Book Review: The Abolition of Man

This book exactly describes the condition in which we now find our society. In the last few years, I have often imagined myself standing in the middle of a big field, screaming at the top of my voice, "This Is Insanity!" And no one can hear me. 


When I look at how far we have slipped down that proverbial slope in our values and morals as a culture, it often seems as if the world has gone mad! 


When I hear of another judge making another immoral decision based on relative truth, I want to pull all of my hair out. 


When I hear another thing that my taxes are paying for that is morally reprehensible, I want to bang my head against a wall. 


I have asked over and over and over again how "they" could have come to believe "that?" How can evil be called good and good evil? How can Truth be exchanged for a lie? How can life have become so cheap? How can all of our most basic Values in which previous generations of this nation stood firmly now be considered optional?


According to Lewis, our Society has slowly been desensitized and reprogrammed to believe that man will only be "free" to become what he should become when he has shed his loyalty to those underlying principles on which all of society has previously stood: "General Beneficence, Special Beneficence, Duties to Parents or Elders or Ancestors, Duties to Children and Posterity, The Law of Justice, The Law of Good Faith and Veracity, The Law of Mercy, The Law of Magnanimity." These principles are common to all the major value systems in history: Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental. 

"But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, 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 calls this foundational belief system the Tao for the purpose of this discussion and defines people as those "inside" the Tao (belief in Absolutes, Objective Values) and those "outside" the Tao (Those who define things according to their personal motivations and desires). 


As the "powers that be" have shifted more and more to being "outside the Tao," their efforts to reprogram minds have infiltrated the most basic principles of education. 

"Hence the educational problem is wholly different according as you stand within or without the Tao. For those within, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil's mind: or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic 'justness' or 'ordinacy.' The latter course involves them in the questionable process of creating in others by 'suggestion' or incantation a mirage which their own reason has successfully dissipated."

When the ultimate "reason" behind the decisions a society makes are no longer founded on objective values, what rises to the top of the motivation behind actions is supposedly "Instinct." Here is where we see so much of the devastating results of Darwin's "theories" and the havoc they have wrought to the very underpinnings of civilization. (I would LOVE to witness a debate between Lewis and Darwin. Lewis would eat his lunch!) When the reasons behind the actions are reduced to "Instinct," as if that which is "basest" in man is best, then all bets are off. One person can claim "Instinct" when committing any crime he feels like committing because "Instinct" can be wholly defined by the individual with no dependence on or responsibility to cultural mores, laws, values, or conscience. What is right for one is "right" simply because that one says it's right, regardless of the effects of his choice on anyone else. 


So everything that is noble, honorable, self-sacrificing in the human race, everything that elevates man above beast is relegated to the cultural trash heap and what started as a quest for freedom to attain man's highest form results in the Abolition of Man.  

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

I have not come close to doing justice to the brilliance of Lewis' arguments. He is a master logician and theologian and philosopher and can unravel any argument that roars it's lies in the face of Truth. Ultimate Truth does exist and the argument and proof lies all about us when we see the reflection of Christ in man and the Fingerprint of God in all of Creation. 


So, as from the beginning, it boils down to two sides: God, or the rejection of God as embodied in the evil one. Even though it seems that our culture has come to a "new low," it's not new. It's simply a revisiting of the original and perpetual battle that wants to reject the Authority of God over the Universe.


This is #33 in the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. 

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