The Prescience of C. S. Lewis & the New Assault on Objectivity

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered…by quiet men with white collars…who do not need to raise their voices.  – C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters

It is as if he is speaking directly to us, warning us again, about today.

I read C. S. Lewis for the first time in college. The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia—all offered insight and immense enjoyment. But it was the subject of another of his works—the loss of our humanity—which captured my attention and holds it still.

Today, I realize there is something prescient about that work and thus about Lewis himself. And this feeling is even more pervasive today, given the advent of AI, electronic implants, and their profound implications for society.

Science and Western education seemed to be heading down a dangerous and frankly unwholesome path in 1940s England. So profound were the issues that the British literary scholar felt compelled to write three lectures addressing it, first published as The Abolition of Man in 1944.

It was the third talk that had the greatest impact. Lewis argued with considerable verve that the power to affect (in its entirety) the ensuing history of homo sapiens will be profoundly altered by a relatively few technologists and bureaucratic planners who, through the advance of science, will affect foundational aspects of human biology.

The three brief chapters making up The Abolition of Man, “Men without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man,” were originally presented as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle in February of 1943. In the lectures, especially the one from which the book takes its title, Lewis warns perceptively that “if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.” Far from experiencing more freedom from toil and advancing the human race, these new “creatures” will be “weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them.” As a result of sophisticated biotechnology, “Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” Lewis concludes:

The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will have been won.

The lectures betrayed Lewis’ profound mistrust of modernity in general and its educational pursuit in particular. Modernism’s tendency toward moral relativism and progressive scientific policy illustrated his concern in each of the lectures.

Biotechnological experimentation was of great concern for Lewis, especially with humanity as its “patient,” the potential for which he also considered in his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength. In both works Lewis cautions a real possibility for humankind being reconfigured by scientific programmers who have “stepped outside the Tao”—away from “the eternal law of God.”

Every human being, potentially, would at some point reflect in her or his very cells a new nature designed and developed by biotechnologists. Homo sapiens’ new nature would exhibit a moral compass based on popular but essentially modern liberal agendas built around progressive thought and evolution, narratives that would influence even scientific planning.

Lewis wrote famously, “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases will be the power of some men to make other men what they please.” These “man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irrepressible scientific technique: we shall get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in any shape they please.”

For the Conditioners—Lewis’s moniker for the scientists and bureaucratic functionaries—are forever at work on a new human race. A new pedagogy, informed by advanced psychology, treats values and feelings as mere physical phenomena to be produced or repressed in students so as to elicit the appropriate response.

Traditions are turned upside down. Rather than a deeply rooted moral awareness to be refined, values become a pedagogical outcome to be reproduced, they become “the product, not the motive, of education.” The Conditioners will ultimately acquire the capability to “produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce in man.”

Future academic and governmental elites will define “good” and then set about producing this newly invented good in humankind by a combination of pedagogical technique and biotechnology. Lewis seems quite certain that they “know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us,” though guided by no external, objective standard of good or morality themselves. The timeless “Tao” will be ignored; thus, the Conditioners become the arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong.

What Lewis warned us about has already begun its journey toward the “abolition” of humanity from homo sapiens. The Conditioners are busy implanting electronic devices in the brains of mice for the purpose of control, preparing for the next stage in humanity. Propaganda of the Conditioners has been preparing homo sapiens for its role through the manufacture of order and consent, by maneuvering humanity away from the Tao, “the Way,” away from our freedoms through Natural Law, Traditional Morality, First Principles, Providence…God.

As Lewis describes a world without the “Tao,” we begin to see the first similarities between his fractured world of what might happen and our real one that is today. With the advent of postmodernism, in particular, objective reality (objective truth) has been exchanged for the relativity of mere subjective truth of anyone’s opinion. One no longer has objective principles to which one can appeal; rather, everyone creates their own reality, their own morality, their own truth—or lack thereof.

Yet, it seems that since the 1940s, and especially the four decades after Lewis wrote, modern liberalism has moved on to another even more insidious attack on objective truth. Some have suggested that relativism is no longer the issue it once was. Political commentator for PBS NewsHour, David Brooks, argued in a New York Times article that whereas most college campuses (well into the 1980s) were “awash in moral relativism,” this is no longer the case. Rather, Brooks argues, “college campuses are today awash in moral judgment” and provide a forum for what some call a “shame culture”—one in which unmerciful moral crusades are initiated against those who violate the “absolute moral values” of inclusion and tolerance.

The overriding concern in society and universities is no longer moral relativism and the rejection of objective truth; it is not the idea of the subjective nature of truth where one opinion about truth carries equal weight to any other. Rather, in stark contrast to moral relativism, the new assault on objectivity is the absolute nature of another’s view that their moral judgements must be objectively true because they are based on what are proposed as “absolute moral values” and must therefore be accepted as the “truth,” not just tolerated as such amongst others.

Thus, moral relativism is essentially about tolerance, and both have today morphed into political correctness and wokeism, as essentially intolerance to anything which seeks to challenge the moral judgements of one who’s judgments are based on self-affirmed absolute moral values.

By proclaiming tolerance, saying, “we must tolerate the views of those we don’t agree with,” relativists establish their own tacit benchmark of morality. To say, “no view is absolutely true,” while also believing “my view (that no view is absolutely true) is absolutely true” is logically inconsistent and self-contradictory.

The subjectivity of moral relativism is no longer the “weapon of choice” against objective truth. Rather, what is proposed is the “supplanting of objective truth with subjective truth.” The alleged tolerance of relativity has been undermined by its own intolerance. In practice, the discourse sounds like this:

“There are no absolute truths.”
“Is that the truth?
“ABSOLUTELY!!”

To no one’s surprise, universities today embrace DEI and Critical Race Theory (alleged “antiracist dictates”) as absolutized moral truths, which we are told must be accepted, ABSOLUTELY, as objective moral judgements against the history and traditions of Western civilization.

Relativism may have been superseded by “intolerance to tolerance,” but the “ghost of Nietzsche” is still with us. An increasingly secular Britain and America are not ushering in a rational, neutral, and indifferent regime, but rather a revitalized form of atheism, agnosticism, or pure apathy. Indeed, irrationalism is on full display in both countries.

The malevolence of secularism is already palpable on both sides of the Atlantic. Abortion and euthanasia are new forms of self-indulgence, or worse, population control; transhumanism and transgenderism reflect an incipient proclivity towards imposing “moral value judgments” as objective truth—where the lines blur between what constitutes man and woman. Infants are not born male or female; they are “assigned” that distinction at birth.

And then there is AI, Artificial Intelligence, increasingly supplanting human artifice—a “Prometheus” bearing gifts of alleged knowledge to humanity—to be exalted as a 21st century “godlike” entity.

This is Nietzsche’s future—about control rather than freedom. We must not let it become ours; otherwise, we will witness…the abolition of man.

Photo from the International Churchill Society