Posted on 03/14/2024 1:02:41 PM PDT by Heartlander
For years now, our culture has waged war over the question of what it means to be a man. To that battlefield, some online pundits have brought the heavy artillery of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
In the well-stocked armory of words and ideas comprising Lewis’ short treatise, we find other weapons of enlightenment of which we have need today, concepts that mark Lewis not only as a philosopher but as a prophet. Chief among these is the Tao (translated literally as path or way), a synonym for “Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes.”
Lewis writes: “It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.” Rid ourselves of the Tao, and “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of men to make other men what they please.”
As Lewis describes a world without Tao, we see the first resemblances between his broken but imaginary world and our real one. With the advent of postmodernism, in particular, capital-R Reality has been exchanged for the quasi-truth of individual opinion. We now longer have objective principles we can appeal to; rather, everyone creates their own reality and morality.
Lewis foresees two deadly consequences in this exchange of natural law and traditional virtue for man-made values. The first is that this “power will be enormously increased” such that “the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique.”
These powers and scientific techniques are in play in the 21st century, and though we may shake with laughter at the notion of our federal government as omnicompetent, there are people hard at work in our Capitol trying to make it omnipotent.
The second consequence Lewis dubs even more significant. The traditional practice of handing the Tao from one generation to the next, of “old birds teaching young birds to fly,” will give way to Conditioners, “who know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce.” He goes on, “The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race.”
Though he recognizes that some men and women hope that these Conditioners will be benevolent, Lewis has his doubts, unable to think of “one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, had used that power benevolently.”
Fast-forward to our day, in which we are conditioned daily to accept new ideologies, sometimes twisting language to bring them to life. Phrases like toxic masculinity, reproductive choice, white privilege, gay marriage, and cisgender vs. transgender—all concepts that ignore objective truth and the anchor of tradition—now abound. Conditioners in our culture, for example, have taken a phenomenon like transgenderism (once rare and, until recently, regarded as a mental illness), reworked it into an ideology, and encouraged more and more people to accept it as the norm, with deniers often suffering severe consequences.
Other Conditioners are intent on convincing us to eat bugs rather than beef and to eradicate fossil fuels, all to save the planet from climate change, a measure which could leave countless people impoverished or dead of starvation. As Lewis told us, our Conditioners know how to produce and influence conscience, and they busy themselves day and night to that end.
At the heart of these efforts are two modern dogmas: universal relativism and irrational toleration. Put those two together, and a path can indeed be built—not a Tao but a roadway to the extermination of our humanity.
Because, as C.S. Lewis sees it:
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 pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common law of action which over-arch rulers and ruled alike.
Lewis then writes:
Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape. … The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere … specimens … begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements.
Fighting against this constant brainwashing requires a stout will and a strong sense of the traditions, morality, and natural law inherent in the Tao. The battle is constant, and sometimes the future appears dark, but only if we forget that we have reason and truth on our side, and that we possess (as some “old birds” once told us) the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—all endowed not by a government but by a Creator.
The lies and power lust of Conditioners are shackles intended to enslave us. Heeding and defending the truths of the Tao will keep us free, come what may.
Either he's an idiot (which I suspect) or...well, I can't think of an "or."
A former pastor of ours wrote a book called something like “The Facebook Generation” (10 years old now probably). He talked about how today's kids get SO MANY different world views that their maturity has been delayed.
Back in Jesus’ day, Mother Mary had grown up with ONE world view, and KNEW who she was and was considered an adult at her first menstruation.
Today, studies show that for men the average age that they are considered “adults” is something like 31 years old! (Women it is 28 or something.) I don't know how they determined that. But knowing grown men that play video games all evening while ignoring their wife and kids that may be an indication.
And part/much of it is getting so many different viewpoints, that it takes so much longer to figure out what ones own values are.
Yes. Lewis called it. A long time ago.
But he wasn’t a prophet and wouldn’t have claimed to be.
He was a prophet in that he could observe, learn, reason and think under The Holy Spirits’s wisdom.
31 years old. I guess that is why Jason Aldean was sitting in OHP car acting like a baby. He said something about just being a 26 year old kid. Trooper did not care, he still arrested Jason.
Ping
Francis Schaeffer considered the C.S. Lewis novel “That Hideous Strength” to be prophetic.
Marxism is but one of many modern scientistic ideologies wherein Conditioners to reduce the human being to a soulless aspect of nature. Like the other systems, Marxism begins its process of social engineering (conditioning) by teaching humans that they are the product of evolution working on matter, thereby allowing them to be deconstructed and depersonalized. In this way the sense of their individual souls, intellect, free will, and conscience eventually fade to black since all four are shown by 'science' to be illusions.
Social engineering allows the New Man to imagine he is a bio-machine or hominid rather than the image bearer of the Triune Creator. This allows the New Man to sink into passive slavery to instincts and passions. In short, since the New Man has no real choice, whatever harm he does to others can never be his fault since ' science' has liberated the New Man from the burden of freedom. In this way, the New Man can fully enjoy his earthly rewards as a slave within a deterministic system of cause and effect unless truth and reality invade his collective darkness. Far from redeeming the New Man, social engineering has but brought back the Old Man of 2 Tim. 3:3.
Scientific engineering is based on the proposition that since man has evolved over millions of years from a sub-human past then logically he will evolve over time into something better or "post human."
Furthermore, it is the Elect, the already highly evolved and purified post-human race of god-men – the avatars of divine history leading the world to utopia (ie WEF) – who possess the godlike power to scientifically engineer the New Man who worships his 'creators.'
And so, Conditioners have already engineered a new conscience, which turns out to be the conscience of the old man
When Richard Nixon asked Russell Kirk what is the one book that he should read, Kirk said “The Abolition of Man”.
It really is relevant to what is happening today.
I read it twice and hated it both times, but I do agree with that assessment.
Thanks for posting!
Close yours eyes, and start walking. Reality is what hits you in the face when you get to a wall.
That other world, the one that exists behind your eyelids, that’s just pretend. Sometimes lots of people like to pretend together. That’s still pretend.
At this point inevitably the scapegoating begins. Everyone has something they dislike, and the "naturally good" folks invariably pick out some institution or group of people that they demonize as this "source of all evil." Dawkins blames the Christians, others have blamed the Jews, or blacks, or capitalists, etc. From here it is a short walk to the natural conclusion: Utopia could be ours, if we just stamp out the Source of All Evil that is corrupting society!
And so a nice-sounding belief that everyone is naturally good becomes, by ruthless logic, a driver of genocide against the scapegoated group. You can see this again and again through history. Such a nice-sounding idea. Such hellish consequences. All because they won't acknowledge that sin begins in their own heart.
Should read “why then do we sin?” in the 2nd sentence, sorry.
In my opinion, the best thing I’ve read by Lewis, ever.
I have been watching lots of Nixon interviews and stuff lately. Everyone comments on how he answers things in an intelligent, thoughtful and respectful manner. And how politicians today could learn something from him.
BUT - would the people listening today be able to follow along on a 5 minute long response to a question? We have been conditioned by TV and the internet to 15-second sound bites.
Just the other day I was out walking the dog in the evening and he stopped by a bush. I could see the glow of a TV in a window. It would change colors as it changed scenes or dialogue I suppose. Every 15 to 20 seconds the glow would change.
In the 3rd sci fi book of the trilogy of C.S. Lewis
Our academia is pretty much like the academia of
That Hideouse Strength
Sick
Sicker
Sickest.
This is what invariably happens when there is no accepted absolute truth and everything is relative. Take out the Creator/Lawgiver and every man does what is right in his own eyes. Man, left to his own devices and because of his innate sin nature, will always gravitate to anarchy and devolve into his own destruction. How many times does it have to happen before we finally get it?
Based on what Scripture shows us happens at the end of Satan’s 1,000 year imprisonment when he is released for a short time, ..... never.
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