Lewis and The Abolition of Man

On three evenings, February 24 to 26, 1943, with the war still going on, an Oxford English tutor named C. S. Lewis stood before an audience at King's College, Newcastle, and talked about a schoolbook.¹ The book was The Control of Language, a 1939 reader for upper-form students by two authors, Alexander King and Martin Ketley. Lewis did not name them. He called them Gaius and Titius.² The lectures were the Riddell Memorial Lectures of the University of Durham, and they became a short book, The Abolition of Man, published by Oxford University Press that same year.¹

Why a Schoolbook Mattered

Lewis was born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925, took a chair at Cambridge in 1954, and died in Oxford on November 22, 1963.³ By 1943 he was also a voice well beyond the university. Wikipedia notes that he spoke on BBC religious programs from 1941 to 1943.³ A man who talked to a national radio audience about right and wrong had good reason to care what the schools were teaching about the same subject.

The book was used as a text for upper-form students in British schools.² Lewis read it as teaching that a value statement, such as "this waterfall is sublime," only describes the feelings of the person who speaks. On that reading, "This is sublime" reports the speaker's own feelings, and Lewis answered that even on the authors' terms the feeling behind it would be veneration, so the translation would have to be "I have humble feelings."⁴ A student who absorbs that lesson learns to doubt that anything is really admirable or really vile. Lewis also pointed out that the authors contradicted themselves. They plainly believed that better learning for their students was a real good, and they could not defend that belief on their own terms.²

Men Without Chests

The first lecture takes its title, "Men Without Chests," from an old picture of the human being. The head stands for reason and the belly for appetite. Between them sits the chest, the seat of trained feeling, which lets a man love what deserves love and loathe what deserves loathing.⁵ Lewis argued that subjectivism, the view that goodness and beauty are only feelings, cuts out that middle part. A school that teaches the head to analyze and leaves the appetites free still has no way to train the part in between.⁶

His most quoted lines come at the end of that lecture. One is "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function."⁷ The other is set off below. Earlier in the lecture he used the phrase "trousered ape" for the man whom a false leading article on patriotism and honour cannot reach.⁶ His complaint was that a society cannot tell its young that courage and honor are only moods and then ask them to die for the country or run its institutions honestly.

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise."

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943, lecture 1.⁷

The Tao

The second lecture, "The Way," gives the positive case. Lewis borrowed the Chinese word Tao, the Way, for what he described as the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false to the kind of universe we live in and the kind of things we are.⁸ He said others might call it Natural Law or Traditional Morality.⁹ Lewis added an appendix, "Illustrations of the Tao," quoting teachings from many traditions, from Old Norse poetry to Babylonian hymns, to show that the same moral rules turn up wherever people have written about how to live.⁹

He then made a hard argument. If you try to refute the Tao and set up a fresh set of values in its place, you will find that you have borrowed your new values from the old ones. He wrote that the Tao is "the sole source of all value judgements," and that if it is rejected, all value is rejected.⁸ The authors of the schoolbook wanted to turn out young people with good habits of mind. That aim already treats some things as worth wanting, so they were drawing on the Tao while claiming to be above it.⁸

Lewis allowed for change within the Tao. A moral teacher might see a duty more clearly than the ones before him, as the Christian precept of love went beyond a Confucian rule of reciprocity. Such a person develops the Tao and does not cancel it. A thinker who tosses out the whole body and starts again, and he named Nietzsche as an example, is not offering a better morality. He is trading a loaf of bread, Lewis said, for bricks and centipedes.¹⁰ He also warned against putting the basic values on trial before a tribunal of one's own, because a trial like that would destroy all values and the critic's own ground with them: "You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao."⁹

The Conditioners

The third lecture turns from the classroom to the laboratory and the state. Modern science, Lewis said, had spent centuries gaining power over nature. The next target would be human nature. The people who held that power he called the Conditioners. If they shape human beings without a standard above themselves, their only guide is their own arbitrary will, and Lewis said the process was under way "among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists."¹¹ He feared the man-moulders of the new age armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state, and he gave the book its title with a line from this lecture: "Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man."¹¹

The warning is not against science. Lewis closes with a hope for what he called a regenerate science, one that when it explained would not explain away.¹¹ His point concerns who answers to what. Only the Tao, he wrote, gives a common law of action that can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. When the rulers declare themselves free of it, the ruled have nothing left to appeal to, and the result is the "post-humanity" he saw many nations laboring to produce.¹¹

Does the Tao Need God?

Readers sometimes ask whether Lewis's argument stands without religious premises. The book does not argue from the Bible. It speaks of the traditional moralities of East and West, "the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew," and its appendix gathers teachings from sources as far apart as Old Norse poetry and Babylonian hymns.¹² The Tao, on this account, is a human inheritance, found wherever people have tried to say what it is to live well.

That is a different approach from Schaeffer's. Schaeffer argued from the God of the Bible, and two of his best-known titles, The God Who Is There and He Is There and He Is Not Silent, say so in their names.¹³ The two methods can stand side by side. A citizen who has met the Tao as shared human wisdom may find it easier to hear the further claim that the standard has an author.

Natural Law and the Founders

The Declaration of Independence appeals to what it calls "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as the ground of the colonies' claim to a separate station among nations.¹⁴ It then says that all men are created equal and that governments are instituted to secure rights that come before them.¹⁴ That is a statement about a standard above the state.

Lewis wrote from the same family of ideas, since his Tao is the natural law and his argument is that rulers stand under it too.⁹ Anyone who admits that some things are really good has already granted what the argument needs. The Founders' framework depended on that granting. An appeal to rights fails where students are taught that rights are one more opinion.

Schaeffer's He Is There and He Is Not Silent came out in 1972 and gave its second chapter the title "The Moral Necessity."¹³¹⁵ The two men write in different styles and from different careers, a literary scholar and a pastor who moved his family to Switzerland in 1948 and helped found L'Abri there in 1955.¹⁶ This lesson sets the two side by side and does not claim that either drew on the other. Both ask the same question: where does a moral standard come from if man did not invent it? Lewis answers with the Tao and the long record of human teaching. Schaeffer answers with a God who is there and has spoken. Citizens can use both to test a proposal. Ask what it assumes about human beings, and whether the people carrying it out would accept that account of themselves.

What Lewis Expected to Happen

Lewis said the process was already going on in his own day, under every kind of government, and that the methods might "at first" differ in brutality.¹¹ The pattern can be pictured with ordinary examples. A school drops the teaching of honor because honor cannot be measured. A planning office treats citizens as populations to be steered. A research program treats the human body, and then the human mind, as one more material to be reshaped. The examples are illustrations of the pattern and are not quotations from Lewis.

The test that follows from his argument is whether anyone remains who can say no on grounds outside the plan. Under the Tao a conscience can. A parent, a juror, a county commissioner or a clerk who refuses an unjust order has somewhere to stand. Lewis held that a belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule that is not tyranny or an obedience that is not slavery.¹¹

Using the Tao on a Real Policy

Lewis gives a method that a school board member, a county commissioner or a voter can use without any training in philosophy. Take a proposal, for example a new curriculum, a rule for how a public agency treats the people who come to it, or a technology that tracks citizens. Ask what the proposal treats as good, and why. If the answer is that people simply prefer it, the proposal has no defense against a different preference tomorrow. If the answer is that it serves something people really owe each other, such as honesty, protection of the weak or fair dealing, then it has drawn on the Tao, and the debate can be about whether it serves that end well.

The second question is about the people who will carry it out. Lewis feared a class of managers who treat the public as material to be shaped. A citizen can ask whether the proposal binds the managers to the same rules it sets for everybody else. A rule that exempts its own authors from the standard it states has the shape of the Conditioners' project, whatever its aims.

The three Riddell lectures, February 1943

Lecture	Title	Main claim
1	Men Without Chests	Teaching that values are only feelings leaves students without trained moral sense
2	The Way	All real moral reasoning draws on one objective body of values, the Tao
3	The Abolition of Man	Rulers who reject the Tao can shape human nature to suit themselves

1. 1939 King and Ketley publish The Control of Language.²
2. 1943 Lewis gives the Riddell lectures in February; Oxford University Press publishes the book.¹
3. 1963 Lewis dies on November 22.³
4. 1972 Schaeffer publishes He Is There and He Is Not Silent.¹³

Learn more

• Word on Fire, The Abolition of Man at 80: a lecture-by-lecture guide with the key lines.
• Hillsdale College, Men without Chests: a reading guide to the first lecture.
• Hillsdale College, Chapter Two: The Way: a guide to the Tao and the argument about innovators.
• Wikipedia, The Abolition of Man: background on the lectures and the schoolbook.
• National Archives, Declaration of Independence: the founding statement of natural rights.
• Wikipedia, He Is There and He Is Not Silent: the Schaeffer book with a chapter on morals.

Notes

1. "The Abolition of Man," Wikipedia, section on the lectures: first delivered as three evening lectures, the Riddell Memorial Lectures, on 24 to 26 February 1943 at King's College, Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham; published by Oxford University Press in 1943. The Macmillan edition's title page reads "University of Durham, Riddell Memorial Lectures, Fifteenth Series." Read it online. ↩
2. "The Abolition of Man," Wikipedia, section on the Green Book: The Control of Language (1939) by Alexander King and Martin Ketley, whom Lewis calls "Gaius and Titius," used as a text for upper-form students; Lewis on value statements as reports of feeling. Read it online. ↩
3. "C. S. Lewis," Wikipedia: born 29 November 1898 in Belfast; fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925 to 1954; chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge from 1954; BBC religious programs 1941 to 1943; died 22 November 1963 in Oxford. Read it online. ↩
4. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 1, on the passage from The Control of Language about the waterfall, "This is sublime," and Lewis's reply that the feeling behind it is veneration, so that the proper translation would be "I have humble feelings." Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
5. "The Abolition of Man," Wikipedia, section on the chest: reason (head), appetite (belly) and the "chest" that joins them. Read it online. ↩
6. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 1, "Men Without Chests," where Lewis argues that subjectivism leaves schoolboys without trained sentiment and uses the phrase "trousered ape." Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
7. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 1, closing passage: "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise." Also quoted at Hillsdale College Online Courses. Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
8. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lectures 1 and 2, on "the doctrine of objective value" and on the Tao as "the sole source of all value judgements." Also discussed at Hillsdale College Online Courses. Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
9. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 2, "The Way," where Lewis says the Tao may also be called Natural Law, Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason, and warns "You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao"; and the appendix, "Illustrations of the Tao," drawing on Old Norse, Babylonian and other sources. Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
10. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 2, on development within the Tao, the advance from the Confucian maxim to the Christian one, and the man who says "Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead," applied to the morality of Nietzsche. Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
11. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 3, "The Abolition of Man," on the Conditioners, the omnicompetent state, "post-humanity," the regenerate science, the passage that begins "Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike," and the closing line "Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man." Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
12. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan; first published by Oxford University Press, 1943), lecture 2, the passage on "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew." Read the Internet Archive scan. ↩
13. "He Is There and He Is Not Silent," Wikipedia: first published 1972 (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House); chapter 1 "The Metaphysical Necessity," chapter 2 "The Moral Necessity," chapters 3 and 4 on knowledge. The Crossway trilogy contents list The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason and He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Read it online. ↩
14. Declaration of Independence, 1776, National Archives transcript: "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them"; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"; "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." Read it online. ↩
15. Francis A. Schaeffer, The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway), table of contents of He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Read it online. ↩
16. "Francis Schaeffer," Wikipedia: the family moved to Switzerland in 1948 and established L'Abri in 1955. Read it online. ↩