The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man is perhaps the best defense of natural law to be
published in the twentieth century. The book is outstanding not because
its ideas are original, but because it presents so clearly the common
sense of the subject, brilliantly encapsulating the Western natural law
tradition in all its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian glory. Interestingly,
Lewis' defense of objective morality here resonates not only with ideas
from the giants of Western thought (including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine,
and Aquinas), but also draws on the wisdom of the East, including Confucius and the sages of Hinduism.
In "The Abolition of Man" C.S. Lewis developed three lectures entitled
"Men without Chests'', "The Way", and "The Abolition of Man". In them he
set out to attack and confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He
started by quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists'
textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral subjectivism.
In his second lecture he argued against various contemporary isms, which
purported to replace traditional objective morality. His final lecture,
"The Abolition of Man", which also provided the title of the book
published the following year, was a sustained attack on hard-line
scientific anti-humanism.
The first essay, "Men without Chests," indicted the modern attempt to
debunk objective virtues and sentiments. According to Lewis, traditional
moral theorists believed that virtues such as courage and honor were true
regardless of culture; these theorists also maintained that the purpose of
education was to inculcate virtues in people by linking them to the proper
emotions. This process of reinforcing virtue with emotion produced
"sentiments" in people, supplying them with "chests" that safeguarded them
from savagery. By debunking all sentiments as merely subjective, however,
modern critics have generated "men without chests", human beings who are
unable to resist their basest appetites because they have been deprived of
the very means of resistance. The situation has made civilization
unsustainable according to Lewis. "We make men without chests and expect
of them virtue and enterprise," he observed. "We castrate and bid the
geldings be fruitful." Lewis concluded his first essay by launching his
argument for the existence of an objective moral code that transcended
time and culture.
In the second essay, The Way, Lewis claimed that an honest study of
different cultures, far from showing ethical confusion, indicated the
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