C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man - book review

It's been a while since a book has challenged my assumptions about morality to such an extent, and it's been a while since I've seen someone provide a strong argument against a Nietzschean revisionism of morals. I had a few issues with how Lewis portrayed scientists and people that nowadays would be called "critical theorists" — it seemed a bit like a caricature —, however, I can't help but agree with most of his arguments (if I look past the style of his rhetoric).

The crux of his argument could be summarized by this quote: "The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate desserts." (p. 13).

I feel like this goal has long been surpassed or forgotten. In the post-structuralist, postmodern, critical theory kind of world we are trying to swim in the shallows, at the same time drying up any reserves of what would be considered "common-sense" or "ancient wisdom".

We went too far by questioning everything, with no end goal in sight. At some point, we have to assume that something is good in itself, otherwise we're decomposing (our thoughts and our lives) to the point of absurdity:

"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." (p. 41).

The problem that arises once we think that nothing in morality is self-evident is incredibly underestimated. Science cannot solve the is/ought dichotomy, it only describes what is, but cannot tell us what ought to be. The latter has always been the domain of religions, proverbs, folk stories, etc — things that aren't scientific in any sense of the word, but which had been valued for the most of human history as self-evident guides for how we should live. Modern man has been obsessed with debunking things, and it's a tendency driven by our curiosity first and foremost. It is, in a way, natural to do so. But in debunking bad faith ideas from the past we've painted with a too broad of a brush, swiping away things that grounded us as well — things that were good.

What is left, it seems, is just preferences and desires:

"When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains. (...) The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure." (p. 65).

How do we know what to value? It seems like there's no answer beside what "Reason" tells us. But in a world in which nothing is self-evident, even Reason can be manipulated, every value can be potrayed in a way that benefits a few, and everything remains relative — this is the trap that modern man has fallen into, he has "debunked" Reason itself, has appropriated it to his goals, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself:

"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." (p. 72).

Lewis criticizes the idea of “Man’s conquest of Nature” (a phrase used to describe the progress of applied science). The last stage of the conquest will be when human nature will surrender to Man. It will be the power of some men to make other men what they please, and not a conquest of Nature per se:

"We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because 'Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered." (p. 71).

And what we end up with is what Lewis calls "magician’s bargain" (when we give up our soul and get power in return):

"that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. (...) if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material 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." (pp. 72-73).

He doesn't really define "Conditioners", but it's not too hard to grasp what he means. It's basically people with power of influence that use applied science to manipulate human behavior (because no moral value is self-evident, so nothing forbids what they do). Even in his time (1943), the post-Freudian schools of thought (with people like Edward Bernays) studied mass propaganda in details. The more obvious example are contemporary ways of manipulating human behavior through internet, social media and deeper understanding of neuroscience.

All these problems are aggravated even more if we live without any self-evident moral beliefs; in other words, if we live by instinct.

The problem with living entirely by instinct is that we cannot know how to build the hierarchy of instincts. Which instinct is more valuable? Which one should be at the top? Even posing this question seems absurd, as it asks a value judgement from a thing that has no intrinsic value. It is the problem that Nietzsche couldn't solve. As good as his diagnoses were, his solutions were lacking severely or at best, were simply naive.

Lewis puts it eloquently:

"The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the 'basic', or 'fundamental', or 'primal', or deepest' instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dillema. Either the premises already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely the indicative." (pp. 36-37).

I don't know how to solve this, beside accepting the fact that "a dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary". That sounds unsatisfactory, almost like an intellectual defeat, but I fear that we've come past the negotiation phase. We are in a post-structuralist world, where fundamentals are being questioned to the core, where nothing is self-evident anymore. What Descartes did a few hundred years ago (by using radical skepticism) seems like child's play to what is being attempted today. We are searching for values without a sincere belief in their validity — an almost schizophrenic attempt at building by constantly demolishing.

Rating: 5/5