- Lewis, C. S.
The Abolition of Man.
New York: HarperCollins, [1944] 1947.
ISBN 0-06-065294-2.
-
This short book (or long essay—the main text is but
83 pages) is subtitled “Reflections on education
with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper
forms of schools” but, in fact, is much more: one of
the pithiest and most eloquent defences of traditional values
I recall having read. Writing in the final years of World War II,
when moral relativism was just beginning to infiltrate
the secondary school curriculum, he uses as the point of
departure an English textbook he refers to as “The Green
Book” (actually The Control of Language: A critical
approach to reading and writing, by Alex King and Martin
Ketley), which he dissects as attempting to “debunk”
the development of a visceral sense of right and wrong in
students in the guise of avoiding emotionalism and sentimentality.
From his description of “The Green Book”, it seems
pretty mild compared to the postmodern, multicultural, and
politically correct propaganda aimed at present-day students,
but then perhaps it takes an observer with the acuity of a C. S. Lewis
to detect the poison in such a dilute form. He also identifies
the associated perversion of language which accompanies the subversion
of values. On p. 28 is this brilliant observation, which I only
began to notice myself more than sixty years after Lewis identified it.
“To abstain from calling it good and to use, instead, such
predicates as ‘necessary”, ‘progressive’,
or ‘efficient’ would be a subterfuge. They could be
forced by argument to answer the questions ‘necessary for what?’,
‘progressing toward what?’, ‘effecting what?’;
in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs
was in their opinion good for its own sake.” But of course
the “progressives” and champions of “efficiency”
don't want you to spend too much time thinking about the
end point of where they want to take you.
Although Lewis's Christianity informs much of his work, religion plays
little part in this argument. He uses the Chinese word Tao
(道) or “The Way” to describe
what he believes are a set of values shared, to some extent, by all
successful civilisations, which must be transmitted to each successive
generation if civilisation is to be preserved. To illustrate the
universality of these principles, he includes a 19 page appendix
listing the pillars of Natural Law, with illustrations taken from
texts and verbal traditions of the Ancient Egyptian, Jewish, Old
Norse, Babylonian, Hindu, Confucian, Greek, Roman, Christian,
Anglo-Saxon, American Indian, and Australian Aborigine cultures. It
seems like those bent on jettisoning these shared values are often
motivated by disdain for the frequently-claimed divine origin of such
codes of values. But their very universality suggests that,
regardless of what myths cultures invent to package them, they
represent an encoding of how human beings work and the distillation of
millennia of often tragic trial-and-error experimentation in search of
rules which allow members of our fractious species to live together
and accomplish shared goals.
An on-line
edition is available, although I doubt it is authorised, as the
copyright for this work was last renewed in 1974.
May 2007 