Key Ideas

Lewis begins by stressing the essential role of education. He shows how easy it is to smuggle propaganda into the minds of students under the fog of a humanistic worldview. This does not just destroy the aims of education. It eventually destroys the entire civilization.

He unleashes a devastating critique of relativism, postmodernism, subjectivism, and all of the other -isms hanging from their hooks in the sky.

He shows us that when we give up saying "I ought", we are left with nothing but "I want". And no one wants to live in that world. More importantly, no one actually does. Even those who pretend to end up borrowing from Christianity to make their case.

He concludes with a depressing vision of man’s supposed "conquest" over nature. In reality, this conquest is just radical rebellion - man's attempt to takes God's role in the world He has made. If we take this path, Lewis predicts that we will make two startling discoveries:

1) Man’s conquest of nature actually turns out to be some men’s conquest of other men. The idea of "nature" is just an excuse for this abuse of power.
2) Nature's conquest over man is the final play in this dangerous game, and it leaves mankind degraded and despised.

The short appendix at the end of the book provides a concise yet convincing collection of evidence in support of what he calls the Tao and what we would call "Natural Law" or "Traditional Morality". Essentially, he lays out the almost monotonous agreement that can be found throughout history on the essentials of morality and ethics.

Adversaria

"The Green Book" is Lewis' name for the book The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing by Alex King and Martin Ketley.

That Hideous Strength (also by Lewis) takes the key ideas of The Abolition of Man and communicates them through the medium of character, plot, and story. In the preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis wrote, "This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man."

The political philosopher J. Budziszewski said that The Abolition of Man is "perhaps the greatest work on natural law in the twentieth century." He went on to make the rather startling observation that "most scholars of natural law have never heard of it."

Alternate Title: "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools."

Related Resources

Some of the connections between Hideous Strength and Abolition of Man can be found in this article.

This article gives some helpful commentary on the quotes and allusions in this book.

This short lexicon will help explain the latin (and other unfamiliar references) in The Abolition of Man.

These three doodle videos summarize the themes of the book.

After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man - Michael Ward by Michael Ward

Details

• Full Title: The Abolition of Man
• Author: C.S. Lewis
• Type: Book
• Topics:
• Look up: World Cat