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Summary: C.S. Lewis's Next Greatest Book
Review: After Mere Christianity I think this is C.S.Lewis' greatest book. This is not at all a treatise on Christianity. In fact he employs his alacrity with the other schools of religious thought to better make his points. Its focus is on subtle turns of phrases employed in school texts that diminish and undermine the the man's unique ability to impute quality of character, nobility, and beauty to objects and events. One chapter called Men Without Chests is a phrase that will haunt you time and again as you think back on this book when discussing why things seem better than ever in the world today... yet people feel more shallow and empty and don't know why. The book discusses how man is teaching away his humanity. It is inspired by a simple line quoted from a school text book about a waterfall. At first it is difficult to see what C.S. Lewis feels so passionate about but well before the end of the book you understand clearly. This is a book that can bring you into focus and may have a lasting impact on the way you look at the world. By the books end you may find yourself even more human than when you began
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Summary: A truly profound book
Review: C.S. Lewis's masterpiece, THE ABOLITION OF MAN, is a great work not only because it challenged the thinking of readers 50 years ago and continues to challenge our thinking today, but because it is one of the most visionary books of its time. Here Lewis discusses not only the issue of "objective vs. subjective" truth in a fascinating (if not definitive) manner, he also brings to bear philosophical questions about the nature and epistemology of scientific research and the ethics of genetic programming and evolutionary biology. In doing so Lewis was at least 30 years ahead of his time: his answer to the question of whether ethics could possibly be the product of evolutionary forces, a current hotspot in philosophy, has been reformulated and perhaps improved upon but not yet challenged. And while his book is a tour de force on the necessity of believing in objective truth, his question about whether empirical research is inevitably "a basilisk that kills what it sees and only sees by killing" has been echoed over and over by constructionist philosophers of science in recent years. You may not be persuaded by Lewis's arguments, but you will certainly be intrigued by the questions he raises.
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Summary: Habermas repeats this argument in Future of Human Nature
Review: I read this on the advice of one friend and was encouraged by another. It starts out in a very surprising way. But of course! Considering this would be written to be published in 1944 a perspective of this sort on values surprises me only to the extent that it has a target at all. I at first thought the real target must be G.E. Moore but he specifically mentions Nietzsche later in the text. (This resulted in a reading of Moore's "The Refutation of Idealism" leading to a review of some of Berkeley's work...) I found his discussion of the non-dulce character of death (p. 22) interesting in light of what he would later write in "A Grief Observed." (Did anyone ever figure out who he meant by Gaius and Titius?) I also read a BMR review of The Future of Human Nature by Jurgen Habermas, and noticed that the basic form of most of Habermas' argument followed that of C.S. Lewis in this book. While Habermas (in translation) is concerned with the relationship hypothetical "programmers" would have with the "objects" of their efforts, Lewis refers to the "conditioners" but the reasoning is the same. I suppose this reflects the change from using behaviorism as the tool of control to our more contemporary set of computer metaphors. Notice also that Lewis uses the expression "post-humanity" p. 75. This is revisited in Fukuyama's book "Our Posthuman Future".
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Summary: The intellectual bankruptcy of ethical relativism.
Review: The book contains three closely related essays on ethical relativism. As different as Eastern philosophy (Chinese and Indian) may be from Western philosophy (Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian), all seriously reasoned and internally consistent systems of ethics (i.e., morality) accept the true existence of an absolute Good. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis, a thinker deeply versed in philosophy, philology, and ancient literature, calls this universal ethical reference system 'the Tao' (borrowing a generalization from Confucius). He exposes the logical self-contradictions and the human negation of modern dogmas of moral relativism.
From 'Men without Chests': "The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of [students] we only make them easier prey to the propagandist ... a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."
From 'The Way': "An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut."
From 'The Abolition of Man': "It is not that [propagandists of ethical relativism] are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside of the Tao, 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 proven to be the abolition of Man."
We accept relativism in modern physics because reason has led us to it. But popularized ideas of relativism in ethics, while sometimes transparently parading as 'intellectualism' (this label attempts to discourage critical examination), must take a course which leads far from consistent logic, and which ultimately turns against itself. This book is an outstanding offering from the wonderful mind of C.S. Lewis.
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Summary: Lewis and the Unabomber
Review: Those who read this book, might also want to read Alston Chase's Harvard and the Unabomber. There Chase traces Ted Kaczynski's hatred of technology to two factors, one of which was the education he received at Harvard between 1958 and 1962. At that time, the sorts of ideas that Lewis blasts in The Abolition of Man were beginning to take over Ivy League campuses. In a effort to counter them, aging humanities professors managed to add 'Great Books' to the required courses. They also warned of the dangers if the technocrats (value-free science) took control of society. To counter them, the technocrats blasted books by "dead white men." Ironically, while both Lewis and Kaczynski hated what the technocrats were doing when they regarded human ideas such as truth, goodness and beauty as meaningless, only Lewis offered constructive answers. Kaczynski could only hate the evil and, in the end, become as evil as what he hated. Lewis was also influenced in this area by Arthur Balfour's Theism and Humanism, which argues that a healthy humanism benefits from a belief in God. As some have put it, if God is dead then all that matters in man must die--truth, beauty and goodness.
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Summary: Universal rules for knowing what to do or not to do
Review: INTRODUCTION
This famous 50-page survey of Natural Law thinking is one of Professor Lewis's tougher but more important works and with the current revival of NL thinking it should rise again. As moral philosophy (of the realist-objectivist school), via ancient literature, it is unusual and original. It is certainly not a work of theology. Confucius, Hindu 'Laws of Manu', and ancient Babylonians are quoted on a par with the Old and New Testament. (Catholics may sail through; but antinominianists will struggle against a non-theist exposition of the universal Law. In this case take Rom. ch. 1-3, and a bracing meditation on the concept of General Revelation as a tonic.) Although its terseness makes it unsuitable for beginners, it would be possible to work up to it; either via Lewis's 'Mere Christianity', Book I, and Book III, parts 1-5 (a total of about 40 pages); and then the two essays from his book 'Christian Reflections', entitled 'On Ethics' and 'The Poison of Subjectivism' (total 25 pages). Or read Plato's 'Republic', Bks. 1-4, avoiding the old Jowett translation. (Kantians could limber up with 'Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law', by John Wild.) SYNOPSIS: Chapter 1: Men Without Chests
The first 7 pages are discursive and, read once, may be skipped thereafter (rather like Book 1 of Plato's 'Republic'). They famously and confusingly deal with the link between objective aesthetics and emotive reactions to 'Nature'. It is not for Philosophy 101 students, reactions ranging from: 'What--who cares?--it's only opinion', to 'How is this relevant?'. Read the 'Republic', Bks. 1-4 until mastered. The dogs of war are unleashed in the next 6 pages, from the paragraph opening: '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...' We then race through Coleridge and Shelley's 'just' and 'ordinate' reaction to beauty in Nature; Augustine's on 'virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections'; Aristotle and Plato on education (beauty and ethics); Rta and satya in early Hinduism; Tao (pronounced "Dao") in the Analects; and the Law (of the Lord) of the Hebrews. [Compare ancient Egyptian Maat.]. This is the universal 'doctrine of objective value'. To not know it is to invite the separation of fact and value, as all sentiments (emotional habits) are made purely subjective and even non-rational. Plato's tripartite model of Man: the Rational element rules the Appetites via the Sentiments (Spirited Element): 'The head rules the belly through the chest...The Chest--Magnanimity-- Sentiment--these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.' To deny this model is to produce Men Without Chests. Chapter 2: The Way
Even Subjectivists have objective values. The fact that they act at all, even to propagate their own point of view, proves that they hold some real values. Calling values 'progressive' is subterfuge: progressing to what, and why? Modern ideologies isolate an element of morality, exaggerate its importance, and suppress others. Eg, communist States supposedly feed everyone fairly-but crush individuality, freedom, truth, and creativity if it helps. We cannot get a moral basis for human action from reasoning with facts alone--no deducing an 'ought' from an 'is'. This does not debunk moral reasoning: it merely proves that there must be Moral Axioms to start from, as there axioms in logic. Plato and the Stoics called this basic morality Natural Law, the other cultures by their synonyms. Lewis chooses the term the 'Tao' for brevity and neutrality. Scientific objections: morality is Instinct--but if two instincts clash how will you know which to obey? There is no Master instinct. The great civilizations all agree in this: so much for sociological relativism. Moral progress within the tradition of the Tao is possible: Paul the Pharisee, 'perfect as touching the Law', yet he saw its limits. Chapter 3: The Abolition of Man
The 'Brave New World' scenario: if we cede final and total socio-psychological control to technocrat master-politicians even the few at the top will have to act according to some moral principles. But they also must be the ultimate Supermen, incapable of making mistakes, and guaranteeing happiness for the brainwashed ant-minions: '...the magician's bargain: to give up our soul, get power in return.' But to give up your soul is to lose yourself. And so losing free will in society results in the Abolition of Man. Appendix: Illustrations of the Tao
Select quotations on the basic morality of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, Anglo-Saxon, etc. 1. The Law of General Beneficence, negative and positive.
Do not murder. Love thy neighbour. (Hebrew) 2. The Law of Special Beneficence
If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith. (Christian) 3. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors
Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. (Hindu) 4. Duties to Children and Posterity
The Master said, Respect the young. (Chinese) 5. The Law of Justice: sexual; honesty; in court
Has he approached his neighbour's wife? [sinfully];
To wrong, to rob, to cause to be robbed;
Whoso takes no bribe [in the judiciary]...well pleasing is this... (Babylonian) 6. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity
The foundation of justice is good faith. (Roman) 7. The Law of Mercy
I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked. (Egyptian) 8. The Law of Magnanimity (self-sacrifice)
To take no notice of a violent attack is to strengthen the heart of the enemy. Vigour is valiant, but cowardice is vile. (Pharaoh Senusert III, Egypt.)
Rating: 
Summary: Too close to home
Review: The Abolition of Man is curious. It begins from a mere germ of an idea, inferred from an unchallenged source, and then slowly balloons until it is a diatribe against eugenics, modern education, moral relativism, egoism, secularism, scientism, Nietzche, Darwin, and Jeremy Bentham. It's a rather audacious trajectory, and would be ludicrous if it weren't so... accurate. As the saying goes: "I'm not paranoid if they're really out to get me." Lewis makes some bold statements here, extrapolating from a relatively subtle implication in a textbook to a metaphysical humanist conspiracy. But Lewis understands Natural Law, and understand the penalties of disobedience. Consequently, the picture he paints of the evolutionary abolition of anything recognizably human in man is disturbing and all too believable. Anyone familiar with today's college campus, or today's journalist, will realize the total victory of relativism (unless, of course, he is a relativist). Conditional eugenics, so thoroughly disgraced by the Nazis and the New Deal, is replaced by Genetic eugenics, praised and lauded ala the human genome project. Anyone who sits back and wonders what we'll do "once we crack the code," ought to read The Abolition of Man for his answer... or "Dumbing Us Down" for confirmation.
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Summary: Read more carefully [...]
Review: This book will not be easy for everyone, but it will be rewarding to engage with it, even if you disagree with Lewis' thinking. The series of lectures known as _The Abolition of Man_ (TAoM), which are presented here as essays, are not intended to be thorough or in-depth refutations of the positions which Lewis takes issue with. So people who complain that he doesn't successfully refute things like emotivism in this work are right - but he didn't intend to launch into that in depth. These lectures were meant to paint a portrait, to explore a perspective, and to breathe a few whispers of supporting argumentation within the space afforded. Judge his work according to what he intended to accomplish by it, and don't posh-posh it because you demand more - or less - from it than what he expected to offer by it. Many people seem to think that Lewis' is arguing, in the first section, against "Moral Relativism" (MR). While MR is an aspect of what Lewis is here concerned with, it is not what he directly addresses. Morality, popularly used, merely refers to "rules for behavior," whereas what Lewis is talking about is not directly behavior, nor rules for it, although there are behavioral implications to what he is talking about. What he _does_ address is the problem evidenced in the grammar textbook he quotes from, that students are being taught to think of their own sentiments/value judgments as 'merely' their own emotions having nothing to do with the objects or events upon which they are passing judgment. Once, he says, you teach a student in one instance to sunder their evaluation of a thing from the thing itself (i.e., to teach that when I say that a waterfall is sublime, I'm not saying anything about the waterfall, but only about my own emotions: I'm really saying "I am having sublime feelings," not "the waterfall is such that the most proper response from me is to feel that it is sublime"), the result is that you train the student to snap any perceived link of the correspondence between their sentiments/value judgments and the world. Lewis is claiming that there are qualities intrinsic to objects and events themselves that ought to call forth proper responses in us. Furthermore, he claims that the correspondence between our sentiments/value judgments are more or less true by virtue of their conformity to an Order that roots reality, and Order which, in relation to proper sentiments/value judgments, we perceive intuitively and kinesthetically, if at all (he calls this Order "the Tao" for convenience, and demonstrates that ancient civilized cultures were quite familiar with such an experience and understanding of the world). This Tao is what we try to articulate in all of our moral principles (our moral principles, therefore, may be provisional - if we discover that the Tao is better articulated by a competing principle, we are not abandoning the Tao by discarding our old principle to embrace the one we have just come across. We are simply claiming, then, that our older principle was an inferior articulation of the Tao, and thus corresponded less perfectly with it). This is a much subtler point than what I understand many to have in mind when they rail against MR. The final section of the book was an interesting and haunting perspective on where Lewis sees these new habits can lead if left unchecked. For any interesting related reads on education, morality and such, feel free to fire me off suggestions and/or to pick my brain, if you think it's worth picking.
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Summary: The dangers of moral relativism
Review: In this short book, CS Lewis takes public education for his subject, though the scope of the work goes well into the philosophical and ethical realms. The master Christian apologist is here arguing against what he sees to be the evils of moral relativism. His essay "Men Without Chests," reminiscent of TS Eliot, speaks of just what would happen if we were to lose all sense of good and bad, and chose instead to attempt to see everything in a purely 'objective' way, without regard for what has been established as right and wrong. The rest of the book develops and plays upon this idea, and Lewis examines the possibilities of a civilization who abandons "The Tao" (the name Lewis gives to a widely accepted system of moral values) and tries instead to mold its citizens into whatever form its leaders should decide. Of course, this is exactly what Lewis warns again in his Science Fiction novel That Hideous Strength, and what is also seen in the book 1984. To me, the highlight of this book was the appendix. Superbly compiled, it is Lewis's definition of "The Tao," and features a number of moral values (such as one's obligation to society and duty to parents). The best part of this, though, is that Lewis quotes from an enormous range of sources, citing everything from Plato to Beowulf to the Bible to Egyptian writings to show that these are values which have been widely accepted throughout history. This is his basis for calling "The Tao" the ultimate system of moral values, and his justification through widespread acceptance is very good indeed.
I believe this is one of CS Lewis's best works, full of inspirational thoughts on morality and warnings against using Science to make man a part of 'Nature' and losing all respect for man as a Divine Creation. His book God in the Dock goes along well with this one--many of the essays in that book coincide nicely with those in this one. Once again, CS Lewis has proven himself a master of putting things in a way everyone can understand.
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Summary: Interesting gathering of ideas, concepts, and theories.
Review: I'll admit that some of Lewis's comments left me in the dust, but I did appreciate how well grounded some of his arguments were. If there is not some common shared moral or ethical viewpoint in the mass of humanity, then all will be lost and undoing the teaching of the past is undoubtedly a BIG mistake. If we do dismantle the teaching of the past and build something knew, just what foundation will it be built upon if the moral or ethical foundation is as small and individualized as grains of sand? Certainly some will jump all over this essay published as book (actually it reads more like lecture notes than an actual book or essay), but I found little fault with it other than the parenthetical one mentioned above. Highly recommended.
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