The postmodernist deconstruction of objective truth and value claims will spell the end of freedom and usher in dictatorship and slavery. Indeed, postmodernism has within its capacity to bring about the very end of the human race. This is essentially the claim of the book we review today: C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.
Ideas and interests drive decisions and disagreements. And they are, at the core, responsible for the division in our society today. C.S. Lewis understood this at a deep level – a level that few authors explored as effectively as he did. And one of his greatest works in this examination of ideas and worldviews is The Abolition of Man.
Yesterday was Election Day….at least for my American readers. And it’s unfortunate that most people these days, including most Christians, tend to get swept up in the emotional tumult of political and social controversy while being blithely ignorant of the undercurrents. Not so C.S. Lewis.
Were he still alive, Lewis would tell us very clearly and explicitly that there’s more to America’s survival than politicians, parties, or elections. There are undercurrents — ideas and interests — that require our attention.
It’s these undercurrents of thought that Lewis addresses in The Abolition of Man.
The name “C.S. Lewis” is familiar to most educated Christians today. A popular novelist and apologist, Lewis was quite simply one of the most influential literary figures and thinkers in the modern English-speaking world, certainly when it comes to religion and philosophy. And The Abolition of Man puts on display the brilliant insights that contributed to his influence and legacy.
Clive Staples Lewis could be described in a number of ways: writer, literary critic, lay theologian, and armchair philosopher. A scholar in English literature, he held academic positions at both Oxford University and Cambridge University in the course of his career. He wrote more than 30 books, including The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and The Abolition of Man.
The Abolition of Man was inspired by Lewis’ negative reaction to a textbook on reading and writing that he had the opportunity to review. Lewis was appalled that such a text would be used by English school students, and he couldn’t resist speaking out.
“I do not want to pillory two modest schoolmasters who were doing the best they knew,” explained Lewis. “But I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work.” Lewis assigns them pseudonyms for the purpose of his response and also addresses other works with similar implications.
Lewis’s response to what he saw as this growing tendency in education to subvert external truth and objective value began as a series of lectures at King’s College, Newcastle, part of the University of Durham, as the Riddell Memorial Lectures in February 1943. But it soon took written form as The Abolition of Man and was published later that year.
Lewis grounds his argument for natural law and objective virtue not in biblical orthodoxy (his focus in Mere Christianity), but rather in science, longstanding philosophical traditions (going back to the ancient Greeks and what the Chinese referred to as The Tao), and common sense.
One might consider The Abolition of Man as a 20th-century philosopher’s defense of faith-leaning (thought not faith-reliant) modernism against the rising influence of postmodern thought.
The ultimate consequence of postmodern thought, as Lewis correctly surmised, is the deconstruction and undermining of all binding narratives and truth claims. Humanity is freed from any overriding, ontological boundaries or accountability.
As a result, we move away from logic and reason – since we no longer trust truth claims – and toward emotion and desire.
As Lewis explains: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”
But it isn’t just moral virtue that’s undermined.
The idea and practice of Reason itself is also sacrificed.
As we head deeper down this path, we replace truth with perspective and virtue with preference and primal hunger.
As the king governs by his 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, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-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.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man
Lewis continues laying out the consequences, by warning that (as more people embrace this view) we will see more debauchery. He then delivers one of his most iconic quotes:
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
ibid
Lewis of course was well aware that the reasons 20th-century modernists and early postmodernists embraced relativism included failures of modernist thinking, corruption and hypocrisy in religious circles, and strong antagonism against many religious teachings.
However, Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man that these same folks smuggle values and beliefs of their own into the mix without applying anywhere near the same level of scrutiny or critique they dish out otherwise.
A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge.
ibid
Oh, that more people would have listened to C.S. Lewis.
We might have been able to avoid much of the confusion and catastrophe in the years since.
We are living in Lewis’ nightmarish, dystopian future today — because too few listened to him back then.
The Abolition of Man is one of the best defenses of natural law and objective value ever put to print. It warns of terrible consequences should society embrace the deconstruction of those concepts — consequences we are indeed experiencing today.
If you haven’t read this book, do so.
