Goobie’s Notes version of - The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It was first delivered as a series of three evening lectures at King's College, Newcastle, England on February 24–26, 1943. The National Review ranked the book #7 in its 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked the book as the second best book of the 20th century. Professor Peter Kreeft of Boston College lists the book as one of five "books to read to save Western Civilization". In my humble opinion, the book is prophetic in it’s predictions concerning future generations of male persons (those living today) who are unknowingly afflicted with blindness and have fallen terribly short in their potential to be men.
The following Shortened Content is taken verbatim from The Abolition of Man and condensed to focus on the ideas, concepts, predictions and warnings in the book. The condensed version is approximately 1/10 of the total content. If it strikes you as a powerful guide and insight for life, you can find the whole book for free on numerous websites.
Shortened Content: Gaius and Titius are teaching a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power
of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy
who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics,
theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his
mind, but an assumption, which ten
years hence, its origin
forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in
a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy,
and he cannot know what is being done to him. What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps
indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in
themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.
I think Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the
pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed
by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is
sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the
minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an
opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess
of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold
vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down
jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to
inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our
pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For
famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection
against a soft head.
Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the
universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be
either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not
merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our
reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with
the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who
called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such
that certain responses could be more 'just' or 'ordinate' or 'appropriate' to
it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same.
The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe
his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited
those emotions.
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris,
the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that
kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.11 Aristotle
says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.12
When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained
in 'ordinate affections' or 'just sentiments' will easily find the first
principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all
and he can make no progress in that science.13 Plato before
him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right
responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at
those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.14
In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth
is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of
man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just
distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would
give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished
by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at
length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in
welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.'15
In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists
in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that
great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in
the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple.
Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified
with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said
that the Good was 'beyond existence' and Wordsworth that through virtue the
stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves
are born of the Rta and obey it.16 The Chinese also speak of a great thing
(the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality
beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is
Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe
goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly,
into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in
imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities
to that great exemplar.17 'In ritual', say the Analects,
'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.'18 The ancient Jews
likewise praise the Law as being 'true'.19
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian,
Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for
brevity simply as 'the Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have
quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what
is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is 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. Those who know the Tao can hold that to
call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a
psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but
to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether
we make it or not. No emotion is,
in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical.
But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to
conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should,
obey it.
The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of
Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable
sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison
officers between cerebral man and visceral man. 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 is an outrage that they
should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to
say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not
distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any
virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a
persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be
long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could
debunk as easily as any other. It is
not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks
them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that
makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we
continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You
can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our
civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or
'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly
simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. 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. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
`Why should you suppose they will be such bad
men?' But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in
the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in
traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what
`Humanity' shall henceforth mean. `Good' and `bad', applied to them, are words
without content: for it is from them that the
content of these words is henceforward to be derived.
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
artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.
The wresting of powers from Nature is also
the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops
short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But
as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of
mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been
sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many
instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion
produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman
who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence
concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house
with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain:
give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will
not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to
which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as
a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for
scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does
not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a
dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and
the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw
material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly
imagined, by himself, but by
mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized
Conditioners.
Because we
have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be
like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of
step as the one before. I
implore you to remember the Irishman and his two stoves. There are progressions in which
the last step is sui generis—incommensurable with the others—and in
which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey.
To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up
to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us
something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on `explaining away' for
ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot
go on `seeing through5 things for ever. The whole point
of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the
window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.
How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to `see through'
first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is
transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see
through' all things is the same as not to see.
The direct frontal attack 'Why?'—'What good does it do?'—'Who said so?'
is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no
values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that
kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own
criticism as well as the thing criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor
must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been
examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It
is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can
recognize Reason when it comes.9 It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man
'perfect as touching the Law' who learns where and how that Law was deficient.10
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I may add that though I myself am a Theist,
and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for
Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes
of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt,
having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some
supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed.
At the moment, then, of Man's victory
over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and
those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to
their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values,
rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of
Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of
Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this
conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals.
We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands
held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If
the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of
the planning) comes into existence, Nature
will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her
so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth
and mercy and beauty and happiness.
