C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man

I finished reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis the other week. (Tip: if you want some classic CSL quotes, skip to the bottom of this post.) This is so far the only book I've managed to read all the way through since exams, and is a not particularly long book. It's an interesting work, consisting of three lectures Lewis gave in the 1940s about the crisis of values in modern culture. According to the blurb on the back of the book:

"In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society. Both astonishing and prophetic, this book is one of the most debated of Lewis's extraordinary works."

(And yes, I was reading an American edition, the 2001 HarperSanFrancisco edition to be precise, hence "honor". Thankfully English spelling is retained in the text itself.)

I'm not sure I follow all of Lewis's points, and if I did I'm not sure if I would agree with them all, but the overall effect is quite thought-provoking. The three lectures together form an interesting and bold trajectory. In the first, Lewis starts by attacking subjectivism in the teaching of English in schools (i.e. a poem is good only because I think it's good), going on to criticise the modern dominance of functional or "utilitarian" values over broader and richer human values. I have a friend who currently works for the DfES and is frustrated by what he sees as a "skills" culture which neglects more "transcendent" notions of value and of educating the whole person rather than an economic commodity. (In my exam on the "English moralists" I managed to quote DfES documents on citizenship teaching in contrast to Plato's view in Protagoras that good citizenship cannot be taught.)

In the second chapter, C.S. Lewis outlines the system of ethical value he believes to be under attack. He claims that this system is universal and finds embodiment in every major culture. Confusingly, he refers to this as the Tao, which I think he chose as a non-Western and therefore "neutral" term, but this concept is often referred to in Western thought as the Natural Law. The appendix to the book provides a series of ethical statements from world civilisations which illustrates the component parts of this system, including acting benevolently towards others, respecting elders and caring for the young and vulnerable. He also finds sterner values such as justice and courage in war in this system of value which he commends. This code of conduct bears strong resemblances to what Alisdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum would call the "heroic" code, found, for example, in Homer's epics, though Lewis also finds more altruistic strands, such as universal benevolence, in this universal ethical code.

Having bewailed the supplanting of this deep-rooted system of value with an attenuated modern system of ethics based on "rational" self-interest, Lewis considers in his final chapter where he believes this sinister trajectory is headed - towards the denial of all objective value and the treatment of humanity simply as raw material to be conditioned. Lewis makes the point that for "man" to have power over "human destiny" is in actual fact for some humans to have power over other humans, and extends this in an interesting way by saying that each generation seeks to exert power over future generations and to resist the influence of past generations. Lewis suggests that if one generation's power over future generations were to become total, though eugenics and similar means, humanity would be reduced to raw material and thus what makes humans human would be destroyed. In a similar way, it can be useful to explain one set of values in relation to another, but to try to find a perspective beyond objective value by which to explain objective value is desperately counterproductive, since it leads to the destruction of all value. This would be "the abolition of man".

"I am a man rather prone to think of remote futurity - a man who can read Mr Olaf Stapledon with delight", says Lewis. My knowledge of Olaf Stapledon is almost entirely limited to the several references in CSL, though it's a great name for a writer. The "remote futurity" envisaged by Lewis seems, if I may say so, rather a mid 20th century conception of the future, similar to that found in H.G. Wells and George Orwell (and presumably Stapledon). My reading of science fiction is fairly scant, but Lewis envisages a dystopian dominance of technology over humanity. In fact, it is more the technological mindset than technology itself that becomes oppressive, the treating of all things as a means to an end. As CSL is at pains to point out, he is not against science itself, but against a reductionistic, so-called "scientific" mindset, which wants to explain away and control everything, even human nature itself. Though, on further reflection, I guess the information revolution exemplified by the Internet has extended and modified, rather than removed, this fear of "the abolition of man" by technocracy (witness The Matrix - IMDB entry; official trilogy site). Today, I would suggest, it is the disintegration of a stable value system rather than the tyranny of misused science which forms the more pertinent part of Lewis's warning.

If you've found this hard going, take heart - Lewis's prose is better and so easier to follow than mine. Here are some quotes:

"To disagree with This is pretty if those words simply described the lady's feelings, would be absurd: if she had said I feel sick Coleridge would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well." (p.15)

"Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence?" (pp.35-6)

"Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it." (pp.80-1)