"That Hideous University": CS Lewis against Weberian modern education
To give an account today of the onset and qualities of “modernity” is a fraught enterprise. What follows by way of introduction is the merest sketch of a mare’s nest of qualities and influences.[1] I start with the twentieth-century commentator who almost always gets mentioned in such accounts: Max Weber, the German scholar considered today to have co-founded the discipline of sociology along with Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Weber saw a highly rational and calculating bureaucratic order eclipsing older religious meaning-structures in the West, in a process he termed “disenchantment.” He was blunt about the human results of this shift, observing that as the erstwhile settled verities of religion, with their metaphysical and ethical traditions, were demoted from the public sphere to the realm of private speculation and preference, political and economic actors increasingly treated their fellow humans as numbers in the accounting book rather than as persons.[2] As one interpreter has summarized Weber’s analysis, “disenchantment has created a world with no objectively ascertainable ground for one’s conviction.”[3]
A modern Christian humanist text pushing back on modernity as described by Weber and diagnosing a fourfold separation from the Real along epistemological, ontological, anthropological, and ethical lines (though describing these separations, for humanist apologetic reasons, in non-theist terms) is C S Lewis’s triptych of essays, The Abolition of Man (1943).[4] Famously, Lewis here presents a diagnosis of the modern loss of the Tao, his term for the near-universal premodern worldview that (in religious forms particularly) had long steered human affairs by the lodestar of a unified natural and moral Real.
Lewis himself was an academic, and he saw the university (and to a lesser degree the elementary classroom) as ground zero for the dissolution of Christian humanist values. Just as he embeds the Real of morality within the Real of nature in the Abolition, he does so imaginatively in That Hideous Strength, which he described as a fictional version of the Abolition’s central argument.[5] The novel portrays the modern university as riven with a variety of quasi-scientific, anti-humanist ideologies, and paints against this backdrop a small, rearguard movement whose strength was an embodied morality exemplified in married sexuality and the homely virtues of the family. The latter are portrayed in the household of St. Anne’s-on the-Hill, represented as under attack by the bad ideas of N.I.C.E. (the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments”) and its “mild-eyed scientists in pince-nez,”[6] who engage in all four modern separations through social-scientific reductionisms and the twisting of language.
That Hideous Strength thus imagines the more frightening university version of the soulless moral relativism Lewis found reflected in the writers of the elementary school Green Book discussed in his Abolition. It reveals where Lewis thought British universities were headed in 1943 as the war, which he saw as the result of anti-humanist ideologies, ground into its final bloody years. This was the academic world as described by Weber, which seemed to Lewis to be dedicated to the abolition of human values themselves. Per Mark Schwehn, “Indeed, Weber insisted that questions of ultimate meaning and value [i.e. the Real] must not be examined within the academy”[7]:
[T]he constraints Weber placed upon academic inquiry were but a special case of the limits of the same formal rationality that governed the political and economic spheres of modern life. The virtues of friendship, brotherliness, and charity had, according to Weber, retreated from not only the economic and political spheres of life but from the academic sphere as well. Under such conditions, an impersonal, objective, and ascetic concept of vocation was, for Weber, the only adequate guide for action in a disenchanted world.[8]
In short, what Weber had offered was something between diagnosis and prescription, portraying the university’s shift from the old Christian humanist purpose of bildung – the shaping of character according to the wisdom of tradition (as in the old German academic “brahmin” tradition) to a new purpose that, in accord with the presumed objective nature of science, limited itself to the discovery of rational, calculable sorts of knowledge, setting moral values aside (in ways he understood to be perilous, though unavoidable). The modern university must dedicate itself to the creation and dissemination of technical knowledge. It could no longer attend to the formation of the student in some objective morality—for morality was wholly subjective, not objective—to be chosen by the individual according to religious or philosophical dicta, subjective forms of understanding that could no longer be imparted, as presumably fixed and reliable, in the classroom.[9]
“Academics were, therefore,” Schwehn said, “true to their own calling when they steadfastly refused to address questions about the meaning of the whole or the purpose of human life.” In the words of Weber, Schwehn concluded, “academic life could no longer be understood as ‘the way to true being, the way to true art, the way to God, or the way to true happiness.’”[10]
Writing in light of this Weberian reality now embodied in the modern university, Lewis described the loss of the older Christian-classical understanding of the Real as knowable to human reason (true); as participating in the transcendent (beautiful); and as imbued with a moral nature that we realize in ourselves through the cognitive and affective training of our character (good). Together, those unities had once cohered in an understanding of humanity that Lewis recognized as now in danger of being “abolished,” and therefore in need of retrieval.
In arguing that the purpose of education is to reconnect the student to the Tao or the truth of what it means to be human, Lewis’s Abolition rejected the rationalized Weberian vision of the purpose of education as being about the making and transmission of technical knowledge rather than the passing-on to students of traditional values (the Tao). In “Science as Vocation,” Weber had described the process of rationalization, intellectualization, and “the disenchantment of the world” as meaning that we could “in principle master all things by calculation,” such that the end of academic life became “nothing less than mastery of the world.” In the Abolition, Lewis described the scientific program of mastery of nature bluntly as a thin veneer over the technocratic impulse of some men to master others, with nature as the instrument.[11] Lewis’s argument here seemed well-borne-out in the scientific ideologies that ravaged Europe in wartime years during which he was writing.
Back, finally, to the “mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez.” Lewis argued that, freed of the Tao, the modern scientist could now turn humanity into mere passive matter, releasing us in the process from the inconvenient impositions of the moral Real:
It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. . . . Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. . . . [M]any a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, 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. (Lewis, Abolition, 32-3.)
In other words, by their application of an empirical method that carried with it a strict fact-value split, the scientific positivists emptied humans, let alone nature, of all life and motive power – and thus also of the Tao, the moral Real. In their hands, the scientific paradigm, with its language of “laws of nature,” became a rigid and spiritless schema that explained everything – an “objectivity” that finally abolished the subject.
[1] One exploration of the complex byways of modernity may be found at the Genealogies of Modernity website: https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/ and its related journal. This is a project of Beatrice Institute, based in Pittsburgh, and the Collegium Institute, based at the University of Pennsylvania, with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[2] It is also worth noting that he also believed the seeds of this secularization and privatization of values had been contained within the church itself—in Puritanism and indeed the Reformation. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century Catholics have agreed, including Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory; see Gregory, Unintended Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2015).
[3] The modern individual now “tends to act only on [their] own aesthetic impulse and arbitrary convictions that cannot be communicated. . . . [T]he majority of those who cannot even act on their convictions, or the ‘last men who invented happiness’ à la Nietzsche, lead the life of a ‘cog in a machine.’” “Max Weber,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/.
[4] For a fuller treatment of this Lewis text as demonstrating the author’s Christian humanism, see Chris R. Armstrong, “The Christian Humanism of C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man.” Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy, Dec 18, 2023; https://doi.org/10.54669/001c.90878.
[5] [5] Lewis, “Preface,” That Hideous Strength (New York: Scribner, 1974; orig. pub. 1945), 7.
[6] Lewis, Abolition, 46. This phrase’s meaning in context will be considered below.
[7] Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden (Oxford University Press, 1993), 10.
[8] Weber’s address “Science as Vocation,” delivered at the University of Munich in the final year of the first World War (1918) has now become “the locus classicus for the elucidation of what has become the predominant understanding of the academic calling.” Schwehn notes that the term Wissenschaft in Weber’s title, though translated “Science” today in referring to this work, was meant by Weber to denote not merely the natural sciences but rather all academic disciplines; we can add: therefore, by extension, Weber was addressing the vocations of all professors. Schwehn, Exiles, 10, 6.
[9] “[F]or Weber, in modernity, on the one hand, all meaning is revealed as made rather than discovered, and values are at once consummately important yet ultimately undecidable. On the other hand, established meanings and the value of values are relentlessly unmade by forces of disenchantment and rationalization, respectively the usurpation of myth and mystery by science and the cannibalization of ends by means in a world governed by instrumental rationality.” “Precisely because values are so important, and so imperiled, the task of the teacher is to withdraw them from the moral or theological castles in which they are often locked not to discover whether they are ‘true’ — which they cannot be — but to submit them to rigorous analysis of their premises, ‘internal structure,’ and entailments.” Wendy Brown, “Max Weber’s Ethical Pedagogy for a Nihilistic Age,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2023; https://www.chronicle.com/article/max-webers-ethical-pedagogy-for-a-nihilistic-age.
[10] Schwehn, Exiles, 7, citing Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 143.
[11] “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Abolition, 35.