The Abolition of Man
“In his 1947 book, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis wrote about the way education shapes and reshapes our sense of morality. He warned about the blindness of a growing social engineering class (which he called the Conditioners) who through education and other social organs promoted their limited concept of man and society. Driven by a kind of social-revolutionary fervor, they lacked genuine moral courage and moral vision. What was then a small trend, though spreading rapidly, has now, 60 years later, come to dominate the entire Western world.
In the passage below, Lewis refers to ‘Nature’ in the sense of instinctive drives in man. Nature cannot be treated as so much raw material for the service of our egoism, social experiments, or industrial exploitation. Our effects to control it through supposedly rational measures (reason divorced from conscience) will always backfire on us. Any attempt to manipulate it to our own ends, either by greedily exploiting it, or worshiping it, or reconstructing it according to theories, will unleash unexpected negative consequences. Nature must be approached with respect, and human nature above all must be respected. Whenever Natural Law and the moral imperatives of Supernatural Law are ignored, Man is the first victim. The exploitive industrialist and the ecologist alike, though seemingly in opposition to each other, bring about the same end result—the abolition of Man—that is, the negation of his true meaning and dignity, the violation of his eternal value. This translates into the destruction of human beings in the name of ‘humanity.’”
~Michael O’Brien
“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 untrammelled 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. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.”
~C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
In the passage below, Lewis refers to ‘Nature’ in the sense of instinctive drives in man. Nature cannot be treated as so much raw material for the service of our egoism, social experiments, or industrial exploitation. Our effects to control it through supposedly rational measures (reason divorced from conscience) will always backfire on us. Any attempt to manipulate it to our own ends, either by greedily exploiting it, or worshiping it, or reconstructing it according to theories, will unleash unexpected negative consequences. Nature must be approached with respect, and human nature above all must be respected. Whenever Natural Law and the moral imperatives of Supernatural Law are ignored, Man is the first victim. The exploitive industrialist and the ecologist alike, though seemingly in opposition to each other, bring about the same end result—the abolition of Man—that is, the negation of his true meaning and dignity, the violation of his eternal value. This translates into the destruction of human beings in the name of ‘humanity.’”
~Michael O’Brien
“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 untrammelled 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. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.”
~C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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