Sample entry from The C.S. Lewis Reader's Encyclopedia (Zondervan, 1998), edited by Jeffrey Schultz and John G. West, Jr. ©1998 by Zondervan Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Not for distribution without written permission of the copyright holder.

In our study of A.I. and the possibility of man creating an artificially intelligent machine with consciousness and therefore an entity that 'we' might endow with rights, this 60 year old book by C. S. Lewis raises some very important questions.  IF you think it is possible for man to create a thinking, conscious machine EVEN IF IT IS NOT POSSIBLE, have you abolished man?  Have you, in your mind, abolished your self as a person?  Are you then to think of your self as a machine with artificial intelligence?  But if your intelligence is artificial was their a 'programmer' or did your intelligence come about through chance or what are called stochatic processes undirected by any intelligence at all?

As you read through this short but remarkable book ask yourself  "is there such a thing as objective truth" and are their such things as 'self-evident' truths as are referred to in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident...."  If you think there are self-evident truths, what are they and how do these relate to the question of whether or not you think it is possible for man to create a thinking, conscious machine?

You might also ask yourself this question: Did things come before thoughts or did thoughts precede things?  And why do you choose to believe thoughts came before things or things came before thoughts?

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

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's 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.

The book originated during World War II when Lewis was asked by the University of Durham to present the Riddell Memorial Lectures. Lewis travelled to the city of Durham (and then further north to the village of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the lectures were actually delivered) with his brother Warren in February, 1943. Warren recalled the journey with gratitude in his diary, noting that the trip was "a little oasis in the dreariness, and the first holiday we have shared since our last walk." The years since the start of the war had been bleak ones, and the brothers found welcome relief in what Warren called their "jaunt together." Lewis's three lectures were delivered on the evenings of February 24, 25, and 26. They were published in book form the same year by Oxford University Press.

The Abolition of Man is divided into three essays. Essay one, "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 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's critique in this first essay focused largely on the moral relativism implicit in two English textbooks, neither of which Lewis referred to by name in order to spare the authors the embarassment of being pilloried by him in print. The first text, which Lewis called "The Green Book" by "Gaius and Titius," was in reality The Control of Language (1940) by Alex King and Martin Ketley. Lewis probably called this volume "The Green Book" because its cover was green; the reason he referred to its authors by the names of Gaius and Titius is more obscure. There are several figures from antiquity with those names, but it seems likely that Lewis chose the names because they were used in ancient literature for illustrative purposes, much like "Smith and Jones" are employed in English today. The second English text Lewis attacked in this chapter was cited as being authored by "Orbilius." The real title and author of this second work was The Reading and Writing of English (1936) by E. G. Biaggini. Lewis's identification of Biaggini as "Orbilius" was likely a reference to Orbilius Pupillus, an infamous grammarian known for inflicting beatings on the Roman poet Horace while teaching him Homer's Odyssey.

Lewis concluded his first essay in The Abolition of Man by launching his argument for the existence of an objective moral code that transcended time and culture. Lewis claimed that an honest study of different cultures, far from showing ethical confusion, indicated the existence of a universal moral code, which Lewis (drawing on ancient Chinese philosophy) called the "Tao." Lewis backed up his case for the Tao by supplying appendices that catalogued common moral maxims from civilizations around the world.

Lewis defended the existence of the Tao more fully in essay two of The Abolition of Man ("The Way"). His main point in this second essay was that those who deny the validity of moral judgments are usually self-contradictory because they cannot escape making moral judgments themselves. The only way for relativists to escape self-contradiction is to deny the existence of objective truth altogether and to claim that we create our own meaning by a sheer act of willpower. This was the solution offered by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but it is a cure that may be worse than the disease, as Lewis pointed out in his third and final essay of the book..
That essay "The Abolition of Man"discussed the potential for tyranny in a world where the elites no longer believed in any sort of objective truth. If everything is simply reduced to a struggle for power, then there is no constraint on what societal elites might do to reshape society in their own image. The fundamental question in society becomes not "Which policy is more just?" but "Which group has the most power to impose its will on society?" Lewis saw this mentality as the wellspring of tyranny.

The main ideas in The Abolition of Man can be found throughout Lewis's other writings and lectures, especially those that date from the 1940s. In fact, Lewis's first talk on the BBC ("The Law of Human Nature," broadcast August, 1941) dealt with natural law. The talk was published in 1942 in the collection titled Broadcast Talks , and it ultimately became the first chapter of Mere Christianity. Some time later, Lewis apparently worked on a speech covering much the same ground as the Riddell lectures, but for another audience; his text was published after his death as the essay, "On Ethics." And on February 8, 1943 (only a couple of weeks before the Riddell lectures), Lewis presented a talk at the Oxford Socratic Club titled, "If We Have Christ's Ethics, Does the Rest of the Christian Faith Matter?," which previewed part of the Riddell lectures by showing how Christianity's ethical teachings shared considerable common ground with the moral teachings of other religious and philosophical traditions. During the summer of 1943, Lewis published "The Poison of Subjectivism," an essay that was largely a synopsis of The Abolition of Man.

However, perhaps Lewis's most intriguing treatment of the ideas expressed in The Abolition of Man came in the novel That Hideous Strength. There Lewis depicted in fictional form the dire social consequences that would follow from a Nietzschean science allied with the tools of government bureaucrats. In many respects, That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man are parallel books that ought to be read together. Written during the same period in Lewis's life, both books present the same critique of subjectivism, and Lewis himself advised readers of That Hideous Strength that they could find the message of that novel presented in non-fiction form in The Abolition of Man.

Lewis's interest in natural law continued to the end of his life. After World War II, his classic study on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954) examined natural law and its relevance to politics. In chapter 7 of The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis discussed the conception of reason in the medieval world, which included the capacity of humans to rationally apprehend the first principles of morality. In Studies on Words (1960, rev. ed. in 1967), Lewis explored themes relating to natural law in his essays on the words "Nature" and "Conscience and Conscious." Natural law themes can also be found in the Chronicles of Narnia.

The Abolition of Man remains one of Lewis's most prophetic works, for the moral subjectivism that he predicted in the 1940s has come to pass with a vengeance, not only in Europe but in America. Such subjectivism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. The denial of the old moral absolutes has paralleled a dramatic increase in the authority of government to plan people's lives down to the last detail. It has also led to a moral vacuum in many disciplines, opening the door to the post-modern claim (springing ultimately from Nietzsche) that people are free to create their own reality through a sheer act of the will.

--JOHN G. WEST, JR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith,1969.

Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. HarperSanFransisco,1996.

Warren Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren HamiltonLewis, ed. by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco:Harper and Row, 1982.

John G. West, Jr., "Finding the Permanent in the Political: C. S. Lewisas a Political Thinker," in Andrew Tadie and Michael Macdonald, editors,Permanent Things . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

John G. West, Jr., "C. S. Lewis and the Materialist Menace," lecturepublished by Discovery Institute, Seattle, 1996.

Gregory Wolfe, "The Abolition of Man Revisited: College Textbooks inthe Social Sciences." The University Bookman. Summer 1982. pp.75-94.