Abolition of Man video part 1 n five minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=Gux4Ldy8cN8
Benjamin McLean

The Abolition of Man is a short philosophy book by C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian
writers of the 20th century. Alot of people know he was a friend of JRR Talkien. Most people
only remember him for his Chronicles of Narnia books but it’s his non-fiction that he ought to be
remembered for. That’s what people in England wanted to hear on the radio while the Blitz was
going on outside.

Lewis was a classicist which means he agreed with Plato and Aristotle alot and considered
himself a converted pagan in a world of apostate Christians. He had a way of introducing
paradigm shifts that turn modern thought completely around. Rather than vainly trying to
hit unbelievers over the head with the authority of scripture as so many would-be Christian
apologists have unfortunately tried to do, Lewis defended his ideas through force of argument
and tried to get people to examine and challenge their own philosophical presuppositions. The
fundamentals of his philosophy are outlined in, “The Abolition of Man.”

The thesis of this book is that if we debunk and abolish traditional moral values and gain control
over the conscience of man as science has enabled us to control other things in nature, it
will result in the eventual Abolition of Man, the dehumanization of humanity. Abolish man’s
conscience and you abolish man. Although Lewis is a theist and argues for theism elsewhere,
he makes no attempt to argue for the existence of God or any particular religion in this book.
A staunch atheist could completely agree with The Abolition of Man and yet remain a staunch
atheist.

Lewis writes of two opposing views, the world of the Green Book and the world of the Tao. The
world of the Tao is a broad generalization that contains the traditional moralities of both East
and West; the Bhuddist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Socratic all lumped
together. Lewis refers to, “the sole source of all value judgements” and calls it the Tao. The
Tao is, he asserts, not something we can change, for it ceases to be the Tao when we do.
Judgements in the world of the Tao are right or wrong like mathematical statements.

But in the world of the Green Book, all value judgements are subjective. The Green Book
itself is an actual English textbook which, perhaps accidentally, teaches unwary children that
all sentences containing a predicate of value are not statements about qualities inherent in
their subjects but are really unimportant statements about the speaker’s own feelings. Lewis
first points out that this amateur philosophy is absolutely out of place in an English textbook
regardless of it’s validity and proceeds to tear the position to shreds anyway.

Lewis wrote, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to
be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous
to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or
disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” “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.”

Lewis models the mind of man in a Platonic division of three - the head, center of intelligence,
the stomach, center of desire and the chest, center of will. He argues that removing all
sentiments from the mind as many modern so-called “rationalists” try to do produces, “Men
Without Chests” that value judgements are an essential part of a rational mindset. And that’s
just part 1, there are three other parts to this book.