The Reestablishment of Man

 Recently, I have had the opportunity to delve into one of C.S. Lewis’s many masterpieces: “The Abolition of Man”. I was particularly struck by the poignancy and relevance of Lewis’ message for today. The book itself is barely eighty pages, yet Lewis has that rare gift of being able to say in only a few words what other authors might spend tomes discussing . As such, I can only touch on a few small things that stood out to me, chief among them being the issue of modern reductionism.  

The book begins as a critique of a high school English textbook​. Lewis refers to the pair of authors under the pseudonyms of “Gaius” and “Titius,” and the anonymous text as, “The Green Book”. Then he proceeds with his criticisms. The first passage of the book upon which Lewis directs his ire concerns a story about a waterfall. As two tourists observe the waterful, one of them describes the sight as “sublime”. According to “The Green Book”, the man who called the waterfall sublime only meant that he had sublime feelings .  

Such an observation may seem innocent enough, but it teaches that an apparently objective statement about an external truth (“the waterfall is sublime”), is in reality a subjective claim that defines the external world according to internal emotions. If the school children accept this to be true, then it necessarily follows that all value judgements are just claims about how the speaker feels. Thus, according to “The Green Book,”statements about virtue such as “this is good” are to be understood as saying, “this makes me feel good”. Against this, Lewis sets up what he calls “the Tao,” which he defines as “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” ​​. Within the Tao, there is right and wrong; there is a grand movement of the universe; there is a bastion of truth and a citadel of virtue. Emotions are evaluated as being either reasonable or unreasonable. “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it”​​. There are times when I ought to be in awe and times when I ought to be in distress. Certain responses are proper for certain situations and others are not. This, Lewis would say, is what children ought to be trained in.  

According to Lewis, these value claims are expressed across cultures and may appear as mere sentiment, but they are axiomatic. When Christ says, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12), He is making an objective claim about values. Lewis goes to great lengths to show how these cannot be derived from mere instinct. Value judgements must exist to rule over conflicting instincts. There are thus two paths: reject the Tao and with it all moral values, or accept the Tao as obligatory, for “if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all”. If we cannot agree that some things (murder, for example) are wrong at the most foundational level, we will fail to build any sort of society worth living in. 

Those who reject the Tao are faced with a clear next step: to fashion a generation free from the perceived oppression of obligatory objective values. This requires power over Nature which “turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument”. Ironically, the Conditioners of this power, who have done away with objective value judgements, themselves are led only by conflicting instincts. “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to man”​. This is where Lewis sees the abolition of man. The Conditioners are men with “no ground to stand on”. “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man”​

According to Lewis, then, the abolition of man is the reduction of man. To reject the Tao is to remove an essential aspect of human experience. It is to dissect—and therefore to kill—humanity. The human person is fundamentally a mystery; like a painting, every detail matters and is invaluable to the harmony of the whole. Man without virtue is no man at all; he becomes a beast to be wielded by other men, and those men are themselves slaves to their natural, bestial instincts, or, as Lewis would say, to “Nature”. In our quest for freedom, we have become slaves. 

As a result, our modern world faces struggles that are the product of such a reduction being allowed to fester. Take, for example, the issue of abortion, a horror that the world of C.S. Lewis had yet to fully conceive. Frequently, those who condemn it are privy to the objection that a fetus is “just a clump of cells”. While it is true that a fetus is a clump of cells —and so are we— that is not all that the unborn child is; to say so is to reduce a child simply to its parts The fetus is a unique human person who is already bound to the life of another and has been from the moment of conception. But our modern western society has reduced this child to “Nature”. As Lewis put it, “[Nature] seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness;” and again, “The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her”. When something is reduced to mere quantity, you can do with it whatever you please—even if that “something” is an unborn child.

In our postmodern society, we  have already abolished man, and are currently watching the consequences unfold. We think that we are self-determined, free from the oppressive judgement of the Tao, and yet we are chained to our feelings. We think that our feelings define truth—I might have one reality, and you might have another. All the same, I cannot relate to people if I see them as objects and not as people. While we have succeeded at becoming gods– the universes we rule are pitifully small and lonely; loneliness is one of the most pressing issues facing modern youth; suicide rates are only rising; we have so much power at our fingertips, yet we cannot seem to manufacture joy or friendship or love–we have failed at the ultimate task of becoming men.  

Is our situation hopeless? If man has been abolished, can man be reestablished? For the Christian, the abolition of man began in the garden, when man first desired to become like God without God. The world turned from something to be loved to something that is possessed and controlled. The conquest over nature is the rejection of man’s calling to steward nature. The conquest of some men over other men began when Cain slew Abel. Yet, for the Christian, man has already been reestablished. The new Adam has come and reconciled us to God. When Christ died “for the life of the world” (John 6:51), He filled this dead universe with life. He invites us to share in this life, and for those of us who believe He gives us “the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). We become truly human when we surrender control of our individual and lonely universes and accept the invitation of the King of Glory to dwell within our hearts and fill them with His joy and friendship and love.