After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

by Michael Ward

“thoroughly routs whole volumes of Nietzsche and Sartre.”

For examples of that admiration, we might look to the National Review and to The Intercollegiate Review, both of which have placed The Abolition of Man among the ten best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

Inevitably, it also has its detractors. Ayn Rand, the novelist and founder of objectivism, covers the margins of her copy with blisteringly hostile reactions (“The abysmal bastard! . . . The cheap, drivelling non-entity!” etc).

Inklings biographer Humphrey Carpenter brands the book “not an argument but a harangue.”

Philosophy professor Gregory Bassham ranks the work as “one of the most jaw-dropping straw-man attacks in literary history.”21 Historian and theologian George Every considers it “very dangerous.”

Behaviourist philosopher B.F. Skinner does not dispute Lewis’s claims but flips them on their head, embracing the apocalyptic dystopia sketched by Lewis as welcome and long overdue.

The question as to whether his overall argument is actually right, wrong, or a mixture of both is outside my remit.

However, though I offer no judgement on the merits of Lewis’s overall case, I will venture to suggest one particular explanation for Abolition’s largely positive reception-history. It has to do with the effect of the Great War on Lewis’s life and its bearing upon the argument that he propounds.

The distinguished historian of Victorian England, G.M. Young, was fond of remarking that, in order to understand a figure from the past, a good question to ask is, “What was going on in the world when he was twenty?”

“I am the only survivor,” he wrote, recalling the quintet of friends with whom he did his officer training. “I think of Mr. Sutton, a widower with five sons, all of whom have gone.”22 And there was one loss that affected Lewis more directly than any other. That was the death of Paddy Moore, who had been his roommate in the billet of the Officers’ Training Corps.

Lewis promised Moore that, if the worst happened, he would take care of his friend’s mother and sister. Following Paddy’s death in battle (see figure 3), Lewis became a de facto surrogate son and brother to Jane and Maureen Moore, respectively. He would go on to live with them for decades.

Lewis presents “death for a good cause” as the crucial test of objective value.

For him, as for so many of his first readers, the meritoriousness or otherwise of dying for one’s country was not merely an intellectual matter, it was an emotionally charged question that was raised every morning by the presence of an empty chair at the breakfast table.