The Abolition of Man
At the 2018 World Economic Forum, Historian Yuval Noah Harari gave a lecture entitled “Will the Future Be Human?” Audience members, consisting of over 340 of the world’s highest ranked political officials from around the globe, sat quietly as he answered that question in the negative. Harari states, “You can really summarize 150 years of biological research since Charles Darwin in 3 words: Organisms [i.e., humans] are Algorithms.”
In 1943, C.S. Lewis delivered a series of three evening lectures at the University of Durham. These lectures would shortly be turned into a book known as, The Abolition of Man.† In it, you will see that he predicted Harari's speech eighty years before it happened.
The book itself is a short one—about one hundred pages—and can be read cover to cover in a couple hours. This is part of its brilliance. It is also what can make it difficult to read. Lewis doesn’t waste a word, and because of that, it has a depth to it that can’t be measured by its page count. Lewis moves quickly, but in a masterful cadence that keeps the reader engaged and in awe.
Men Without Chests
In setting out to paint a picture of the future that would prove prophetic—a world where humanity is stripped away of its soul—Lewis begins in the classroom.
Lewis uses two elementary English textbooks as his starting point, textbooks that make no mention of philosophy, ethics, or politics, but smuggle in a vision of the world that impacts all those subject areas. Lewis says, “It is not a theory they put into his [the child’s] 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” (p. 5).
This theory is known as nominalism, or the belief that all value claims are subjective and trivial. Lewis sees this as a noxious gas that is in the very air we breathe. Without proper warning of its presence there is little we can do to defend ourselves, let alone our children. What is on the line in his estimation is the very essence of humanity.
This takes us to Lewis’s next important argument, his breakdown of Man. This is done by way of metaphor in three parts: the head (intellect), the chest (sentiment), and the belly (appetite). It is this middle element of Man that Lewis is primarily concerned with.
The chest element of man is what gives us soul, life, meaning, and purpose. It is what protects us against our lustful desires and makes us more than machines (or algorithms). Our sentiments, which reside in the chest, act as a liaison between the intellect and the appetite. Lewis says “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (p. 24). Our task then as parents, teachers, friends, and image bearers alike, in Lewis’s estimation, is to train the chest to have the right responses to the world.
This is only possible for those that stand within a system of objective values, or as Lewis puts it, within the Tao (pronounced “dow”). The Tao is what he uses as his summation of the Moral or Natural Law that most of mankind has used across history. He defines it as such: “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (p. 18).
What about those that place themselves outside of this system? Lewis sees two paths available: either all sentiments are debunked as irrational and meaningless, or a new system of values will have to emerge by people Lewis calls the ‘Innovators.’ The former is addressed in the final chapter, the latter in the next.
The Way
Within a naturalistic worldview, the Innovator cannot steal from, borrow from, or appeal to the Tao. He is then left with two possible options to establish a new system of values.
The first comes by way of ‘rational grounds.’ The method employed by the Innovator has to be a deductive argument based on observable facts and nothing else. The task proves impossible: “From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn” (p. 31). You cannot derive an ought from an is. Neither can you claim any value to be primary or foundational without appealing to an outside standard. Any appeal to duty, justice, or love is a reversion back to The Tao and the whole project collapses.
The next attempt comes by way of instinct. There is an initial plausibility to this argument that Lewis tosses up. Is it so troublesome to say that our values come from spontaneous impulses (instincts) that we must follow? Lewis doesn't waste any time batting it down. For if that is the case, “Why this stream of exhortation to drive us where we cannot help going?” (p. 34). In other words, if we are arguing about whether or not we should follow our instincts, we must not have to follow them. The Innovator cuts off the branch he is sitting on.
To conclude this chapter, Lewis moves into the defense of the Tao. He lays the groundwork for this being a matter of first principles. “It is the reality beyond all predicates” (p.18), as Lewis stated in chapter one.
In chapter two he picks this thought back up: “You may, on the other hand, regard them [objective values] as rational — nay as rationality itself — as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof. But then you must allow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dismissed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all” (p. 40).
To accept the Tao is to accept Reason, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as universal axioms that undergird the world we inhabit. But, to argue against the Tao brings you to the contention of the last chapter—The Abolition of Man.
The Abolition of Man
The Innovator’s task proved impossible—and so it goes when one tries to square a circle. From this, Lewis does not then anticipate that the world will correct its course and come running back home to embrace the Tao. Lewis is too honest and insightful for that. Instead he starts to tell the story of the future, or, to the current reader's angst, the present.
He begins this final chapter with the modern idea that we live in an age where man possesses power over nature through the means of science. This seems plausible, but Lewis wants us to think a little deeper about what is really happening here. By what method is science advanced? By popular vote? And who is dictating the direction it goes? All of us? “What we call Man’s power over nature is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by” (p. 54). Man's power over nature turns out to be man's power over other men.
This is where it all starts to come together. Lewis has been weaving together a tapestry, and we have been carefully following each thread. It’s gone something like this: Humans have a soul, or sentiments, that our head uses to keep our lustful appetites at bay. Those sentiments are either trained and developed to map on to reality and conform to The Tao, or they wither and die, leaving the head defenseless against the belly. The modern world is in that defenseless state. It is a world that no longer recognizes an ultimate ground for virtue, and thus does not adequately train the chest.
Science then becomes a weapon to be wielded without consequence by a minority of conscienceless Conditioners. Once the world is stripped of ultimate value, meaning and purpose, the only thing left is subjugation of the world (or as Lewis puts it in this last chapter, ‘nature’). Manipulate nature and conquer everything and everyone in it. Lewis puts the inevitable final step like this:
”At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ — to their irrational impulses. Nature untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man” (p. 67–68). A tragicomedy is the final act.
In 2018, Yuval Harari raised the question, “Will the future be human?” The Abolition of Man gets to the very cause of how such a question can be seriously asked. It exposes the root of the insanity that has become commonplace in our modern world.
Heed the warnings, be watchful of the Innovators of our day, but do not lose hope. The Tao, as Lewis would confirm, is more than a philosophical position, it is a revelatory fact as stated in God’s Word: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Harari is wrong. The future will be human. The final act is not the abolition of man, but the redemption of man in Christ Jesus. That victory has been won, and nothing can prevail against it.
† All quotations from C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001).