I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but it took me a long time to “get” what C.S. Lewis was doing in The Abolition of Man. It’s the kind of book that gets name-dropped by columnists, philosophers, theologians, and–knowing that there is a joke in here somewhere–at least one Catholic Pope, Chief Rabbi, and Archbishop of Canterbury. I mean, it’s an important essay (really a set of three lectures). And we all want to know if Star Trek’s Spock is one of Lewis’ “Men Without Chests.”
In this little book, Lewis talks about the “tao”–an essential moral path built into the human universe–and is prophetic on concepts like technocracy. Even if you don’t know what technocracy is, you are experiencing it–maybe even in reading this post. So I try to bring it into my thinking, like the vinyl that is on right now in my living room: Hip Hop artist Shad’s TAO (referring both to “tao” as “the way,” and “The Abolition Of”). In this concept album, Shad reflects on the wasting away of the human heart in our our alogorythmic police state.
I’m battled-tested but was never that aggressive
Even as an adolescent I would rather have a message
But, man alive the whole game’s been sanitized
Damn, what we done to the young, is like infanticide
Infantilized, the dumbed-down get amplified
Via algorithms that’s anything but randomized
I can’t abide while these lies keep confusing things
They use euphemisms to lose the meaning of human beings
We know we’re old souls, they call us new machines
What they call enhanced reality’s a lucid dream
Literally remove the screen and you’ll see through the schemes
The stupid memes we consume keep us too serene
I love to laugh too but, it’s too much
What we lose in our addiction to these cool new drugs
We relax then detach then we straight lose touch
With everything, and that’s when at last we lose us (from “TAO Part 1”)
Yeah, that’s it for me, the age of human history that Lewis is warning us about. In this track, TAO Part 2, Shad rhymes his observations between three blazing quotes from The Abolition of Man.
He closes the song with Lewis’ mic drop moment from The Abolition of Man:
It is not that they are bad men
They are not men at all
Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void
Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men
They are not men at all
They are artifacts
Man’s final conquest has proved to be, the abolition of man (from “TAO Part 2”)
Well, I know that Hip Hop isn’t everyone’s philosophical love language, and Lewis requires a bit of translation for our age (like Shad and the folks hinted at above all do). But with these few words, I think you can see part of the journey that I have taken in appreciating this classic moment of cultural criticism.
The Abolition of Man did not come easilty for me. It didn’t come at all, actually, until I listened to the audiobook–which makes sense because it was a lecture series, originally. After reading and rereading, I invited the mirky pattern I took from the text to my desk and into my classroom. That’s when Lewis’ warning about the present future came clear to me.
I am not alone in thinking that The Abolition of Man is one of the 20th century’s great cultural essays. I think it stands up with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964, “the medium is the message” and “global village”), E.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), Hannah Arendt on “the banality of evil” (1963), Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942) and–well, my list is no doubt different than yours. If you are a fan of Ayn Rand, you probably don’t have The Abolition of Man on your list (see this essay), but who knows? And there is always more to add: This National Review list that has Abolition of Man as #7, reminded me of some other essential culture shapers I forget to remember.
While I don’t think I “get” The Abolition of Man fully, I have let it work on me and I continue to work on it. In fact, there is an aspect of Lewis’ warning that I think people are missing; I want to draw that out sometime when I’m in a philosophical state of mind.
Meanwhile, though, I’ll share my review of Michael Ward‘s After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Ward’s “guide” is intricately designed to provide context clues for Lewis’ most important and most difficult work of cultural criticism, The Abolition of Man. This review was originally published in an academic journal–Sechnsucht–and I have made some slight adaptations.
Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Park Ridge, Illinois: Word on Fire Academic, 2021). 253 pages. $24.95. ISBN 9781943243778.
Though it is an intellectually resonant book, C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man remains puzzling for those who are not trained philosophers. The three lectures contain striking and immediate images and ideas. Nevertheless, there is an elusive quality for later readers—and, apparently, for many of Lewis’s original audience. The linked lectures are so brief that they require close reading to follow the tight logical progression. It is easier to feel Lewis’s warning about the abolition of humanity in our bones and even to discern some of the reasons for this moral apocalypse than it is to know precisely what Lewis is arguing concerning the “Tao.” Thus, The Abolition of Man remains a challenge even for committed readers. It is also a notoriously easy book to appropriate for ideological reasons–and I’m not certain that choice is always an innocent one.
That is why there is a need for Michael Ward’s After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Ward goes beyond annotation and commentary, exceeding expectations with a remarkably rich and somewhat unusual guide.
The greatest strengths of Ward’s Guide correspond to the two most significant challenges in understanding Lewis’s argument. First, Abolition emerges within a very particular social context and at a particular point in C.S. Lewis’s life. Second, literary, philosophical, and religious references fill The Abolition of Man, giving the book a deceptively complex and implicated subterranean intellectual ecosystem. Ward personalizes the material by bringing each of these contextual and literary complexities together in a series of brief but informative background essays, a clear overview of the argument, helpful discussion questions, comprehensive text glosses with an extensive bibliography, a philosophically-informed literary commentary, and a precise evaluation of Abolition’s impact.
After Humanity surprising me in its beautiful design, including thirty-six full-colour plates, white space for personal annotations, and poetic moments, including Malcolm Guite’s sonnet, “Imagine,” as a closing image (which he reads here as part of Regent College’s Laing Lectures in 2019).
Readers need to have some sticky notes on hand, I think. The Guide invites us to engage somewhat proleptically because of its (initially puzzling) combination of in-text citations, footnotes, endnotes, and glosses–and because Ward covers the “impact” question in three separate chapters. Sometimes this back-and-forthness could be simplifies; for example, some of Ward’s mini-essays could use separate treatments. However, as a guide, it is fitting that readers will flip back and forth, moving between Lewis’s original argument and the commentary. After Humanity’s peculiar–and initially challenging–features are its strength as a companion to Lewis’s somewhat idiosyncratic book. The Abolition of Man‘s sophisticated and verdant argument demands a reading that appreciates complexity. It will take work.
Ward is commendably restrained in providing a companion text rather than his particular point of view, yet does not hesitate to refute (usually unstated) misreadings of Abolition of Man. For example, Ward explains how Lewis is resisting a kind of moral subjectivism that he sees as a growing presumption in his cultural moment. A doctrine of objective value, Lewis argues, is the foundation of any truly human society in its shared moralities and virtues, including social values like scientific curiosity, intellectual honesty, and self-sacrificial love.
Still, things become more complex when we attempt to articulate what positive response Lewis has to the subjectivism he sees as a cultural blight. It is not uncommon in social forums for someone to quote Lewis against subjectivism (often reduced to moral relativism) but fail to note two other essential threads. First, Lewis consistently affirms the subjective centre, including our limitations of knowledge as seekers of truth. Second, it is true that Lewis is rejecting moral subjectivism that would hollow us out ethically (both individually and as a culture); however, he is also rejecting various kinds of claims to objectivity.
Ward commendably guides the reader down Lewis’s radical middle way.
As ideologies and worldviews do not sit on a two-dimensional spectrum from objectivity to subjectivity, however, it would be helpful for Ward to map the intellectual landscape of Lewis’s contemporaries. Ward productively discusses I.A. Richards and A.J. Ayers, so it would help to place Ayer’s logical positivism or Richards’ scientific-literary criticism in the context of other claims to objectivity. Lewis says “no” to these kinds of objective reductionisms in concepts like “Two Ways of Seeing,” which includes both the personal-subjective knowledge of experience and the objective-distant. What we don’t always see is that Lewis’s rejection of objectivist reductivism is as powerful as his challenge to moral relativism, for the errors are linked. Lewis’s main argument for a doctrine of objective value is the Tao—a shared cultural value that Lewis believes is in some sense “there,” but that is ever-evolving and, we must admit, comes from a “subjective discovery of objective value,” to use one of Ward’s titles. I am not certain that Ward clarifies this enough for a culture beset with competing and often uncritical claims to objectivity and autonomy, but I have seen few commentators try to draw out the distinction.
Mapping the fine points of Lewis’s argument is absolutely critical because, in ghastly simplicity, popular readers of Lewis can unblushingly quote The Abolition of Man about moral relativism and ignore his argument about technocracy, utilitarianism, and environmental destruction. Others place Lewis confidently on a contemporary–often American–left-right political spectrum. This error introduces into Lewis’ thought a distinction that does not exist there, and then determines which side of that distinction he fits (to paraphrase Dr. Ransom). But Lewis is doing something more subtle and valuable. Thus, I fear on this point that, as careful as Ward is, there remains a risk of some readers “falling foul of the subject/object split” (33).
There is always more one can say in a guide, and Ward’s brevity is commendable. He shows wisdom and restraint in choosing material that supports a wide variety of readers, including students and teachers, theologians and pastors, philosophers and cultural critics. Ward lets Lewis’ critics speak and gives space to the scholarly quotations and explanations of literary references—the diverse, overflowing bookshelf that is hidden in each of Lewis’s essays.
This symposium in libro links Lewis’s prophetic warning with the great religious traditions and centuries of scholarship. Ward’s Guide provides us with the tools we need to read Lewis accurately and profitably for ourselves. Ward invites readers to consider the implications of Lewis’s thought in our own classrooms, living rooms, and neighbourhoods. Together with the companion edition, Ward’s guide has given me my most fruitful reading of The Abolition of Man thus far.
Originally published in Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal 15, no. 1 (2021). See here for the free (open-source) PDF. With thanks to the publisher for the review copy and to the folks who contribute to public scholarship by making Sehnsucht free for the public.
This is a video of the Wade Center’s virtual book launch of Michael Ward’s After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
Link to PDF of my review: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cslewisjournal/vol15/iss1/25/.
Excellent discussion and review. I was probably a teenager when I read Lewis’s book. And I’ve definitely begun to think about it more in the past decade, as I realized that we are increasingly living in a technocracy. When I read it again, I would like to do it with Ward’s Guide.
Excellent response, David. Perhaps I didn’t communicate one thought as clearly as I could: The Abolition of Man is not just hard in that it requires us to struggle with it, but hard in that we need to keep working it out in our own cultural spaces.
Prof. Dickieson,
Well, apparently, I didn’t have seeing the world of Lewis’s most philosophic text not just mashed together with, but also inspiring a whole album that belongs to the realm of Hip-hop. Charles Williams might express the irony of such a discovery by saying something like, “Some things you just never expect to happen, and so there it is, anyway”. Credit should go to the kind of outside the box thinking that can find a way to bring old words to life for a new era and generation. After sampling some of rapper Shad K’s Lewisian work, I don’t think I’ve ever found myself so richly unnerved by the way a musical speaker says the simple word God when juxtaposed against and otherwise calming bit of background music complete with sermonic affirmations. It’s as if K found a way of dramatizing the maxim “Good, but never safe” in a way that manages to bring the whole atmosphere of the words home on a visceral level that Lewis’s book could perhaps only suggest on various levels. The last time the weight of the concept was brought home to me was in reading the work of Flannery O’Connor or watching the cinema of Martin Scorsese.
As for the complexity of “AOM”, my own experience has been that it’s one of those works where the full meaning of its content has to come home to you by various degrees through the passage of time. It’s as if the reader had to gain a bit of living under the hood in order to figure out just what the author is talking about on occasion. In my case, it unintentionally helps that the advancement of the digital realm is making Lewis’s thoughts on control and controllers more relevant than even he would have wished. Beyond this, you’re talk of how the book seems to be made up of striking images and metaphors is one that’s difficult to argue with. The one that still retains the most vividness to this day in my mind is the metaphor that Lewis is able to draw forth from his discussion of Plato’s Myth of the Chariot. In addition to the original Platonic concept of the Driver and the Two Horses, it is Lewis’s modernization of Plato’s metaphor into the image of Men Without Chests that seems to be the logical text’s finest artistic achievement. I have my own thoughts on that metaphor, yet I’m curious to hear you think it might mean or imply, if anything?
Didn’t Charles Williams say somewhere, “we sacrifice on the altar in one place knowing the fire may descend somewhere else.” I would guess that Lewis didn’t have Rwandan-Canadian hip hop in mind in 1942 and 1943.
Shad as Flannery O’Connor, very cool thought. Check out his “Short Story of War,” what my son says is the best Hip Hop album in Canadian history.
And on AOM’s artistic achievement, you certainly have it right. On “Men Without Chests,” it was this idea that caught me: We are teaching “innovation”–technology, literacy, etc.–but we aren’t teaching innovativeness, the creativity and courage to do the thing. We send studs in for breeding but we’ve made them infertile. I decided then to be a teacher of the heart/chest as well as the head and hands.
What do you think? What do you find there?
Prof. Dickieson,
For me, the key idea behind the metaphor of “Men Without Chests” comes from concepts found in Lewis’s prodigious knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance scholarship. The best catch-all term I can find for the issue Lewis is addressing with that image would have to be called something like The Problem or Question of Character. It all has to do with the question the writer asks at the beginning of his study. What kind of minds are we molding in the service of…what? Life, the State, “the Common Welfare”, as Dickens had it?
I’m inclined to believe that a proper understanding of this metaphor is to be found in its “possible” origins within the writings of Cicero, Milton, and Spenser. For instance, there’s an article on the Somnium Scipionis by an Austin McConnell, who sort of helped put yet another complex philosophical text into terms that I could understand, and it kind of set me on the road to figuring out some of the depth and scope of Lewis’s metaphor. According to McConnel, “The Dream of Scipio advocates a fundamental reappraisal of the true worth of local political institutions, values and practices. It stresses the superiority of a distinctly cosmic model of politics, in which one does not merely place the greater good of the res publica over personal concerns but rather comprehends political life as a participation in a grand rational cosmic order of being”. “Throughout the Dream Africanus stresses that true and right political action is not limited to or determined by the transitory realm of earth and all its contingencies (especially those popular opinions concerning virtue, fame and glory), but rather it is timeless and absolute for it involves acting in accordance with the eternal truths of the cosmos, which is the ultimate patria—and so by engaging properly in political life on earth, by practicing politics in a truly virtuous and hence truly glorious manner, one is in fact operating in an exemplary fashion on the cosmic stage.
“Cicero’s model of the cosmic statesman ensures that good political practice is essentially the same in all spatial and temporal locations; he is offering a timeless model that is applicable universally, involving as it does the exercise of virtue and practical wisdom in accordance with the timeless laws of the cosmos. Cicero offers a vision where statesmen from all nations and historical moments can stand together as equals in eternity as they have all, with conviction, held to the good no matter the particular pressures of their circumstances (53)”. McConnell finds the key to this Ciceronian ideal of Liberal Statesmanship in one of the Roman philosopher’s own Latin terms, “Magnitudo Animi”, literally “The Great Souled Individual”. More down-to-Earth ways of saying the same thing are “The Magnanimous Individual”, or “The Big-Hearted Person”. It’s Cicero’s concept of the ideal human being as anyone who can earn or prove the title of being “Big-Hearted” that suggests to me a positive opposite correlative to Lewis’s Chestless Men. The concept of the Magnanimous Soul is one that outlived Cicero, and somehow even went on to inspire the thought and writings of one of Lewis’s most favorite Late Renaissance authors.
Nicholas McDowell, for instance, in his biography “Poet of Revolution” offers up the following connective thread between Tradition and Individual Talent. “Milton was evidently fascinated at this point in his life with the idea of the man whose pre- eminent humanitas makes him more than human—the magnitude of whose learning gives him god- like insight. He would have found comparable notions to those of the Florentine Neoplatonic philosophers in the familiar source of Cicero’s De officiis and its account of the ‘magnanimous spirit’, or ‘great soul’. The magnusanimus, or vir sapiens, as Cicero calls him in De oratore, emphasizing the degree of learning required of the ideal orator (perfectus orator), is the individual who distinguishes himself from his peers by the almost superhuman extent of his achievements and the glory which they bring to his community or commonwealth (res publica). Milton invokes the Ciceronian magnus animus and vir sapiens in the seventh Prolusion when he presents to his audience an image of the…man of heroic learning and virtue who can lead the community away from temptation and corruption through force of persuasion and example…
“…The Ciceronian idea of the heroic actions on behalf of his commonwealth of the…man possessed of…wisdom, eloquence, and magnanimity—the capacity to subordinate his baser passions to the rational understanding that the good of the individual depends upon that of the community—would become increasingly important to Milton after he entered public controversy, and in particular during his role as a public servant of the republican governments of the 1650s (150)”. McDowell’s words about subordinating base passions to rational understanding acts as the perfect summation of Plato’s Chariot Myth as Lewis utilizes it in “Abolition”. The fun thing is this connective thread holds true even if the biographer never had the link in mind when the words were being written. Spenser, meanwhile, helps put the matter in its plainest terms once you realize that all Milton and Cicero are talking about is how to “fashion a Gentleman”. One possible positive interpretation being that Cicero was of the belief that every person born on this Earth counts as a Citizen, and as such it becomes their eventual duty to become “Big-Hearted”, or Equals, one to another in the guardianship their shared home of planet Earth.
That seems to have been the ideal that writers like Milton held, anyway. My own impression is that “The Abolition of Man” is an example of Lewis taking the complex nature of such background knowledge, and demonstrating one of his greatest skills in boiling it all down into the kind of updated terminology that “can” be understood to modern eyes and ears. At least that “might” have been the case in Lewis’s day. I believe it was Stephen King who once wrote that “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things. But that’s not all. The most important things he too close to wherever your secret heart is buried; they are clues that could guide your enemies to a prize they would love to steal. It’s hard and painful for you to talk about these things . . . and then people just look at you strangely. They haven’t understood what you’ve said at all, or why you almost cried while you were saying it (381)”.
In Lewis’s case, it all does come down to the way that our relationship with both the past and its language keeps changing. There’s always the need for someone to draw up a new roadmap sooner or later. It’s easy to imagine someone else having to come along and build upon what Ward has written here. Sanford Schwartz might have gotten ahead of things there. As it seems to me that his “C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier” is just as good a guidebook to the thought of “Abolition” as “After Humanity”. Indeed, I want to say that Schwartz has given readers the context needed for understanding how the three lectures came about. Either way, Ward’s guide seems slated to be looked upon as one of the major works of critical scholarship on the “Abolition of Man”. And the Problem or Question of Character seems to be the positive antithesis to all the dilemmas and ideas that the Narnian tackles in that tome. He seems to be asking along with Cicero and Milton how do you go about creating Men with Big Hearts.
Also, before I forget, Austin McConnell’s essay on the Dream of Scipio can be found here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5184/classicalj.113.1.0045
Prof. Dickieson,
Speaking of music and modern media finding ways of conveying Mythopoeic ideas to a contemporary audience, I just recalled seeing something in a similar vein to Shad K’s “Tao” album. It’s from an old 80s UK pop band called The Outfield. They were sort of beneficiaries of the advent of MTV back during the network’s glory days (one of many rock groups raised from radio obscurity to mainstream notoriety, in point of fact). If you have difficulty remembering who they were, their biggest hit single was “I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight”. It’s like one of the quintessential musical identity markers from that era. Anyway, the Lewis connected song I have in mind is called “Voices of Babylon”. It was one of the group’s lesser known hit singles. The kind of song that gets its fifteen minutes of fame, then slides into pop culture obscurity. What’s striking about this piece from the standpoint of a book like “Abolition”, and an author like Lewis is the way in which it’s able to match the ideas that the Narnian was talking about, not just in terms of lyrics, but also that of imagery, as well. On the prosody side of things, the lyrics to “Babylon” are cryptic, yet they bare a surprising resonance with Lewis’s prognostications.
For instance: “We conceived a modern generation. It was free but now we pay the price. We’re the victims of our own creation. Chasing rainbows that were painted black and white. Watch the struggle of our own temptation. Instincts barely keeping us alive”. In terms of imagery, the makers of the music video that went along with the Outfield song deserve a certain amount of credit. That’s because they’ve succeed in creating a moving collage effect of sights and symbols drawn from the war torn years when Lewis was first crafting and then delivering his lectures. The music video features a constant barrage of images such as World War II fighter planes, along with the types of wireless analog radios and technical equipment that were available during that era. And shots composed of the type of propaganda that Britain churned out during the London Blitz. All of this Modernist typology is then juxtaposed with brief flashes of religious symbols drawn from ages past, including Roman, Greek, and Celtic and perhaps even Arthurian mythology, as well as a passing shot of a Crucifix. It’s as if the makers of the music video have crafted an accidental iconology that nonetheless is able to provide a visual shorthand for the time period and mind set in which Lewis created the “Abolition of Man”, while the lyrics of the band themselves are able to suggest some of the themes of that book. It’s got to be one of the most amazing cases of artistic serendipity that I’ve ever seen. Watch for yourself and see what you think:
I have not yet caught up with everything here, yet, but wanted to note I recently encountered – and enjoyed – John Lennox’s commendation of The Abolition of Man in his recent conversation with Glen Scrivener about AI and Yuval Noah Harari posted on 30 January on the YouTube channel Glen Scrivener (Speak Life).
D.L. Dodds,
I am aware of yet another video in which graphic novel artist Dave Mckeon tried an experiment pitting his own skills as a collage surrealist capable of taking different styles of art and then juxtaposing them into a new aesthetic unity against the capacities of AI generators. He came away alarmed by the results that he saw. As while there was a quality to the images, it was lacking something in the way of the human touch. There was no way to find, bring, or create any sense of unity to what a computer spat out.
So, he decided to create a graphic novel version of Lewis’s “Abolition”, and combined the AI art with his own proficiency as artist and illustrator, in order to demonstrate to the reader just how well Lewis’s words applied to the current moment. He even made a release party video in which the content of “Abolition” and its applicability to today were discussed in terms of the growing concerns of the morality of the Digital Village.
Yet for the life of me, the bloody thing seems to have vanished into the electronic aether. A plot twist which might not have surprised either writer, come to think of it.
ChrisC,
Wow – thanks for this! Among other things, you make me aware of how insufficiently aware of Dave McKean and his work I am.
Funnily enough (or is that, ‘algorithmically enough’?), when I try to follow up, one of the first things suggested is the (supposed?) availability for 68.22 euro of The Abolition of Man: The Deluxe Edition: An Experiment in Four Parts (published by Living the Line LLC on 5 September 2023) from the Dutch branch of Amazon. But the publisher’s YouTube channel also seems to have something about it.
D.L. Dodds,
Oh dear. Then again, when has that never been the way. CW would appreciate the irony.
Prof. Dickieson,
As to the question of whether or not the figure of Mr. Spock from “Star Trek” counts as a Man without a Chest. My own answer would have to be an unqualified no. I tend to see such readings as shallow, overall. I’d argue it’s possible to use Lewis’s Platonic Chariot imagery in a way that is able to prove that rather than viewing the character in isolation, it makes much more sense to see him as fitting into the Triptych that Lewis describes as going together to make up a whole human being. The way it works is this. It helps to view the three main leads of “The Original Series” as symbolizing one of the three elements that Lewis and Plato claim as making up the well ordered person. “Bones” represents the element of the Passions, or Emotions. The Gut, as Lewis calls it. Spock then stands as his polar opposite capacity as an embodiment of the Intellect. It is the figure of Captain Kirk, I’d argue, who is supposed to be the main Personality, or Heart as CSL describes it, that is meant to unite his two other shipmates into a larger, Big Hearted whole. At least that’s the way I would solve this particular conundrum.
Beyond this, I stand by what I said earlier. It is just possible to make the claim that with “Out of the Silent Planet”, Lewis more or less turned himself into a storytelling pioneer, of sorts. It’s a mistake to claim he was the first author to present a sympathetic and even heroic non-human character in a work of Fantastic fiction (if you keep to a broad definition, then writers like Spenser, Homer, and Lucien of Samosatos beat the other Sci-Fi writers who got ahead of Lewis by centuries). It’s just that in retrospect, it becomes possible to see how the Hross would contain qualities of style and dramatic presentation which would leave plenty of room for a greater elaboration by future artists like Gene Roddenberry down the line. It’s even possible to trace a tree of descent from characters like Hyoi through to a figure such as Spock, and then all the way to the likes of “E.T. the Extraterrestrial”. Come to think of it, I don’t recall anyone ever discussing that film in relation to the themes of “Abolition”. This is fascinating because you’d think a movie like that would offer plenty of room for thought and comparison.