Make Your Own Morality?

C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis (1898–1963), the bookish and book-writing Oxford don, is known for myriad literary achievements, both academic and popular, both fiction and nonfiction. I have been reading and re-reading his many books for nearly fifty years and have seen during this time a steady stream of books about nearly every aspect of his work and life. (I await C. S. Lewis and his Dogs, however.) For thirty years, I taught a course on the philosophy of C. S. Lewis, which kept me absorbed in his thinking consistently year after year (although I was immersed in it previously). Lewis never gets old and will be read a hundred years from now.

The man known for his (literally) epic children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, and for his perennial bestseller, Mere Christianity, also wrote technical academic works throughout his career. One of the more scholarly works was a small book called The Abolition of Man, which is comprised of three transcribed lectures and an appendix. While many have told me that they find it difficult if not impossible to read, I first read it while in college in 1977 and found a compelling argument for how materialism fails to support objective moral values.

The Abolition of Man, while not an apologetic for Christianity per se, argues cogently for a moral telos and standard for mankind. In Mere Christianity, Lewis claims that a personal God is the best explanation for these truths.

Innovators & Conditioners vs. the Tao

But what does that odd title mean? How can man be “abolished”? Despite the title, Lewis does not mean the extermination of the human race. It all starts, seemingly innocuously, with a textbook for British high school students. Lewis hides the identities of two writers, authors of what he calls The Green Book, who claim that all statements of value are only statements about the person making the statement and are thus not very significant. In discussing a passage in Coleridge about whether a waterfall is “pretty” or “sublime,” the two writers claim the dispute rests on a confusion, since the ascription should be traced to the one making the statement and not to the object in question (the waterfall). “This confusion is continually present in language as we use it,” they write. “We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.”

Lewis judges this assertion to contain a ghastly philosophy, that, if consistently applied, would destroy all objective value and leave human beings as soulless animals, subject to the command of those who create their own values willy-nilly and inflict their will on others with no apprehension of a moral law beyond themselves. Lewis calls them “Innovators.” They reject what Lewis defends: “the doctrine of objective value” or “the Tao”—meaning, “the way of morality,” not Taoism. By the Tao, Lewis means “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Another phrase for this is realism with respect to value, whether moral or aesthetic. The claim Lewis is exposing and wants to refute is called relativism or nonrealism. But I get ahead of myself. What about that waterfall?

Lewis begins his analysis with an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one. This may strike us as odd. Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder? What does a waterfall have to do with “the abolition of man”? He agrees with Coleridge that a waterfall has objective aesthetic value and properties, which can be identified, misidentified, or dismissed as nonexistent. The same applies to moral judgments, such as those pertaining to patriotism. But the two authors of The Green Book have evacuated the world of moral meaning, leaving the world a collection of material states and leaving us as no more than glorified organisms whose pretensions to being more than animals must be dressed down. If objective value is not resident in a transcendent objective reality, then neither instinct nor institutions can give it a home. In one of many lapidary quotes found here, Lewis writes,

From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible.

In other words, you cannot derive a moral ought from a natural is. This is the mistake the atheist Sam Harris makes in The Moral Landscape. He simply assumes certain positive human and political values and proceeds to apply them to a godless world. But he cheats, as Lewis here explains, and as philosopher William Lane Craig cogently insisted in a debate with Harris in 2011. Harris assumes what his worldview will not allow: objective moral value that is not based on mere physical states.

Instinct cannot be the guide if the Tao is removed, since there is no way to rank instincts without a moral standard, and our instincts may conflict with each other with no referee available. Lewis writes, “Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.” (As he writes in Mere Christianity, “The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys [of the piano].”)

Those who reject the Tao have abolished the idea of human nature and its norms. They become “the Innovators,” those who invent morality. To control society, they, as “Conditioners,” must invent new and arbitrary rules and condition (not teach) people to follow them. (Francis Schaeffer called these “arbitrary absolutes.”) Rational persuasion is impossible, since there is no practical reason remaining to guide us in this wasteland of a worldview. “The abolition of man” is complete, at least philosophically.

Moral Relativism & Its Consequences

Godless governments must abolish the biblical view of humanity—and all objective moral value—in order to implement their secular goals. Leaders become surrogate gods, wielding untutored power. Lewis illustrates this philosophy in his fictional work, That Hideous Strength, which pairs well with The Abolition of Man, since Lewis was a brilliant Christian philosopher who was a master of both prose and fiction.

Today, the rejection of human nature and its attending norms finds extreme expression in transgenderism—the claim that sexuality lacks any built-in purpose, but is, rather, subject to arbitrary revision according to subjective preferences. The abolition of man results in the abolition of sexuality as historically and biblically understood.

Man cannot truly be abolished, but he can be bruised, abused, and violated by false philosophies. Lewis’s masterpiece is an intellectual antidote to that disaster.