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

by Michael Ward

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.