The Abolition of Man in Easley Library Bookworms

Apr 25, 2020 Werner rated it liked it

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This is a very short --but pithy-- book, with actually only 113 pages, and only the first 81 of those make up the main body of the text; the rest are the Appendix and end-notes (mostly documenting sources). The three main chapters are the texts of the three Riddell Memorial Lectures delivered on successive evenings in February 1943 at the Univ. of Durham's King's College. It's sub-titled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," s This is a very short --but pithy-- book, with actually only 113 pages, and only the first 81 of those make up the main body of the text; the rest are the Appendix and end-notes (mostly documenting sources). The three main chapters are the texts of the three Riddell Memorial Lectures delivered on successive evenings in February 1943 at the Univ. of Durham's King's College. It's sub-titled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," starts with a critique of some aspects of a 1939 British high school textbook, The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing (although Lewis didn't name the book), and is cataloged by most U.S. libraries that have it with books about education. However, the real focus is on fundamental philosophical questions of value and morality, which of course necessarily underlie whatever approach one takes to education, but which underlie every other aspect of human life as well.

By 1943, the British intellectual establishment, like their counterparts everywhere else in the Western world, had pretty much totally embraced the view that the concept of right and wrong has no objective validity, and that human emotional, affective responses to persons, things or situations in the world are purely biochemically determined reactions, with no legitimacy apart from whatever evolutionary survival value they might have (or formerly have had) for the human species as a whole. The task of education and of social engineering generally, in this view, is to systematically debunk transcendent ethical values and whatever emotions support them. Lewis' message here is a root-and-branch rejection of this view, and a thumbnail case for debunking the would-be debunkers. (Since the establishment consensus in 2020 is the same as it was in 1943, with the only differences being that it now has, if anything, more political power, less willingness to tolerate opposition, and the benefit of nearly 80 more years of time to further its mission of social and cultural demolition, it's clear that the debate set forth here is as relevant as ever.)

Basically, to paraphrase and condense the contents of these lectures in my own words, Lewis' contention is that there is an underlying Natural Law of right and wrong, wholesome human relations, and appropriate response to the beauty and majesty of the natural world and universe, the existence of which can not be demonstrated by reason (though it is not contrary to reason), but which rather has to form the first axiom of moral reasoning, and which is intuitively perceptible by the inborn human conscience. (This has a similarity, as Lewis recognizes, to "instinct," the existence of which his opponents admit, but transcends the idea of purely biochemical instinct for evolutionary survival value.) This Natural Law, which Lewis here (as he does sometimes elsewhere) calls the Tao, has been recognized as valid throughout human history by cultures around the world, with considerable unanimity as to its basic concepts. Whether or not this Tao derives ultimately from Divine revelation (although Lewis himself believed it did, as he asserts in other writings) is immaterial; the important thing is that it exists as the bedrock postulate of reality, however you explain it, and conveys information about moral truth that we neglect at our peril.

In his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick suggests that the basic difference between his androids and humans is that the latter can feel genuine empathy for their fellow humans and other living creatures, while androids can not. Though they're very different writers writing decades apart, Lewis here is saying something similar. Natural feelings of love, pity, respect, reverence, family affection, patriotism tempered by general fellow-feeling for all humans, delight in beauty are the things that make us truly human, more so than the dispassionate operations of our reason, and which mediate the demands of reason to our bodies, which by themselves wouldn't be anything but animal. Annihilating human capacity for these kinds of emotions produces "men without chests" (alluding to the idea of the heart as the seat of emotion), and really would, for all practical purposes, mean the "abolition of Man" as genuinely human. (He's using "Man" here generically, of male and female humankind, and all readers in 1943 would have taken it that way.) He also suggests that the social engineering that brings about the creation of such post-humans is not an elevation of humanity in general, but simply an elevation of the engineers to absolute power, which according to their own principles would be exercised without ethical values. This main body of the text is very rigorously reasoned, and can be demanding to follow.

The Appendix is a roughly 19-page collection of quotations from around the world, drawn from a variety of cultures and representing sources ranging from ancient to modern, roughly topical in organization, designed to illustrate the universality of the Tao. (The quotations are not intended to be comprehensive.) Three of these are taken from American Indian sources, and what cost the book a star in my rating is that the cultural source of these is identified as "Redskin." (Wikipedia has a very comprehensive discussion of the etymology and use of the term, and its gradual pejoration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redskin .) I do not think Lewis consciously intended the term as a slur, and it was not apparently as pejorative in British as in American English at this time. But it was still a slangy term not normally used in formal contexts, as it is here, and as such I think reflects a lack of respect. (This would have been general among British intellectuals on both the Right and the Left in 1943 --some of whom still advocated the extermination of "inferior races," for which Lewis to his credit called them out elsewhere-- and his opponents at the time had no objection to it; but it's nevertheless objectionable to me.)

Note: The Goodreads description of this edition states that it's "Permanently unavailable owing to copyright issues." Since it was originally published in 1943, which under the terms of current U.S. copyright law (a.k.a. the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act") would presumptively remove it from the public domain, I'm guessing these "issues" would have been the result of some lawsuit against the publisher, Harper. However, the terms of whatever verdict or settlement was reached presumably wouldn't have required the surrender of copies sold before the suit took place. One of these was donated to the Bluefield College library in 2016, and was the one that I read. (As an author, albeit in a small way, and a librarian, I support reasonable copyright protections. I don't consider perpetual "copyright" reasonable, and I doubt that Lewis would have, either.) ...more

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