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.

Read More – From the Sublime to the End of the World

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