After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man by Michael Ward
Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021; 241 pp., $24.95

In 1924, E.F. Carritt of Oxford University joined the University of Michigan philosophy department for a one-year appointment. C.S. Lewis had recently finished his undergraduate career at Oxford, matching his First Class in Literae Humaniores in 1922 with a First Class in English in 1923. Carritt turned to the young Lewis to fill his shoes, and so the man who finished his career as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge began it as a philosophy tutor at Oxford.

Carritt himself was a student of H.A. Pritchard, who was with W.D. Ross a main proponent of the Oxford school of ethical intuitionism, inspired by G.E. Moore’s intuitionism at Cambridge. But intuitionism proved to be far less influential on the broader culture than the emotivism of A.J. Ayer, I.A. Richards, and others. Ayer taught that “the presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content”; instead, an “ethical symbol” simply flourishes the statement with an expression of the emotions of the speaker. Thus, a statement like “Adultery is wrong,” just means, “I don’t like adultery.” And not just “ethical symbols” but all symbols of value, including those in aesthetic judgments, come under the emotivist's knife. If you or a loved one has ever had to fill out a “fact/opinion” worksheet, where all statements of value are supposed to go on the opinion side, you have been exposed to emotivism.

In the middle of World War II, Lewis gave a series of lectures at the University of Durham, in which he criticized the emotivist theory, and offered a platonic “likely story” about what would happen if emotivism ever came to saturate public values and policy. These lectures became The Abolition of Man. Yet unlike the rest of his non-scholarly books, Abolition is not about religion. It is prophetic, but its prophecy is about the apocalypse we seem very capable of inflicting on ourselves.

Imagine a true technocracy—the Conditioners, as Lewis calls them—who deny the objectivity of value and are guided in their actions only by what they happen to want, wielding the power to remake human nature according to those wants. Their human subjects will be to them as so much raw material, potential artifacts, as a tree is potentially a house. To some, including B.F. Skinner, who read Abolition and welcomed the doomsday it foretold, these lucky Conditioners have achieved the apogee of power over nature. But Lewis understood human psychology far better than that famous behaviorist. Really to believe that all Nature is raw material for the imposition of your subjective wishes, and really to believe that your fellow men and women are parts of that Nature, is itself to have ceased to be human.

The first step away from this brink, Lewis tells us, is to embrace “dogmatically” what nearly all men have at all times believed: that we humans are essentially subjects of a moral law, the participation in which constitutes our distinctively human way of life. To deny the reality of the law, or its authority over us, is to move out of the human family and return ourselves to mere nature.

Michael Ward’s After Humanity offers a detailed commentary on Abolition. Philosopher though he was, Lewis’s reading and thinking always overflowed the banks of any single academic discipline, so Ward guides the reader through the many allusions and references, here picking up half a line of Milton or Bunyan and showing us the world, there an overlookable reference to electricity and illuminating what seemed like filler, and always relating Abolition to themes in Lewis’s other works. Ward does not always exhibit the philosophical precision a philosopher would hope for, but Ward is one of the rare readers of Lewis who can mine all of Abolition’s lodes taken together: literary, historical, theological, as well as philosophical.

After Humanity also includes a six-chapter critical study and a final concluding chapter. He discusses the appraisals of the book by biographers, philosophers, and former students. He wades knee-deep into the streams of philosophical opinion which Abolition was meant to divert—those streams, at least, which reached non-academics through popular channels like King and Ketley’s The Control of Language, immortalized as Gaius and Titius’ The Green Book. The chapter on Abolition’s legacy seems to me correct in its main lines, though I was unpersuaded by Ward’s argument that Abolition influenced Anscombe and MacIntyre in their seminal works of moral philosophy. This quibble aside, After Humanity is a learned, sympathetic, and deeply insightful study of Abolition, from which any student of Lewis will benefit. I teach Abolition once a year in a class on the Inklings at Baylor University. This past fall, my lectures and classroom discussions were enriched by the resources I found in After Humanity.

In the conclusion, Ward reflects on Lewis’s use of the willingness to die for one’s country as his main example of a traditional value. Probably intending no criticism of Wilfred Owen (whom Ward persuasively argues Lewis probably hadn’t read), Lewis could affirm with Horace that it is indeed sweet and seemly to die for one’s country. He had been in battle and lost friends, he nearly died himself, and judging by a diary entry of 1922, probably suffered PTSD. As Ward remarks, Lewis defended traditional value “not so much because it told him how to live, still less because it entitled him to tell other people how to live, but because it told him how to view death,” and this reading is confirmed by the final three quotations in Abolition’s Appendix, the last of which is taken from the Gospel of John: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it (12:24–25).”

Ward’s focus on the theme of noble death is to my mind the greatest of his many great insights into Abolition. The way of the Conditioners and the Way of Christ both lead to death. But the Conditioners promise a death from which there is no return; they cannot promise an eternal life about which we humans can or should care, even if they discover some way to prolong indefinitely the life of some post-human organism whose nature and values we cannot guess. But the Way of Christ includes a promise that the death to self, which is a condition for true love of God and neighbor, is really a purification in anticipation of the fulfillment of our deepest individual and collective longings, and this fulfillment carries on into eternity.