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In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned us how power, divorced from timeless values, would become a tool for oppression.

I’ve read C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man a few times now, the last three times almost back to back. I found one point so compelling that I had to read the book over and over again to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood, or overlooked something, or got the wrong end of the stick entirely. I still don’t quite understand how a mortal being could be so prescient and utterly right:

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

To get to this point, Lewis takes us on a three-part journey. First, in Men Without Chests he uses an anecdote about Coleridge’s dismay that someone could call a waterfall merely pretty, rather than sublime. Per Lewis, Coleridge believed “inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it that others…The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.”

Lewis had noted that the trend in education and in society at large was that such objectivity was being replaced by a deference to feelings, rather than objective value. Lewis foresaw the ultimate logical conclusion of such a trend, which was a total abandonment of the notion of values altogether, replaced only by personal desire or want: sic volo, sic jubeo (what I want, I command).

The second part of the journey, The Way, tests this claim of objective merit by examining the source of what we call values, which Lewis refers to as the Tao:

It (the Tao) is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.

In an appendix, Lewis provides a helpful list of examples, across cultures and time, that illustrate the Tao:

1. The Law of General Beneficence
2. The Law of Special Beneficence
3. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors
4. Duties to Children and Posterity
5. The Law of Justice
6. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity
7. The Law of Mercy
8. The Law of Magnanimity

The act of subordinating this Natural Law to one’s feelings is an act of personal and cultural recklessness that can not have a happy ending; hence the title of Lewis’s work.

In the third part of the journey, The Abolition of Man, Lewis shows us that without a firm grounding in objective value, all power would end up being exercised in tyranny. If feelings rule the day, and objectivity and fundamental values are abandoned, what is left is only personal desire, pleasure. To do this, Lewis examines what is meant by the common conception ‘Man’s Power over Nature”:

Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men – by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for the bombs and the propaganda. And as regards contraception, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or the subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Lewis casts himself forward to a dominant age in the future (quaintly, as it turns out, supposing the hundredth century A.D.) which “resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species.” He goes on:

But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realised, 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. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

The warning bells toll throughout the whole book, reverberating today in deafening horror for those with ears to hear or eyes to see the stories and claims of our age. We have stepped outside the Tao, constructed a false reality around ourselves, and gained power, which is exercised according to the strength of the emotional impulse pulling one way or another.

Doctors with the power of surgery profit from the feelings of those who want, because of their feelings, to have a different-looking body. Thumbing their noses at the Tao, the way things are and ever will be. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

Legislators pass laws permitting suicide and abortion until birth. Thumbing their noses at Duties to Children and Duties to Parents. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

Billionaires with the power of bribery claim mastery over genetics and impose global rules on the masses, while raking in ever more billions. Thumbing their noses at the law of justice. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

Politicians with the power of legal use of force deign to deny the masses affordable heating by banning coal and oil. Thumbing their noses at the Law of General Beneficence. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

Censors make rules for how the rest of society can communicate – who may use which modern tools and what they may or may not say. Bureaucrats impose restrictions on movement claiming knowledge of airborne disease. Police commissioners call for curfews to make their lives easier. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

How long will it be before bankers insist on the right to control our purchases? We know they want this. Sic volo, sic jubeo.

Lewis’s book seems pessimistic; as far as I can tell, he proposes no antidote or course correction. But buried in a short discussion of what we mean by ‘Nature,’ is this:

Nature is a word of varying meanings, which can best be understood if we consider its various opposites. The Natural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural. The Artificial does not now concern us. If we take the rest of the list of opposites, however, I think we can get a rough idea of what men have meant by Nature and what it is they oppose to her. Nature seems to be spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes…as against final causes.

If Man’s “conquest” of Nature is a one-way ticket to tyranny and finally annihilation, then perhaps what we need is more deference to the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural.

As it happens, there’s a whole lifetime of knowledge and wisdom passed down to us by generations who did recognise the Tao, and the Duties to Children and Posterity. If we, likewise, recognise the Duties to Parents, Elders, and Ancestors, we’d do well to see what they had to say about the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural.

It’s worth a try.

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Republished with thanks to Brownstone Institute. Originally titled ‘From the Sublime to the End of the World’. Image courtesy of Unsplash.