| The Abolition of Man |
| The Abolition of Man is perhaps the best defense of natural law to be published in the twentieth century. The book is outstanding not because its ideas are original, but because it presents so clearly the common sense of the subject, brilliantly encapsulating the Western natural law tradition in all its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian glory. Interestingly, Lewis' defense of objective morality here resonates not only with ideas from the giants of Western thought (including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas), but also draws on the wisdom of the East, including Confucius and the sages of Hinduism. In �The Abolition of Man� C.S. Lewis developed three lectures entitled �Men without Chests'', �The Way�, and �The Abolition of Man�. In them he set out to attack and confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He started by quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists' textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral subjectivism. In his second lecture he argued against various contemporary isms, which purported to replace traditional objective morality. His final lecture, �The Abolition of Man�, which also provided the title of the book published the following year, was a sustained attack on hard-line scientific anti-humanism. The first essay, "Men without Chests," indicted the modern attempt to debunk objective virtues and sentiments. According to Lewis, traditional moral theorists believed that virtues such as courage and honor were true regardless of culture; these theorists also maintained that the purpose of education was to inculcate virtues in people by linking them to the proper emotions. This process of reinforcing virtue with emotion produced "sentiments" in people, supplying them with "chests" that safeguarded them from savagery. By debunking all sentiments as merely subjective, however, modern critics have generated "men without chests", human beings who are unable to resist their basest appetites because they have been deprived of the very means of resistance. The situation has made civilization unsustainable according to Lewis. "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise," he observed. "We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." Lewis concluded his first essay by launching his argument for the existence of an objective moral code that transcended time and culture. In the second essay, The Way, Lewis claimed that an honest study of different cultures, far from showing ethical confusion, indicated the existence of a universal moral code, which Lewis (drawing on ancient Chinese philosophy) called the "Tao." Deny the Tao and the existence of objective value, and you deny the validity of the objective which nearly every religion depends on to govern conduct. We require these objective standards, and not surprisingly all religions have arrived at roughly the same ones, for �As the king governs by the executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited.' The head rules the belly through the chest� It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests.� It was this objective value system which was missing in that English text book sent to Lewis by the two schoolmasters, which Lewis referred to as �The Green Book�, outlining their approach in teaching English to schoolboys. Their lack of an objective value or truth system in his view would de-humanise those schoolboys by destroying rationality and morality, because it is this Tao, this bedrock of basic values, which defines us as humans as distinct from animals. "Stepping out of the Tao," says Lewis, "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." This argument embodies the third and last chapter, the Abolition of Man. Suppose that the subjectivists succeed and they destroy the Tao, the concept of objective value. What will they erect in its place? The answer of course must be that whoever wields temporal power at any given moment will get to define and impose their version of "morality". It is the Natural Law (the Tao) that enables us to convict Nazi war criminals even though they were "following orders." We understand that it is possible for a legal order to be "unlawful". This is because we, all of us regardless of our rhetoric, believe in the Natural Law and objective values. When we truly stop believing, then it will be up to the state, as the only power left, to both pass laws and define morality. The state itself will "Condition" behavior. At that point, all orders will be lawful. All actions of the state will be permissible. At the point where Natural Law has degenerated completely, all that remains to be determined is the character of the state, and what behavior it chooses to mandate. Without this law, mankind finds itself in �a terrible fix�. The fix we are in is guilt before a holy God, the one who is the Giver of this Law. The fact is that without even opening our Bibles we are aware of two realities, observes Lewis. "First that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not, in fact, behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature, and they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in." At this point, Lewis might well ask, as he often did: "Is it not true? Do you not find it to be so?" And so, in conclusion, we have to say, "Yes, we find it to be so." Yes, we find it to be so that there is such a thing as a moral code written into the fabric of the universe and into our hearts (chests) and into nature by God Himself. And we find it to be so that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And we find it to be so that this Moral Law is known and discerned in Natural Revelation by the major religions of the world, by the dictates of conscience and by the constituted order of things in nature. That is why, all that being so, "we have cause to be uneasy", because faced with this Law (Tao) of God, with Absolute Goodness, and demands therein, we see we that we have "all sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). When we take some time to ponder the meanings of The Abolition of Man and its writings, we see that Lewis� essays were not new ideas at all. In the contrary, they were reminders of what man has intrinsically known since the beginning of time. As Samuel Johnson once said, �Man is in need more frequently of being reminded than informed.� |