Tag: The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man, Chapter 3 & Appendix

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

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.

I hope you’re enjoy­ing the read­ings as much as I am. I had for­got­ten how prophet­ic Lewis is in this lit­tle vol­ume.

If you’ve got­ten a lit­tle behind, there is an excel­lent short sum­ma­ry of all three chap­ters by Arend Smilde at Lewisiana and a 13 page study guide by Dr. David Nau­gle at Dal­las Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty.

I’ll con­tent myself with three quotes that stood out to me:

When all that says ‘It is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains…. those who stand out­side all judge­ments of val­ue can­not have any ground for pre­fer­ring one of their own impuls­es to anoth­er except the emo­tion­al strength of that impulse. (pages 723–724)

This insight alone explains SO MUCH about con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. Strength of feel­ing over­whelms every­thing else in today’s moral dis­course. In fact, emo­tion has become the new deter­min­er of moral val­ues for many peo­ple. Pick vir­tu­al­ly any news sto­ry and you will see this play­ing out, espe­cial­ly when it comes to the debates sur­round­ing the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion and its con­se­quences.

It is not sur­pris­ing that the sex­u­al norms preva­lent in our soci­ety are in direct con­tra­dic­tion to the old ones, because one of the func­tions of the Tao is to be a trel­lis upon which our emo­tions may grow. To revis­it Lewis’s phras­ing from the first chap­ter “Men With­out Chests”, it used to be that the head (rea­son) shaped the chest (emo­tions trained by habit) and there­by gov­erned the bel­ly (desire). But in our time it often hap­pens that the bel­ly shapes the chest and there­by gov­erns the head. Our wants have become self-authen­ti­cat­ing and dom­i­neer­ing.

My oth­er favorite quote from this chap­ter address­es the lim­its of skep­ti­cism:

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. 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. (page 730)

This reminds me of some­thing Lewis said in the pre­vi­ous chap­ter:

The rebel­lion of new ide­olo­gies against the Tao is a rebel­lion of the branch­es against the tree: if the rebels could suc­ceed they would find that they had destroyed them­selves. The human mind has no more pow­er of invent­ing 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. (page 714)

Rad­i­cal skep­ti­cism is self-defeat­ing. If it suc­ceeds it fails.

Some­thing I often tell peo­ple is that they need to learn to doubt their doubts. Our aca­d­e­m­ic cul­ture con­di­tions us to place doubt in a priv­i­leged posi­tion over trust, but doubt is not a neu­tral thing. Doubt needs a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion just as belief does, and when you are inclined to doubt (whether the word of a friend, a truth of a moral prin­ci­ple, or the accu­ra­cy of a claim) it is worth ask­ing whether the rea­sons for and costs of doubt­ing out­weigh the rea­sons for and costs of trust­ing. Some­times they will, and some­times they will not.

Skep­ti­cism, inci­den­tal­ly, is dif­fer­ent from ask­ing ques­tions. Skep­ti­cism is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent thing than curios­i­ty.

John 12:37 illus­trates the dif­fer­ence: “Even after Jesus had per­formed so many signs in their pres­ence, they still would not believe in him.” Unbe­lief, in this sense, is a choice. It is not that they did not have rea­son to believe in Jesus — it is that they did not want to believe in Jesus. Hebrews 3:12 warns us not to have “an evil, unbe­liev­ing heart.” But we must weigh that against Jude 1:22 which tells us to “be mer­ci­ful to those who doubt”, against the praise giv­en the Bere­ans for their “noble char­ac­ter” in Acts 17:11 for inves­ti­gat­ing the claims of the apos­tle Paul, and against the fact that Thomas is not con­demned for his hes­i­ta­tion to believe in John 20:24–29. Putting them togeth­er, we see that God is not both­ered by hon­est ques­tions but He is opposed to moti­vat­ed skep­ti­cism.

The lat­ter is famous­ly illus­trat­ed by Aldous Hux­ley in his book Ends and Means, “For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the phi­los­o­phy of mean­ing­less­ness was essen­tial­ly an instru­ment of lib­er­a­tion from a cer­tain sys­tem of moral­i­ty. We object­ed to the moral­i­ty because it inter­fered with our sex­u­al free­dom.”

I think there are many peo­ple in our cul­ture like Hux­ley. I pray they learn to doubt their doubts before it is too late.

Side note: Hux­ley was a con­tem­po­rary of Lewis — they actu­al­ly died with­in hours of each oth­er. There’s a fun lit­tle book premised upon this fact called Between Heav­en and Hell by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Peter Kreeft. It’s a clever dia­log between Lewis, Hux­ley, and John F. Kennedy (who also died with­in hours of these two) as they await the after­life and debate what is going to hap­pen next.

That’s all for this week. Next week we begin read­ing The Four Loves!

The Abolition of Man: Chapters One and Two

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

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:

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?

Kicking off the C. S. Lewis Summer Reading Project

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

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.

This is the first week of our sum­mer read­ing project. I’ll be send­ing out reminders to read along with some com­men­tary on the read­ings through­out the sum­mer. Remem­ber that the sched­ule is online (you can print it out and use it as a book­mark if you find that help­ful).

This week we’re read­ing the first two chap­ters of The Abo­li­tion of Man by C.S. Lewis: “Men With­out Chests” and “The Way” (pages 693–717 in the anthol­o­gy).  If you don’t have a copy of the book yet, you can hear it enter­tain­ing­ly pre­sent­ed on the C.S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel (not all of our read­ings are on this chan­nel, but some will be).

I believe this is one of Lewis’s most impor­tant books, and I am not alone in my opin­ion. In The Narn­ian, Alan Jacobs (him­self an excel­lent essay­ist) calls The Abo­li­tion of Man the “most pro­found of Lewis’s cul­tur­al cri­tiques” (page 174).

At first you may won­der why you are read­ing about a British high school text­book from 1939, but as you progress into the chap­ter you’ll dis­cov­er that Lewis is point­ing out a pro­found error in think­ing which has become even more wide­spread today. I encour­age you to per­se­vere; the pay­off is worth it. The last four sen­tences of the first chap­ter are among the most pow­er­ful I have read, and you will find that the sec­ond chap­ter seems to be addressed to your con­tem­po­raries at Stan­ford.