booklady's Reviews > The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man is a short work but very powerful. As with everything by C. S. Lewis, we are in for reading/listening pleasure as well as education. He fills our minds with his own terms (Men Without Chests) examples taken from real life (The Green Book) and convincing arguments from literature (Faust). Can you just imagine being one of his lucky students?

Published in 1943, Abolition is more applicable today than when it was written but probably the least known of his major works. When I did a GR search of quotes, there was less for this book than for all the others. As a work written for all people, believers of whatever or no particular faith, it is a shame that this work is so largely ignored.

In Abolition, Lewis gives us a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of doing away with or "debunking" those things. His concern is for what we are teaching our young people and yet he freely admits—tongue in cheek—to not being particularly fond of little children knowing the reaction this admission would arouse among some in his audience.

He warns us:

‘For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased... the man-molders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao* — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgments of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of nature which they have conquered.’ (Italics added)

*Lewis says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture "...the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...". This he calls the Tao.


Read this back in 2001 but can't remember it. Peter Kreeft recommended it during his recent lecture on How to Win the Culture War: A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis.