Jeff Minick, Intellectual Takeout, 3/14/24
For years now, our culture has waged war over the question of what it means to be a man. To that battlefield, some online pundits have brought the heavy artillery of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
In the well-stocked armory of words and ideas comprising Lewis’ short treatise, we find other weapons of enlightenment of which we have need today, concepts that mark Lewis not only as a philosopher but as a prophet. Chief among these is the Tao (translated literally as path or way), a synonym for “Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes.”
Lewis writes: “It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.” Rid ourselves of the Tao, and “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of men to make other men what they please.”
As Lewis describes a world without Tao, we see the first resemblances between his broken but imaginary world and our real one. With the advent of postmodernism, in particular, capital-R Reality has been exchanged for the quasi-truth of individual opinion. We now longer have objective principles we can appeal to; rather, everyone creates their own reality and morality.
Lewis foresees two deadly consequences in this exchange of natural law and traditional virtue for man-made values. The first is that this “power will be enormously increased” such that “the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique.”
These powers and scientific techniques are in play in the 21st century, and though we may shake with laughter at the notion of our federal government as omnicompetent, there are people hard at work in our Capitol trying to make it omnipotent.
The second consequence Lewis dubs even more significant. The traditional practice of handing the Tao from one generation to the next, of “old birds teaching young birds to fly,” will give way to Conditioners, “who know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce.” He goes on, “The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race.”
Though he recognizes that some men and women hope that these Conditioners will be benevolent, Lewis has his doubts, unable to think of “one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, had used that power benevolently.”
Fast-forward to our day, in which we are conditioned daily to accept new ideologies, sometimes twisting language to bring them to life. Phrases like toxic masculinity, reproductive choice, white privilege, gay marriage, and cisgender vs. transgender—all concepts that ignore objective truth and the anchor of tradition—now abound. Conditioners in our culture, for example, have taken a phenomenon like transgenderism (once rare and, until recently, regarded as a mental illness), reworked it into an ideology, and encouraged more and more people to accept it as the norm, with deniers often suffering severe consequences.
Other Conditioners are intent on convincing us to eat bugs rather than beef and to eradicate fossil fuels, all to save the planet from climate change, a measure which could leave countless people impoverished or dead of starvation. As Lewis told us, our Conditioners know how to produce and influence conscience, and they busy themselves day and night to that end.
At the heart of these efforts are two modern dogmas: universal relativism and irrational toleration. Put those two together, and a path can indeed be built—not a Tao but a roadway to the extermination of our humanity.
Because, as C.S. Lewis sees it:
Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common law of action which over-arch rulers and ruled alike.
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https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/03/the-abolition-of-man-cs-lewis-prophecy/
There are some areas of Lewis’s essay which could be revised by applied psychology because his discussion implies that. I don’t know if I can cover it that well but here goes.
By “Conditioners” he likely means conditioning like that of Pavlov’s dogs, which is simple stimulus – response. But humans are more than that: humans are stimulus – recognition – response. That’s a more recent discovery which likely wasn’t known in Lewis’s time. Thus the outcome for a “conditioned” human stimulus is not certain, like Pavlov’s dogs are.
I also see here the interplay between nature and nurture. That is something I’d prefer to discuss with other psychologists because “natural impulses” can be either good or evil and can just as well be nurtured. Today it’s called “human/social engineering”, which can be partially successful depending on the level of propaganda that accompanies it.
That, I suppose would be removing the “recognition” from the stimulus – response. And that entails removing the human element to effect an animal’s response, treating them like sub-humans in effect.
That’s all I can think of thus far. But yes, removing objective truth, the blueprint, the “recognition”, the measure of all things, can manipulate human beings into brainwashed barbarian slaves of chaos ruled by the all – powerful statist tyrants.
Do you understand where this is going? They want to treat us like dogs. Next they’ll want us to get down on all fours and bark like a dog. And eat whatever they choose. Or just euthanize/starve us.
P.S. I may have misremembered the psychology I studied back in the late ’70’s. I think it was rather stimulus – cognition – response. Maybe.