The Abolition of Man
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| Abolition of Man | |
| Author | C. S. Lewis |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Essay |
| Publication date | 1943 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | A Preface to Paradise Lost |
| Followed by | Beyond Personality |
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.
The Abolition of Man begins as a critical response to The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing by Alex King and Martin Ketley (1939), whom Lewis' refers to under the pseudonyms "Gaius and Titius", authors of The Green Book.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Logical positivism vs. natural law
Lewis starts with an observation that certain books purporting to teach English to school children have an implicit philosophy 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. He 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.
He cites ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, who believed that the purpose of education was to train children in the "ordinate affections," that is, 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".
[edit] 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).[1] 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.
[edit] Infuence in popular culture
In 2003, the Post-Hardcore band Thrice based a homonymous song off their album The Artist in the Ambulance on this book.
[edit] References
- ^ Although Lewis saw natural law as supernatural in origin, as evidenced by his use of it as a proof of theism in Mere Christianity, his argument in this book does not rest on theism.
[edit] External links
- Full text of The Abolition of Man at Columbia University (with helpful "transcriber's footnotes")
- Notes on Quotations & Allusions in The Abolition of Man
- A Summary and a Brief Summary of The Abolition of Man
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