The Abolition of Man

Summary

The Abolition of Man is the text of three lectures C. S. Lewis gave as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, then part of the University of Durham, in February 1943, and published that year by Oxford University Press with the subtitle Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The first lecture, Men without Chests, begins with a small English textbook for schoolchildren, which Lewis calls The Green Book and whose authors he names Gaius and Titius out of courtesy. They comment on the story of Coleridge at a waterfall, where one tourist called it sublime and another pretty, and they conclude that such a statement is only about the speaker's feelings. Lewis argues that this lesson, slipped into a grammar exercise, teaches pupils that all judgments of value are subjective and trivial. Against it he sets the shared doctrine of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, the Hindu and Chinese sages and the Hebrew Scriptures that some responses are fitting to their objects and others are not, and that education consists in training the affections to love what is lovable. Reason governs appetite only through trained sentiment, the chest, the seat of magnanimity, and modern education that debunks sentiment produces men without chests. The second lecture, The Way, examines the educator or Innovator who rejects traditional values and tries to found morals on something else: on reason stripped of sentiment, on instinct, or on the preservation of the species. Lewis argues that each attempt either fails to yield any duty at all or secretly borrows a fragment of the traditional morality it claims to discard. He calls that traditional morality the Tao, the doctrine of objective value, and insists that no new system of values can be made from outside it; what is offered as a new ethic is always a part of the old one swollen into madness. The third lecture, The Abolition of Man, asks what man's power over nature really means. Lewis answers that it is the power of some men over other men, with nature as the instrument, and that the final stage would be the power of a generation of Conditioners, armed with eugenics, prenatal conditioning and applied psychology, to shape all their successors. Having stepped outside the Tao, the Conditioners would have no ground for choosing except their own impulses, so man's conquest of nature would turn out to be nature's conquest of man. An appendix, Illustrations of the Tao, gathers parallel moral teachings from Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Norse, Indian, Chinese and Christian sources under eight laws, among them general and special beneficence, duties to parents and to children, justice, good faith, mercy and magnanimity.

Top Lessons

• Education trains the affections

  Lewis recovers the classical and Christian view that the aim of education is not only to inform but to teach the young to like and dislike what they ought. A pupil taught that every value judgment is merely a feeling has been given a philosophy without knowing it.

• No values from outside the Tao

  Lecture II argues that every attempt to build an ethic from instinct or from bare utility smuggles in some part of traditional morality. Lewis's point is that moral first principles are not invented but recognized.

• Power over nature as power over men

  Lewis argues that every technical advance gives some people power over others, including power of the present over the future. When that power reaches human nature itself, the question of which values guide it becomes decisive.

• The common moral inheritance

  The appendix gathers parallel teachings from many civilizations to show that the Tao is not one culture's private code. Lewis presents the parallels as evidence, not as a claim that all religions are the same.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Lecture III bears on the history of medical ethics. Writing in 1943, Lewis names eugenics, prenatal conditioning and an education and propaganda based on applied psychology as the means by which one generation might fix the character of all later ones, and he treats contraception as an example of power exercised by the living over those who might have been born. His argument is philosophical rather than clinical: the danger he identifies is not a particular technique but the loss of any standard outside the planners' own impulses by which to judge it. The lecture is often cited in later bioethics debates on genetic enhancement; readers should keep in view that Lewis was answering the eugenic and behaviourist programmes of his own day.

• Lecture III

  Power over nature analysed as power of some men over others, with contraception, eugenics and prenatal conditioning as examples of control by one generation over its successors.

• Lecture III

  The Conditioners, who use applied psychology to produce whatever consciences they choose in their pupils.