguments. It is here that Lewis’ criticism reaches its crescendo.
C.S. Lewis uses “man’s conquest of Nature” as the point of departure for his argument, for having done away with Natural Law, Nature is no longer a good gift to be stewarded and understood, but an obstacle to be conquered and overcome. Here he gives three examples in which man claims to possess power over Nature: the airplane, wireless communication, and the contraceptive.
In every case, the technological advancement is not a universal triumph of man over Nature but is “a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by” (54). Planes can be used for transport and for dropping bombs. Wireless can be used for news broadcasts and for propaganda. Yet Lewis saves his most forceful, detailed, and prophetic warnings for the use of contraceptives, which the Church of England (to her shame) officially permitted over a decade prior at the Lambeth Conference of 1930 – the first major Christian denomination to permit its use.
As in so many cases, Lewis articulates the moral reality far better than I ever could:
“And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument” (55).
In principle, when someone exercises power over something, he inherently weakens the object of his power. Therefore, if man’s power over Nature is in practice an exercise in power over future generations, then today’s technological advances aimed at overcoming natural human “limitations” exercise a certain power over our successors. The popular cultural narrative of a progressive emancipation from tradition and increasing control over the processes of nature (such as human biology and sexuality) resulting in a multiplication of human power becomes instead the power of one generation over the next.
Future generations become subjects of the present. “They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them… apart from this, the later a generation comes… the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few” (57).
Remember that Lewis wrote this passage over 80 years ago. Does he not perfectly describe the impending demographic crisis looming before us today? The coming demographic collapse (where we have far too few younger generations to replace and care for the aged) will be the defining issue for the Church in my lifetime and even more so for my future children and grandchildren.
To understand what that future looks like, simply look to the countries with the lowest birth rates. Look at Japan or South Korea, or China as it grapples with a generation lost from its one-child policy. Countries, unable to reverse population decline, will increasingly rely on technology, AI, and robotics (“wonderful machines”), alongside an omni-competent state, to mitigate economic decline and care for the elderly. The Church will desperately need men with chests to shepherd her people through this complex new social reality.
Lewis describes the people responsible for exercising the power necessary to overcome Natural Law as the “Conditioners.” They have emerged from inherited tradition not to pass it on but to decide which elements of it they may manipulate to shape the next generation.
But how will the Conditioners decide which arbitrary values to pass on? This is their inherent dilemma – the same as the earlier problem of “ought.” By throwing away Natural Law, they stepped into the void and ceased to be men at all. Future generations therefore also cease to be human because they are merely artifacts of the Conditioners’ making. “Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man,” Lewis asserts (64).
A Better Way Forward
In other words, man’s conquest of Nature destroys his humanity altogether. Through man’s victory over Natural Law, the many are subject to a few, and the few subject to their own appetites. Ironically, man’s victory over Nature (Natural Law) becomes Nature’s victory over men (his surrender to carnal appetites).
Lewis writes, “The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature” (71). We reduce things down to “nature” so that we may “conquer” them or explain them away – but this process continually adds more things to the category of “nature” until there is nothing left outside of it, with man being the final step – at which point “the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same” (71).
What is the end result if not tyranny, or at least a loss of the freedoms enjoyed by Judeo-Christian civilization? Only Natural Law – the good order of the universe ordained by the Creator – can provide the framework of a common law which lends itself to human flourishing. C.S. Lewis says it this way: “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery” (73).
Lewis also offers a rebuttal to those who will accuse him of rejecting science altogether. He posits that many modern scientists (those beholden to an ideology) are not particularly different from the magicians of the past. In fact, both modern scientists and magicians gained popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries out of an impulse to subdue reality rather than conform to it. Modern science just happened to thrive while magic died out. The modern scientist may reject magic because it does not work, but he shares the same desire as the medieval magician: knowledge as a tool to increase and exercise human power.
The practice of science as a means of liberation from Natural Law and not a reverential inquiry of Nature requires a corrective. “Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required” (73).
Lewis imagines a new “Natural Philosophy” which instead looks to explain without explaining away; which seeks to analyze without destroying; studies the parts while remembering the whole; illuminates the conscience without diminishing it to animal instinct.
Even in his day, C.S. Lewis warned against the “fatal serialism of the modern imagination – the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds” (80).
More than 80 years later, it is clear that mankind did not heed the warnings of C.S. Lewis, and instead we continue to invite our own abolition in the name of “progress.” May God raise up a generation of men with chests to lead His Church; may the Church be bold enough to offer a corrective to modern science before man totally offers his humanity on the altar of the machine; and may God use the wisdom of C.S. Lewis to give us new categories with which we can understand and describe the rapidly changing world around us, sending forth the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“You cannot go on seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it… If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world” (81).
Works Cited
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015.
