IN 1943, C. S. Lewis wrote a book with incredible predictive power, The Abolition of Man. He was able to predict what accelerating technology would do in the next century. And it began with his annoyance at an English textbook.
Here’s how his argument unfolded. A school textbook smuggled in a philosophical claim: that statements like “this waterfall is beautiful” tell us nothing about the waterfall but only about the speaker’s feelings. Lewis pointed out that this was teaching students that there are no objective values like truth, goodness or beauty in the world.
Lewis then went on to show that this was at odds with centuries of human thinking. Lewis draws on Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Hindu scripture, and Norse tradition to show that virtually all human cultures and traditions have believed in real, objective values. He uses the Chinese term “Tao” (or Dao) to designate this natural revelation.
Next, Lewis shows that pure fact-collecting cannot give you values of good and evil, true or false, beautiful or ugly. No set of facts about nature or human psychology — can by itself generate an “ought.” No amount of facts can tell us how life should be lived.
The result of a world that rejects objective values and simply collects facts is “men without chests”. In ancient Greece, the “chest” was the seat of trained emotions and moral sentiments — the part of a person that has been educated to feel the right things about the right objects (indignation at injustice, reverence for the sacred, affection for the good). This is the middle ground between the head (reason) and the belly (appetite).
Every society before ours trained its young people in objective values. Ours has eliminated it, leaving us with people who have nothing to mediate between their appetites and their intellect. Their emotions, affections or desires are untrained and cut off from any moral foundation. They can be intellectually sophisticated but emotionally brutal, or sentimental, or vacuous. They can be highly informed but simultaneously morally debauched, hugely knowledgeable while being utterly unrestrained and untethered in their passions, appetites and feelings.
Lewis then predicts what will happen.
As humanity gains ever-greater power over nature — including, eventually, power over human nature itself through eugenics, conditioning, and technology — some group of people must decide how that power is used. But if there are no objective values, the “Conditioners” who shape future humanity have no real principles to guide them, only their own arbitrary impulses or the appetites of those in power. The last and greatest conquest of nature — the control of human nature — turns out to be the point at which nature, in the form of raw appetite, finally conquers the conquerors.
It’s easy to insert AI as one of the powers, along with eugenics, DNA manipulation, and robotics. If AI developers operate without objective values like truth, goodness and beauty, it is not human, in the true sense. What begins to be abolished is human virtue, human choice, human goodness.
Lewis’s conclusion is that the only alternative to the Tao is not freedom but submission to whatever impulses happen to be in control, dressed up in the language of science and progress.
The seemingly modest, modernist claim that value judgments are merely subjective feelings, if followed through consistently, ends not in enlightenment but in the destruction of the very humanity that was supposed to be liberated.