Status Updates From After Humanity: A Guide to ...

This seer “Knew too much to be clear, could not explain.”

Lewis took the title of his poem from a traditional proverb: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” But his poem indicates that the one-eyed man actually has no such proverbial advantage because his blind compatriots no longer believe him when he speaks of what he can see. He describes the sighted person not as fortunate but as “luckless,” “poor,” a “misfit.”

The Tao provides a more rational basis for ethics (and for democracy) than the one supplied by subjectivism.

Subjectivism afflicts democracies and tyrannies alike. Democracies can only be preserved, Lewis implies, if they view ethical systems in an undemocratic light. In other words, there is a hierarchy in play: different ethical systems are not all equal; some are better than others and remain objectively better even if a majority in a given electorate votes otherwise.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny and an obedience which is not slavery

“We all want progress,” he writes in Mere Christianity. “But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be....If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

To accept traditional morality is not to be convinced of the existence of a particular code of ethics, but to wake up to the implications of the code within which one already lives. It is a kind of homecoming, a relaxation into one’s earlier or original self.

Lewis declares that, in sending his readers back to traditional morality, “I send you back to your nurse and your father, to all che poets and sages and law givers, because, in a sense, I hold that you are already there whether you recognize it or not.”

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. This is “the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce."

This brings us to the final lecture, and here Lewis shifts up a gear into full prophetic mode. If chapter 1 was the check-up and chapter 2 the diagnosis, chapter 3 is the prognosis, and it does not make for comfortable reading. In closing the coffin-lid on objective value, humanity has opened Pandora’s box.