The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," but it actually uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of doing away with or 'debunking' those things.

Lewis starts with an observation that certain books purporting to teach English to schoolchildren have an implicit philosophy that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object. He says that such a subjective view of values is faulty, and on the contrary, certain objects and actions merit positive or negative reactions: that a waterfall can actually be objectively beautiful, and that ones actions can be objectively good or evil.

He cites ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, who believed that the purpose of education was to train children in the "ordinate affections:" that is, to like and dislike what they ought; to love the good and hate the bad. He says that although these values are universal, they are not natural in children, and must be inculcated through education.

He moves on from this to criticize modern attempts to debunk natural values (such as those that would have ascribed objective value to the waterfall) on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that has been shared, with minor differences, by every culture; he calls this the Tao, although without any special reference to Taoism. (Although Lewis saw natural law as supernatural in origin, as evidenced by his use of it as a proof of theism in Mere Christianity, his argument in this book does not rest on theism.) Without the Tao, no value judgements can be made at all, and he therefore says that modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some 'rational' reason can be justified only by arbitrarily preferring one part of the Tao to others. The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to 'see through' any system of morality that might induce the to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims.

A fictional treatment of this idea forms one thread of Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.