by Michael Ward
The book consists of the three Riddell Memorial Lectures that were delivered by Lewis at the University of Durham in February 1942 at the height of the Second World War. In that same year Lewis was certainly at the height of his power and conviction as both literary critic and Christian apologist. It was the year of the publication of both The Screwtape Letters and A Preface to Paradise Lost. The lectures were themselves published as The Abolition of Man in January 1943, the year in which he also published Perelandra, the masterpiece of his science fiction trilogy, and right in the 1. The Revd. Dr. Malcolm Guite is Chaplain of Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Ashgate, 2010) and of “Poet” in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010). As a poet himself, he is the author of Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury Press, 2012), and The Singing Bowl (Canterbury Press, 2013). He maintains a web presence at www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com.
2. Letter to Mary Willis Shelburne (20 February 1955), The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3, ed. Walter Hooper, 566–67.
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midst of the series of radio broadcasts he gave from 1941 to 1944 that eventually became Mere Christianity (1952).
The Riddell Memorial Lectures were established for “a subject con-
cerning religion and the contemporary development of thought,” and Lewis’s offering certainly fits the bill. What begins as a specific discussion of a schoolroom textbook in English literary criticism, soon widens as Lewis follows the implications into a profound critique of society and our account of our own humanity. At the core of that critique is a recognition that what he elsewhere calls “the poison of subjectivism,”3 taken to its logical conclusion will ultimately undermine all the essential qualities of our humanity. He follows his criticisms of the subjectivism of contemporary culture, therefore, with a robust account of what he calls “the doctrine of objective value,”4
grounded ultimately on a universally acknowledged given “rightness in things,” which is not ultimately contingent or entirely culturally determined and which he calls the “Tao” or the “Way,” borrowing his term rather surprisingly from the Chinese mystic, Lao Tsu. It is an extraordinary book, at once enlightening, challenging, and infuriating, and I want in the rest of this paper to highlight three aspects of it that together may be responsible both for its importance and its unpopularity. These three aspects are: first, its paradoxical or contradictory nature; secondly, its essentially prophetic character—prophetic both in the sense of clearly foreseeing what has, in fact, come to pass, and also in the sense of speaking out, speaking truth to power; and thirdly, I want to look at the serious problems and cultural blind-spots that are embedded in it. In conclusion, I hope to tease out some of the insights it has to offer us in the twenty-first century.
The Paradoxes of The Abolition of Man
So let us start with the paradoxical and contradictory aspects of this book. I think these are fourfold:
First, what appears to be a detailed, even pernickety critique of a school textbook suddenly becomes the launch-pad for a serious attack on a whole tranche of widely held cultural assumptions. Is his attack on the textbook merely a ruse, or are there serious reasons for starting there?
Secondly, what might be mistaken for cultural chauvinism or heavy
religious propaganda turns out to be an exploration and defence of universal values, a recognition of common truth in the midst of extraordinary cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity.
3. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Hooper.
4. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 17.
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Thirdly, what looks in the middle parts of the book like a conservative retrenchment of tradition turns out really to be a radical challenge to renewal and liberation.
Finally, what starts as an attack on a certain kind of “debunking,” on deploying the hermeneutics of suspicion, turns out itself to be a piece of applied scepticism, of unmasking and deconstruction.
i) Mere Literary Criticism?
Let us attend first to the literary critical elements in this book. Lewis famously begins with the account of Coleridge and the “sublime” waterfall.
The poet overhears two tourists remarking on a waterfall: one calls it pretty, the other sublime, and Coleridge deplores the first and approves the second response. Were Lewis to be writing directly about the incident itself, he would have wonderful things to say both from his rich and deep reading in the Romantics and from his profound understanding of the history, context, and nuance of English words. However, his concern in this book is not what he would make of this incident but what has been made of it in a school textbook, which he calls The Green Book and ascribes coyly to two authors whom he calls Gaius and Titius. In fact, the book in question was called The Control of Language, written by Alex King and Martin Ketley, two young Cambridge men, both Australian, who published it in 1939.5 Throughout this book, King and Ketley are trying to alert very young readers to the possibilities of surreptitious or subliminal emotional manipulation through the use of emotive language. Here is the passage from their book to which C. S. Lewis objects:
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 a 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.
Lewis comments: “here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion.” But King and Ketley are not yet finished. They continue: 5. The Control of Language: A Critical Appraisal to Reading and Writing was published in London in 1939; Lewis was sent it for review. His much-annotated copy, now at the Wade Center, Wheaton College, has a green cover; the publisher’s name
“Longman, Green,” may have further contributed to the nickname he gives it; but one assumes he also had in mind some of the negative meanings of “green,” such as “naïve,”
“nauseous,” and possibly also “envious” (one thinks of the Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair, who wishes to invert the moral order).
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This confusion is continually present in language as we use it.
We appear to be saying something very important about some-
thing: and actually we are only saying something about our own
feelings.6
The rest of Lewis’s book could be said to be an analysis of “the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph.”
First, he dismisses the asinine absurdity that the statement “this is sublime” means “I have sublime feelings.” Properly speaking, to say something is sublime actually means “I have humble feelings”—humble towards the sublimity. If to say “this is sublime” means “I have sublime feelings,” then to say “this is contemptible” would mean to say “I have contemptible feelings.” Having dismissed this pons asinorum, as Lewis calls it, he goes on to deal with the far more serious implications, which involve the debunking or undermining of all statements of value and the way this is done by a series of unconscious and unchallenged assumptions visited with authority on a school child who will have no awareness of what is being done to him. As Lewis says:
The very power of Gaius and Titius 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 poli-
tics 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 cont
roversy which he has never recognized as a controversy
at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they
are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to
him.7
It is particularly telling how deep Lewis’s sympathy is for the young person at school, how searchingly he asks the question: will this particular piece of education enlarge or enrich the whole person or will it narrow and restrict it? So he goes on to say:
Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters,
have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose,
the possibility of having certain experiences, which thinkers of
more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and
humane.8
6. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 7–8.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Ibid., 11.
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The pupils in question thought they were having their day’s lesson in English, “though of English they have learned nothing. Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.” And this leads Lewis, in a throw-away line, which has justly become one of the most famous quotations from the book, to adumbrate an entirely new approach to education in a single sentence:
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”
A great deal of Lewis’s real vision of human freedom and flourishing is embedded in that sentence. Education is not about imposing dogma nor about cultural hegemony: it is about enabling the unfolding growth and the potential hidden in the rich ground of the human psyche.
ii) Cultural Chauvinism or Universal Values?
Having objected to the way in which the pupil has had a little portion of the human heritage “cut out of his soul,”9 Lewis goes on to set out what is missing in King and Ketley’s approach, namely the doctrine of objective value and the fitness of certain responses to the world, the approach which he calls the “Tao.” And this is where we find that what might be mistaken for cultural chauvinism or religious propaganda turns out to be an exploration and defence of universal values, of common truth in the midst of linguistic and religious diversity. Lewis ranges freely from the Tao Te Ching and the Analects of Confucius through the Upanishads to Plato and Aristotle and the writings of the Stoics. He also includes allusions to the Old and New Testament, but cites them only as part of common witness to a common theme, not in this context privileging them in any way as special revelation.
The direct allusions to this extraordinary range of ancient religious writing is further supplemented in the remarkable appendix (“Illustrations of the Tao”) in which he takes eight—in his view—objective moral insights and illustrates all eight with passages ranging from the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the Norse Volospa through Native American sayings (including an account of the Battle of Wounded Knee) to Babylonian texts and the Bhagavad Gita. Lewis’s point is not only that utterly reductive and isolating subjectivism is self-contradictory, but that it is also contradicted by a univer-9. It is remarkable how this phrase paradoxically anticipates the language of Philip Pullman, who has thought himself so opposed to Lewis. In Pullman’s fiction it is the church that, by the hideous operation of “intercision,” cuts children’s souls away from them. Lewis is entirely with Pullman in protesting against such psychic violence, but has pointed out long before him that it is, in fact, aggressive and reductive secularism that is actually doing the damage. Cf. Pullman, Northern Lights, especially 204–14.
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sal testimony of religious insight throughout all times and cultures, which, however culturally coloured, seems to bear witness to an objective reality.
Having established and reminded us of this vast common inheritance of religiously inspired and culturally shared humane values, he returns again to the withering pre-suppositions of this little school textbook.
Over against this stands the world of The Green Book. In it the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable—or even unreasonable—has been excluded from the outset. It can be reason-
able or unreasonable only if it conforms or fails to conform to
something else. 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 of shoes but
of feet. But this reference to something beyond the emotion is
what Gaius and Titius exclude from every sentence containing a
predicate of value. Such statements, for them, refer solely to the emotion. Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be
either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational
not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error. On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of
feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.10
That Lewis himself had felt deeply the consequence of the reductivism he is now attacking, had known what it is to live in a world in which facts “without one trace of value” and feelings “without one trace of truth or falsehood” confront one another, is evident from that remarkable passage in Surprised by Joy where he talks about how the two hemispheres of his mind were in the sharpest contrast: “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”11 His attack on The Green Book has a personal force behind it; he is speaking from experience.
iii) Conservative Entrenchment or Radical Renewal?
It is in the context of these two alternatives symbolized by the Tao and The Green Book that we can see another of our paradoxes: what looks like a 10. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 16–17.
11. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 161.
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conservative re-entrenchment of tradition is really a radical challenge to renewal and liberation. This is because, as Lewis I think cogently shows, the “doctrine of objective value” that he is seeking to defend is itself a presupposition that defends freedom and all other values. Lewis points out in the chilling final chapter (“The Abolition of Man”) that those who debunk and deny all objective value may nevertheless choose to exploit what they regard as the illusion of value, carefully fostered in others, for their own purposes. So he writes:
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 is making them or not, and in mak-
ing which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they
are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational,
as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they
must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible,
from the pupil’s mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for
reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic “justness” or
“ordinacy.” 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 penetrated.12
As so often, Lewis illustrates his point with one of those brilliant and imaginative analogies which often carry implicitly even more wisdom than he purports to get out of them:
The difference betwe
en the old and the new education will be
an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely
“conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal
with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals
with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—
making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know
nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men
transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.13
12. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 17.
13. Ibid., 18.
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iv) Debunking the Debunkers:
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
This leads us to our final paradoxical element in this remarkable book.
What starts as an attack on a certain kind of debunking, King and Ketley’s deploying of the hermeneutics of suspicion, turns out to be itself a brilliant example of applied scepticism. The whole analysis of The Green Book is a process of unmasking and deconstruction, and what it reveals is a discourse of power, the establishment of a cultural hegemony whose effect is to disen-franchise those who subscribe to it. As Lewis goes on to say:
Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which
can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objec-
tive value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not
tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.14
The Abolition of Man as Prophetic Writing
Lewis died on the same day as two other great figures of the twentieth century: President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. Readers of The Abolition of Man, especially its final chapter, cannot help being struck by the extraordinary parallels between the dystopic future against which Lewis warns and the one Huxley had already imagined eleven years earlier in Brave New World (1932) and whose many fulfilled predictions he had later analysed in Brave New World Revisited (1958). Both foresee the possibility (even before the discovery of DNA) of a combination of genetic modification, eugen-ics, and overwhelming scientifically-driven cultural conditioning, allowing human beings completely to redefine and re-engineer their own humanity.