The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man, a book on education and moral values by C.S. Lewis, published in 1943. The book originated as the Riddell Memorial Lectures, three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. Many people regard this as Lewis’s most important book. In it he argues that education, both at home and in schools, needs to be conducted in the context of moral law and objective values.

Throughout the book Lewis argues for an objectivist position in aesthetics and morality, contending that qualities and values inhere in things and positions and are not just projected onto them. Two objectivists may disagree about whether a work of art or a human act is good or not, but both believe there are agreed-upon standards by which the work or act is to be judged. Unlike subjectivists, objectivists hold common principles on which to base their judgments.

The doctrine of objective values, which Lewis calls the Tao, is “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.” Lewis uses the Chinese term Tao for what he elsewhere in The Abolition of Man refers to as “Natural Law or Traditional Morality” in order to emphasize the universality of traditional values: people throughout history and around the world believe in the same objective values. (Lewis also explores these ideas in the first chapter of Mere Christianity.) He illustrates such universality in an appendix that offers quotations from widely varying cultures, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, showing agreement on the need for general beneficence and on specific duties to parents, elders, and children, and agreement that loyalty and justice are consistently praised while disloyalty, lying, theft, and murder are consistently condemned.

The first lecture begins with a critique of a composition textbook published a few years earlier. Lewis’s concern about the book is that while it teaches writing, it also subtly advocates subjectivism. Such moments occur, for example, when the textbook refers to an observer who calls a waterfall “sublime”; Lewis quotes the textbook’s claim that, in such observations, “[w]e appear to be saying something very important about something, and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.” Lewis points in particular toward the textbook’s use of the words appear and only: dismissive words such as these suggest that predicates of value are merely projections of the inner state of the speaker and have no significance. Lewis replies that the speaker is not just expressing his own feelings but asserting that the object is one that merits those emotions.

On this ground Lewis argues the importance of objectivism for education. Children are not born with knowledge of appropriate reactions; those reactions must be nurtured. According to Lewis, “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.” Thus, teachers and parents who are objectivists teach their children principles of right and wrong, because if a child knows right principles, Lewis claims, he or she will respond in particular situations with the right sentiments and will know the right thing to do.

Right sentiments is a key concept in the book: by it Lewis means “emotions conform[ing] to Reason.” As he explains it, “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.” When children’s emotions have been so trained, their moral impulses can be trusted to lead them correctly. For Lewis the ability to have right sentiments is what separates humans from animals, but such training of the heart—training of the emotions, what Lewis refers to as the “chest”—is lacking in modern education, with its emphasis on the intellect. The failure to nurture right sentiments ultimately results in the abolition of man, Lewis contends, because modern education produces “what may be called Men without Chests.”

Lewis goes on to argue that the lack of sentiment in modern thought is particularly dangerous when it is extended to science and the social sciences. The modern sciences teach people how to analyze nature—to dissect it, literally and figuratively. Thus does science turn nature into an object, Lewis laments, instead of treating it with respect or care as a living being. What worries Lewis most is the tendency for the sciences to regard human beings as a part of nature. Such an understanding of people allows them to be treated as things to analyze and experiment on. That allows some people to gain power over other people. If that happens, Lewis asks, what principles will guide their use of such power? If they are objectivists, the Tao will guide them. If they are not, Lewis fears, they will have no absolute guidelines or trained sentiments to restrain them. (Lewis later embedded these ideas in a novel, That Hideous Strength [1945], which depicts England being taken over by a totalitarian force that has almost unlimited power and uses it without moral principles of restraint.)

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis urges a new attitude for science—treating it as a “Thou” (citing the philosopher Martin Buber), not an “It” having a personal relationship with nature, a love of “Truth” rather than a desire for power. The degree of power humankind has attained makes such a change in attitude necessary and makes it crucial, Lewis argues, that the world return to having the Tao at the centre of education.