The Abolition Of Man - book review

This book review of "The Abolition Of Man" by C.S. Lewis was so good I thought I'd post it. It's for those who really enjoy the lost art of "thinking."

My summary: man will abolish himself when Subjectivism takes over Object Truth.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Undoubtedly, people (at least kids) will be reading The Chronicles of Narnia (see Orrin's review) for years to come. And The Screwtape Letters (see Orrin's review) are also likely to last, if for no other reason than that they are very funny. Though folks aren't terribly likely to make the connection to the historical person, the character C.S. Lewis will even live on thanks to the movie Shadowlands. But the work for which he really deserves to be remembered is this short trio of lectures ostensibly on education.

In the first lecture, Men Without Chests, he takes as his starting point a deceptively simple reference to The Green Book, an English textbook used in Britain's upper form schools:

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty': and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comments as follows: 'When the man said That is sublime, he appeared to bemaking a remark about the waterfall. ... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime," or shortly, I have sublime feelings.' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying about our own feelings.'

I say deceptive because for those of us who were brought up using such texts, it is easy to miss the insidious nature of the distinction its authors draw. But as Lewis points out:

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.

This may still seem unexceptional; don't we after all believe that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?" What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that the textbook authors are teaching children that there is no such thing as objective value, that all judgments about value are subjective. And this is a big deal, the biggest. Because to deny that there is such a thing as objective value is to reject something fundamental to our belief system, indeed to the belief system of nearly every advanced civilization. Lewis refers to this fundamental concept as the Tao:

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are

really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

Deny the Tao, deny the existence of objective value, and you deny the validity of the objective standards which nearly every religion depends on to govern conduct. We require these objective standards, and not surprisingly all religions have arrived at roughly the same ones, because in their absence man has no internal regulators to make him behave in a moral fashion:

As the king governs by the executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of
the 'spirited element.' The head rules the belly through the chest--the seat, as Alanus tells us, of
Magnanimity--Sentiment--these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his
intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book and
its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests.

Resort to pure reason (the Head) or pure emotion (the Belly) does not suffice to instruct us what behavior is right and what is wrong. There must be objective values--standards that are absolute, universal, and external to man--to provide guidance. These are then internalized--whether as God's Commandments or Aristotelian Ethics or whatever--and Lewis says, located in the Chest where they essentially form what we call character. When Lewis says that texts like The Green Book are creating Men Without Chests, he means that they produce students who have no character.

In the second lecture, called The Way, he makes the case against subjectivism. He makes the case, which I have always found compelling, that once opponents deny that objective value exists, it is impossible for them to then reconstruct a coherent basis for morality:

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or
Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one
among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is
rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems of
(as they now call them) 'ideologies,' all consist of fragments of the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched
from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the
Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so
is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. if
the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of
new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could
succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power
of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun
and a new sky for it to move in.

Think of any non-religious attempt at morality that you've ever studied. They all consist of finding little more than new justifications for the same traditional rules of behavior. And all founder on the same shoal, trying to find a reason why that behavior should be imposed absent an absolute standard (i.e., God's Commandments). In the end, they must all resort to the unacceptable assertion that you should behave in a certain way because they say so.

Which brings him to the third lecture, the eponymous Abolition of Man. Suppose that the subjectivists succeed and they destroy the Tao, the concept of objective value. What will they erect in its place? The answer of course must be that whoever wields temporal power at any given moment will get to define and impose their own version of "morality". It is the Natural Law (the Tao) that enables us to convict Nazi war criminals even though they were "following orders." We understand that it is possible for a legal order to be "unlawful". This is because we, all of us regardless of our rhetoric, believe in the Natural Law and objective values. When we truly stop believing, then it will be up to the state, as the only power left, to both pass laws and define morality. The state itself will "Condition" behavior. At that point, all orders will be lawful. All actions of the state will be permissible. All that remains to be determined is the character of the state and what behavior it will mandate:

Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man. Having abandoned objective values, men leave themselves prey to the diktats of other, more powerful, men, thereby ceasing to be Man at all. They are no longer made in God's image, but in the image of whomever rules them at that moment. One needn't be religious to see the tragic nature of this turn of events.

This rise of subjectivism or moral relativism is the single most important trend in Modern Times. Virtually all of our other problems stem from this rotten seed. This case has never been stated more succinctly than in Lewis's excellent little book.(Reviewed:19-May-00)
Grade: (A+)