"The Abolition of Man" discussion thread

Great Debates
1

This is the discussion thread for the book The Abolition of Man, as planned in my most recent thread. It is intended to be a free-wheeling conversation in which anyone can say what they feel about the book or any part of it. The only rules are (1) no insults and (2) only participate if you’ve read the book.

I love this book for a lot of reasons, one being that it crams many important points into such a small space. In the first section, ‘Men Without Chests’, Lewis introduces us to a whole new way of thinking. It’s not one that he invented himself-far from it-but one that’s unfamiliar to most readers. As he says, a modern education teaches a typical child to “take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

This controversy is about the proper role and value of emotions. As Lewis says, many persons alive today are unaware that there is a controversy; they take for granted that sentimentalism is bad and that our feelings can teach us either nothing or nothing of high importance.

Lewis defends a much more important role for sentiments with several tactics. He points out that great literature or great poetry would lose their value if we didn’t pay attention to our emotional reactions to it. The same goes for beautiful scenes in nature. But most of all, we would lose part of our human heritage if we took that route.

Lewis then tackles an obvious question: why would anyone reject this part of the human experience if it’s both good and important? His answer is that the bad educators “see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda…and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify young minds against emotion.” In short, anyone raised in his society–or ours–is accustomed to seeing emotions used crudely: in the media, by politicians, in advertising, on greeting cards, and so forth. Thus it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t have to be used crudely. As Lewis says, “The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”

In fact, any campaign to wipe out all sentiments is doomed. Human nature won’t allow it. Ayn Rand, who had an impressive talent for being wrong, once said, “Experiencing an emotion tells you nothing other than that you are experiencing that emotion.” However, merely dislike for feelings (which is in itself a feeling) won’t stop you from having them, and Lewis finishes his essay by analyzing what would happen if the viewpoint of Gaius and Titus is taken to its logical conclusion. He concludes that “without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”

2

Dam, That was too quick. Give us a chance to read it.

3

I’ll make a longer post later, so for now i’ll just say; i’m not entirely sure why you’ve picked this as a “religious side” book.

4

Ok doke, here we go.

Men Without Chests -

As I understand this section, Lewis is kinda ripping on these guys for writing a book that (he supposes, probably not incorrectly) attempts to indoctrinate kids. As far as I can tell, he has no problem with this per se (I think he’d be happy with a similar type of indoctrination for different beliefs), it’s what they’re attempting to get kids to think like that matters to him. And what he interprets this as is a disregarding of sentiment in favour of cold hard reason.

First problem; I don’t think that’s what they’re doing. He quotes a part and makes great show of pointing out that they say “only saying something about our feelings”. And on the face of it, sure. But then he goes on to himself point out the differences between subjective feelings and objectivity. What the two authors are actually saying is not “It appears they’re talking about something important; but eh, it’s just their feelings really, a topic of poor importance”; as I read it, they’re saying “It appears what they are saying is objectively true, i.e. that the waterfall is sublime. What they’re actually saying is that they themselves believe the waterfall to be sublime, and this feeling, being subjective, is lesser than the apparent objective status being given”.

I don’t think Lewis’ example is a good example of what he’s trying to illustrate. Now, I don’t know and I wouldn’t want to say whether there were people with such sentiments in his time or not. There probably are people who think along those lines now. But in the context of this being put forward as a pro-religious text, I think this is an example of a pretty common stereotype of atheists. We’re all for reason, science, and logic, at the expense of emotions and abstract notions. Which is pretty wrong, IMHO. What’s wrong with emotions and abstract notions? Athiests believe in duty and loyalty and all that kind of thing. We don’t seek to destroy or suppress emotions. Our source for all these things we may think is different; we may think that loyalty is just a result of societal behaviour, inbuilt into us; that anger and happiness are just chemical changes in the brain. But that doesn’t mean we think less of those things.

5

The Way -

Ah, all the fun of the fair. A bit of anti-utilitarianism, in the form of problems defining good when sentiments need to be avoided. I already disagree that that’s a goal, but let’s assume he’s right.

He suggests that a person who seeks to define goodness in terms of pure reason has a difficulty on their hands, that they can’t involve emotion at all. The problem with this is that he assumes pure reason would* ignore* emotion. Why would it? Emotion exists. It may not be quantifiable, but emotion certainly needs to be included in any kind of reasoned study of people. A conclusion on why domestic abuse happens, for example, without any mention of anger probably wouldn’t be very reasonable. His words;

Lewis’ explanation to men would be this; “You should sacrifice your lives because it will make others feel happy”

Mine is this; “You should sacrifice your lives because it will make others feel happy”.

What is unreasonable about seeing the effect happiness has on people? Pure reason accounts for all variables.

Lewis then gets into the problem of being able to have a motivation while lacking an objective standard (I think). If we think there’s no objective good, then why do we do anything? Each choice would be no more objectively correct or better than another. In this, he is exactly correct, at least to my mind; I don’t believe in any objective standard, and thus each choice has exactly the value of any other; nil. Exactly the objective value, that is. Subjectively, on the other hand, each choice can have considerably different values. I may believe that there is no overall good, but that’s not really going to stop me from feeling happy when i’m with friends or sad if not. Again, to go back to his “pure reason” problem; I may think that happiness is really not more objectivly correct than sadness, but that doesn’t stop me preferring one to the other. Nor does it tend to stop anyone else from having a preference. Pure reason works with what we’ve got; it is not unreasonable to support methods with subjective motivations.

Lewis sort of ends up saying that there is no way for a “pure reason” type person to come to any kind of system of values. It “needs to come from somewhere else”. I don’t believe mine does, and it only takes one example to break a hypothesis of certainty.
He does say that if values exist, they must all be of the same type and source, and I think i’d agree with that one.

6

The Abolition of Man -

His opening part, about our apparent power over Nature is more power over others who themselves may have that power, or over objects with that power, I pretty much agree with. It depends really whether you’re willing to include all of what humans do as part of nature or not.

He suggests that there will come a point at which a generation (well, a group in a generation) will hold the “most” power, both over their present generation, the past in terms of domination, and the future in terms of wielding power as they see fit. This seems to assume that at some point we won’t be able to go any further; that there will be a point at which future accomplishments will all be either nonexistent or entirely predictable. I’m not really sure I see that as possible. It also seems to assume that there will only be one group who act in accordance, all with exactly the same views, all with exactly the same goals. Again, not really sure that’s possible. It also assumes these people will be willing to actively shape the future exactly and precisely as they want it; to have total control over the future and present populations. I can picture that, sure, but I don’t see it as a certainty as much as Lewis seems to ( I don’t think I fall into the trap of being a “simple minded critic” since I get Lewis isn’t saying they’re bad; I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m just saying I don’t see acceptance of ultimate control as a certainty).

He again goes into the idea that for such people, there would be no concepts of objective good or bad, and thus that they would find themselves unable to choose between many ideas, something I neither agree with nor see as likely. Pretty much the whole of the last section then I don’t really have much to say to other than I don’t think he’s right and I believe i’ve said why. I don’t take his book as an attack on science, though.

Overall thoughts;

As an attack on people who believe in “pure reason”, I don’t think it works, both on the grounds that I think his concept of such people is a caricature and I don’t think his argument follows through. But there’s still a good amount that I agree with. As I said before, though, I don’t see what makes this a pro-religioun/spirituality book. Other than as perhaps an attack on the stereotype of atheists as people who put rational concerns above all else and try to ignore emotions or abstract ideas; but as you might have guessed i’m pretty sure that’s a stereotype. Atheists are as much interested and invested in those things as religious people are.

What I think is the problem (and this is very very IMHO) is that religious people who think this see their emotions (as a face of their soul or spiritual being) and abstract ideas (like love in that form or duty) as coming from a greater source or being. The body itself is just a shell for this soul, biology is lesser than spirit. So when they see atheists who believe that emotions and abstract ideas can be and are just explained by biology, they think that we must consider those things to be as lesser as they consider the body “shell” to be in terms of the spirit. But that’s just a guess.

7

I think when reading Abolition of Man it’s important to examine its cultural context. We today are in a culture that is much more accepting of emotion than it was at the time of Lewis. Lewis was writing at the beginning of the period that led to a psychiatric industry that treated every human emotional state as a disorder that can be treated. Ten years ago you couldn’t really study happiness as an emotional response without being laughed at. The modernist idea has led to the notion that emotions are the shackles of the unenlightened, at least in some circles. The idea that the artist is not as important to society as the businessman was quite prominent around the time that Lewis wrote Abolition of Man. It was a markedly different time from today when people are writing books with titles like ‘The Molecules of Emotion’ and ‘Emotional Leadership’.

‘Abolition of Man’ was probably quite influential in keeping that sort of ‘Men Without Chests’ culture contained. We are seeing a resurgence in interest in traditional culture today, in all likelihood because throughout the 20th century our ideological conflicts were dominated by economic theories and realpolitik pragmatism. Lewis was writing around the pinnacle of such ideas. A time when real men didn’t concern themselves with such inconsequential ephemera as feelings.

I think it would be a mistake to think that he is talking about current rationalism that is more informed by great strides in cognitive theory that simply did not exist at the time.

8

Theres so much misunderstanding of what Lewis was saying that I’m not sure there’s any point.

What Lewis was getting at in the first section is that you must be consistent to be honest. What he was pointiong out it that the popular intellectualism of his day was really quite dim. They would happily deny or overanalyze something they didn’t like, but ignore the precise same flaw in their own thinking. Emotion was bad when it guided other people, but of course their own thinking was guided, and less intelligently so, by the same emotions. Thinking they were quite unconventional free-thinkers, they were really rather pathetic, cowering under the sheltering wings of the ideas they wanted to smash.

Likewise I don’t think Lewis believed that a society in which one group would overwhelm all things and control everything would exist, or probably could exist. Rather, he was showing, step by step, not only what kind of world would be created if the pseudo-intellectuals could, but why, and why it was such a monstrosity. And of course, he was blowing a giant hole in the idea that mankind was really ever becoming more “powerful” - humanity wasn’t changing, just its internal politics.

The entire point of the book is that he thinks children ought to be taught, not “inbdoctrinated.” The difference is that, as he pointed out, indoctrination is fundamentally a lie: either you are snivelling manipulator trying to shape others into something for your own ends, or a honest man trying to pass on the knowledge you have. There’s a world of difference between the two. And it applies to parenting as well as schools.

We might see an example in Communist countries. I don’t think they realy believed in wjhat they wereteaching, not for long. Pograms and purges and coups and massacres and “re-education centers” sent that ship sailing a long time ago. But they kept teaching it because it was useful for the leadership which didn’t want to face up to its total failure. In contrast, virtually any other education system on earth tries to pass along what people believe to be true, and to give the best to the next generation. I’m somewhat doubtful of their success in general, but at least they’re trying.

9

I understand what he’s saying. I simply disagree that that flaw has to be present in their thinking, and in the specific case that it’s certainly present in the example he gives.

I think he’s right on that power issue. And I think you’re right in that he may not expect this to happen, but he says that if these impulses were followed, that’s the logical conclusion, and I disagree with that. I think his step-by-step showing is flawed, and his monstrosity of a world concept is flawed as a result.

10

I’m only half-way through, but so far, Revenant Threshold has said everything I want to say. Reading Lewis (his non-fiction, anyway) always makes me want to bang my head into a wall, because he makes such beautiful and simple arguments that are so obviously and fundamentally wrong in both their premises and their inferences. The Abolition of Man may (I don’t know) have been a good rebuttal to the specific case of anti-sentimentalism common in Britain in the 1940s, but it is no rebuttal at all (though it pretends to be) to moral subjectivism as a philosophy.

11

I’ve now read the entire thing. I liked the third essay better than the first two.

The first essay, “Men Without Chests” might be defended as a response to the culture of its time, but in today’s world, Lewis has already lost the argument. How many today believe dulce et decorum est? Lewis does throughout the book, but especially here and in the appendix, what he accuses his opponents of doing: supposing the mores of his own era and social class to be universal.

The second essay frustrated me because it seemed to presume the impossibility, at least for Lewis’s audience, of simply abandoning the idea of objective morality (as nearly every philosopher has now done). In fact, he claims to address this possibility in the third essay. Here, he only argues that if any objective value is to be accepted, all of traditional morality (which he again assumes to be more-or-less universal and consistent with upper middle-class interbellum British morals) must be accepted. I agree that those who attempt to base an objective morality on something like biology or psychology are pursuing a fool’s errand, but I don’t agree that other principles could not replace Lewis’s vaguely defined ideals as axioms of an alternative morality. It is true they would have no greater authority than Lewis’s, but that is the nature of axioms. Axioms are not, as Lewis seems to think, necessary and inevitable formulations without which nothing can proceed: non-Euclidean geometry is just as valid as Euclidean, and non-“traditional” ethics can be just as valid–or non-valid–as “traditional” ethics. (I wonder if Lewis was familiar with the concept of non-Euclidean geometry. I think it would have struck him with horror.)

The third essay fascinated me. In it, Lewis shows his ability as an author of science fiction (and according to Wikipedia, he later used the same ideas in his Space Trilogy, which I haven’t read). Fundamentally, I agree with what he writes in this essay. I think he mis-imagines the future as controlled by what is implicitly a single unified cabal, but I don’t think that detracts from his essential point that humanity will eventually be free from itself. When we all have Penfield Mood Organs at our bedside or, like Data, the ability to turn on and off or to reprogram the part of ourselves that provides our emotions and drives, we will indeed be in a world without givens, adrift in a new kind of freedom. What will anger you when you can turn on and off your own anger? What will you pursue when you can decide what will make you happy? How do you decide what to want without wanting something first? These questions may be unanswerable, but unlike Lewis, I don’t perceive such a “post-human” future with horror; I see it as merely inevitable and in its own way both fascinating and desirable (if that word can still have meaning in this context).

Lewis’s problem, however, is not that he finds such a future monstrous, but that he fails to address the very simple objection he provides at the beginning of chapter 2: that because something is monstrous, it is not therefore false. Even if I agreed with Lewis’s valuation of this possible future morality-less world (and the morality-less present it implies), I wouldn’t thereby be convinced of the reality of traditional morality. And here do so many appeals to tradition in the realm of morality and metaphysics fall (cf., e.g., Huston Smith, *Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief*). Religion–as vague universalism, at least–is pleasantly appealing, and we may well be poorer without it. Too bad it still isn’t true.

12

Though he never says so, the biggest target that Lewis is going after is probably Freud. The attitude that Lewis wants to combat is expressed in a famous Freud quote:

This is a pretty sweeping statement, and it’s worth remembering that Freudian thought was huge during the first half of the twentieth century. In light of those facts, Lewis certainly was not aiming at small fries here.

In our time Freud is still around. Psychologists and psychiatrists still read him, but they aren’t instructed to take everything he wrote at face value. In that respect, Lewis’ argument may have less direct importance, but I still believe they are relevant.

Let’s break the central claim of “Men Without Chests” into two parts.

Part 1 is that the universe is such that “certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it”. For certain things, positive emotions are appropriate, while for others, negative emotions are appropriate. This appropriateness is carved, if you will, into the nature of reality and won’t be altered if humans ignore it.

Part 2 is that we make value judgements based on these emotions. Lewis quotes Plato as saying that a proper person must “see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a juste distaste blame and hate the ugly” and “give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it”.

Considering part 1, Lewis expects that some readers will call it “merely quaint or even magical”. Today, certainly most intellectuals (atheist or otherwise) think that genetics or brain chemistry are the best explanation. As Revenant Threshold said, this does not mean that they are rejecting emotions entirely, or even relegating emotions to second place. One could have this attitude and still believe that producing positive emotions in a laudable and important goal.

Lewis does not fear total rejection of sentiment. What he fears is that those who take the “genetics or brain chemistry” approach to part 1 can never reach part 2, and this is what “The Way” is all about. If we make a value judgement, by definition we expect it to be universal. (Some may want to argue with this, but we can at least agree that there are many areas of human existence in which it’s necessary for large groups to have common values.) And to put it bluntly, genetics and brain chemistry aren’t convincing arguments. It’s tough to imagine rallying an army by telling the soldiers that they have the right genes for self-sacrifice, or praising a painting for causing the release of good neurotransmitters.

The last point Lewis makes is that if we can’t get common values from those sources, there will always be strong pressure to get them from somewhere. And if we agree that our emotions come from our chemical construction, then the inevitable result is that some will want to change that chemical construction by force to get the emotions they want. That brings us to “The Abolition of Man”, which unfortunately I don’t have time to discuss right now.

(My last thought for the night is to explain why I chose this book. It is, as Revenant has said, not a religious book, though I’m sure you can see some parts leading towards religious topics. I certainly wouldn’t expect this book to cause any conversions. Rather, I see it as a first step towards understanding why those like C. S. Lewis (and myself) think the way we do. I often approach religious debates by thinking about what would have been convincing to my younger, atheist self, and I think this book would have made an impact on me ten years ago.)

13

Ah, fair enough. Like i’ve said, I don’t know much of Lewis’ part of history, but Freud I can get.

Let’s break the central claim of “Men Without Chests” into two parts.

I think I get what you’re saying. The problem isn’t that we can’t make value judgements; it’s that brain chemistry is not particularly persuasive in this particular case. I would say two things; first, why would I say “genes for self-sacrifice” or praise things for releasing good neurotransmitters? It’s the equivalent of you saying “Soldiers, you should sacrifice yourselves because we’re metaphysical beings, not physical, and physical life is nothing compared to uncertain existence types on an alternate plane”; it’s not just what you’re saying, but the obfuscating language could make anything sound unsellable. You don’t say “I like this painting, because my metaphysical being as provided by an outside source has been influenced goodly by it and my body made to respond likewise”. You say “I like this painting”. And so do I. Lewis isn’t providing an argument about why we cannot make value judgements, he’s just showing that those judgements are unsellable when put badly.

And two; there are situations in which I think such value judgements would be very sellable. If I go to the doctors, for example, and he tells me that my iron levels are low and I should take some tablets, I’m probably going to be convinced of it. The value judgement that “normal iron levels are good” is just the same as before, but in this situation, it would probably convince most people.

Is that the inevitable result? We already try to influence emotions through chemical construction by force, and it’s called torture. This isn’t exactly something that’s looked on well - by atheists, too. :wink:

Lewis’ argument for this part hinges on the idea that such people don’t have objective standards, think all options are therefore the same, and so it won’t matter. But I don’t think there are objective standards, and I think all options are the same objectively. Lewis doesn’t seem to recognise that a person can recognise and have a subjective set of standards which do give exactly what objective ones do.

Thank you for the answer! And it sounds like you made a good choice, then, even if I disagree with a lot of it. :wink: I do see Lewis mentioning religious topics, but I don’t see him making any religious arguments, or talking about any specifically religious topics.

14

Much of what I had to say has been said, but also, I am troubled by Lewis’ claim that there is an inherent goodness or badness to things, regardless of the observer. He claims that the waterfall is in fact sublime. Its sublime-ness is as much a part of it as its wetness. Humanity could disappear, and that there waterfall would still be sublime. That garbage dump next to it, however, is pretty despicable.

The falsity of this seems so self-evident that I was convinced I had misinterpreted what he was saying. I could see a case to be made for the universality of the waterfall invoking a positive response in humanity. A nice source of non-stagnant water surrounded by lush vegetation, is a useful thing to have around for a large tool-using mammal. To a cockroach, the waterfall is a death-zone, and the garbage dump is nirvana.

To many creatures, I suspect it would just be water going over a cliff.

15

How so?

16

I’d be interested to know too. I believe it, but I don’t think it’s self-evident.

17

I’ve been struggling with a way to answer this for you, and I think it may come down to my basic view of the universe, and perhaps highlights why ITR champion views this as a good book to start a discussion, and I see it as quite unconvincing.

In a universe willed into being by a creator, imbued with purpose, and filled with sentient beings for whom it was designed, of course the waterfall is intrinsically good, just like the watermelon and the pangolin. For something such as a waterfall to have an ultimate moral value, there needs to exist an ultimate moral authority.

If you don’t believe in an ultimate moral authority, then, I would suggest, the idea that these objects have no intrinsic moral value is self-evident.

18

I don’t think “is self-evident” is the right term; I think you mean “follows as a direct consequence.” You start with disbelief in a Creator, and logically infer a lack of intrinsic values. Lewis (in some sense here, and perhaps more explicitly in his opening chapters of Mere Christianity) starts with belief in intrinsic values, and from this infers a Creator.

One of Lewis’s points is that, if you do not believe in intrinsic moral values, this represents a profound difference between yourself and what the human race in most times and places throughout history has believed:

and the difference between them and you is the difference between those who “stand within or without the Tao.”

19

I guess that is all a fair and valid summary of Lewis’ position. And so it leaves me in fundamental disagreement with Lewis. He believes that those of us ‘outside the tao’ will eventually cause the downfall of humanity. I believe it is the right place to be, and could lead mankind away from its brutal and repressive past towards a new peace and prosperity. And I guess, maybe, that is the real discussion to be had from this book.

I guess that it goes without saying that I believe that Lewis’ conclusions are wrong, and reminiscent of other theists’ belief that atheists are not capable of basic human morality. I’d be interesting to know if anyone in these discussions has drawn the same conclusions as Lewis?

20

But what do you mean by “basic human morality,” if you have denied intrinsic moral values?