Lewis on Postmodernism: The Abolition of Man
The words “C.S. Lewis + Quotes” are probably the most googled words by last-minute sermon writers, as it seems that once a month the local pastor is letting one of Lewis’ buttery either/or quotes to slip off of his tongue (the most famous, I’m sure, is the either Jesus was the Son of God or a poached egg argument in Mere Christianity). But Lewis’ beauty is in his subtlety, if not his complexity. And it seems that no book has escaped the average Christian more than The Abolition of Man.
The Abolition of Man is Lewis’ scathing on modernism and on the deconstruction of traditional values, which he calls the Tao. “It is the doctrine of objective value” as Lewis says. The Tao is the universal, shared morality that has always existed despite a lack of shared culture (in some cases). For instance, Lewis notes that “the law of good faith and veracity” was shared by the Babylonians, the Anglo-Saxons, Chinese, Norse, Romans, Greeks, Hindu, Egyptians, and, I would add, the Jews. This importance of a society built on mutual trust was everywhere, and some of these cultures had very little interaction so that its prolific veracity cannot be identified as transferred values.
But Lewis is outraged that the Tao, or system of shared, universal values, is under attack by modern man. To contemporize, Lewis is saying that to educate in postmodernism is to educate in the destruction of society. He warned about what would be the result of unhooking our moral mores in society.
This move by the modernists (Lewis calls them conditioners) in seeking to deconstruct the Tao (or, if you prefer, Natural Law) are seeking to control Nature. These people claim to have deconstructed everything except their ability to deconstruct. Lewis said, “If you ‘see through’ everything then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ things is the same as not to see.”
“Each new power won by man is a power over man as well,” Lewis said. We create airplanes to travel from place to place but airplanes can also demolish buildings. We create bombs and are frequently bombed. And the more humanity learns to control nature the less in control humanity will really have. We know more about psychology now and yet seem less in control of our minds as advertisers use psychology to exploit us. More and more, fewer and fewer men control mankind. Who is able to avoid being bombed except those able to do the bombing?
But good and evil, duty and taboo, vice and virtue, etc. (the Tao) is something subject to and deconstructed by these few men. Since good and evil are beneath their authority, they cannot rule by what is good and what is evil. There is no objective law for them to base their decisions on. So how do they act? How do they determine which is the best way to control their subjects? Having become men without chests (that objective rationality which connects the intellect to the appetite and defines us as humans) we therefore become animals ruled by nature. For when reason was the rule we truly controlled Nature, but in claiming reason is a subjective thing we have destroyed it. Human beings then will be ruled by appetite and instinct and, having rejected the tools to determine which appetite to follow, will be blown about in the wind. Thus, in man’s efforts to conquer human nature we have inevitably subjected the whole of us to nature. We have used our science to deconstruct our humanity and found we were no longer human.
“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.”
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