What is Nature doing in Lewis's Abolition of Man? Part I
Intro: Nature in Abolition
The article on which this talk is based is long and will appear next year in the pages of Sehnsucht. I won’t be able to reproduce the whole argument in this brief talk, but here we go.
What is Nature doing in the Abolition of Man? That is, first, why is it in the book, and second, what function does it have there?
The heart of the Abolition is what Lewis calls the Tao. And we’ve learned to identify the Tao with some sort of ethical frame – an “objective value,” which is a term Lewis uses.[1] But if this book is simply an argument for objective moral value or “the natural law” (which we think of as more law than nature), then why begin with waterfalls that demand of us certain kinds of aesthetic judgment,[2] and end by saying that technocrats who take Nature in their own hands to control others with it have stepped outside of something larger than moral law, Reality itself, and thereby lost their very humanity?[3]
This side of the dividing line
In his 1954 Cambridge address De Descriptione Temporum, Lewis says that we lost our “old Western” understandings when we started turning scientific categories and methods inward, to discover the meanings of our own humanity. This is social science (broadly construed), whose advent came in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Weber, Durkheim, and Marx co-founding the discipline of sociology. Weber famously wrote in 1917, [QUOTE] “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”[4] “Disenchantment,” he concluded, “has created a world with no objectively ascertainable ground for one’s conviction.”[5]
That hideous university
A telling line from That Hideous Strength throws social science under the bus with particular snark. Mark Studdock’s field is sociology—the study of social realities. Yet, QUOTE, “His education has had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy was the shadow.’”[6]
The mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez
Such deceptive and indeed manipulative shifting of the Real, Lewis believed, lay at the root of the toxic ideologies of wartime Europe. Here’s how he put it in the Abolition:
“[M]any a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez . . . means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere ulh, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material.’”
[1] Lewis linked the Tao to “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Lewis, Abolition, 10-11.
[2] “The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.” C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Kindle edition, HarperCollins 2009; orig. pub. 1944), 9
[3] “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void.” Lewis, Abolition, 29.
[4] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., from Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford University Press: New York, 1977), 155. Cited in Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden (Oxford University Press, 1993), 9.
[5] “Max Weber,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/. Italics mine.
[6] Thomas Howard, “The Triumphant Vindication of the Body: The End of Gnosticism in That Hideous Strength,” in The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, ed. David Mills (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 136-137, quoting That Hideous Strength – note Lewis’s use here of Platonic language of the “real.”