“The Abolition of Man” is the third and final chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (affiliate link), and it brings the argument of the book to its disturbing conclusion. Lewis turns from the formation of the individual to the larger question of what happens when humanity gains the power to remake human nature itself. The promise is mastery through science, education, and technology. The progressive dream is that we might finally conquer Nature and arrive in Utopia. But Lewis asks what happens when the conquerors themselves become the conquered.
The problem Lewis points out is that every new power over Nature is also a power over human beings. If one generation gains the ability to determine what its descendants will value, desire, and believe, those descendants are not more free, but less. They become the products of someone else’s will. And if those who exercise that power have abandoned objective value, they have no rational basis for deciding what humanity ought to become. Thus the “conditioners” do not so much govern their descendants as manufacture them, imposing their own value judgements on all who come after them.
Lewis’s conclusion is that science, technology, and education, severed from objective moral reality, cease to serve man and instead become instruments for remaking and ultimately mastering him. Thus, “Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”
Here are some of the most powerful quotes I gleaned from this final chapter:
“Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.” (56)
“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. They are weaker, not stronger.” (57)
“Man’s conquest of Nature…means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.” (58)
“They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena.” (60–61)
“They are…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.” (63)
“Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void…Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.” (64)
“Those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.” (65–66)
“I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.” (66)
“Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” (68)
“We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them… The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature.” (71)
“The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature…as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified.” (71)
“It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us.” (72)
“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.” (73)
“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.” (73)
“It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” (81)
