Our congregation's reading group recently finished discussing C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, a collection of three lectures he delivered in 1943. In the first ("Men without Chests"), he observes how a presupposition that all values are subjective was being propagated in the British schools of his day. (And now in the American public schools of our day, where children are taught to classify "the sky is blue" as "fact," and "God is good" as "opinion.") In the second ("The Way"), he refutes the theory that values are subjective, and labels as the "Tao" the objectively real virtues which have been discovered, recognized, and taught by all cultures across time and space. In his third lecture (the titular "Abolition of Man"), Lewis explores the consequences for humanity should his society's elites succeed in their project to condition all people to believe values truly are subjective. (Spoiler alert: said consequences are not good.) While the book is a warning against a possible abolition of man, this last lecture strikes a fairly pessimistic note (at least to my ears).
The Abolition of Man is widely praised as a rigorous piece of moral philosophy, and justly so. I've always thought of it as the theoretical background for That Hideous Strength, which is hands-down my favorite of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels. Still, I wondered whether, seventy-some years on, western anglophone culture continues to move in the direction projected by Lewis. If anything, culture seems to be much more atomized and individualistic as the control of elites (in politics, entertainment, education, etc.) has been eroded by the media explosion birthed by the webernet’s arrival. If elites no longer dictate the culture's direction, then they cannot condition our beliefs.
Hence, I am grateful to be reading together with other thoughtful Christians. One of our interlocutors asked whether the transhumanist movement, which seeks to transcend human limitations by genetic tinkering and such, represents a rejection of humanity itself. With that, a penny dropped in the vast and vacant recesses of my mind.
Over the last few years, I've become accustomed to reading stories in Denver's journal of record which begin with something like "Dylan was assigned as a male at birth." Give heed to that verb, "assigned." One is assigned to a homeroom class at the beginning of high school, and to a cabin at the beginning of summer camp. No one in the history of the entire human race, or of any other mammalian species while we're at it, has ever been "assigned" a gender. Rather, the gender of every single human being has been DISCOVERED by a cursory visual inspection. While gender expression is a subject fraught with tension and subject to cultural variety, in human society gender is universally controlled by one's sex, full stop.
This editorial cartoon gets the matter exactly right. If a girl can be a Boy Scout, there is no meaningful relationship between the thing and the thing's descriptor. There is, then, no way to determine what a thing is; instead, the thing's essence is fluid, undetermined, and defined only by whim. Accordingly, there's no way to determine what a thing is because it has no essence. Instead of a square knot, we have only a tangled mess.
In logic, the argument from the lesser to greater holds that if a statement is true regarding the lesser thing, it is all the more true for the greater thing which encompasses the lesser. It seems to me that in the realm of objectively discovered fact, gender identity is far more obvious, and easily discoverable, than moral truth. If our culture is now at a point of rejecting the objective reality of gender identity, then that of moral truth was long ago abandoned.
As Westminster Shorter Catechism #10 helpfully reminds us, mankind images God precisely in his moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10). If morality has no fixed content, and our bodies have no fixed identities, then humanity is not in the image of the eternal and unchanging God.
In other words, there's no point in heeding Lewis's warning that the abolition of man is coming. Man has already been abolished.
This editorial cartoon gets the matter exactly right. If a girl can be a Boy Scout, there is no meaningful relationship between the thing and the thing's descriptor. There is, then, no way to determine what a thing is; instead, the thing's essence is fluid, undetermined, and defined only by whim. Accordingly, there's no way to determine what a thing is because it has no essence. Instead of a square knot, we have only a tangled mess.In logic, the argument from the lesser to greater holds that if a statement is true regarding the lesser thing, it is all the more true for the greater thing which encompasses the lesser. It seems to me that in the realm of objectively discovered fact, gender identity is far more obvious, and easily discoverable, than moral truth. If our culture is now at a point of rejecting the objective reality of gender identity, then that of moral truth was long ago abandoned.
As Westminster Shorter Catechism #10 helpfully reminds us, mankind images God precisely in his moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10). If morality has no fixed content, and our bodies have no fixed identities, then humanity is not in the image of the eternal and unchanging God.
In other words, there's no point in heeding Lewis's warning that the abolition of man is coming. Man has already been abolished.
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