(Archive link here:https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88346/page/n50/mode/1up)

I had to read C.S Lewis’s “Abolition of Man” for an ethics class and I tried just getting through it without getting annoyed, but I couldn’t and wanted to share my thoughts

I’m not expecting anyone here to really like the work (it’s idealistic nonsense), but I would like a second pair of eyes to go over it and see if there’s something ive missed from my analysis.

1.Im really bugged by his use of one Dao definition while not acknowledging the other. Basically (to my knowledge) there are two conceptions of the Dao. One is the confucian Dao, which is somewhat close to how Lewis uses it, in that it’s the traditional and “ideal” set of values ypu base your morals off of. The Daoist conception is that the true (unnamed) Tao is the way of the universe, and cannot be described but rather experienced. [This is the broad generalization. I know that this is not exhaustive, I just wanted to point out the difference since i was confused the first time I read it]

It would be like if a Chinese philosopher refered to the English conception of the “State of Nature,” while only conceiving of the Hobbsian definition and not the Lockian one. It’d be somewhat insulting, no?

2. There is a rational conception for selflessness though. I’m not rationalist/liberal humanist or whatever, but there is a pretty simple logic.

I need society to survive

Society is good for me

I should work to preserve society

maybe this doesn’t cover the selfless actions of going to war and such (although, whether that’s a good thing really depends on the war), but its pretty basic to point out that soldiers do get many boons for going to war, and surviving. There hasn’t been a single society where you’re not promised benefits for this (whether they come to fruition is another thing). I don’t even believe in the rationalist line of reasoning here, but it bugs me that he dismisses it without much thought.

3. There’s kind of a chicken and egg problem with the “Tao” here. It is, apparently, so natural that basically every society on earth follows the same values with minor differences. However, conversely, the Tao must always be taught and never is instinctual or comes naturally to children who are not taught the “tao.”

Obviously human society survived long enough for people like Plato and Confucious to write about it, so it’s not like they originated the “tao.” So where did it come from? If it’s natural than it must come from somewhere originally and ergo doesn’t have to be taught. If it’s not, then it’s unexplained how it appeared. Of course you should teach children these things [to use an analogy, you wouldn’t wait for teens to figure out the method of calculating a derivative instead of just teaching them how to], but it comes into question why his criticism of these English books matter. If these values are so natural, they have to originate from somewhere within the human mind without being taught, no? [Of course, class society and Hegemony explains this, but I’ve given up hope that British people can understand any of that]

4.The entire third chapter kinda kills the book for me. It feels like reading Orwell again. It has this banal Kantian view of government and coercive state power and just really pathetic. “Uh oh, better follow these traditional values or these scary conditioners are going to get you.” Why these conditioners are here, and why people put up with them, is never answered really. They just are. It’s never questioned if these traditional values are moral either. Was every genocide committed by the Roman’s, british, etc. all caused by supposed “moral innovators?”

5.He has a wierd obsession with contraceptives. He claims that “the conditioners” will essentially control what humanity will be through eugenics via contraceptives. This would be wierd normally, but this was written in 1947. The nazis didn’t use condoms and birth control to do eugenics…they killed people. And even when eugenical regimes aren’t committing genocide with guns and gas chambers, they still sterilize undesirables and disabled people, and forbid intermarriage between them. Eugenics isn’t some thing where nebulous people in control try to make humanity better because muh authorarianism. Eugenics is something spawned out of 18th century “scientific” racism. It’s not just controlling who gets to sire children by giving people IUDS, it’s murder, deportation, castration and sterilization.

Edit: Forgot to add this point. It’s a really odd idea that conditioners just control “humanity.” Eugenics isn’t just something where a bunch if technocrats want to make humanity better or whatever. Most (if not all eugenicists) believe that their group is inherently superior. So the point is that these eugencists want there to only be their group of people (usually, white germanic capitalist/aristocrats). The problem is not some nebulous wishy washy idealism about “oh what about the power we hold over future generations.” The problem is the erasure of entire groups of people, ethnic, disabled, etc.