Old Birds Teaching Young Birds to Fly Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life

I mentioned the other week that I was transcribing my margin notes from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man into my commonplace book. In the spirit of tying up loose ends, I finished that little project earlier this week.

I started this post by simply quoting from the final chapter those things that had really caught my attention. But it will be more beneficial to me–and perhaps useful to you if it’s been a while since you’ve read the book–to put these quotes into context. So here’s a synopsis cribbed from some internet sites. Not linked. Search, and like much else these days, one site just copies from another, so did I. I’ll just fill in transitions where needed.

Men without Chests

Lewis begins with a discussion of a current elementary text for children in the upper grades in which the authors claim that when we make statements such as “the waterfall was sublime,” we are not making a statement about the waterfall itself, but rather the feelings the waterfall conjures up in us. The synopsis says that Lewis believes the authors are “reducing all statements of value to emotion, or sentiment, and give students the unintended message that all expressions of emotion are worthless.”

The synopsis misses a critical component of Lewis’s argument at this point, but I’ll set that aside. Synopsis continues:

“The real problem with modern students, Lewis believes, is that their sentiments have not been properly trained. Lewis believes that this is because modern educators no longer believe in objective value. That is, they do not believe that objects (like a beautiful waterfall) intrinsically merit certain human responses. Thus any expression of a human response is regarded as a statement merely about the speaker’s psychology, not a statement of an objectively merited value” [my emphasis].

Lewis calls these objective values, the Tao. The synopsis:

“The Tao is a repository of beliefs in which objective value is upheld: objective value being “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Modern education … rejects the Tao. Moreover, it rejects the ancient, Platonic conception of the human being as one whose reason rules the appetites by means of the emotions, or sentiments—“the head rules the belly through the chest.” Today’s educational system, consequently, produces “Men Without Chests.”

2. The Way

From the synopsis:

“Lewis argues that modern educators are dangerous for society because they try to get beyond the Tao in order to discover supposedly more basic values beneath the traditional ones.”

An important point that Lewis makes is the “is/ought” sentence distinction. This is the point I mentioned above that the synopsis misses. It’s missed again here as well. But we’ll carry on. The synopsis:

“Lewis concludes, therefore, that the Tao is the basis for all value systems, and that it must be accepted or rejected as a whole. This does not mean that the Tao can never change or develop. However, a development from within—by someone who already understands and accepts the Tao—is different from an innovation imposed from without.”

END SYNOPSIS of the first two chapters

One quote from the end of the second chapter:

Very well. [Step outside of the Tao–give up objective value–and do not what we ought, but what we like] Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

This is the rejection of the concept of value altogether
p. 51

Below are the quotes I pulled from the final chapter, “The Abolition of Man.”

Page numbers refer to this edition. C.S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. Harper One, New York. 2001 (Paperback). 1944 (first edition).

We’ll start with the two from that last post.

In what sense is Man the possessor of power over Nature?
p. 54

Lewis’s answer,

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
p. 55

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
p. 58

Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man. … For the power of man to make himself what he pleases means… the power of some men to make other men what they please.
p. 59

In the old [educational] systems, both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao, a norm to which teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart.
p. 60

It was old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgment of values are to be produced in the people as part of conditioning.
p.61

I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. … 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.
p. 63

It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into a void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.
p. 64

This is not quite the end of the chapter, but it’s a good place to stop.