Hard Reading and Hip Hop After Humanity: A Review of Michael Ward’s Guide to C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man

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.