C. S. Lewis the abolition of man

?This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgement of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them,

something given. They have surrendered?like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not obey them [the ultimate springs of human action].

They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man?s struggle with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature has been conquered?and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.? 71-72.
Theme #6: The invention of a new, man-made, artificial Tao. If the conditioners have rejected all values and the basis of all values, where will the new values come from and what will be it or their basis? They have assumed the God-like role of creating the motives for human behavior and of motivating people to behave in a certain way. But what is the basis for their own motivation

project? Lewis suggests that for a while at least it will probably be the remnants of the real Tao itself that will be the basis and motivation for creating a new basis and motivation for behavior:

they have a ?duty? to do the human race ?good.? But this cannot and will not last for long because it is objective ?duty? and notions of the ?good? which they have conquered and rejected.
Will they then decide if the rest of us should be conditioned to embrace duty and the old reactions to it? And yet duty itself cannot decide that since duty is no longer absolute. It is itself up for trial (why be dutiful?) so it cannot be the basis for this judgment. Good is in the same boat. They know how to produce good in us, but which conception of the good.
Good cannot help them decide that since it is up for grabs. A debarred judge cannot decide his own case!

The bottom line: rejecting the Tao leaves no foundation upon which to decide a new one.

This is no sham dilemma, that is, factitious which means something ?produced artificially rather than by a natural process.?
Theme #7: The loss of genuine humanity and the cultivation of a psuedo-humanity. It is not that these conditioners in Lewis?s estimation are bad men: THEY ARE NOT TRUE MEN AT ALL!
?Why should I suppose they will be such bad men?? But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ?Humanity? shall henceforth mean. ?Good? and ?bad,? applied to them, are words without content: For it is from them that the content of these words is henceforth to be derived. 73
They choose what they think the rest of us want (food, drink, sex, entertainment, art, science, long life). But who is to say that the rest of us want these things. And even if we did, why should we dutifully make these things available to ourselves and to our

posterity? What ?duty? compels us to such action? Preservation of the species? They can find no ground to stand on, else they beg the question of the Tao itself.

?It is not that they are bad men. they are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects (the conditioned ones) necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts

. Man?s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man! 74

Theme #8: Radical subjectivism as the basis of morality. The only motivation left for morality is the conditioners ?felt emotion? and ?pleasure.? But impulses stripped of the Tao for guidance is rarely benevolent or noble. And history shows that few if any rulers stripped of the Tao has used their power benevolently (WWI and WWII is in the background). Chance is the only basis of hope

for a good society, that the conditioners will choose benevolence as the basis for it, but there is no guarantee.

?My point is that those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.? 75
?Their extreme rationalism, by ?seeing through? all ?rational? motives leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behavior. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere nature) is the only

course left open.? 76

Sidebar conjecture: The conditioners will hate the conditioned because at least they have the semblance of meaning in their lives whereas the conditioners have none just like eunuch envy real men.
Theme #9: Man?s conquest of Nature turns out to be Nature?s conquest of man. That is, the natural impulses of the conditioners turn out to condition ?man,? including the manhood of the conditioners themselves. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the conditioners and, through them, all humanity.
The conditioners appeared to be on top of Nature:
Conditioners

Nature

But as it turns out, Nature actually is on top of the conditioners:

Nature

Conditioners

And the conditioners are on top of the conditioned:

Nature

Conditioners

Conditioned

So everything and everyone is subject to the unrestrained impulses of Nature. Sounds

suspiciously like our own society today!
Theme #10: The ?disenchantment? of nature, including man. Before there was a sense that there was something more to nature than just nature.

?

Nature enchanted: quality, consciousness, autonomy, values, final causes.

?

Nature disenchanted: spatial, temporal, quantity, objects, bound, no values, efficient causes

.

But modern science has reduced everything, including human beings, to mere nature by its analysis and quantification. Bodies and trees are examples, but they can become just a body and just a tree stripped of their genuine qualities. We reduce things to nature to conquer them, but we become a part of that nature, and then ironically we get conquered. People become mere objects, like everything else, for manipulation. Nature and man become the same thing!

?But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain (man) and the being who has been sacrificed (nature) are one and the same. 79
?It is in Man?s power to treat himself as a mere ?natural object? and his own judgements of value raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. ... The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of the dehumanized Conditioners.? 80
Theme #11: Either/or dilemma: Naturalism or Taoism! ?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. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery? 80-81.
Theme #12: This process applies not just to Communists and Nazis but to all societies that have rejected the Tao. It has just gone on faster in the former settings than in democratic ones, but it is and will happen in democratic societies as well. 81
Theme #13: This process of the abolition of man shows up in the everyday use of language, especially in redefining terms and in commodification.

Killed bad men = liquidate unsocial elements.

Virtue = integration

Diligence = dynamism

Boys worthy of a commission = potential officer material

Thrift and temperance and intelligence = sales resistance (commodification) 81-82.

Abortion = pro-choice

Baby in womb = fetus

Legal justice = dream team of lawyers

Moral formation = self help

Virtues = personal values

Sin = indiscretion

Sexual immorality = hooking up.
Theme #14: Humanization or dehumanization again.

Humanization: ?In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation

varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. While we speak from within the Tao we can truly speak of Man having power over himself in a sense truly analogous to an individual?s self-control.
Dehumanization: ?But the moment we step outside and regard the Tao as a mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared. What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F., and Man?s conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.? 82
Theme #15: The prostitution of science. For CSL, instead of pursuing science in its purest sense for the sake of true knowledge and wisdom, it is pursued for the sake of power over nature as if it were a kind of magic.
People will think of Lewis as a Luddite (one who opposes science and technology). Not so he says. Genuine natural philosophers, that is, those who pursue science in a philosophical sense in quest for genuine knowledge and wisdom as a value in and of itself, knows that CSL in defending values defends knowledge at the same time. If you destroy value, you destroy knowledge simultaneously. In fact, CSL thinks that true science might be the source of the real cure for all the problems he has raised (more on

this later).

Strange as it may seem, science is more like magic than real science. Magic was less prominent in the middle ages and more prominent at the time of the birth of modern science.
?In the old days, wisdom, not magic or science was the primary concern: ?For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men (reality to the soul): the solution is a technique; and both (magic and science) in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious....? 83-4

Faustus (who struck a deal with the devil for gold, girls, and guns = power) and Bacon (the founder of modern science who said knowledge was not valuable for its own sake but for power) have more in common than we think! Hence, Lewis calls for a new

science!
Theme #16: The call for a new science. It is science in the context of the Tao, science that pursues genuine knowledge, science that respects nature, science that enters appreciatively and respectfully into the thing known, etc.
Theme #17: The absolute indispensability of the Tao or the loss of everything. You can?t explain everything away: if you do, you have no ground to stand upon and in doing so you destroy it all. The Tao is the first principle, and without it you have nothing.