The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (C.S. Lewis Classics) (Paperback)

by C. S. Lewis (Author) "I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books..." (more)
Key Phrases: men without chests, mere nature, The Green Book, Practical Reason

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross

Review
"A Real Triumph." -- Owen Barfield --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 109 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone Books; 1st Touchstone Ed edition (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684823713
• ISBN-13: 978-0684823713
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #716,749 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

192 of 196 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like an open letter to Richard Rorty. . ., June 27, 2000

By	Charles Warman (Wichita Falls, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Abolition of Man (Paperback)

. . . but written when Rorty was still in diapers. This is by far the most prophetic, and the most disturbing, of Lewis' works. Starting with a deceptively simple observation - that modern (now postmodern) philosophy tends to reduce all statements of value to mere statements of subjective feeling - Lewis goes on to demonstrate the corrosive and ultimately fatal effect of this line of thinking on any civilized culture.

Lewis accurately predicts the parallel development of two trends: (1) the loss of any objective transcendent moral standards; and (2) the ability of a scientific or political elite, through social conditioning and/or genetic manipulation, to affect the thinking of successive generations of the rest of us - the great unwashed. The ascendancy, during the last decade, of moral relativism and the political correctness movement demonstrate how far down these parallel tracks we have come (i.e., Rorty: truth is what gets us what we want; truth is what my peers will let be get by with saying; Christians are "the natural constituency of Hitler").

While he's at it, Lewis refutes the postmodern, and generally unexamined, truism that the historic moral principles of Western Civilization are fundamentally different from other cultures' norms, and thus are arbitrary and nonbinding. In a lengthy appendix, Lewis shows that the great moral principles are timeless and have been generally accepted by all civilized societies, at all times (until ours).

So where will it end? In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.

I must take issue with the reviewer who referred to the book as a "disguised apologetic" for Christianity. While Lewis openly acknowledges his Christian beliefs, he takes great pains to establish that the existence of objective moral standards is transcultural; that it is "trans-" any specific religious or ethical system other than relativism. Those who insist otherwise are simply out of touch; controlled by their own hermeneutic of suspicion, they see closet Christians lurking behind any and all moral absolutes.

A final point - I must also disagree with the reviewer who referred to the book too difficult for the average reader. I'm an accountant, I have no training in philosophy, and I'm definitely not a candidate for MENSA membership - but I had no trouble "getting it." Light reading it's not, but, hey, it's short, the type is large, the book is cheap, and it's written in Lewis' inimitable conversational style. Don't be intimidated, the stakes are too high!

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Need For Universal Truth, May 11, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Abolition of Man (Paperback)

Attack on the idea of universal truth and the values that derive from it is stronger now than in 1944 when this book was written. Yet, despite many rhetorical defenses of universal truth and values launched in the "culture wars," this remains one of, if not the best, defenses of universal truth and values.

Lewis believes in Natural Laws - laws of morality, such as duty to children, parents, elders, the "golden rule," mercy, magnanimity, justice - which have been accepted both throughout history and by varied cultures. Lewis calls these laws "the Tao."

The problem as Lewis outlines it, is that if nothing is self-evident (i.e., true), then nothing can be proven. And, if nothing is obligatory because it is self-evident, then nothing is obligatory for its own sake, i.e., because it is true. If nothing is obligatory, then rules of conduct are subject to pleasure or whim and are enforced only by power of some over others. Ultimately, this robs of us our humanity. Lewis says, "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."

The consequence of rejecting the idea of universal truth, or "the Tao," is the destruction of the society which rejects it. This is, as Lewis says, tragically comical because "we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible."

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just say no to nihilism..., March 29, 2005

By	nto62 (Corona, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Abolition of Man (Paperback)

The Abolition of Man is a series of lectures wherein C.S. Lewis debunks the debunkers of virtue and values. Pulling no punches, Lewis successfully charts their "belief system" from beginning to bankruptcy. They suppose that the value of a thing is only what we perceive it to be, thus there is no true good, there is no true bad. Nothing is truly of value. Though written decades ago, we see traces of this in our non-judgemental society, in our lowering of expectations, in the race to dumb everything down, make everything equal, where nothing is inherently bad and nothing, it seems, inherently good.

Beyond the fact that, by their own definition, this nihilistic approach has no intrinsic value but what we perceive it to have, we find that the successive devaluation of everything leads to the value of nothing - including ourselves. And this, Lewis has it, is the abolition of Man. We may see evidence of this abolition in many current debates to include euthanasia, abortion, gender selection/eugenics, and embryo farming. When we have no value, but what we perceive, then there may be hell to pay when those perceptions change. Auschwitz is a remarkable example. Bioethicists with the ethics of swine are another.

As usual, C.S. Lewis slings well-honed arrows that hit their mark with ease. What Lewis provides best is clarity such as very few writers can. 5 stars.