Alone. Welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom paths between primary and
secondary world. I'm your host, Andrew Snyder, and I am always grateful
for your company. All Right, welcome back, And first of all,
I do want to apologize for the lack of content over here. I thought
that I was going to have some more time this summer, but in reality,
I've been as busy as ever, if not more so. I'm teaching
I don't know, five or six online classes, some of them brand new,
and so I've had to produce a lot of content for that. And
I'm currently in talks with a publisher regarding a potential book deal, and so
I've been drafting a couple chapters from that book and so hopefully that'll lead to
something. And then also i've been teaching this independent Philosophy and Fiction of CS
Lewis course, which I've really just enjoyed greatly. I've enjoyed doing the research,
I've enjoyed producing the content. I've enjoyed our discord conversations as well as
especially our weekly live Zoom meetings. It's something that I've been looking forward to
every week, and I think that other participants have as well. So far
we've covered out of the Silent Planet Perilandra, and we are currently finishing up
That Hideous Strength. And I've been doing some bonus content for this unit,
because, as I said, this is a focus on the fiction of C.
S. Lewis, even though I've been including some secondary reading Lewis essays
and some other texts and whatnot. But in the midst of this that Hideous
Strength section, I've also been doing some content I'm calling a bonus content on
the Abolition of Man, because that's not obviously his fiction. However, it
is very much related to that Hideous Strength, and in fact, in the
prologue to That Hideous Strength, Lewis says that explicitly that the message of that
story is very much tied to what he lays out in a nonfiction form in
The Abolition of Man. Because this kind of bonus material, I'm also going
to drop it into this podcast. That way you have some content as well
as you wait for the more regular content, as I do hope to get
back to the Bewulf series very soon. But what you're about to hear is
the audio for my presentation on the first half of the Abolition of Man.
And so that covers the essays Men without Chess and the Way, and then
next time you will get the second half of the Abolition of Man. And
so during this presentation you will hear some references to That Hideous Strength, because
again is the original context for this presentation. But even if you have never
read That Hideous Strength or even the Abolition of Man for that matter, which
I mean, you should read both of those. But I think that these
summaries and these analyzes will stand on their own as being worthwhile content. And
if you would like to jump into this philosophy and fiction of C. S.
Lewis, course, you are still more than welcome to do. So
you will have all the content into definitely, And so it's okay that you've
missed at this point almost all of the Ransom series. You can listen to
that whenever you want to and jump right into where we're about to start,
which is till we have Faces, and then after that we will read the
Great Divorce and then all of the Narnia books, and so you're walking to
jump in for all of that, and then just listen to what you missed
whenever you're able to, and if you'd like to enroll. Then just go
to Andrew Snyder dot Padia dot com and you can see that link in the
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July twenty third. Use the Code podcast to get fifty percent off enrollment.
And I would love for you to jump in and join the currently sixty participants
who are in this course, and so it's a good robust group and I
would love to have you join in. But for now, let's go ahead
and jump into my presentation on the first half of C. S. Lewis's
The Abolition of Man. Hello, welcome back. So obviously this week and
next week we're not starting new text. We're continuing with that hideous strength,
and I don't really feel a particular need to provide introductory videos for each section
now that we've started in on the book itself, and so I've decided that
instead for your beginning of the week content, I'm going to break up The
Abolish of Man over two weeks, and so this week we'll be covering the
first two essays in that book, which is Men Without Chess and The Way,
and then next week we'll cover the other two essays. Now, Lewis
mentions in his preface to That Hideous Strength that the ideas of that story are
very much laid out in The Abolish of Man, at least in large part
some of the most significant themes. And so this is a very strong opinion
text, as I've already discussed, and so I think it's worth taking a
look at now. I know a lot of people have expressed difficulty with the
Abolition of Man, having a hard time getting their minds around exactly what's going
on. Now I have the benefit of coming to Lewis not just from a
literary background, but principally coming to Lewis from a philosophical background. Right,
that's my academic training, that's the world that I work in. And so
maybe for that reason this text has not been too much of a difficult struggle
for me, and I'm hoping that I can bridge some that gap for you
if it has been a struggle for you, and help you to see what's
going on there in that text, and by extension, what's going on in
that hideous strength, and of course what's going on in our world as well.
And so let's go and take a look at the abolition of man,
all right. Now, of course I had to feature this cover one of
the best book cover arts of all time. Now, yes, this is
from an unlicensed version, but nonetheless it is a version that you can find
that you can purchase. It just makes me laugh, but also I think
it's just a good job of demonstrating the degradation of humanity into the beastly that
we find through the philosophy that we're going to be talking about in this study.
Okay, So at the beginning of Men Without Jess Lewis says in their
second chapter, Guias and Titus quote the well known story of Coleridge at the
waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present, that one called it
sublime and the other pretty, and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgment and
rejected the second with disgust. Guius and Titus comment as follows. When the
man said this is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the
waterfall. Actually he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but remark
about his own feelings. What he was saying was really, I have feelings
associated in my mind with the word sublime, or shortly, I have sublime.
Feelings. Are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion,
But the authors are not yet finished. They add, this confusion is
continually present in language. As we use it. We appear to be saying
something very important about something, and actually we are only saying something about our
own feelings. Now, this green book that we're told about written by Gaius
and Titus, in reality, is the Control of Language, written by Alec
King and Martin Kettley. And I was able to find that full text online.
I don't have the interest or time and digging into that right now.
Eventually I'd like to come around to it to get a even better grasp as
to exactly what it is that Lewis is dealing with here. But in short,
Guyas and Titus are providing this textbook on English language for students. But
as we're going to see here, they're not just providing an instruction on language
in their instructional language. They are ultimately providing a philosophy that's being subtly brought
in Trojan Horse style, and maybe Guyas and Titus don't even recognize exactly what
it is that they are doing. But really what they're doing here is they
are presenting the worldview of scientism or of analytic philosophy of naturalism. And this
philosophy was very powerful, especially in Lewis's day, and we definitely see it
in our own day as well. This is the idea that the only real
knowledge that we can have, perhaps even the only meaningful language we can have,
deals with empirical realities, realities that we can scientifically investigate. In fact,
one of Lewis's contemporaries, in fact, even taught at the same college
for a time with Lewis, and they even had a debate with each other.
Ajair falls into this school of thought. He said that language is only
meaningful if it can be empirically verified, and so this is called verificationism.
And whenever we talk about things that can't be empirically verified, such as statements
of value, he says, at that point we're not actually using real language.
We are essentially just emoting in the same way as if we were just
kind of grunting with delight or with anger, and so statements about the value
of something only actually reveals something about your personal sentiments. You're never actually talking
about the world as it exists, because that comes outside the realm of empirical
scientific knowledge. Therefore it's not actually knowledge at all. And we see how
this philosophy infiltrated the humanities to the point where it's just being embedded in the
way. We're talking about the way that language works. And so if somebody
were to say it, the waterfall is sublime, our Guias and Titus are
going to say that, no, the waterfall is not sublime. All you're
saying is you have sublime feelings when you are experiencing or when you are looking
at the waterfall. But the word sublime cannot actually extend to the waterfall itself.
And this whole exchange very much reminded me of this scene right here.
Good morning, What do you mean? Do you mean you wish me a
good morning? Or do you mean that it is a good morning whether I
want it or not. Oh, perhaps you mean to say that you feel
good on this particular morning, or are you simply stating that this is a
morning to be good on all of them months? I suppose. Okay,
So through their instruction in English language. Guys and Titus are ultimately teaching school
children that all statements of value are nothing more than emotion and don't actually carry
meaning. They're not really a legitimate use of using language to communicate about shared
realities, which is really why we communicate, right, We speak words with
a common reference point to somebody else. That way we can both be referring
to the same thing. If you lose that common reference point of reality,
then you really lose communication because you lose that medium between agents. And so
what people with this school of thought want to do is to say that.
And so people who are operating under this school of thought are going to say
that the only shared reality we have comes down to empirical observation. But any
statement of value, that's just individualistic emoting. It's not real. We don't
have a common reference point regarding value. There is no natural law, there
are no ideals. Everything is just concrete and material. And so Lewis says,
the schoolboy who reads this passage in the Green Book will believe two propositions.
Firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the
emotional state of a speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.
Their words are that we appear to be saying something very important, when
in reality we are only saying something about our own feelings. No schoolboy will
be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word.
Only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any
conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are
subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titus depends on the fact
that they are dealing with a boy, a boy who thinks he is doing
his English prep and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are
all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind,
but an assumption which, ten years hence its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious,
will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never
recognized as a controversy at all. And so this is I think a great
red flag for us regarding what is going on in education, that we tend
to think that these big worldview issues don't really rise up and tell youth become
a little bit older and they're able to recognize consciously the stakes at play,
but that's not true at all. The most apparently mundane English grammar book can
do great harm by shaping the way that students understand language, and the way
that they understand language is going to directly shape the way that they're relating to
their world, because that's what language does. It helps us to relate to
the world. And so we need to be aware of the philosophy that's embedded
in these early grammar books, these early books on English language, and as
well as just the humanities in general, because the humanities consciously or unconsciously are
putting forth an idea as to what it means to be human, how do
we live in this space that we occupy? And Guys and Titus are pushing
students in a particular direction, namely in discounting all idea of value as nothing
more than irrational emotion. As Lewis says, I must, for the moment
content myself with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary position.
In filling their book with it, they have been unjust to the parents
or headmaster who buys it, and who has got the work of amateur philosophers
where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if
his son returned for the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head cramed with
the dentists obit addicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory, and so again we
need to recognize the philosophy that's being pushed through apparently ordinary non philosophical mediums.
Now stepping away from just simply the educational impact of this philosophy and moving into
a criticism of the philosophy itself, Lewis says, 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 congress or incongress to it. Believed,
in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval
or disapprove, our reverence or our contempt. Lewis is making the point that
just about all people, not even just in the Christian world. Right,
there's the reason why instead of using the language of natural law, he's going
to use the language of the Tao, which he's going to mean basically the
same thing as natural law. But he's trying to demonstrate the fact that what
he's arguing for is not unique to a particular culture. It's not just some
Western ideal that we can dismantle. But this idea that there is such a
thing as right and wrong, that there are some affections to certain things that
we should have, well, this is an idea that we find across cultures,
across time, across spaces, and in fact, he argues us pretty
regularly, it's such as in mere Christianity that we cannot help but to appeal
to a moral law. It doesn't matter how much someone might claim to be
a relativist. You can push that to certain limits where they're going to say
that some things are right and some things are wrong. Most people, if
you put before them gross evils like genocide, they're not going to say,
well, these things are just wrong because I think they're kind of icky,
but you know, to each their own. No, most people are going
to say that these kinds of obvious heinous evils are just that they're evil,
or even if they're afraid they're using that language, they'll say they're wrong,
and they'll say that they should be stopped, that rapists should be punished because
they violated some kind of moral law, even if in another context that same
person might say there is no moral law, they don't really believe that,
or the fact that so many people bring up tolerance as the chief virtue,
and they'll say that you can believe whatever you want to as long as you're
not pushing your beliefs on other people. But the problem is they're then appealing
to a law that stands between us, that we shouldn't push our beliefs onto
other people, And of course that means by extent, they are pushing their
beliefs onto us. And so despite the fact that they might be wrapped up
in all kinds of inconsistencies, they can't help but to recognize that there is
a moral law. Even if we disagree as to the application of the moral
law, and what things are justified and not justified within the moral law,
we cannot help but to appeal to the fact that there is indeed a moral
law that stands between us and judges us when one of us wrongs the other
person. Otherwise we cannot meaningfully talk about wronging another person. And so what
Guys and Titus are doing, they're not just criticizing a particular philosophy. They're
criticizing the very experience of what it means to be human, because to be
human is to be in touch with the moral law, with the natural law,
with the Tao. As he goes on, Saint Augustine defines virtue as
ordo amorus, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded
to that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says
that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he
ought. When the age of reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been
thus trained in ordinate affections or just sentiments, will easily find the first principles
and ethics. But to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all,
and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him it
said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right
responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and
hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.
And so the path to wisdom is not just thinking the right things,
but cultivating the right affection, so that way you love the things that are
lovely, and you hate the things that are wicked, the things that are
corrupting. You hate evil, you hate sin, you hate vice. I
may have talked about this before, but you go back to the classical understanding
of beauty and you see these two competing forces of true beauty, which pulls
the affections, or which pulls the mind and pulls the heart, pulls the
soul up toward that which is true and good in lifegiving. On the other
side, you have seduction, which can have the appearance of beauty, it
has a very different result, leading you toward what is false, what is
deadly, and ultimately what is life consuming. We see this portrayed in the
difference between the muses and the sirens. On the surface that are very similar,
but they have very different results. And so what we need to do
is to cultivate the right affections so that way we love the true manifestations of
beauty when they present themselves, and we have a hatred for the counterfeit.
But that goes beyond just reason, because, as Pascal says, the heart
has its motivations that reason doesn't understand. And I think that we all recognize
that that's true, and so the path to wisdom is about strengthening the hearts.
That way, we actually love the right things and we hate the wrong
things, and that is the path of wisdom. Now, Lewis is going
to point out that Geyson Titus practically speaking, would agree with this, because
they want for us to adopt a certain way of being, a certain way
of using language, a certain way of approaching the world and approaching each other
and approaching our own moral sentiments. And so, in other words, they're
putting forward a good that we ought to favor and that we ought to pursue.
They're putting forward something for us to love, and then in contrast,
they're putting forward something for us to hate, which it would be their understanding,
but misuse of language by treating value as something real and objective, and
so they are undermining the very worldview that they are espousing. This goes back
to Protagoras when Socrates says, protagonists, what do you do for a living?
Vertagoras says, I'm a teacher, and Socrates says, well, I
find this very puzzling, because as soon as you tell your students what they
believe is just as valid as what you believe. What more can you teach
them As soon as you spout out the view of the relativism, as soon
as you say that there is no absolute truth, well, you're then attempting
to impose an absolute truth on other people. Is self defeating. It breaks
the law of non contradiction given to us by Aristotle, which is another way
of saying that it is quite literally nonsense. And so at the same time
they're trying to say that language of value is irrational, they are cutting out
the very reason for believing their own argument, which they believe to be valuable,
and so it's nonsense. It leads into avoid and this gets to some
of the major themes we've been seeing throughout the Ransom series, especially regarding this
worldview of naturalism or scientism, where science is trying to play philosophy, and
in so doing it's trying to deal with value, is to deal with ethics,
which science has no way of engaging in. There's no scientific experiment you
can run that will tell you what you ought to value, and so whenever
somebody tries to determine or to shape value through science, they're attempting to deal
with something they don't have a category for understanding. They don't have a category
for dealing with. And so ultimately what they're doing is they are placing value
in a void, in an abyss, because there's no place for value within
this scientific worldview, and when you place value in the abyss, what you
get is an abyss. And so it is a march into nothingness, just
as we saw from the Unman's discussion of Satan reaching into the void. Because
for Satan to reach forward through progress, as in progress away from the good
established by God, it is literally a reach into nothingness. And so that
is what Satan found, that is what the Unman found, that is what
the agents of the Nice are finding. That's what Mark will find for much
of the story. It is a progress into the void, into emptiness,
into things that the scientific worldview, or the attempt at a scientific worldview,
can't deal with. And so what that means is going to be led by
forces that it does not understand. And so, again just showing that he's
not appealing to a particular culture, but really just to broad human experience,
he says that the Chinese also speak of a great thing, the greatest thing
called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates the abyss that was
before the Creator himself. It is nature, It is the way, the
road. It is the way in which the universe goes on, the way
in which things everlastingly emerge stilly and tranquility into space and time. This conception,
in all its forms, Platonic, Aristilian, Stoic, Christian, and
Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to, for brevity simply as the Tao,
and so Gatting's getting to not a particular philosophy, not a particular ideology,
but simply universal human experience that all people have recognized through their reflection on
what it means to be human, and so operating under the Tao, operating
reference to natural law, he says that to say that the cataract is sublime
means saying that our emotion of humility is appropriate or ordinate to the reality,
and thus to speak of something else besides the emotion, just as to say
that a shoe fits is to speak not only the shoes, but a feat.
But this reference to something beyond the emotion is what Gayas and Titus exclude
from every sentence containing a predicate of value, and so, operating under this
Tao model, we see that to say that the waterfall is sublime is to
make a statement about the waterfall, namely that a right relationship to the waterfall
will instill a sense of the sublime in us as we participate in the beauty
that the waterfall expresses, the beauty and the power that it expresses, and
so there is a real value to beauty. Beauty is real. And here's
the thing. We all know that beauty is real. Even those who say
it's an artificial construct don't really believe that. For example, I teach at
public university, and most of those students take some form of relativism and say
that there is no beauty, it's all social construct or individual opinion, blah
blah blah. But I took them to the art museum and I had them
figure out which pieces of art speak to them, what do they find particularly
beautiful, And then which ones do they not find beautiful, what do they
not find appealing, And almost all of them said that the most beautiful art,
or some kind of classical painting or even a Renaissance oil painting or something
like that, something that had great depth, something that had great substance behind
it, something that obviously spoke to a transcendent reality. And then almost all
of them recognize that the modern art, or really postmodern art, is a
scam, that there's nothing there, that it's just vapid, it's vacuous,
and that's not something I had to convince them of. They recognize it reflexively
because we all know substance when we see it, and we know empty propaganda
when we see it as well, at least most of us, as long
as we have our eyes at least partially open, and so we know that
beauty is not entirely subjective. If somebody watches a glorious sunrise and comes out
saying it was boring, well, then that actually reveals that there's something wrong
in them. Just as Lewis says in the Abolition of Man that he doesn't
particularly like being around kids, but he recognizes that that's a fault in him,
that there's something wrong in him because he doesn't have the preference that he
should for valuing children, for valuing being with children. And so when Lewis
says that the waterfall should instill within us a certain feeling when we are rightly
related to the waterfall and everything that it contains, what he's saying is that
there is this universal realm of values that we all inescapably are related to,
and we know that we are related to it if we are willing to be
at all self conscious of our experience in the world. These are things that
you can't avoid entirely. And this is what we see in Romans one as
well, where Paul says that as God's image bear living in God's creation that
testifies to who he is, we all can't help but to know the truth,
even though we naturally suppress it in or I guess I should say we
unnaturally suppress it in unbelief, and in so doing, foolish hearts become darkened
and we're given over to foolish and futile thinking. Because we are contradicting the
most fundamental reality that we cannot ever fully escape, and because we're not able
to recognize value as a legitimate point of reference for our language, we can't
even meaningfully talk about what we should be as humans. We can't really talk
about what human nature is. We can't meaningfully talk about the idea of progress,
because progress has this idea of moving from what is less valuable to what
is more valuable. From what is worse to what is better. But if
we aren't able to talk meaningfully about values I value isn't real beyond our emotional
sense, then we have no realm to talk about progress. We can't even
talk about why we should use the right kind of language, right we should
value the kind of language that guys and titans are giving to us. So
again, this is a philosophy that cuts itself off at the feet, and
the idea of education itself doesn't really make sense with this philosophy, just like
when Divine says that the nice is aiming to make it a more efficient man,
despite the fact that they reject ideals, and so the question remains what
man's can be more efficient at doing what? At being what? And that's
something that they simply can't answer, which again leads us into progress into the
void, and thus Lewis goes on. 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's 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 miss between us and the real objects.
As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments as far as
possible from the people's mind, or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that
have nothing to do with their intrinsic justness or ordinancy. 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. And so again, they're
trying to instill certain values in other people that don't have any more internal justification
than the values that they claim to be debunking. And so what they're doing
in the name of reason is actually something very irrational. They're simply uttering forth
what they want to see manifested in the world, with no clear root in
nature, no clear root in reason. And so this is why he says
that ultimately what they're doing is a questionable process of creating in others, by
suggestion or incantation, a mirage which their own reason has successfully dissipated. And
so this brings them into the realm of magic. And we've already seen this
in Screwtape. Lewis talks about this more in the Abolition of Man. This
idea that this modern scientific philosophy and magic sorcery has the same root in a
desire to dominate the world, not to nurture the world, not to cultivate
the world, not to help the world be more itself, like we see
in the Company of Saint Anne's for example, right, they helped Jane become
more of herself. No, Instead, what we see is a desire to
simply put forth words that dominate, words that manifest realities. What we see
is magic, and I mean, this is what the nice does. This
is what is happening under the worldview of scientism, under naturalism, and this
is what we should see. Every time some famous scientists makes some prescription for
how we shall live or how society should be directed on scientific grounds. Whenever
they start giving us shoulds in the name of science, they're doing something non
scientific. They're doing something unreasonable. They are uttering an incantation. And of
course, from their worldview, there's nothing wrong with this, because there's no
virtue that can stand against them in judgment. There's no substance. They have
no solid ground to stand on. They are floating and a void, and
will avoid doesn't cast judgment. And that's because the void is the judgment.
And so the operation of the green Book and its kind is to produce what
may be called men without chess. It is an outrage that they should be
commonly spoken of as intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he
who attacks them attacks intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished
from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth, nor any virtual ardor
to pursue her. Indeed, it would be strange if they were a persevering
devotion to truth. A nice sense of intellectual honor cannot be long maintained without
the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titus could debunk as easily as any
other. It is not excess a thought, but defect of fertile and generous
emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary.
It is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. And
all the time, such as the tragic comedy of our situation, we continue
to claimor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open
periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more dry or
dynamism or self sacrifice or creativity. Side note this week you think of screw
Tape when he says that that Wormtong shouldn't make his patient think that materialism is
true, or you shouldn't teach him any kind of doctrine, even the wrong
doctrine. What he needs to do is convince him that materialism is courageous or
progressive. Same thing going on here, in a sort of ghastly simplicity.
We remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chess and
expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to
find traders in our midst We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. And
that is, I think a powerful way to end this section. It's a
powerful rebuke to this community that pushes progress on us, that pushes justice,
that pushes the importance of man and of community and whatever else well at the
same time destroying any reason to pursue any of these things. And so we
get reason without the root, which is not reason at all. We get
ultimately a descent into hell. While it is being dressed up in a pursuit
of heaven on earth. All right, next we have the way, and
at least as far as a high level presentation goes, we're dealing with some
of the same themes here, and so this is going to go fairly quickly.
Now, Lewis says that the practical result of education in the spirit of
the Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it. And
so he continues to point out the fact that this way of thinking uproots the
very foundation of thinking that it requires. And so they want to discount all
values as being real well at the same time telling us how we should act,
how we should live, or at the very least, how we should
use language. But whenever you're talking about should or should not, you are
dealing with the domain of value. And so to even put forth any kind
of education, put forth anything as that which ought to be believed, Well,
now you're appealing to a transcendent value, the same transcendent value that you
are discounting, And so it's self contradictory. Everything that leads to a good
citizen, everything that leads to a good society, gets discounted as essentially meaningless,
being void of real content. But that's no way to build a society.
It's no way to build a community. It's no way to even build
an individual life as one person being a community of persons living across time.
And so this is just a way of living that ultimately is a movement into
the void. And it continues to point out this self refuting tendency of this
philosophy, as he says, however subjective they may be about some traditional values,
guys and Titis have shown by the very act of writing the Green Book
that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all.
They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation,
if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good,
get certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society
which they regard as desirable. They could be forced by argument to answer the
question necessary for what progressing towards what affecting? What? This is the question
I raised when Divine says that he's trying to make a more efficient man,
and the question is efficient for what? Lewis continues. In the last resort,
they would have to admit that some state of affairs was, in their
opinion good for its own sake. And this time they could not maintain that
good simply describe their own emotion about it. For the whole purpose of their
book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval.
And this would be either a fool's or a villain's undertaking unless they held their
approval was in some way valid or correct. And so you can't at the
same time undermine value and then say that your philosophy is that which ought to
be believed, because in so doing you are putting forth some kind of value,
something that you believe people should believe. And so this kind of radical
subjectivity, this kind of radical relativism, it is dead upon arrival. It
is, as Chesterton says, an orthodoxy, reason without root, which is
how you get madness. And so these people who are using the language of
reason, right, they set themselves up as intellectuals, as rationalists. Well,
actually what they're doing is very unrational or irrational rather, because they are
destroying the very foundations of reason, because reason demands that we appeal to the
reality of value, because to say that we should act, we should think
in a certain way, we should believe a certain set of doctrines. Well,
whenever we make those kinds of claims, we're saying that some things are
intrinsically more valuable than others, which means value is real. And in the
end, where this philosophy leads is brutality to compulsion. It's going to rely
on the state. And I mean when thinking about how the nice is this
governmental agency that's trying to use the power of the state in order to enact
its progressive philosophy on the populace, because that's the only thing it can do
because it doesn't have a goodness on its side, it doesn't have virtue on
its side. All it has is power. And so it's no wonder that
Lewis is using this philosophy as the driving force of his dystopian speculations. He
demonstrating the natural outworking of the ideas that have a pretty mainstream platform in our
world today, this idea that there is no real value, that the only
things that really exist and can be meaningfully discussed are material empirical realities, and
that everything metaphysical is off the table as a legitimate reference point for language.
And so this just falls apart altogether, because without metaphysics, all of our
communication falls apart, as we seek to tell others what ought to be believed
right. Otherwise, we wouldn't actually be using language unless we have that presupposition
in play. And so as soon as you destroy metaphysics, you really destroy
language altogether. And more on this, Lewis says, in actual fact,
Guys and Titus will be found to hold with complete uncritical dogmatism the whole system
of values which happen to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the
professional classes during the period between the two wars. Their skepticism about values is
on the surface, it is for use on other people's values about the values
current in their own set. They are not nearly skeptical enough, and so
the Titus crowd are very likely going to say that those who hold to a
traditional understanding of values as embedded in reality and understood through reason, which would
be most people across time and space, as Lewis is already demonstrated, from
ancient China to Greece to Rome and beyond. You know, we've all recognized
that there is something like human nature, that there are better and worse ways
to live, and that the better that we live, the more free we
are. Well, Guys and Titus are going to look at that and say
that, Okay, this whole idea of the good is just sort of socially
constructed and it's really meaningless when you get down to the actual content of language.
But really, what they're doing, as we've already seen, is they're
simply protecting their particular set of values without criticism, without any kind of skepticism.
And then they are saying that they're trying to make man free by undermining
all of the values, all of the idea of genuine progress that would actually
allow men to be free. Because if Guys and Titus are correct, and
we can't meaningfully talk about value, then we can't even talk about the value
of freedom. And this is when you get to Screwtape. Especially in Screwtape
proposes to Toast when he wants to encourage talk of democracy, but at the
same time, he wants to empty the word democracy of any kind of meaning.
He wants to empty of any kind of reasonable understanding of freedom, any
kind of reasonable understanding of equality. And what he wants us to do is
empty these of any kind of legitimate values and just make them sounding points,
so that the progressive democratic philosophy just sounds courageous, it sounds emboldening, it's
stunning and brave, as we might say today. But what we never want
to worry about are actual discussions about what is true and what is false.
All we want to know is what is courageous, what is progressive, what
is moving us forward? And we could certainly hear some of Weston in this,
all right, moving on a great many of those who debunk traditional,
as they would say, sentimental values have in the background values of their own
which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be
cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos in
order that real or basic values may emerge. And again same thing. They
are putting forth a certain set of values while trying to debunk value as such.
And so really, I mean, in the end, what they have
here is a set of values that can't be analyzed, that can't be assessed,
and that they're trying to propagate through compulsion while gaslighting everyone else into thinking
that they're not doing something metaphysical. And at this point, I'm really repeating
a lot of these same ideas, and so I'm going to end with I
think is a pretty significant couple of passages here from the way in which Lewis
is taking the mindset, taking the perspective of his opponents, and so with
that in mind, he says, how can the modern mind be expected to
embrace? The conclusion we have reached This tow which it seems we must treat
as an absolute is simply a phenomenon like any other, the reflection upon the
minds of our ancestors, of the agricultural rhythm in which they lived, or
even their physiology. We know already in principle how such things are produced.
Soon we shall know in detail. Eventually we shall be able to produce them
at will. Of course, while we did not know how minds were made,
we accepted this mental furniture as a datum, even as a master.
But many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants.
Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short in stupid reverence
before this final and toughest bit of nature, which has hitherto been called the
conscience of man? And we see a lot of this kind of thinking alive
today as we move into increased integration of AI, cybernetics, neuralink and all
that. I mean. Obviously some good can come out of these efforts,
but we have to recognize the forces that are at play here. What exactly
is it that we are trying to do? Are we trying to become more
enchanted? Are we trying to help man more fully reach his form? Are
we trying to bring out of nature that which was always there? Or are
we trying to take charge of nature? Does progress simply equal what comes next?
And if that's the case, then we are setting ourselves up for a
healthscape when we talk about what progress means without any kind of tay loss,
without any kind of formal goal in mind. And then, finally, this
should really hit home as we consider what we've already seen from that hideous strength
well as west End and this whole approach of scientism and progressivism and that sort
of thing. He says, you threaten us with some obscure disaster if we
step outside it. That is the Tao and the natural law. But we
have been threatened that way by obscurantists at every step in our advance, and
each time the threat has proved false. You say we shall have no values
at all. If we step outside the tow very well, we shall probably
find that we can get on quite comfortably without them. Let us regard all
ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival. Let
us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let
Us decide for ourselves what man is to be, and make him into that,
not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to
be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose
our own destiny. And reading that should send shivers down your spine, because,
as he is going to go on to say in this book, really
what this comes down to is not the freedom of all men. What it
comes down to is a select few men who happen to have power, who
are able to exert their ideas of what they want to be on the masses.
This is the movement toward fascism. This is the movement toward tyranny of
some kind or another. As you have certain people on the top who are
simply deciding what values they are going to compel on the world around them,
and ultimately this has to come down to compulsion, because by its own philosophy,
it can't use reason to appeal to value as to how we should live,
how we should act. All we have is the people who have the
power to decide for themselves what they want man to be and by extent,
what they don't want man to be, and so they're going to use the
forces of their disposal in order to in order to compel influence on those around
them. We see this in the nice I think we see this stream of
thought in a lot of elements of our culture today when you look at some
of the conversations taking place. Because again, if you don't believe in value
as something that you can meaningfully reference as a common ground between men, then
all you have is brutalism. All you have is survival of the fittest.
All you have is force. And as we've already seen through Mark, it
is this kind of courageous progressivism that can lead nice men to do very bad
things. And I guess with that warning we'll go ahead and leave off,
and the beginning of next week we will cover the next two essays in the
Abolition of Men. Until next time, God speed, Thank you for listening.
I hope that you found that helpful, And if you have never read
The Abolition of Man, I certainly recommend that you pick that up and read
it. I think that it is just so important for understanding what's going on
around us culturally, speaking, philosophically, educationally. I think that CS.
Lewis helps us to root ourselves in deeper veins of thought. He helps us
to root ourselves in reason, He helps to root ourselves in goodness. He
gives us a foundation for understanding and engaging with beauty, so many things that
have been just emptied out and undermined in pretty significant ways in our cultural setting
right now and again, you are more than welcome to jump into the philosophy
and fiction of C. S. Lewis. Course. Just click on the
link below and make sure you use the Code podcast for fifty percent off enrollment.
But before we go, I do want to thank all of my patrons,
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