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The Abolition of Man
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The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," but it actually uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of doing away with or "debunking" those things. It defends science as something worth pursuing but criticizes using it to debunk values —the value of science itself being among them—, or defining it to exclude such values.
s begins with a critical response to what he calls “The Green Book”, by “Gaius and Titius” (in fact The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing by Alex King and Martin Ketley (1939)), which purports to teach English to school children, but takes it upon itself to teach that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object.
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The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," but it actually uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of doing away with or "debunking" those things. It defends science as something worth pursuing but criticizes using it to debunk values —the value of science itself being among them—, or defining it to exclude such values.
Logical positivism vs. natural law
Lewis begins with a critical response to what he calls “The Green Book”, by “Gaius and Titius” (in fact The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing by Alex King and Martin Ketley (1939)), which purports to teach English to school children, but takes it upon itself to teach that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object. Lewis says that such a subjective view of values is faulty, and, on the contrary, certain objects and actions merit positive or negative reactions: that a waterfall can actually be objectively praiseworthy, and that one's actions can be objectively good or evil. In any case, Lewis notes, this is a philosophical position rather than a grammatical one, and so parents and teachers who give such books to their children and students are having them read the "work of amateur philosophers where they expected the work of professional grammarians."
Lewis cites ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, who believed that the purpose of education was to train children in "ordinate affections," that is, to train them to like and dislike what they ought; to love the good and hate the bad. He says that although these values are universal, they do not develop automatically or inevitably in children (and so are not "natural" in that sense of the word), but must be inculcated through education. Those who lack them lack the specifically human element, the trunk that unites intellectual man with visceral (animal) man, and may be called "men without chests".
Men without chests: a dystopian future
Lewis criticizes modern attempts to debunk natural values (such as those that would deny objective value to the waterfall) on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture "... the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christan, the Pagan, and the Jew...". Lewis calls this the Tao (which closely resembles Confucian and Taoist usage). Without the Tao, no value judgements can be made at all, and modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some "rational" reason always proceed by arbitrarily selecting one part of the Tao and using it as grounds to debunk the others.
The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. The controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed.
An appendix to "The Abolition of Man" lists a number of basic values that Lewis saw as parts of the Tao, supported by quotes from different cultures.
A fictional treatment of the dystopian project to carry out the Abolition of Man is a theme of Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.
Influence in popular culture
In 2003, the Post-Hardcore band Thrice based the song "The Abolition of Man", off their album The Artist in the Ambulance, on this book.
National Review ranked the book #7 in its 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century list. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked the book as the second best book of the 20th century.
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