C.S. Lewis was an Oxford don, a scholar, and a Christian apologist. He authored prominent works of fiction including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, and The Screwtape Letters, along with works of non-fiction like Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and God in the Dock.
His book The Abolition of Man is divided into three short chapters: “Men Without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man.” Lewis’ main contention is that modern education — grounded as it is in modern rationalism, empiricism, and positivism– will destroy our recognition of objective value, will create a generation without the capacity for virtue, and will ultimately abolish humanity through the corruption of human nature. In this essay, I’ll summarize his argument and explain how it applies to our current cultural context.
“Men Without Chests”
“Men Without Chests” begins with Lewis’ criticism of what he calls “The Green Book,” an English Grammar text intended for middle- and high-school students. While ostensibly discussing the English language, the authors of “The Green Book” off-handedly criticize a tourist who remarks that a waterfall is “sublime.” They insist that this statement is not actually an objective description of the waterfall, but is really a subjective description of the tourist’s feelings. The waterfall is not sublime; rather, the tourist just has certain “sublime feelings” about the waterfall. Throughout the book, the authors engage in this “debunking” exercise. Their underlying assumption is that statements about objective beauty, truth, and goodness are actually just sentimental, subjective expressions of the speaker’s feelings.
Lewis points out that this assumption is destructive and out-of-step with classical education. One of the primary aims of classical education was (and is) to shape the character of the student. Teachers believed that “objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt” (p. 25). The goal of classical education is to train students to love what is objectively good, true, and beautiful and to abhor what is objectively evil, false, and ugly. In contrast, modern educators engage in “debunking” the idea of objective value and treat all such claims as mere emotionalism, to be discarded in favor of a more “rational” and “intellectual” outlook on life.
Thus, modern educators create “men without chests,” that is, men who have never been trained to conform their appetites and urges (their Belly) to their intellect (their Head) through their will or habits or settled affections, what Lewis calls “the Chest.” Lewis warns that this practice will have disastrous consequences because, without training in virtue, our urges, impulses, and appetites will always overpower our reason.
“The Tao”
In his second chapter, Lewis explains what he calls “The Tao,” the idea –universally held across time and culture– that the universe possesses a natural order to which man must conform. The Tao instructs us how we “ought” to act. In his Appendix, Lewis shows that civilizations all over the world and throughout history have affirmed the same basic injunctions to love one’s neighbor, to care for one’s children, to honor one’s elders, to show mercy and charity, to not steal, to not commit adultery, and so forth. To the modern man, Reason is purely intellectual and proceeds from a set of arbitrary presuppositions to a set of abstract conclusions. But the Tao entails “Practical Reason,” which demands recognition of and obedience to some fixed, non-negotiable set of moral norms.
In place of the traditional Tao, the modern Innovator sets out to construct a new set of “modern, rational, scientific” values and norms, a “new ideology.” Yet Lewis argues that this “new Tao” is perverse, unjustified, and unstable.
First, it is perverse because whatever authority the new ideology holds is borrowed from the Tao; it merely singles out and bloats one particular part of the Tao at the expense of all other parts. For example, “the preservation of the human race” becomes the one overriding, overruling concern at the expense of love for neighbor, love for children, love for justice, and all the other supposedly “regressive,” “sentimental” elements of the Tao.
Second, new ideologies are unjustified because they try to derive an “ought” from an “is,” often by grounding obligations in instinct. For example, Innovators argue that we “ought” to preserve the human race because we have an instinctive desire to preserve the human race. But Lewis argues that: 1) in reality, no such abstract instinct exists, 2) if it did, it would conflict with other instincts, and 3) the existence of this instinct would not demonstrate that the “human race ought to be preserved.” “Oughts” can be found in the Tao, and nowhere else.
Third, the “new Tao” is unstable because its core principles can be debunked in the same way that the “regressive elements” of the actual Tao were debunked, leaving us with no values at all. If we can “see through” love for children as mere sentimentalism, why can’t we “see through” love for humanity as mere sentimentalism? Lewis writes that The Tao “is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree…The human mind has no more power of imagining a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in” (p. 56).
“The Abolition of Man”
The modern man looks with skepticism on the idea that we should submit meekly to the dictates of the Tao. He will ask: If we can conquer Nature, why should we not conquer Human Nature as well? Why should we allow ourselves to be pushed around by the Tao if we believe that it is nothing more than a vestigial artifact of our evolutionary history? One day, our technological and scientific mastery will allow us to engineer a new kind of human with a different kind of conscience and a different set of moral intuitions. The great men, the Conditioners, will decide what will be regarded as “Good” and “Evil” by the next generation. “[The Conditioners] are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean. ‘Good’ and ‘bad,’ applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived” (76).
Yet if the Conditioners have truly succeeded stepping fully outside the Tao such that it no longer obligates them to act “justly” or “benevolently” towards the next generation, then their only motive can be whim or fiat. The artificial Tao they create will be the arbitrary product of their own impulses which, ironically, will be dictated by Nature operating through Chance. “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest over Man” (80). To prevent this conquest, Lewis urges us to re-enchant nature and reframe science in a way that explains (e.g. “this is what human beings are made of”) without explaining away (e.g. “this is all human beings are”).
Analysis
Lewis’ book is brilliant in criticizing the dangers of a so-called “modern, rationalistic” approach to education, the loss of the Tao, and the temptation to remake human nature. Yet our modern context differs from Lewis’ in two major ways.
First, Lewis lived during the heyday of logical positivism, which tended to throw out morality altogether. In his day, it was more plausible to think that educators would either implicitly or explicitly debunk the very concepts of right and wrong, good and evil.
In contrast, the Great Awokening of the 2010s did not lead people to reject morality or to embrace the relativist, subjectivist “true for you” morality of postmodernism. Instead, progressive culture today is marked by a moral fanaticism that one normally associates with religion. As many cultural commentators across the political spectrum have noticed, social justice texts function like sacred scripture, speech codes are a kind of blasphemy laws, cancel culture is the censure of heretics, and the renaming of schools and the removal of monuments is iconoclasm.
Second, C.S. Lewis (and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell) feared of powerful cabal of omnicompetent Conditioners who had the technological power to create a “New Man” with an utterly reshaped conscience within an utterly reshaped society. Those fears have not (yet) come to fruition. With the fall of communism and fascism, hard totalitarianism has largely failed.
Yet C.S. Lewis did not necessarily foresee the kind of “soft totalitarianism” we’re now witnessing in the West. Lewis worried about a small clique of politically-powerful Conditioners cynically reshaping the consciences of the unwitting masses. But, today, we should be far more worried about a vast army of “true believers” who wield the soft power of media, education, entertainment, and corporate human resource departments.
However, even here, Lewis was prescient. The various critical social theories that undergird the Great Awokening do indeed debunk traditional morality as it’s found in the Tao, especially norms surrounding sexuality and gender, respect for authority, and love for country. But they also borrow whatever moral authority they possess from the Tao. They embrace a single, guiding moral principle from the Tao: care for the vulnerable. This principle is “arbitrarily wrenched from [its] context in the whole and then swollen to madness in [its] isolation” (56). On the basis of the Tao’s injunction to protect the weak, we are ordered to silence all speech deemed harmful, affirm obvious falsehoods, and submit meekly to fiats of whoever is most oppressed (or the HR apparatchik who claims to speaks on their behalf). As C.S. Lewis recognized, one part of the Tao is being weaponized against the whole. All our obligations to honesty, fairness, and justice are being sacrificed on the altar of Sacred Victimhood.
For fellow Lewis junkies: instead of the cold, rationalist, cosmic imperialism of Westin in the Space Trilogy, we are lurching towards the smothering, devouring narcissism of Pam in The Great Divorce.
Significance Today
While C.S. Lewis’ context was different than ours, his solutions remain just as relevant: we must reenchant the universe and rediscover the Tao.
The New Atheist movement of the 2000s was convinced that reason and logic would sweep away the darkness of religion, giving birth to a new Enlightenment. Instead, it’s become clear that man cannot live by logic alone. A universe stripped of meaning, purpose, and narrative is a psychologically uninhabitable universe. The Great Awokening filled the vacuum left by New Atheism with a heroic metanarrative, a battle between the liberatory forces of social justice and the bigoted forces of oppression.
Just as C.S. Lewis called for science to be reconceptualized in non-materialistic terms to combat the dry, debunking modernism of his day, we likewise must reconceptualize people’s categories of identity, morality, and justice to combat the “woke” worldview of critical social justice. Identity must be grounded in our status as God’s creatures rather than in our group membership. Morality must be recognized as encompassing all of God’s commands, not merely his commands regarding our treatment of the vulnerable. Finally, justice must be decoupled from equality of outcome. Ultimately, a worldview which runs from oppression to liberation must be re-routed through the narrative of creation, sin, redemption, and restoration.
Christians must also promote a rediscovery of the entirety of the Tao. Lewis pointed out that –in his day– modern people rejected the very idea of the Tao because it conflicted with their materialistic, “scientific” assumptions about reality. Today, we’re facing a different problem: many people can’t believe in a Tao that would conflict with progressive assumptions about gender and sexuality. Here, we must reiterate C.S. Lewis warning that all the injunctions of the Tao stand or fall together. The same Tao that admonishes us to care for the vulnerable also prohibits sexual immorality. To pick and choose from the Tao is to reject the Tao.
Moreover, critical social justice actually engages in the same “debunking” that Lewis criticized, but in a different way. Materialists in Lewis’ day would accept some commands of the Tao as “rational” while rejecting others as “sentimental.” They commanded us to –say– perpetuate the human species while debunking commands to honor our fathers and mothers. Critical theorists similarly accept some elements of the Tao as valid and binding (e.g. “care for the vulnerable”) while debunking other elements as mere mechanisms by which the ruling class perpetuates its privilege.
This approach is, as Lewis noted, wholly unstable. If the command to remain sexually faithful to your spouse is merely a way to perpetuate male power, why isn’t the command to “liberate the oppressed” merely a way to perpetuate the power of DEI bureaucracies? Lewis memorably concludes his book by noting: “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
While Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man from a cultural and historical location that differs substantially from ours, it speaks with timeless authority. Education, like every human endeavor, will flourish when it submits to God and to the reality of his creation. When it rejects God and his creational order, it will wither and perish.
Quotes
“What [the student] will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible. He will have no notion that there are two ways of being immune to such advertisement–that it falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it” (p. 20)
“It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and other are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are…. to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental of filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not” (p. 29).
“The old dealt with its pupils as grown bids deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds–making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing” (32-33).
“Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the powerless organism. I had sooner play cards against a many who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” (p. 34)
“The head rules the belly through the chest… emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” (p. 34). “it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (p. 34)
“The direct frontal attack ‘Why?’–‘What good does it do?’–‘who said so?’ is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao.” (60-61).
“I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity” (p. 61)
What about modern science? “while we did not know how minds were made, we accepted this mental furniture as a datum, even as a master. But many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants. Why not this?” (62)
“What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or the subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda” (68).
“From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turn out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument” (69)
“if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them” (70).
“The last men [before human extinction], far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exert the least power upon the future” (71).
“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” (71)
“The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will be won.. But who, precisely, will have won it?” (72)
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