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

by Michael Ward

He tackles “education” in the widest possible sense and takes it to mean something like moral inheritance, the legacy of humane wisdom that the older generation imparts to the younger and which the younger have a duty to hand on in due course.

They want us to agree with them that language is merely the expression of private emotion. In other words, they want us to grant that they have said something true. Though they are great debunkers of other people’s evaluative statements, they do not want their own evaluative statements to be debunked by the same technique. With their subjectivist philosophy they are in error, Lewis thinks, but at least “they are better than their principles”

Are things beautiful, good, and true just for us as individuals, or can we speak and feel about them in ways that take us beyond our isolated perspectives into a shared discourse of objective value?

Lewis closes his first lecture with a verbal sketch of the human person in three parts: head, belly, and chest. In “the head” we have thoughts and in “the belly” we have sensations, but only when we learn to integrate the rational and the sensual in stable sentiments, located in “the chest,” do we really discover ourselves as human beings.

The human being is a synthesis of the human brain and the human belly in the human breast.

It is impossible to live in a logically consistent fashion holding to the belief that value is based on instinct.

The Tao is not something that human beings simply make up; it is something they discover.

As soon as one steps outside the Tao, one has stepped into the void.

In closing the coffin-lid on objective value, humanity has opened Pandora’s box. We no longer find the solution to the problems of life in “knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue,” but increasingly in willpower, technological control, and surgical alteration of nature to suit our own convenience.

Outside that framework, the only basis for ethical decision-making is sheer impulse, dependent on heredity, digestion, the weather, or the random association of ideas, and these impulses are all, by definition, outside the realm of reason.

The malaise that Lewis would diagnose is not peculiar to totalitarian dictatorships, and there is no room for complacency, even in stable, tolerant, democratic England.

The solution is “dogmatic belief in objective value,” for this is a belief necessary “to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery” (73).

However, the book is not an apologia for Christianity, nor even for theism. Lewis makes no particular defence of his own religious commitments but sets out his stall much more broadly, showing himself prepared to make allies wherever he can find them.

One can only be a religious human being, Lewis implies, if one is first a human being, and it is this acceptance of the absolute validity of “the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason” that makes us distinctively human.

only by recognizing objective value does one have grounds for hoping that a resolution of moral differences can be obtained through reasonable and peaceful means. Without such a shared premise as a bedrock, we cannot dispute matters rationally with one another, but only assert our particular subjective preferences and try to shout down those whose preferences conflict with our own. To deny this core principle is to deny what makes us human: it leads to a situation that is so ethically immature it does not even rise to the level of Paganism.

He was attempting to haul a subjectivist culture back not only to honest humanism, but even, if need be, to pious Paganism, for both of these standpoints had a moral substance that was superior to the vacuity of post-Christian subjectivism. Such a journey would be a long way round, but it might well turn out to be the shortest way home.

Abolition might even be described as the philosophical theme of Lewis’s output and his other works as its variations.

his Romanticism was too strong to allow him to become a radical sceptic.

Lewis is like his own fictional character Eustace Clarence Scrubb (in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”), who, having learned – slowly enough – that he is a dragon, wishes now to be “undragoned” and to stop having such “a beastly time.” He wants to “get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race.”

to live as a thoroughgoing subjectivist who debunks everything means that one has to debunk all one’s own beliefs too, including the supposed value of that very debunking, and this requires a level of self-defeating rigour which is hard to keep up for long.

knowledge required participation in a cosmic Logos;

“When poisons become fashionable they do not cease to kill.”

Lewis had marked how, in Austen’s novels, “the great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, ‘some duty neglected, some failing indulged,’ impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason.”

The pervasive, almost ubiquitous acceptance of various kinds of emotivism and subjectivism in modern Western culture means there can be no persuasion – that is to say, rational argument leading to a freely adopted change of mind. Rather, as belief in objective value evaporates and the public square is evacuated of practical reason, what passes for moral discourse increasingly resembles a war zone in which political propagandists, commercial interests, private whims, and animal instincts fight tooth-and-nail in a permanent free-for-all. The leaders and the led, the rich and the poor, the white-collar and the blue-collar, the religious and the secular: these parties look at one another with a rivalry bordering on hatred or simply with blank incomprehension.†† In this rational desert, the only way people can effect social or political or legislative change is to mobilise a sufficiently large contingent of like-minded protestors and out-protest their opponents. The question of truth, as such, is relegated to a second- or third-order issue: the real question is one of power. And thus we arrive at our post-truth world.