The Abolition of Man
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- For other uses, see The Abolition of Man (disambiguation).
The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," but it actually uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of doing away with or "debunking" those things. It also contains heavy criticism of pursuing science in the wrong way, i.e. using it to debunk values, or defining it to exclude such values. By this criticism Lewis claims to defend the value of science itself as something worth pursuing.
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[edit] Logical positivism vs. natural law
Lewis starts with an observation that certain books purporting to teach English to schoolchildren have an implicit philosophy that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object. He says that such a subjective view of values is faulty, and, on the contrary, certain objects and actions merit positive or negative reactions: that a waterfall can actually be objectively praiseworthy, and that one's actions can be objectively good or evil.
He cites ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, who believed that the purpose of education was to train children in the "ordinate affections," that is, to like and dislike what they ought; to love the good and hate the bad. He says that although these values are universal, they are not natural (or at least not inevitable) in children, and must be inculcated through education. Those who lack them lack the specifically human element, the trunk that unites intellectual man with visceral (animal) man, and may be called "men without chests".
[edit] Men without chests: a dystopian future
Lewis criticizes modern attempts to debunk natural values (such as those that would deny objective value to the waterfall) on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that has been shared, with minor differences, by every culture; he calls this the Tao (following a Confucian rather than a Taoist usage of that term). (Although Lewis saw natural law as supernatural in origin, as evidenced by his use of it as a proof of theism in Mere Christianity, his argument in this book does not rest on theism.) Without the Tao, no value judgements can be made at all, and modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some "rational" reason always proceed by arbitrarily selecting one part of the Tao and using it as grounds to debunk the others.
The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. The controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed.
An appendix to The Abolition of Man lists a number of basic values that Lewis saw as parts of the Tao, supported by quotes from different cultures.
A fictional treatment of the dystopian project to carry out the Abolition of Man is a theme of Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.
[edit] Lewis's relevance to the present?
a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. The controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed Perhaps not such a distant future? In many ways Lewis's 'dystopia' appears to relate to developments in contemporary western societies - in particular the replacement of all traditional values in every possible area by new, invented 'values' which are essentially decreed by the ruling political, cultural and intellectual minority, and the control of public perceptions through the media. Certainly phenomena such as so-called 'political correctness' would seem to fit Lewis's nightmare vision perfectly. In 'That Hideous Strength' there is a government organisation in Britain involved in enforcing these new 'values' called N.I.C.E. No doubt this was a Lewisian joke - a euphemistic acronym concealing something very nasty indeed, but unthinkable in reality. Except that there actually *is* now an organisation called exactly that!
[edit] The book in popular culture
In 2003, the Post-Hardcore band Thrice dedicated a song to the book on their album The Artist in the Ambulance.
