The Abolition of Man

I finished reading The Abolition of Man last night and I wish I could convey the power of that third and last chapter of the book. I feel like I've been able to glimpse the power and beauty of what Lewis was trying to say, but I still don't have the vocabulary necessary to completely understand and internalize it. If you understand it, please explain it to me. I will make a lame attempt to explain part of it here.

Lewis claims that in seeking to tame nature or overcome her, we pay a great price for our advances. We chop her up into little pieces, analyze and understand each little piece, and reassemble a corpse. Our models of reality are crude approximations that yield great results in terms of power over nature, but all too often destroy the beauty of the whole. Our reductionist theories grant us control over our environment, but somehow in the process, we lose sight of the purpose behind our investigations. Ultimately he claims that these advances, once complete, will result, not in victory over nature, but enslavement to her. More on that in a minute.

Lewis claims that the end result of our conquest of nature must be the conquest of human nature. We, in our relativistic theorizing, will seek to eliminate all convention and tradition in order to be finally free to shape our environment and ourselves according to our pleasure. But without some absolute measure, some value by which to guide our decisions, what will our pleasure be? Surely not something "good" or "benevolent" because radical relativism can have no absolute conception of such values. Lewis tells us that our "pleasure" will be just that - whatever impulse or appetite dominates us in the moment. We, in seeking to conquer nature, in seeking to free ourselves from all constraints of history, of philosophy, of tradition, of absolute moral or ethical standards, have in the end become slaves of our own nature. Having cut out our own chests, we then deliver our souls to the demands of our bellies. We will be ruled by our physical desires and appetites. And while the ruling class may see fit to impose some sort of arbitrary system of values on the ruled for purposes of their own, they themselves can not be subject to any such thing because they have rejected all such authority. They will be ruled by their stomachs and thus will have lost their humanity. And nature, which we sought to subdue, will have become the master of us all.

Lewis suggests that the redemption from such a disastrous outcome may include a reformulation of scientific inquiry. Rather than seeking to slice reality into manageable bits in the form of modern scientific modeling and analysis, perhaps we can perform such analysis without killing the object itself. We can retain a worldview that recognizes the beauty of the whole and accepts an alternative model to the scientific one as being of equal or even greater value depending on the circumstance. For example, the answer to the question, "What is color?" may be answered by science through discussions of electromagnetic waves and propagation, wavelength, cones in the human eye, representations in the brain, etc. But after all that discussion, the weary student may wonder whether all of that actually answered the question. The question may be better answered by an experience of viewing colors, by a discussion of the aesthetics of color, or by some other method I don't know about. Discussing the pieces of the system in isolation with the aid of a mathematical structure may be useful in a lot of ways, but it's also sort of like answering the question "What is a tree?" by chopping up a tree into little bits, examining the pieces one by one, and saying "There; that is a tree." Something important and essential in the concept is missing.

I think the problem is more than just one of science. Science has become something of a religion to many people because of the "miracles" it has brought about ... and I don't wish to minimize the wonder of those miracles. I am a scientist myself and think there is great value in that field. But it shouldn't be held up as the supreme source of truth either. Still, the problem is broader than that. Lewis ends his book talking about science, but as he points out earlier, the denial of an essential, absolute truth inevitably leads us to the destruction of all objective value and morality. By accepting that stance, we're left in a boat at sea with no anchor. We have no ground to stand on. Logic can take us from point A to point B, but it can't create point A out of nothing. Reason must have a place to start. Something Thomas Reid called "First Principles". Something like Aristotle's "Final Cause". Some self-evident truth. These things are not deducible because they are the premise on which deductions are built. They cannot be judged by a subsequent principle because they are the creators and judges of such principles themselves. We can't even really argue about them properly because there is no basis on which to argue. We can try to argue, but ultimately it comes down to what you believe at your core.

Lewis doesn't claim to know what all these First Principles are - he actually avoids discussing what they are, but he claims that they exist. Our conception of them may change, but they themselves do not change. As we operate within that framework of First Principles, our understanding of them may improve and we may better pattern our life after the truth we discover. But our discovery did not create them. They exist independently. When we refuse to acknowledge the existence of such principles, we are left with nothing from which to begin to reason. To avoid the problems Lewis describes, we have to be willing to accept that something simply IS true. That truth exists in a state that is independent of us. Whether we perceive it correctly is a different question. That may seem like common sense, but it's amazing how the alternative can be taught in a way that seems so compelling.