Posted for Austin Schermerhorn

Precis on C.S. Lewis “Abolition of Man” 

C.S. Lewis begins his argument with an anecdote, about a man who is sure of Man’s power over nature, but he himself is dying of a natural illness. Lewis finds this man’s position darkly ironic, and the man’s argument that he is merely a casualty on the winning side. However, Lewis goes on to argue that with all the powerful inventions of Man that seem to the common person power over nature, are actually a select group of men’s power over all humans, and even future generations in the case of planned pregnancies. Lewis uses three examples for this argument: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. He states that if he relies on another person to carry him, he cannot say he is a strong man, and it is the same for technology: if a person is using a technology that relies on a material miner, assembler, factory owner, distributer, etc., he cannot say that he himself is the one with the technological power over nature as he must rely on others. He says that the exerting of power of humans over other humans is not intrinsically a fault due to corruption or a faulty political system, but says that it must always occur as it is not possible for all humans to be exactly equal, and some group will always have power over another group.  He says that through eugenics, each successive generation will be weaker and have less power to exert over others, because of their ancestors predispositions for them, that they have put “wonderful machines in their hands [but] we have pre-ordained how they are to use them”. Because a smaller generation will influence a larger generation so much, the power will fade exponentially. Lewis states the final aspect of nature we will overcome is human nature, after perfect pre-natal selection and careful psychological education.

            Lewis goes on to define nature based on what it is not: the artificial, the civil, the human, the spiritual, and the supernatural, and says that Nature is an idea of something without qualitative aspects, and cannot be “good” or “bad”. He says the more we define Nature and see the surrounding reality as Nature rather than Spirit, the more we exploit it and deep down we feel like it loses some of its meaning for us. He says in fact, we reduce things to “Nature” just so we can conquer them. We cannot conquer that which is internal to us, which has varying meaning to others and is subjective based on cultural and personal bias; but once something becomes solid, objective, and natural, can we presume to understand it and conquer it. If a plague was viewed as the vengeance of a wrathful God, who could presume to sway power over it? But once we reduce it to micro-organisms and study their spread, we can eradicate the plague entirely.  Lewis says this can only be sustained until our final match, ourselves, and once we assign ourselves to nature we are essentially the patsies in a raw deal: we will have given power over ourselves not to ourselves but instead to the Conditioners of the future. He says we cannot have it both ways, that if we presume ourselves to be the product of Nature, then we will resign power over ourselves to those who, presumably, are also just following their natural impulses. Lewis finally ends but saying that we are attempting too much, and he doesn’t want to seem like an obscurest, but our obsession with seeing through things and controlling them can eventually go to far, and he ends with the platitude: “If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through' all things is the same as not to see.”