Alone. Welcome to Mythic Mind, we pursue wisdom of the past between primary
secondary worlds. I'm your host, Andrew Snyder, and I'm always grateful for
your company. All Right, welcome back as we get ready for the next
episode on The Abolition of Man, in which we're going to cover the last
essay of the book, The Abolition of Man. Now, as I mentioned
in the last episode, this is part of a small mini series that I
made for my Philosophy and Fiction of C. S. Lewis course, which
is currently ongoing. And in that course, we're recovering the majority of Lewis's
fiction, and so we're looking at the Ransom series through tape letters till we
have faces, the Great Divorce, and all of the Chronicles of Narnia.
Now, in this sub series that is happening within the That Hideous Strength series,
I'm going over the Abolition of Man, which connects with That Hideous Strength.
Now, because The Ablition of Man is obviously a nonfiction text, I'm
kind of considering this a bonus series, which is why I'm willing to provide
it in the general podcast here. And if you find this useful, you're
more than welcome to jump into the Lewis course already in progress. We're just
wrapping up till we have faces, and so then we're gonna jump into The
Great Divorce and then the Chronicles of Narnia. Even though you've missed the course
up to this point, you'll have access to all of the materials indefinitely,
and so you're welcome to do that as you join us for the Great Divorce
and Narnia, and make sure you use the Code podcast to get fifty percent
off enrollment. But for now, let's go ahead and dive in with a
third essay in the Abolition of Man. Well, welcome back as we wrap
up the Abolition of Man. Now, last time, I'd mentioned a few
times that there were four essays that we'd be covering two of them in this
in this lesson right here. But despite the fact that I've read the Abolition
of Man a number of times, it seems that I've invented a fourth essay,
because there are indeed only three essays in the Abolition of Man. Last
time we covered Men without Chess and the Way, and today we will cover
the essay called the Abolition of Man. And so let's go ahead and get
started on that. So in the first two essays he talks about this philosophy
that's put out by the Green Book, as he calls it, And really
it's this philosophy that was very prominent in his day, it's very prominent in
our day as well, this idea that there is no real such thing as
values, that we never really can talk about objective beauty, we can never
talk about the responses we ought to have to nature, to art, to
anything at all, because what they want to do is they want to remove
any meaningful discussion of human nature, of who we fundamentally are and who it
is that we are meant to be by nature. They want to remove that
kind of teleology. They want to reduce all value speak to mere sentiment.
And LUs has already pointed out that in doing this, what they're really doing
is quote debunking traditional values, well, putting new values in their place that
they believe everyone else ought to follow, right, I mean, in smuggling
this philosophy into an English language book, a grammar book, really what they're
doing is they're saying that we should view language in this way, we should
use language in this way. We shouldn't use it to speak of potential metaphysical
realities. We should only use it to link together statements of empirical fact.
But in telling us what we should do and how we should be using language,
they're not just strictly giving us a grammar. What they're doing is they're
imposing a certain set of values on us well the same time undermining the very
foundation of value at all. And so what we get out of this is
a population that doesn't even recognize the philosophical controversies at play because their very use
of language is already shaped by the conclusions that they don't know that they have
made. And in this essay The abolitiontive Man Lewis is going to continue to
talk about the consequences of this kind of philosophy, this philosophy that has shed
itself of so called traditional values and most importantly, has attempted to shed itself
from natural law, or as he calls it throughout this book, the Tao.
And this is the set of values that we should have and that we
would have and would understand if we were using reason appropriately, and if that
reason we're then directing our pursuit of virtue. And what Luis is giving us
here is a very classical way of thinking. If you read Aristotle, you
read the Nikomackey and ethics. Aristyle is going to say only hand we are
the rational animal. That one thing that separates us from the other animals of
nature is that we can use reason. We don't just live by instinct,
but we're able to consider potential realities. And then we're able to evaluate this
potential realities in order to determine the best course of action. And once we
start talking about the best course of action, that actions those set of actions
that should be valued above others. Well, now we're in the realm of
ethics. Because we are the rational animal, we are also the moral animal.
We are the ethical animal. And connected to that, Aristotle says that
we are the political animal because we are able to come together. Part of
our use of reason means that we're able to communicate abstractly with language to one
another about a shared reality, and say, we are the political animal.
We're the moral animal precisely because we are the rational animal. But when you
try to reduce reason to the purely natural, to the domain of physics,
well, at that point all we ever have is a collection of is statements.
We can ever get any what should be kinds of statements, And this
is philosophy of the analytic philosopher Luvik Wittckenstein. In his lecture on ethics delivered
to Cambridge, he said that if you were to have a book that contained
every fact that could possibly be and by this sement, every empirical fact,
every fact about the natural world. If you have every fact you could possibly
ever have compiled into one book, then you would not have one statement of
absolute value, meaning you would not have one statement that gives us a prescription
on how we ought to live or how we ought to construct our lives,
because you can never get an aught from it is. And Wittgenstein recognized this,
at least on a theoretical level, and Lewis's guys and titis recognized this
as well, that you can never get an aught from and is. However,
as soon as they say that we need to adopt this scientific world viewing
methodology, they are then imposing a value on us. And so this is
what Lewis is demonstrating that this philosophy is fundamentally self contradicting. And because it
is a contradiction, it's very core anything that does is going to be unreasonable.
It's going to be irrational. And what that means is it's not subject
to the demands of reason, and that also means it is not subject to
the demands of virtue. It is not subject to any kind of demands that
human nature might impose on us, because there is no human nature. And
I've frequently referenced this, but I think it's so poignant when the Oarsa of
Mars is talking to Weston, and Weston keeps talking about the progress of man,
and he's doing all his things for man, and Oarsa says, what
do you even mean by man? And Weston is unable to actually engage with
that question. He just says, I'm not here to deal with metaphysics.
I'm not here at top logic. And that's because his philosophy, as much
as it is built around, at least rhetorically, this idea of empowering man,
doesn't actually make a place for man in his category. All he has
is particular men. And that's going to be a major theme here in the
first part of this essay. So let's go ahead and go into it.
Lewis says, let us consider three typical examples of progress. The aeroplane,
the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community in peace time,
anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly
be said that when he does so, he is exercising his own proper or
individual power over nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am
not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things I've
mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men, by those who sell,
or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of
production, or those who make the goods. What we call man's power is
in reality a power possessed by some men, which they may or may not
allow other men to profit buying. Now, obviously a great number of technological
advantages have come through the advancement of science, and he's going to go on
to say that his objective is not to fundamentally undermine science and all of its
works. He's not even out to say whether or not these things that he
just mentioned are good for man, are good for society, good for men
in general. He's simply pointing out the fact that one thing that it does
do is that gives a group of men power over other men. Every piece
of technology put into our hands by someone else might give us some new abilities,
but it makes us more at the whims of those who are able to
produce, those who are able to sell, those who allow the sales,
such as the government. And so every time we become more reliant on things
that are not ours by nature, we seed away some degree of our power.
And Boetheist makes this point a lot that we become weaker when we mistake
external goods for internal goods, because external goods will always be just that,
they will never be ours by nature. They may be ours by fortune,
but they will never be ours by nature. And the more dependent that we
become on external goods, especially external goods that are produced and maintained by somebody
else, usually by a relatively small group of people, the less power we
have, the less freedom we have, the more we are at whims of
our societal betters. And so whenever these intellectuals or these progressive innovators talk about
empowering man, really what they're doing is, yeah, they might give us
some new gadgets, they might give us some new abilities, but they're actually
empowering themselves, or they're empowering a small group of people over the masses.
They're not empowering man as such. Again, as regards the powers manifested in
the aeroplane or the wireless man is as much the patient or subject as the
possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And
as regards to contraceptives, there's a paradoxical negative sense in which all possible future
generations are the patient or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive by
contraception. Simply, they are denied existence by contraception used as a means of
selective breeding. They are, without their concurring voice, made to be what
one generation, for its reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point
of view, what we call man's power over nature turns out to be the
power exercised by some men over men with nature as its instrument. So now
he's starting to do something really important here. Not only are we increasingly at
the whims of this small group of people who are the top of apple or
you know, your Elon Musk or your politicians or whatever. Not only are
we increasingly at the whims of those who are currently in power, but people
also exercise power across time. The decisions that we make are going to impact
future generations. And so you know, through selective breeding, we are determining
in the future what kinds of lives are not valuable, which ones should be
breeded out, And we're also determining which lives are valuable. And we're also
determining which lives are valuable and which ones should be mainstreamed in mayline. And
so in both cases we're taking a godlike role and deciding what life should look
like. And again, Lewis is not giving a hard and fast argument for
what we should do or what we shouldn't do at this point. He's just
trying to get us to understand properly the role of power and empowerment. That
every decision that's made in the name of ennobling men is ultimately a decision made
by a man or usually a small group of men, relatively small group of
men over a broader swathe of humanity, whether we're talking about those who are
alive now or those who will be alive in the future, and from a
perspective that transcends our own current perspective, those who already are alive, getting
out of our chronological egoism. There's a certain sense in which those who will
be alive are already just as live as we are. If we get outside
of our current temporal perspective, in our relationship with those who, from our
perspective, come after us involves a disbalance in power. We have power over
them in a way that they don't have over us, and any attempt that
we make to impose a certain understanding of humanity on them is a kind of
tyranny. We are treating them as a patient, we're treating them as a
subject without their consent. And the reason why this becomes particularly heinous is because
that those who are most interested in inventing humanity, in creating humanity, are
those who don't believe that there is a humanity that we should adhere to,
but that we do need to do just that we need to create humanity,
because these are people who don't appeal to a natural law, people who don't
recognize that there is a human essence that transcends any particular existence, and that
that essence is something that we need to increasingly move into, not something that
we need to increasingly create. Because if we are simply creating human essence,
then that we have no reason to say that it's good. We have no
reason, no framework, to refer to this as progress, because what is
it that we're progressing into? If there is nothing into which we might progress.
That's where all of this takes a really dark turn. We recognize that
all this talk of progress en betterment of humanity is empty and dark, and
in the end comes down to nihilistic displays of power. All right, let's
keep going. Let's keep going. I've already talked ahead of some of these
quotations. I'm not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral
virtue would cure. I am considering what the thing called man's power over nature
must always and essentially be, and by that he means the power of some
men over other men. In order to fully understand what man's power over nature,
and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means,
we must picture the race extended in time, from the date of its emergence
to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors, and
each insofar as it modifies the environment bequeaths to it, and rebels against tradition,
resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which
is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural
processes, resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of
course, if any one age really attains by eugenics and scientific education, the
power to make is the sentence what it pleases. All men who live after
it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger,
for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands, we have preordained
how they are to use them. So here Lewis says much more poignantly exactly
what I was saying when we adopt this philosophy, that human existence precedes essence.
In other words, we are just thrown out into this world. We
have no nature other than that which we take dominion over. We have no
human nature other than that potential which we choose to actualize. Then what this
means is that when we are trying to reinvent for ourselves what it means to
be human, and it is especially when this is tied to a growing scientifically
driven technocracy, then we end up treating the individual men of future generations as
unconsenting patients for the whims of those who are currently alive and who are able
to execute those whims. And so the last men, far from being the
heirs of power, will be of all men, most subject to the dead
hand of the great planners and conditioners, and will themselves exercise least power upon
the future. So we have this progressivism which has powerful, inspiring, stunning
and brave rhetoric about how we are lifting ourselves up from the dark ages.
We're lifting ourselves up from the mire of traditional values, and we are freeing
ourselves. We're unshackling ourselves, and we are going to create a better and
better man over time. Well, in reality, every decision that we make
is shaping what the future is going to look like. And this continues down
the line, and so eventually, once we get to the last generation of
humanity, what we're not going to have are progressive people of unbridled power.
Now, we're going to have these people who have been entirely cut and shaped
by those who happen to be alive before them, and so they won't be
the most powerful men. They will actually be the most disempowered men, living
at the whims of those who are long dead. And so Lewis goes on
man's conquest of nature. If the dreams of some scientific planners are realized means
the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men,
there neither is, nor can be, any simple increase of power on man's
side. And so, in other words, human nature itself is never going
to change. Man is always going to be what man is. It doesn't
matter what kind of technology we have, it's never the masses that are going
to gain more net power. Overall, the more that we are empowered by
technology, the more that we are empowered by science, well, the more
that we are giving ourselves over to external goods that are at the whims of
our societal superiors, the more that we are giving ourselves over to politicians,
the more that we're giving ourselves over to tech companies, the more that we're
giving ourselves over towards those who may or more likely may not have our best
interests at heart. And so the more that we rise up over the demands
of nature, the more we're giving ourselves over to the demands of particular men.
This is why, in that hideous strength, when Mark is talking to
Philistrato shortly before he meets with the head Mark, seems to think that the
nice is trying to achieve immortality for everyone, and phil Strata says, no,
not at all. They're trying to perfect immortality for a small group of
men and ultimately for one man. That is what they are pursuing. And
in that Lewis is giving us what he's talking about here in the Abolition of
Man, that the conquest of nature is carried about by a conquer, and
man in the abstract cannot conquer, only particular men can conquer. And so
what we're gonna have is a tyranny or an oligarchy, a technocracy that has
control over everybody else. And I know I'm reading a lot of long passages,
but I just think that there's so much in this essay that I just
don't want to skip over. And Lewis says this so poignantly. And so
I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a
good thing or bad. I am only making clear what man's conquest of nature
really means, and especially that final stage in the conquest, which perhaps is
not far off. The final stage has come when manned by eugenics, by
pre natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied
psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last
part of nature to surrender to man. The battle will then be one.
We shall have taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho,
and be heaceforward free to make our species whatever we wish to be. The
battle will indeed be one, but who precisely will have won it? And
again this is just continuing that same idea that whenever we talk about our conquest
of nature, transcending our nature, the question is what is it that we're
transcending into. And there's nothing firm there. To move away from nature without
having a broader metaphysical context for nature is to move into nothingness, because these
naturalists don't have anywhere else to go. And so when we transcend nature from
this perspective, there's nothing to determine whether or not we've gone in a positive
direction. And so the more that we do this, the more that we
gain victory over nature, the more foggy things become, because again we're moving
into a territory that doesn't exist. This is why in that hideous strength.
Belbury is just consumed in this fog, both metaphorically and for a time literally,
that everything is just so uncertain. Every time Mark tries to get anything
out of whether he just waxes eloquently, but nothing is actually said. Mark
never knows what his place is. For the longest time, he doesn't really
know what he's supposed to be doing. Nothing is clear, and that's because
they're moving away from nature into the void. Whereas over at Saint Anne's there
is remarkable clarity. In every conversation that Jane has, she gains a greater
understanding of herself, of her responsibility, of what it is that she should
be doing in life. She is increasingly gaining clarity. She is stepping out
of the fog, and that's because she also is starting to transcend nature.
But she's transcending nature into something even more certain, something even more stable.
As Lewis says in The Great Divorce, heaven is what remains when everything else
is shaken, and she is increasingly gaining a relationship with this heavenly stable reality
through the company and the influence of Saint Anne's. And so she's rising up
towards reason and virtue themselves as opposed to Mark, who is descending. He
is moving further and further away into unthinking nature, all the while trying to
transcend in conquer nature. Remember that Mark is pursuing the inner circle, and
remember the innermost circle in a physical or maybe superficial is a better way of
saying, that the inner level on a superficial understanding in the medieval cosmos is
Hell, because remember Earth is at the center, and then Hell is at
the center of the Earth. And so Mark is increasingly moving into the inner
ring of nature, which is Hell, which is as close as you can
get to non being without falling off into non existence. And so he is
thinking of becoming more foggy as he moves further and further into nature, all
the while trying to escape into the inner ring, whereas Jane's increasingly moving toward
the true center of things, which is God. As we're told at the
end of Perilandrum. Now Lewis comments that in all ages, no doubt,
nurture and instruction have in some sense attempted to exercise this power. And in
other words, people have always exercised some degree of power over the generations that
came after them. However, he thinks that there's something unique going on here
in the current movement. He says that, but the man 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. And so in the past people
have tried to shape future generations through education, through appeals to reason, maybe
even a misuse of reason, in fact, very often a misuse of reason.
But nonetheless they have tried to appeal to reason to say how things should
be. They had a meaningful way of talking about what the good of man
is and how to go about fulfilling it. That's very different than the powers
at play that Lewis is talking about here. He says, the man molders
of this age are going to be armed with an omniicompetent state and an irresistible
scientific technique. And so we have powers at our disposal that the ancients could
never have possibly dreamed of, from the atomic bomb, to so called gender
reassignmentsuries, to chips in your brain, to whatever else we could think of.
Here, the power of the scientific technique combined with an omniicompetent state,
creates a force that we have never really had before in the history of man.
And so as much as I try not to make too much of the
time that we happen to be living in, we do need to recognize that
some things are different in our current era, that we're not the case in
the past. And so I think that Lewis is onto something when he says
that the man molders of this new age are different than those who have come
before us. These are people who deny transcendent reality and have great power in
order to impose there apparently arbitrary wills on those who are alive now and those
who will be alive in the future. And so this is and so this
is a different era philosophically, and it is a different era scientifically. And
so the conditioners then are to choose kind of artificial how they will, for
their own good reasons, produce in the human race. They are the motivators,
the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?
For a time, perhaps by survivals within their own minds of the old
natural tao. Thus, at first they may look upon themselves as servants and
guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a duty to do it good.
But it's only by confusion that it can remain in this state. And we
see this now with all the progressive rhetoric about how we should act, how
we should behave with one another, how we should go about pursuing self actualization
and self affirmation, and all the talk about what we should do, what
we shouldn't do, the justice that we owe to certain people. They use
this language of teleology, they use this language of ethics, of the way
that we should be, who we should be, what it means to be
human well, denying that there is such a thing as transcendent reason that we
ought to while denying things like natural law, while denying any kind of ground
for objective value in virtue. And so they want to tell us how to
act while also separating us out from any kind of transcendent standard that tells us
how to act. And what that means is we are trading the freedom that
we have fulfillment of form for tyranny. We are simply told to bow down
to the conditions set by those who happen to have power over us in the
moment. This is tyranny in the name of freedom. It is regress in
the name of progress. And so he goes on duty itself is up for
trial. It cannot also be the judge and good faars know better. They
know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us.
The question is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of
good can help them to decide. It is absurd to fix on one of
the things they are comparing and make it the standard of comparison. And this
just continues that same idea that those who are condition those who are determining what
the human essence is, how we ought to act, don't have any rational
means of deciding what the good is. They don't have any rational means of
deciding what our human duty is to each other, to ourselves, to society.
It all just comes down to power. Now Lewis is obviously presenting it
a rather dour outlook on these conditioners, or rather dour outlook on those who
happen to be in power, and he responds to that. Here to some
it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty from my conditioners. Other
more simple minded critics may ask, why should you suppose they will be such
bad men? But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They
are rather not men in the old sense at all. They are, if
you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order
to devote themselves to the task of deciding what humanity shall henceforth mean. Good
and bad apply to them are words without content, for it is from them
that the content of these words is henceforth to be derived. And so these
are men that are worse than bad. At least, bad men still operate
within a moral framework, and they could potentially become good men. But these
are men who have transcended the categories of good and bad. These are people
who are beyond good and evil, so to speak. And so because they
are determining what the human essence is, they get to determine what the good
is and what the bad is. And this is not connected to transcendent realm
of natural law, a transcendent realm of value the virtues that ought to be
valued. No good and bad is determined by the conditioners of this age.
Therefore, they themselves are not subject to the categories of good and evil,
and so at least within their philosophy, they are not moral agents at all.
But being a moral agent is part of what it means to be human,
at least that's what it means in the old sense. As Lewis says,
Remember, for Aristotle, to be a human is to be a creature
capable of reason and virtue, or actually, even better yet, to be
human is to be a creature that exercises reason and virtue. The more that
we make use of reason, the more that we embody virtue, the more
essentially human we are, and the more that we pull away from these things,
the more that we live according to animalistic instinct, the more that we
neglect our nature, the more that we descend down into nature. As we
become more like the natural beasts that don't have access to reason, that don't
exist within the categories of good and evil, they simply are as all facts
of nature are. They simply are. We have no facts about what could
be derived from physical nature alone, And so the same people who talk about
transcending natural law, transcending any kind of fixed human nature, are actually descending
back down into unthinking, a rational nature, a more nature. This is
why when Mark begins to associate himself with Belbury, he becomes lost in the
fog. Everyone there is able to speak really well, but they don't really
say anything at all. Mark is so confused about what they're doing, what
he's doing there, what he's supposed to be doing. Everything is fog.
The more he goes in, the more just lost he becomes. And that's
because Mark is constantly looking for the inner circle, right. He wants to
get away from the masses, and he wants to get to the seats of
power. He wants to get into the inner circle. And remember four medieval
cosmology, which plays such a important role in the Ransom series. If you
get into the superficial center of things, and well, you give the Earth
at the center of the cosmos, but then at the center of the Earth,
what you have as hell, and that is as close as you can
get to non being as possible, and that's why everything is frozen over.
And so when Marc is pursuing the inner Circle, that's actually exactly where he's
headed. What he thinks he's moving toward transcendent, he's actually moving not further
up and further in, but he's moving further down and further out away from
the true center, and so he's moving into Hell, he's going downward.
Things are becoming less rational, less clear, and this is a theme that
runs throughout the Ransom series. And remember back in out of the Sidlent planet,
Weston and Divine are pursuing transcendence, but instead doing they're actually being pulled
down low. That's right toward the beginning, we're told that they're performing experiments
on their dog, Tartaris, and so they're literally experimenting with forces of hell
in order to reach Heaven. And so as they're trying to move upward,
they're actually being pulled downward. Whereas I feel like at Jane moving towards Saint
Anne's, she gains clarity with every conversation she has, Her reason is sharpened,
her understanding becomes more expansive, and that's because she is moving toward Heaven,
toward the true center. And as Lewis tells us in The Great Divorce,
Heaven is what remains when everything else is shaken, and so that's where
we find the greatest stability as we move upward toward transcendence, and as we
move upward toward transcendence, the imminent world in which we find ourselves the realm
of nature, actually gains more grounding and more stability. In other words,
we come to discover anew the humanity that has been with us all along.
And that's why when Mark is run around edge Stowe looking for Jane and he
runs into Dimple, Dimple offers to help him leave the nice and he says
that I'm inviting you back into the human family, because when we lose the
transcendent in which humanity is found, will we actually lose our actualized participation in
the human family. Because if there are no transcendent realities, if all we
have are particulars, then we don't have anything that holds us in common,
and so the idea of humanity falls apart. You only have humanity if you
have a transcendent realm to anchor it in or to find it in. And
along this line Loose continues. However far they go back or down, they
can find no ground to stand on. Motive they try to act on becomes
at once patitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are
not men at all. Stepping outside the towel, they have stepped into the
void, Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at
all. They are artifacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition
of man. And this reminds me of Lucy's question from Prince Caspian, And
we'll talk about this more when we get to Prince Caspian, But she asks,
wouldn't it be dreadful if someday in our own world at home, men
started going wild inside like the animals here and still look like men, so
that you never know which were which? And so this is getting to one
of the recurrent themes that runs throughout Lewis's writing, fiction and nonfiction. We
see this very clearly in the Ransom series, and we see this again come
up in the Narni series, as we'll look at more detail when we get
there. But I just want to repeat that question, wouldn't it be dreadful
if someday in our own world at home men started going wild inside like the
animals here and still look like men, so you never know which were which?
And as I alluded to just a little bit ago, Lewis says here,
man's conquest of nature turns out in the moment of its consummation to be
nature's conquest of men. By abandoning reason, we abandon what it means to
be human. We seep down into a rational, a moral nature in an
attempt to gain ourselves anew we lose ourselves altogether, because without a metaphysical context
in which to place ourselves, there's nowhere that we can be. We are
simply lost. We are subsumed into unthinking nature. Even as Lewis tells us
in Hell, everyone is subsumed in a perverted unity, into the hunger of
Satan. And as Lewis often does, he points out that this kind of
dystopia can come from democracy just as much from fascism, despite the fact that
elsewhere he does argue for democracy on the grounds that not that everyone is so
great, but that nobody is good enough to rule over other people. Absolutely.
Nonetheless, he regularly points out the ways that democracy can go wrong,
and so he says, I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even
chiefly, of those who are public enemies. At the moment. The process,
which if not checked, will abolish man goes on of pace among communists
and democrats no less than among fascists. The methods may at first differ in
brutality, but many a mild eyed scientist, many a popular dramatist, many
an amateur philosopher in our midst means in the long run, just the same
as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be debunked and mankind
to be cut into some fresh shape at the will, which must, by
hypothesis, be an arbitrary will of some lucky people in one lucky generation which
has learned how to do it. And that or that, I think is
just a good summary of everything that we've talked about up to this point.
That particular men to get power over its subjects by the subjects willingly relinquishing their
power to particular men, whether this be done in the market or by political
means. And so democracy does not necessarily equate freedom. Those are not interchangeable
terms. Now towards the end here, I think he does something really important
when he links together this kind of scientific progressivism with magic. And a lot
of people think that magic was rampant in the Middle Ages, but then it
was replaced by enlightenment science. But he makes the point that that's really not
the case. He says that there was very little magic in the Middle Ages,
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious
magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins. One was sickly and dyed,
the others strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born
of the same impulse. Now that does not mean that we need to go
burn the scientists as witches. That's not what Lewis is saying, and elsewhere
he makes that very clear. But I do think he's doing something important here
by pointing out the common impulses at work behind both magic and science. Now,
obviously science as a study of the empirical world can be put to positive
aims. However, if science is allowed to direct itself, then what we're
going to get is the extension of this impulse for domination, this impulse for
tyranny over nature. But as we've seen again and again, the more that
you reach up for power, the more power reaches up for you. And
in the end that power is going to win. You are going to be
pulled down by forces that you cannot account for within a scientific worldview. Hence,
the dark Eldells are the macrobes of the nice or the descent of west
End into the unman. Science can be a great tool in the right hands.
But when, as Busby says in that hideous strength, when science is
put on scientific grounds, when science becomes self de we at that point we've
given great power over to the sorcerer, over to the witch, and that
is only going to lead to hell. Then he goes on saying, there
is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of
earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been
how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge,
self discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem
is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men. The solution is a
technique, and both in the practice of this technique are ready to do things
hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious, such as digging up and mutilating the dead.
This right here is such a profound statement. For the wise men of
old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality,
and the solution had been knowledge, self discipline, and virtue. So,
in other words, there was this idea that there is a human nature,
and that the more we act in a certain way, the more that we
use reason, the more that we embody verse to you, the more that
we exercise self discipline, the more essentially human we become, or rather the
more that we conform to the human essence. Whereas today, the problem is
not virtue, right, because that sounds like we're shaming somebody for how they're
living. The correct answer is not reason, because I mean, it's oppressive
to say that you have a foothold on truth and that you're right and somebody
else is wrong. The problem is not self disciplined because that assumes a level
of responsibility that again leads the feelings of shame and guilt. We really need
are more sociologists and more psychiatrists who can give us the right techniques and apply
the right medicine to fix us with their professional external means. And I mean,
don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting psychiatry as a discipline, but
I am discounting a lot of psychiatrists and a lot of popular psychiatric methodology and
the philosophy that undergirds such movements, because a lot of those so called treatments
are made by men without chess, who are trying to operate on nature without
recognizing what it even means to be human. And so we'll talk about terms
like mental health without having any kind of understanding for what it even means to
be a healthy human, which means, in turn, we have people in
power who are imposing their vision for humanity divorced from natural law, divorce from
transcendent reason, divorce from any kind of transcendent understanding of human nature. They're
simply imposing their understanding of humanity on other people through their technical, scientific knowledge.
And oftentimes this involves doing things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious. And
so these people operating under the philosophy that Lewis has been talking about are trying
to see through all these so called artificial constructs of society. They're trying to
see through these supposedly oppressive constructions of traditional values and morality. They're trying to
see through all this to just see things as they really are through their scientific
empiricism. But as Lewis concludes this essay, but you cannot go on explaining
away forever. You will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You
cannot go on seeing through things forever. The whole point of seeing through something
is to see something through it. It is good that the windows should be
transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you
saw through the garden too, it is no use trying to see through first
principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a
wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the
same as not to see, and so we have to have first principles.
If we're going to use reason to determine the course of action that we should
take, or to go back to the beginning, if we're going to use
reason to determine even how language should be used, then we have to begin
by assuming that there is such a thing as reason, that there is such
a thing as a right way of thinking, and by extension, that there
are many wrong ways of thinking. But if we aren't able to grant that,
then our whole project falls apart into absurdity. And once we enter into
the realm of absurdity, then we are beyond the realm of good and evil.
We're beyond the realm of right and wrong. All we have is power
enacted on those without power. I really like what Lewis says here that if
we're trying to see through everything but there's nothing foundational at the bottom, then
we're not actually able to see anything at all. Reminds me of his Meditation
and a tool Shed, where he says that there are two ways to look
at a beam of light coming into a dark shed. One hand, you
can look along the beam. At that point you're not really looking at the
beam at all. You're rather seeing that which the beam illuminates. And so
you look through this beam of light and tool Shed, you're looking through the
hole in the roof, and you're able to see some trees, and further
up you see clouds, and eventually you may even see the sun itself,
and so you're not at all actually looking at the beam of light. You're
experiencing the beam of light, and in experiencing the beam of light, you're
experience something real about the light. And he says that the modern way of
looking at things is not to look along the beam, but rather to look
at the beam. And so you don't want to get personally invested. You
don't want to experience the beam. You want to study it objectively, which
means removing yourself from it, just as the modern philosopher scientists might try to
remove themselves from humanity in order to look upon it as if that would somehow
give them more objective, more real, more true knowledge. And so the
person studying the beam is said to have more true, more accurate knowledge in
the person who is simply experiencing the beam of light. But then he says,
by this line of thinking, would it not be more true, a
more real perspective, if then you had somebody standing behind the guy looking at
the beam. And this guy is now going to be studying the guy who's
looking at the beam and looking at his brain chemistry. You know, he's
looking at the gray matter in order to discover something about the thought of the
person who's looking at the beam. And then in discovering the thought that's leading
to his understanding of the beam, he then has a more real understanding because
he's seen through the perception of the first observer. But then would it not
be more real? Would it not then be more objective knowledge to have somebody
else behind that guy looking at his brain to determine how he is thinking through
his brain chemistry? But then would it not be more objective to have another
observer looking at that observer looking at the first observer. And that goes on
for infinity to the point where we're always seeing through something, but what we're
never actually seeing is thought itself. And so we remove ourselves from the experience
so far that we actually lose contact with the experience altogether. And that's what
he's saying here at the end of the Abolition of Man, that when we
see through everything, we actually lose the ability to see at all. We
have to begin somewhere, and what Lewis proposed is that we begin where nearly
everybody has begun throughout time, and that is with the presupposition that there are
things to know. And if there are things to know, then there is
a reason by which we might know them. And if there is a reason,
if there is a better way of thinking than others, perhaps even a
good way of thinking, then there also is a good way of acting.
And by reason, we can consider different scenarios and we're able to actualize those
at our best, first and foremost in our individual lives, but also as
that works its way out to our relationships and into society. More broadly.
In summary, the modern man needs to heed the invitation of dimble and re
enter the human family. And that's it for now. Next time we will
finish up that hideous strength. Until then, God's feeding. All right,
Thanks for listening, And again, if you find that helpful and you would
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