How did we get here?

Reflections on The Abolition of Man

In the middle of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis attained national recognition in Britain through a series of broadcast talks on the BBC. Published under the title Mere Christianity, it is among his best known works.

Yet the lesser-acclaimed series of lectures he delivered at Durham University in 1943, The Abolition of Man, are more consequential. In these lectures Lewis demonstrated how the public education of his day fundamentally contradicted the common aims and pedagogy and moral framework of education hitherto maintained throughout human history. It was exemplified by the monuments of cathedrals and the greatest of Medieval legacies, the university.

Education had always been practical, and fundamentally entailed training in wisdom and virtue. It could not debunk values as irrelevant to education, or at least not without degenerating into something altogether different. The methodology of modern science that treated human evaluation as a type of bias belonged in the lab, not as the aim of education.

Lewis warned that detaching wisdom and virtue from education would only leave us with experimentation. It would inevitably lead to an amoral scientific bureaucracy, concentrating power in the hands of an elite, with education degenerating into an ongoing experiment on children.

Like in Germany, education would become propaganda, a form of manipulating the populace, conditioning them to do unspeakable things to others. It would magnify the power of the conditioners, and that power would be used to define and control human nature, and with it, the future. In short, it was totalitarian, if not demonic.

Lewis’s warning about the broader social consequences of the paradigm shift was clear: educators ought to return to what they had done from time immemorial, acknowledging a natural moral order and using the law to reinforce it, or they would give orders that would be the law irrespective of how unnatural and inhumane they were. Worst of all,

Without the moral law to guide our judgment, Pinnochio’s growing nose could just as readily indicate progress as it had once indicated lying.

What The Abolition of Man described was the emergence of an eschatological anthropology, and with it a paradigm shift in education, from a traditional humanism to an experimental and utopian transhumanism, if not posthumanism.

I will say more about the differences between transhumanism and posthumanism in subsequent posts.

Lewis offered an antidote to this educational shift in his popular fiction. So did his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. I will also write about them in other posts to come.

1. Why this, why now?

This weekly substack will explore my thoughts on culture and relate it to the field of education. It may at times seem rather eclectic, but will connect intimately to the topic of what the Greeks called paideia and the Romans humanitas. What you will be reading will be some of the material culled from my lectures, but also pointing towards a book I am planning on writing.

As you can glean from above, I have a rather dim view of what currently constitutes education. I think it is the primary reason why the world has degenerated from a state of more or less free societies to ones in which we operate under a collectivism directed by special interest groups who act at odds with humanity.

Still, I think that the light always conquers the darkness, however much it spreads.

2. What kind of community am I looking to build here?

I am a Christian Professor of English Literature and regard a reasonable faith to be crucial to far more than my personal salvation. My aim is to assist my readers, Christians or otherwise, to ‘no longer be conformed to this world, but rather to be transformed by the renewal of our minds.’ (Rom 12:2) This transformation on an individual basis is the necessary prerequisite to any effective corporate action.

I have no desire to scream against the darkness, but to point to the salutary effects of the light.

3. Agenda

My intent is to post weekly, on Monday mornings.

• Free subscribers will receive a weekly reflection, as well as links to lectures on YouTube that will expand on the topic I address.

• Paid subscribers will also get a curated reading list of articles for further reading, and an invitation to a monthly discussion group.