One of my favorite books by C.S. Lewis is perhaps his shortest: The Abolition of Man (1943). Its basic gist:
Identify a terrible new philosophical technique: i.e., “seeing through” human values, as merely the result of natural phenomena like prior psychological conditioning.
Show that it’s illogical to stop half-way: that if you see through some values on this basis, you should logically see through all of them. (Many in fact stop half-way, but Lewis criticizes them as illogical and inconsistent).
Show that if you go all the way, you end in disaster: killing yourself, or obeying whatever random impulses you have since you’ve “seen through” everything higher. This is the ultimate “Abolition of Man”.
Argue in course of the above that there’s a universal “Way” or “Tao” of human values, shared across cultures, that we must exempt at least in part from this “seeing through” technique. We must exempt it because: (a) values can never be derived from the neutral facts of natural phenomena; and (b) any attempt to decide which new values would be good for us to adopt, must rely on some prior criteria of good that can only be found in the Tao; i.e, you can’t create bootstrap new values into existence out of nothing.
Lewis gives an appendix illustrating the Tao, which includes groupings like the Law of General Beneficence (not being murderous, cruel, grasping, hateful), the Law of Special Beneficence (special care and respect for one’s family, friends, country), Sexual Justice (like no adultery), Justice in Court (no bribes, no false witness), the Law of Mercy (care for the poor, sick, needy), and the Law of Magnanimity (being large-souled and brave: confronting injustice, choosing death before slavery or base deeds).
His arguments are (as usual) clear and devastating. You will probably go away convinced that this “seeing through” technique is illogical in theory and disastrous in practice.
If you have read “The Abolition of Man” and he’s got you fired up against “seeing through”… what next?
Wait: The Abolition of Man can’t fix the Tao!
I think the first thing we should notice is an unfortunate problem with the book: its failure. The book seeks to restore the Tao, but the tool it provides simply doesn’t work. It reveals damage to the Tao, but does nothing to fix it.
We moderns are basically all in the boat of “seeing through” values halfway (point 2 above). We “see through” some values, but not others. (Almost none of us have “seen through” all values as in point 3). Lewis’s strategy is to call out the point 2-ers as illogical and inconsistent. He’s right, but it doesn’t help.
Lewis slams two modern authors he calls “Gaius and Titius”, who “see through” traditional values like patriotism and honor, but illogically exempt other values like comfort and security from the same deconstruction.
The problem is, even if we force feed Abolition of Man to Gaius and Titius and they’re completely convinced, they will not respond like this:
Thank you for pointing out our inconsistency! We see now that if we “see through” patriotism and honor, we should also “see through” comfort and security too—for those values are equally the product of our prior conditioning.
Therefore we will drop “seeing through” as a technique.
Having dropped it, we a rush of patriotism surging through our veins! God save dear old England, and long live the King!
That’s the problem: “seen through” values don’t magically revive for sake of consistency.
It’s like covid. Covid is fatal to seniors with preexisting conditions (patriotism and honor), but it doesn’t kill healthy young people (comfort and security). This is certainly very “inconsistent”, but pointing it out saves no lives.
Here's another example I’ve thought about, that shows the same inconsistency in “seeing through”:
Alex says: “You believe religion X largely because you grew up in an X family or country; if you grew up in a Y family or country, you’d likely be religion Y. This suggests our religious beliefs are merely a product of our prior conditioning.”
Ben says: “If you grew up in the Old South you’d support slavery, and if you grew up in Old India you’d support the caste system. This suggests our taboo against racism is merely a product of our prior conditioning.”
You could air drop a million postcards over London showing the inconsistency, and it would not increase belief in religion X one iota. At most, you might get arrested for hate speech.
It’s the same relativizing “see through” argument in both cases: exactly the same! But our response is dramatically different. Almost all of us have the reaction that Alex is making a somewhat reasonable point, while Ben is engaged in sophomoric philosophical nitpicking.
It’s like anti-racism is the healthy young adult, completely immune to “seeing through”, while religion is the senior with pre-existing conditions, who is somewhat “see through-able”.
We are right up against the inconsistency here. If you’re a modern Christian like I am, you can probably feel the inconsistency in yourself. I know a lot of conservative Christians, and I think almost all of them would have the same reactions to Alex and Ben.
The Abolition of Man completely convinces me that the “seeing through” technique is a disaster, yet I still treat even my own religion as more “see through-able” than anti-racism.
I viscerally reject any conditioning perspective on anti-racism. As far as I’m concerned, Ben’s argument is an obvious groaner that seems completely unhelpful to any serious discussion. Sort of like: “OK Ben, now let the adults go back to talking.” Just on reflex, I refuse to “see through” anti-racism to the conditioning behind it, at all.
I give a lot more credit to conditioning arguments against Christianity. They feel basically reasonable to me. They can be part of a serious discussion about religion. I don’t roll my eyes and dismiss them out of hand. I credit them as making a serious point, that yes, our prior conditioning obviously does impact our choice of religion, or atheism. In practice, this probably makes me more understanding of those who disagree with me on it; I don’t think unbelievers are stupid or evil. And it probably plays a part in my visceral abhorrence of using force of any kind against unbelievers.
Alex’s “conditioning” point doesn’t fully kill my Christian faith; I don’t “see through” it completely. But it does make my religion a little more transparent, a little more ghostly. It lightens me up on it, makes me more tolerant of disagreement.
My anti-racism is less ghostly. If someone says the N word, their prior conditioning doesn’t figure into my reaction at all. I don’t think “my anti-racism is partly conditioned, their racism is partly conditioned, they’re not stupid or evil”. That’s just not part of my apparatus.
Lewis is right. This is very inconsistent! If we want to go down the “conditioning” rabbit hole, then anti-racism is certainly no less a product of our prior conditioning than religion is. So why do we moderns refuse to apply the conditioning perspective to anti-racism?
Again per covid, it’s like some parts of the Tao have become seniors with pre-existing conditions (patriotism, honor, religion), while other parts remain healthy young adults (comfort, security, anti-racism). “Seeing though” is out there as a technique, but it mysteriously passes over young adults. We illogically exempt them because, well, we just do.
And so The Abolition of Man has this basic failure: Lewis’s inconsistency “gotcha” strategy is impotent. It reveals a puzzling inconsistency, but does nothing to change it. It cannot restore the Tao, as Lewis wants.
Stepping back: What’s going on here?
It seems we need to take a step back and think more about this strange situation. Here are two questions that come to mind—and the book doesn’t attempt to answer to them.
Question 1. Why has the Tao become less solid? Why are so many people “seeing through” major chunks of it now?
Lewis argues there’s been this grand consensus for millennia about the Tao, shared across all major religions and cultures. It sounds potent and inescapable. Something must have happened to weaken what was previously so strong and universal.
What is that thing? Let’s call it “the Event”. Before the Event, we have a robust and fully solid Tao. After the Event, we have a patchy and tattered Tao that is much more easily seen through.
What happened? What is this Event?
Question 2. Lewis recognizes that in practice, those who “see through” the Tao tend to see through it very unevenly; they zap certain parts of it, while exempting others.
Which portions of the Tao remain more solid therefore becomes supremely important as a practical matter, since it determines which values still reign supreme over our culture.
Is there anything we can say systematically about which parts of the Tao remain strong and solid, and which have become more weak and transparent?
Ideally, it’s almost like we’d want a diagram of the Tao, showing which parts have been “seen through” completely, and which parts are still more or less solid. And some theory on what created the difference.
These are the questions I’ve been trying to answer, with my “Jurassic Locke” model of modernity. It’s a cognitive model of modernity, that traces the shifts in our intuitions about the Tao to a small number of new core beliefs (six of them).
People are telling me my posts are too long, so I’m not going to do what I usually do and exhaustively explain the model til eyes glaze over. I’m just going to lightly indicate its answers and give you some links so you can read further if you want.
Jurassic Answer 1: Why the shift? What is the Event? What happened?
Modern physics happened.
Modern physics equations started arriving in the 1600s: Kepler c 1609, Galileo c 1638, Newton 1687. These rationally shifted our intuition toward what we could call the “mechworld” model of reality: i.e., that ultimately it’s all just tiny bits of matter blindly following mathematical laws.
This set up a new standard for what objective truth looks like. It’s either something that can be fully proved (math), or something that anyone can confirm by experiment (science). This narrowed the range of objective truth to math, science, and physical properties (like “this weighs 5 lbs”).
The loser in this was “Everything Else”: all our value judgments, and all our beliefs in the supernatural. If mechworld is really all there is, then value judgments and the supernatural have no actual existence: they’re just notions in our head. We think murder is wrong but children raised by cannibals may disagree, and (unlike math and science), there’s no way to objectively determine who’s right.
This explains the intellectual terrain that Abolition of Man is surveying. Lewis sees an absolute divide between what he calls “the world of facts” and the “world of feelings”. While he doesn’t agree with this split, he sees it as the root of our “seeing through”:
On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.
Lewis uses the phrases “seeing through” and “explaining away”, to convey what’s being reductively done to our values. If you’ve read my Jurassic Locke stuff, you know I use the phrase “mechsplaining” to mean the same thing: i.e., reducing something apparently outside mechworld (like a soul or a moral rule) to something inside it (like the prior conditioning that caused our neurons to hold these “soul” and “moral rule” beliefs).
It’s quite remarkable, the impact this mechworld model began to have on the larger culture in the 1600s. Hobbes visited Galileo and got his mechworld model direct from that source—and it fed directly into his great political work Leviathan (1651). More here.
David Hume famously made the IS vs OUGHT distinction in 1739: that we can never infer a value from a fact. The timing of this seems meaningful: Newton’s equations came out in 1687, and mechworld was in the intellectual air. Lewis stresses the same IS/OUGHT distinction in Abolition:
From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible.
More on mechworld here and here. But let’s move on to Question 2, which leads into the real meat of the Jurassic model.
Jurassic Answer 2: What can we say systematically about what gets “seen through” and what doesn’t?
This was Question 2:
Question 2. Lewis recognizes that in practice, those who “see through” the Tao tend to see through it very unevenly; they zap certain parts of it, while exempting others.
Which portions of the Tao remain more solid therefore becomes ultra-important as a practical matter, since it determines which values still reign supreme in our culture.
Is there anything we can say systematically about which portions of the Tao remain strong and solid, and which have become more weak and transparent?
Ideally, it’s almost like we’d want a diagram of the Tao, showing which parts have been “seen through” completely, and which parts are still more or less solid. And some theory on what created the difference.
This is the diagram I’ve worked out, of how “see through-able” our modern beliefs are:
Darker blue = better shielding = less “see through” = greater certainty.
As shown here, our “Modern Tao” has been fragmented into three chambers (Private, Policy, Panics) which have varying degrees of certainty because they have been “seen through” to varying degrees.
This four-chamber architecture was our modern response to the challenge of mechworld. Mechworld theoretically destroys all values, but we need values to live. Thinkers like Hobbes and Locke cobbled together new moral architectures, that shielded as much of the Tao as possible from this new threat of “seeing through”.
I don’t “see through” anti-racism at all, because it’s in the high-certainty moral Panics category. These modern Panics require grand systemic secular harms like LGBT-phobia, climate change, and abortion (supernatural not allowed). These harms seem so atrocious and their blame seems so clear, that anyone who disagrees is indecent. This unleashes mob force (boycotts, deplatforming, getting people fired, severing relations), which suppresses dissent and thereby circularly reinforces the moral certainty driving the panic.
I do “see through” my own religion to some extent, however, because it’s in the low-certainty Private category. These are “private” or “individual” beliefs. We can use no force over these beliefs, and we treat those who disagree with them as rational and decent. All supernatural beliefs automatically go here—for their own protection. Attempts to use force trigger a greater degree of scrutiny and lead to complete “seeing through” and collapse.
This is what happened to the Extinct Beliefs on the right, like the divine right of kings, the burning of heretics, and the stoning of adulterers or homosexuals. Unlike our modern Panics that have some grand secular harm to justify them, these Extinct Beliefs have only a supernatural rationale that is insufficient to bear the weight of lethal force. They are therefore outside the Modern Tao, and outside modernity.
Our Policy beliefs enjoy an intermediate degree of “seeing through”: above Private but below Panics. We intuitively feel that even in a cold atomic universe, we must punish crimes like murder or chaos will ensue—even if we can’t ultimately prove that murder is wrong. We are willing to use force over such beliefs as long as the force is carefully judicious and performed with the proper procedures (duly enacted laws, majority consent, civil rights, etc.).
Mechworld facts of math and science are on the left. It’s irrational to deny them, yet they provide no impetus to our actions because they are purely neutral; to incite action, you need to add a value judgment from one of the blue boxes on the right.
Locke 1.0 is the architecture laid out by John Locke in his second Treatise of Government and Letters on Toleration (c 1690). It implicitly includes the Mechworld, Private, and Policy chambers—but not Panics. It ingeniously shielded almost the entire Tao of his day from “seeing through”, but at a cost: supernatural religion had to relinquish force and privatize, or it would lose the cognitive shielding of his Private chamber and go extinct. Under shadow of the physics equations, we no longer feel disputes over purely supernatural doctrine like the Trinity or heaven are real enough to burn people over.
Jurassic Locke 2.0 is a partial collapse of Locke’s system that occurred by c 1840. Locke’s cool utilitarian system left a moral vacuum up top that was previously filled by supernatural religion. This vacuum was eventually filled by our modern secular political Panics. Locke would have been horrified by them (e.g., he opposed the economic boycott of heretics, wanting their only punishment to be expulsion from their private sect). Yet ironically, the Panics were effectively forced into existence by Locke’s design. (See here.). In Jurassic Park (1992): “Life finds away”. In Jurassic Locke (c 1840): “Outrage finds a way”. See here.
Am I explaining too much again? Onward.
But why are these the chambers?
Why are these the chambers? How do they block “seeing through”? Why do they have the very specific limits they do (like no force, mob force, etc)?
This is all answered by the six core beliefs that support the four chambers. I call them “hacks” because they’re just half-conscious intuitions that don’t bear much logical scrutiny. I think this is why philosophers have a hard time distilling modernity down to a specific idea or two they can directly refute, a la the projects of Del Noce and Alasdair MacIntyre.
Per the Jurassic Locke cognitive model, modernity is just a set of half-conscious hunches that intuitively shield a lot of the Tao from “seeing through”. They’re more a way not to think about something, than to think about it. That’s all they are. Modernity is not a logical argument. It’s kind of an incoherent mess. See here for a sort of diagram of the mess.
But it’s a mess that works. The Tao carries on, fragmented, limping, and deformed, but still largely there and operating.
For more on these core beliefs (“hacks”), see, e.g., here, here, here, here. I won’t explain them here! Onward.
The Deep Connection Between Abolition of Man and Jurassic Locke
If you’ve read The Abolition of Man and my Jurassic Locke material, I’m sure you see the striking similarity in their intellectual landscape. Both see a fundamental divide between “the world of facts” (I call it Mechworld) and the “world of feelings” (I call it Everything Else). Both are mainly concerned with the terrible threat of “seeing through” or “explaining away” values (I call it “mechsplaining”). Both are troubled by the collapse or partial collapse of the traditional Tao.
Why is there so much overlap? Why are the two so entwined? This is why:
Locke 1.0 and Jurassic Locke 2.0 are precisely what’s been preventing the Abolition of Man for the last two hundred years.
Lewis presents the “Abolition of Man” as that terrible endpoint when all our values have been “seen through”, at which point we’ll be reduced to suicide or to following whatever random impulses we have in the moment. This terrible endpoint never arrives, because the Jurassic Locke architecture is so successful at deflecting our “seeing through”. Our values are safe inside it.
By rights the mechworld model of reality should mechsplain away all our values—and the physics equations have made that coldly neutral model of reality seem dreadfully plausible. Yet in practice, it’s proven possible to reconfigure most of our values to shelter behind certain half-conscious intuitions about reality (“hacks”), that prevent our “seeing through” them.
Visionary thinkers like Hobbes (1651) and Locke (1690) got onto the task of “sheltering our values from seeing through” very promptly, almost as the physics equations arrived (Kepler c 1609, Galileo c 1638, Newton 1687). Thanks to their efforts, our modern Tao is somewhat quashed and deformed, but still mostly there and chugging.
My suggestion is if you read Abolition of Man and feel fired up about “seeing through”, Jurassic Locke is the next thing you should read, to understand how Lewis’s “seeing through” was actually dealt with.