The Abolition of Man: Chapters One and Two

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

Wel­come to week one of the Chi Alpha sum­mer read­ing project!

Some resources that may prove use­ful to you:

• Quo­ta­tions and Allu­sions in The Abo­li­tion of Man — Lewis quotes from or alludes to a lot of exter­nal writ­ings. This shows you what he’s talk­ing about.
• C. S. Lewis Doo­dles: Men With­out Chests: a delight­ful YouTube chan­nel where­in a nar­ra­tor reads Lewis aloud while an illus­tra­tor doo­dles what is being said.

On to Lewis’s argu­ment. He noticed a fea­ture in an Eng­lish text­book which great­ly both­ered him: the authors teach that val­ue judg­ments about the world are state­ments of feel­ing rather than state­ments of fact. Lewis points out that this is a very pow­er­ful form of indoc­tri­na­tion and adds that this is an enor­mous dif­fer­ence from the past.

Until quite mod­ern times all teach­ers and even all men believed the uni­verse to be such that cer­tain emo­tion­al reac­tions on our part could be either con­gru­ous or incon­gru­ous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not mere­ly receive, but could mer­it, our approval or dis­ap­proval, our rev­er­ence or our con­tempt. (page 699 in our anthol­o­gy)

He gives sev­er­al exam­ples and lumps them togeth­er under the com­mon name of the Tao:

This con­cep­tion in all its forms, Pla­ton­ic, Aris­totelian, Sto­ic, Chris­t­ian, and Ori­en­tal alike, I shall hence­forth refer to for brevi­ty sim­ply as ‘the Tao’.… what is com­mon to them all is some­thing we can­not neglect. It is the doc­trine of objec­tive val­ue, 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. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call chil­dren delight­ful or old men ven­er­a­ble is not sim­ply to record a psy­cho­log­i­cal fact about our own parental or fil­ial emo­tions at the moment, but to rec­og­nize a qual­i­ty which demands a cer­tain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the soci­ety of small chil­dren: because I speak from with­in the Tao I rec­og­nize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to rec­og­nize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and dis­ap­provals are thus recog­ni­tions of objec­tive val­ue or respons­es to an objec­tive order, there­fore emo­tion­al states can be in har­mo­ny with rea­son (when we feel lik­ing for what ought to be approved) or out of har­mo­ny with rea­son (when we per­ceive that lik­ing is due but can­not feel it). (pages 701–702)

It is worth think­ing about his illus­tra­tion. I sus­pect some of you will strong­ly dis­agree with it with­out quite know­ing why. Here it is in bare form: not lik­ing chil­dren is a moral defect. It is not “just the way you are.” It is the way you have become, and you have an oblig­a­tion to try to become some­one bet­ter. And even if your dis­like of chil­dren was a mat­ter of your genet­ics of some­thing else beyond your con­trol it would not stop being a moral defect.

But our cul­ture rejects these moral oblig­a­tions along with many oth­ers; more than that, we refuse to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er that they might actu­al­ly be moral oblig­a­tions instead of per­son­al choic­es. We teach that val­ues are mat­ters of opin­ion. And this leads to the stun­ning per­ora­tion of the first lec­ture:

In a sort of ghast­ly sim­plic­i­ty we remove the organ and demand the func­tion. 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. (page 704)

In light of Lewis’ argu­ment, reflect on this recent essay about an arti­cle in the pres­ti­gious pub­li­ca­tion For­eign Pol­i­cy: Should Ama­zon tribes be allowed to kill their young? For­eign Pol­i­cy edi­tors aren’t sure (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion):

“In recent years, cer­tain tribes in the Ama­zon region have been in the news because of their unpleas­ant habit of killing deformed or hand­i­capped chil­dren as well as twins, and even off­spring of sin­gle moms, soon after birth. They also may kill trans­gen­dered indi­vid­u­als. I thought the con­sen­sus was pret­ty clear that such prac­tices were evil. But along came an arti­cle (it was a month ago, but I’m only get­ting around to it now) in For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine that argued how sav­ing the lives of these chil­dren was a west­ern val­ue that didn’t fit with the cus­toms and lifestyle of these tribes.”

If he read that arti­cle, Lewis would not be sur­prised. Reject­ing the Tao opens the door to mad­ness.

In the sec­ond chap­ter, “The Way”, Lewis points out that many peo­ple attempt to hold on to objec­tive ethics with­out admit­ting that they are doing so.

A great many of those who ‘debunk’ tra­di­tion­al or (as they would say) ‘sen­ti­men­tal’ val­ues have in the back­ground val­ues of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunk­ing process. They claim to be cut­ting away the par­a­sitic growth of emo­tion, reli­gious sanc­tion, and inher­it­ed taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ val­ues may emerge. I will now try to find out what hap­pens if this is seri­ous­ly attempt­ed. (page 706)

The most com­mon attempt to find a source of val­ues apart from the Tao is to appeal to human nature. When I talk with skep­tics on cam­pus they most com­mon­ly try to ground moral­i­ty in evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy. But it doesn’t work. Lewis explains:

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. (page 707)

In oth­er words, the only way to derive moral­i­ty is to pre­sup­pose moral­i­ty. Just as the sum of two num­bers will itself be a num­ber, facts can only pro­duce moral oblig­a­tions if moral oblig­a­tions are them­selves facts.

Lewis says a lot more in these chap­ters, but this email is already too lengthy.

Those are the things that stood out to me. What stood out to you?