Either / Or

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

Chapter Seven… (and final chapter).  All chapters can be found here as the second book noted.

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasure of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

Well, if Lewis is right – that our choices are this black and white, this either / or… Well, we know we aren’t obeying the Tao – objective truth, absolute values, etc.  if we are therefore being kneaded and cut and shaped by others – masters, supermen, whatever – then that would seem to be meaningful in leading us to meaninglessness.

Recall that man has long lived, unconstrained, with the objective of conquering nature. as Lewis writes:

Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. …The Battle will indeed be won.  But who, precisely, will have won it?

When he wrote these words, perhaps this was not so clearly visible.  But today?  We have been shown that there is no part of man’s nature – mental, physical, emotional – that is safe from the Conditioners, that is outside of their desired grasp.  In what way are we not being kneaded and cut and shaped by masters?

Is not the answer to the choice Lewis gives us obvious?

And what of that part that makes man unique, different from all other beings in God’s creation?

Genesis 2: 7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

No other being created is so described – that God breathed into it, giving it a soul.  So what happens when even this “nature,”  man’s soul, is conquered?

…once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us.  We shall in fact be slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

And atheists didn’t like the idea of being slaves to Christ.  Well, being slave to something other than Christ isn’t really working out so well for us, is it.  Slaves and puppets – is there meaning in this?

Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.  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.

Love as Man’s Highest Purpose

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

Chapter Six….

For without the judgement ‘Benevolence is good’ – that is, without re-entering the Tao – [the Conditioners] can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others.

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

Benevolence: desire to do good to others; goodwill; charitableness: an act of kindness; a charitable gift:

Hierarchies have always existed and will always exist.  Once a value is promoted, a hierarchy based on success toward that value will be established.  This chapter will begin to examine the relationship between the reality of today, a reality where we live with any value other than love as the highest value, and today’s meaning crisis.

What do I mean by a meaning crisis?  It is man living other than as the human being he was intended in creation, living as a man having little if any say in his life and his future.  Living, not as a human being; living without hope for a future.

The meaning crisis is evident in many ways: higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, the great resignation, fatherless children, aborted babies, gender fluidity, the normalization of the most life-destroying behaviors.

This chapter will also begin to develop further the idea that love (benevolence) must be the highest value if man is to live as intended – respecting creation’s human nature.  Foundationally, Christianity has offered the basis for this via two simple ideas:

Genesis 1: 26(a) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.  27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 2: 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

This is what it means to be a human being.  No other creature was made in the image of God. in no other creature did God breath.

Matthew 22: 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

This is man’s highest purpose, his telos.

If these ideas were proposed in another tradition or religion, I am not aware of it; if they have been developed as thoroughly as they have been in the West, I haven’t seen it.  These ideas form the basis for holding love as the highest value for man, man’s purpose or telos.

But why does that matter?  What does this have to do with the meaning crisis?  Lewis will explain this in the chapter of this book entitled The Abolition of Man.

‘Man’s conquest of nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science.

No doubt, we have all benefitted from this “conquest.”

In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over nature?

Lewis offers three technologies to demonstrate his points.  Two of these, the aeroplane and the wireless, offer a conquest for men living today, now.  One of these, contraception, offers a conquest over men living (or not) in the future.  But this conquest is not absolute, nor always available to all.

Any or all three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men…

While this has always been true, and there are multiple examples throughout history, certainly it was obviously evident in the last two years.

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.

The Destruction of the Society Without Meaning

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

Chapter Five….

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

It will be recalled that The Green Book taught the lesson, albeit not overtly and maybe not even consciously, that words need not have meaning, that qualities are nothing more than personal feelings, and that there need not be anything objective in either – in fact, there can be nothing objective in either.

But what does it mean to say “which accepts it”?  Accepts what?  Accepts the idea that words need not have meaning and accepts the idea that qualities are not more than personal feelings; accepts the idea that there are no such things as objective values.

And what does it mean to say “the destruction of society”?  Can a society be destroyed if it is made up of individuals living a life of meaning?  (No.)  Or is a society destroyed when many living within it live meaningless lives?  (Yes.)  Can life have meaning if words have no meaning and if nothing is valued objectively?  (No.)

In other words, a society is destroyed only when the individuals who make up that society are destroyed.  And herein lies the crux of the issue – the connection of the loss of the objective values that underlie the natural law ethic to the meaning crisis that is consuming almost all of Western society.

However subjective they may be about some traditional values, Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all.

This is, of course, the contradiction in which all subjectivists sooner or later are trapped.  Ultimately, to say that there are no objective values is a statement of an objective value.  But why should anyone buy this?  There is no reason, if all values are subjective.

The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all.  …And this end must have real value in their eyes.

It is not their own objective values that are being questioned by Gaius and Titius, but yours.  And such values must be embraced, not based solely on propositions about facts alone nor solely based on reason.  Facts don’t exist in a vacuum (the silliness of “trust the science” has made this clear, as science can be used toward any end); reason also does not exist in a vacuum (a course of action is reasonable or not, depending on the ends desired).

This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by mediation of society ought to be preserved.

Why ought society be preserved?  There is no fact pattern that leads to this conclusion.  One can use reason to destroy society or to aid it in flourishing.  The end of preserving society must be taken as given; there is no other way to arrive at this end.

And this is described as Practical Reason – judgements such as society ought to be preserved are taken as given; these are not mere sentiments, but rationality itself.  The Innovator cannot accept the whole of this Practical Reason, as it binds him from ends of his innovation; Practical Reason takes the word “progress” and aims it only in certain directions – an unacceptable situation for the Innovator.

This opens up an entire conversation on the topic of free will.  Certainly, one is free to destroy one’s self.  One cannot claim that such an action is rational or irrational absent free will being bound by Practical Reason – there are some oughts that must be taken as given. 

…the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

Free will bound by oughts.  This goes beyond the oughts of the non-aggression principle: don’t hit first; don’t take my stuff.  Nothing about preserving society to be found here.  Why preserve society, if to do so one must give up something of his freedom – maybe even give up his life?  Yet, a lost society is one which is populated by lost people – people without meaning.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard.

We hear it from free-floating ethicists (those who deny objective value but embrace the idea that there is such a thing as “good” and such a thing as “evil”) all the time: they cannot describe the “good” in any meaningful way, but at least they know that Auschwitz (the go-to example) is evil.

But on what basis is this so?  Those perpetrating such evils surely have a rational basis for doing so.  Why are their reasons no less satisfactory than any other?

The Doctrine of Objective Value

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

There is no natural law ethic without objective value.

Chapter Four….

‘Can you be righteous unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem?  All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.’

From Centuries of Meditations, by Thomas Traherne, and as cited in The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

To render something its due esteem, to prize something according to its value…in order to do so, such things must have a value that is objective.  Otherwise, what amount of esteem is due?  After all, otherwise any amount of esteem will do.  What value is the thing’s accorded value?  Can any amount be just as good as any other?  Not if it has an “accorded value.”

We have seen that it cannot be so with words.  For life to have meaning, words must have meaning.  Objective meaning.  “Sublime” and “pretty” are not the same.  When describing the waterfall, one of these words is more objectively true than the other.  Rendering due esteem to the waterfall, esteem according to its value, requires the use of one of these words over the other.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.

Virtue requires some standard; else any behavior can be deemed virtuous.  Can you envision otherwise?

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

“Ought” requires some standard; else any affection can be afforded any degree of love.  Well, unless we are free to live without “oughts.”  For humans, some would describe this as liberty, but the same people would not be so callous in this attitude if describing a lion living without lion “oughts.”

[The young student] must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.

Students who have thus been taught in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ are able to find the first principles of Ethics when the age of reflective thought is reached.  Otherwise, reason is left free to justify every whim, every instinct.  Citing Plato:

‘All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

Absent the inculcation of these first principles of Ethics, Reason can justify any cause, any course of action.

In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta…. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence with reality.

Is it possible to have a life of meaning if one does not live in correspondence with reality?  Or, to frame it in accord with the premise behind this series of posts: if one does not live in correspondence with reality (say, for example, “birthing persons”), one will live a meaningless life – hence, a meaning crisis.

In the Beginning Was the Word

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

Chapter Three….

In their second chapter, Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall.  You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

The first time I read, and wrote about, this book, I thought – while reading this introduction… “I kind of get it…but is it more like a speaker starting with something humorous to get the audience engaged?”  Let’s see if that’s still the case….

Lewis begins his exposition of the fall of men – remember, we end this book with men without chests, men who aren’t men at all (the abolition of man) – with this story about words and their meaning.  He begins his exposition on the loss of objective values with this story about words and their meaning.  It seems Lewis is trying to say something about the importance of words and their meaning to the condition of man.

Genesis chapter one.  “And God said” ten times (well, one of these was “then God said”).  He said.  By speaking, He created light and an expanse in the midst of the waters; He gathered the waters in one place, He brought forth vegetation; He created lights in the heavens; He created living creature in the sea and on land.  Finally, He created man in His image.  He spoke to His creation: be fruitful and multiply.

By speaking, He brought creation into existence.  And He saw that everything He made was very good.

God did not create on a work bench, with tools useful for the purpose.  He spoke.  Words are the source and foundation of creation, the source and foundation for being.  Words must be meaningful if creation is to be meaningful – words must be meaningful if man is to be meaningful, if man is to have meaning.

John 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Without the Word, nothing was made.  Without the Word, there is no creation.  Note: it was not an apprentice that was with God and was God; it was the Word.  In Greek: logos.  This is a bit of a complicated word to translate (like many Greek words, we need several English words to get some understanding), but here is a try:

Logos is … derived from a Greek word variously meaning "ground", "plea", "opinion", "expectation", "word", "speech", "account", "reason", "proportion", and "discourse".

In Greek philosophy: reason, thought of as constituting the controlling principle of the universe and as being manifested by speech.

God spoke being into existence; He used reason – the controlling principle of the universe – as the source of His creation.  To bring creation forth, to make it manifest, He spoke.

So, why does Lewis start with what might seem to many (including me, to some degree and at one time) a trivial point?  Sublime, pretty…pretty, sublime.  Lewis sees the language slipping away, and he sees where this will lead.  He sees this because words are the foundation of our being.

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.

Gaius and Titius did not overtly say that judgements of value are unimportant; they may not even have intended to so chip away at the schoolboy’s mind.  But their words will have this effect.

How far have we fallen since?  We know the quotes from Orwell, from his novel published just a few years after Lewis delivered his talks that resulted in the subject book: ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’  You know what Orwell never said in 1984?  A man is a woman.

The Answer is in C. S. Lewis

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

As noted in my opening post on this matter, I am wanting to more fully and directly make this connection – the connection of the meaning crisis to the violation of a natural law ethic, and why restoring the natural law ethic is the only solution to the meaning crisis.

Again, while I call the previous post my opening post, in reality it is what I have been working through for a few years, but have decided I now need to try to pull it together in a concise form.

It has been a month since I published that opening post, “Nature, According to Our Purpose.”  Almost from the time I published it, I have kept getting pulled to C. S. Lewis’s book, the Abolition of Man.  The more I have thought about it, the more I have come to conclude that the answer to my dilemma is all in this book.  Lewis wrote of the problem and solution almost eighty years ago.

I have written about this book in the past.  My previous posts can be found here:

• This is Sublime
• Finding the Trunk
• Nature Conquers Man
• It’s Natural
• The Natural Law of C.S. Lewis
• Why Should the Species be Preserved?

What I believed would be the case, and as I have started to re-read the book has turned out to be true, is that my thought has developed significantly since the time I wrote these earlier posts almost three years ago.  There are many parts that didn’t catch my attention the first time that now seem tremendously relevant.  So, I can’t take a shortcut and just say “read these old posts for the answer.”  Parts of it will be there, to be sure.  But I don’t think it ties together the way I hope it will today.

So, why The Abolition of Man?  Why do I believe the entire answer will be found in this short (less-than-forty-page) book?  Lewis quickly summarizes why we, as human beings, require objective values if we are to live as human beings. 

Now, consider that last sentence carefully: we require objective values if we are to live as human beings.  If he is right, then the clear implication is that if we do not have and hold to objective values, we cannot live as human beings. 

Hence, if we cannot live as human beings, our lives have lost meaning as human beings.  We can live as something else, but not as human beings.  Would this not result in a crisis of meaning, to live as something other than what we are – to not live as we are meant to live?

Lewis covers all of this.  Now, he begins with an example that seems quite quaint to our ears; a seemingly small little slight, an almost unnoticeable ounce of meaning stripped from a large inventory of stock.  It will be worth beginning by examining how far we have fallen since the time he wrote these words – from a small little gap in maintaining objective values to the chasm we now live with today (and we know the limits of widening this gap have not yet been reached).

The cost of the one little slight noted by Lewis at the beginning of this book can be understood if one understands the quote from Confucius with which Lewis begins his work:

The Master said, He who sets to work on a different strand destroys the whole fabric.

Just one strand out of place – in a different order, one not belonging to the whole – and the whole is ruined.  Once the unraveling begins, there is no end to it.  Once the principle is given up or compromised, there is no natural (principled) place by which one can say “it stops here.”

What is the fabric that is so delicate that one wrong strand, one strand out of place, will destroy the whole?  Lewis answers the question:

Why Should the Species be Preserved?

 

Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

It is time to extend Lewis’s vision….

Lewis is writing of the Tao: also known as Natural Law, Traditional Morality, or First Principles of Practical Reason.  After all else of nature has been conquered, why not also this?  After all, there have always been those, through each advancement in the conquering of nature, who have warned that the next step would be the disastrous step.  Yet, here we are.  So why concern ourselves with messing with the Tao?

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.

But what is meant by “man’s conquest of nature”?  In reality, it is the power of some men over other men, with nature as the instrument (or weapon).  Lewis is not after the issue of man using this power in potentially corrupt ways.  He is after something more fundamental: what is meant when we say man has conquered nature?  It is using nature to exercise power by some men (the Conditioners) over other men (the Subjects).

And this power extends through time: conquest builds on conquest, ever more men are lorded over by ever fewer men; each new power won by men is also a power over men:

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billons upon billions of men.

It will be a conquest over human nature.  At this point, the battle is won…but who, precisely, will have won it?  Having removed the Tao, or Natural Law, men are free to do as they please.  They need no longer act in accord with their nature – the nature of man.

The power of men to do as they please in reality is the power of some men (the Conditioners) to make others (the Subjects) do as these Conditioners please.  The Conditioners will create an artificial Tao, one that ensures ever greater power by ever fewer men: Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

Will some of their impulses, their Tao of artificial creation, prove benevolent?  Lewis has doubts.  History only offers examples of the opposite:

I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned.

Without the Tao, obedience to impulse is all that is left; without the soul and reason, man’s base nature is all that is left.  In other words, we move from obeying Natural Law (the Tao) to laws of nature (the strong dominating the weak).

It is not that they [the Conditioners] are bad men.  They are not men at all.  Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. 

All that is left to guide these Conditioners is their felt emotional weight of the moment.  When everything that gave us the idea of objective “good” is debunked, all that is left is subjective “want.”  To say that they are corrupt or degenerate implies some standard of objective value.  But there is none.

This, it turns out, is equally true for the Subjects – those being conditioned by the Conditioners:

Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men.  They are not men at all: they are artefacts.  Man’s final conquest proved to be the abolition of man.

Conclusion

What did I mean about extending Lewis’s vision?  He is writing of the most important and unique aspect of man – his soul, his reason; that which God breathed into him, the one thing that makes man different from all other created beings.  It is this that has been abolished.

Lewis hints at this extension, the next and final step, when he asks: with all of this power in ever fewer hands, what motivates them – these Conditioners?

The preservation of the species?  But why should the species be preserved?

In March 2020, we entered this phase.  There is no reason for the Conditioners to concern themselves with the preservation of the species.  The subjects, due to their training, have no reason to expect it or even desire it.

Once man’s soul, his reason, has been abolished – via abolishing the Natural Law – this step was inevitable.

The Origin of the Natural Order

 

You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside nature for the real originator of the natural order?

Who Was Right? by C.S. Lewis (Chapter 9 from this collection)

Lewis describes a lecture in which he heard the standard story of human progress and development:

Evolution, development, the slow struggle upwards and onwards from crude and inchoate beginnings towards ever increasing perfection and elaboration — that appears to be the very formula of the whole universe.

The oak comes from the acorn; the most powerful engines of today come from the crude rocket; contemporary art as a high achievement when compared to the crude drawings in caves.  Man from fish from particles of organic matter from particles of inorganic matter.  All of the world and all of human development demonstrates that nature is based on this progress.

The lecture stuck with Lewis, to the point where it brought on a dream.  He was hearing the same voice, but the words were not quite the same:

“The acorn comes from a full-grown oak. The first crude engine, the rocket, comes, not from a still cruder engine, but from something much more perfect than itself and much more complex, the mind of a man, and a man of genius.”

The first prehistoric drawing came not from earlier drawings but from the brain of a human – a brain not inferior to our own, as, in fact, his brain created a drawing where no such thing even existed before.  The embryo from which we came did not come from something even more embryonic, but from two fully-developed human beings.  The dream-lecturer continued:

“Descent, downward movement, is the key word. The march of all things is from higher to lower. The rude and imperfect thing always springs from some-thing perfect and developed.”

The next day, Lewis had some time to consider this dream-lecturer – even considering that large civilizations grow from small civilizations, but these small civilizations are the result of a larger, dying civilization: the Germanic from the decay of Rome; the Greek from older Minoan with a pinch of Egypt and Phoenicia thrown in.

It was then that Lewis considered that the real-lecturer – while having a theory on the absolute beginnings – offered a theory that was a bit slurry: was there an egg that proceeded from no bird, or a bird that proceeded from no egg?  No, Lewis thought: the perfect produces the imperfect which produces, again, the perfect.  The egg leads to the bird and the bird leads to an egg:

if there ever was a life which sprang of its own accord out of a purely inorganic universe, or a civilization which raised itself by its own shoulder-straps out of pure savagery, then this event was totally unlike the beginnings of every subsequent life, and every subsequent civilization. 

An egg from no bird is nothing natural.  It must have had some beginning, just as the first crude rocket had its beginning not in an earlier engine, but in the mind of a man.  Hence, Lewis ends his essay with the quote which began my post:

You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside nature for the real originator of the natural order?

Conclusion

There is nothing that explains how human beings not only survived an evolutionary process, but even came out on top – so to speak.  What defenses did pre-historic predecessors of humans have against the many larger, stronger, faster, more deadly creatures and calamities that filled his earth? 

Without a fully-developed human mind, no such survival was possible.  Yet, could evolution have instantaneously produced such a mind in humans such that he would not only survive but throve in a world filled with creatures much faster and stronger than he?

It may not be the right explanation, but there is certainly one explanation available to us:

Genesis 2: 7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

It is a much more plausible explanation than random atoms smashing together randomly.