Wednesday 15 April 2015

A must-read: The Abolition of Man


When all that says “it is good” has been debunked, what says “I want” remains.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Touchstone, 1996)

A minority of people today believe in the existence of absolute moral truth, meaning certain rights and wrongs do exist. I suspect that if British scholar and author C.S. Lewis were alive today, he would question whether the majority really understand the practical consequences of relative truth. C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man is an essay that speaks to this issue, diving into the inevitable consequences of what happens when you try to remove values from education and absolutes from society.

The Abolition of Man is a bit of a challenge to read. And yet, I had to recommend it for two reasons. First, it’s short – only about 100 pages, so I figure that even if it’s hard, most everyone can make it through a short book. Second, Lewis shows that people may fancy the notion that truth is relative, but they can’t really live by it because the logical result is the destruction of what makes humans uniquely human.

As his quote above points out, when you eliminate absolutes from society, people become nothing more than animals doing what they want based on impulse or instinct. Lewis believed that a relativistic society produces what he calls “men without chests.” In other words, Lewis uses the human body to show that when you remove absolutes and a person’s spiritual conviction (his chest), you also rip out virtues like valor, integrity, and dignity. And when you do so, the man becomes ruled and controlled by his appetites.

Ironically, while society produces these men without chests, it still expects to find virtue and goodness in them. Or, as Lewis so memorably writes, “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

The book was written in the 1940s, which makes Lewis read like a prophet, as society is now struggling with exactly these issues that he saw coming.

Sizing up moral relativism from a Christian view

In a theoretical sense, moral relativism means that you can do anything you believe to be right and I can do likewise. If I disagree with your standard, then I may protest because it doesn’t suit my interests, but it makes no sense for me to claim that I’m right and you’re wrong, because what’s wrong to me may not seem wrong to you.

But consider the practical implications of the idea of people actually living out relativism in society. Suppose, for example, I’m a teacher, and you turn in a political science test on which you answered all the questions correctly. But a day later, when you receive the test back from me, you see a big, fat F on it. Your answers may have been technically accurate, but I decided to grade by the grammar and neatness of the answers rather than content. You can protest all you want and even threaten to take me to the board, just as long as you don’t utter the phrase, “You’re wrong,” (which is a moral judgment). Or suppose that your neighbor is held up in his home at gunpoint and he makes a deal with the criminals to take his children and spare his life. You can be outraged at his decision, but you can’t call him immoral, cowardly, or selfish (which are all moral judgments). Finally, suppose a friend invites you out for a fun night on the town, but you discover en route that she’s actually taking you to a pro-Nazi meeting. You can run out of that meeting quicker than you can say “Aryan nutcases,” but you can’t use the W word when talking with your friend about her opinions.

On the one hand, these examples are certainly extreme. Though they’re unusual, they only serve to underscore the point that society is able to function only because people of all backgrounds accept certain common values as right and some as wrong. C.S. Lewis sums it up well in Mere Christianity (Harper San Francisco, 2001):

What was the sense in saying the Nazis were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which they at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.

If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something – some Real Morality – for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks.

If all values are equal and determined by each individual, then no difference exists between bravery and cowardice, honesty and cheating, and prejudice and tolerance. But people aren’t wired to treat these extremes in an equal manner, writing them off as mere preferences or personal taste. Society is implicitly built on certain values that everyone assumes others will follow. It’s not just a matter of law, but it’s also an intuitive sense of an ultimate Right and Wrong.

For example, postmodernism is a philosophical term that people often use to describe the mindset of contemporary society, referring to the worldview that embraces moral relativism and values equality above everything else. Postmodernists hold up issues, such as homosexual rights, racial equality, environmentalism, and animal rights as moral values of the 21st century. Ironically, postmodernists oppose the idea of a traditional morality but argue for their progressive agenda with a moral fervor that would make a Pharisee (see Chapter 4) proud. In other words, they don’t speak out against bigotry and homophobia as being mere differences of opinion. Instead, they speak strongly of such issues, referring to them as “evils” that must be eliminated from society. What’s notable isn’t the rightness or wrongness of postmodern values; the telling point is the fact that postmodernists hold up any issue as being “right” and condemn the opposite stance as being “wrong” – all the while claiming that universal right and wrong don’t exist.

Moral relativism: New clothes for a modern-day society

Although moral relativism is mainstream, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s correct. In fact, Christians say that if you read the Bible with one eye and glance around at society with the other, you see an example of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes being played out right before you.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the tale, I’ll fill you in. Andersen wrote the story of an emperor who was obsessed with clothes and paid more attention to what he wore than to running his kingdom. One day, two swindlers came into town and persuaded the emperor into thinking that they could make him a new outfit out of a special material. According to the swindlers, this cloth was invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or who was incredibly stupid.

This new material intrigued the king, so he sent the duo off to make the new digs for himself. The king soon sent a councilor to see the tailors’ progress. The two swindlers acted as if they were preparing the new clothes on looms when the man arrived. The councilor saw the empty looms but didn’t want to admit that he couldn’t see anything, so he talked up the attire’s beauty to the emperor. Later, he sent a second assistant, who pulled off the same act. Finally, the emperor went to see for himself, but he didn’t see anything. He knew that if he confessed, he’d be admitting that he wasn’t fit for the office of the king. So he went along with the ruse, even when the tailors put the invisible clothes on him for a parade through the kingdom. As he marched through the streets in the nude, no one would admit that they couldn’t see his clothes; that is, until a lone boy said the obvious: The king had nothing on at all!

In the same way, a Christian sees moral relativism as the new (invisible) clothes of modern-day society. Contemporary culture embraces relative values just like the fictional emperor craved his fancy new attire. But Christians believe that despite the fact that it’s hip and popular, relativism is spun from the same empty loom, having no substance to it. People can try it on and wear it down the street, but when they actually try to live in a truly relativist world, this splash of reality, much like that little boy in the story, exposes the nakedness of their beliefs.

As the section, “Sizing up moral relativism from a Christian view” explains, everyone searches, consciously or unconsciously, for some set of values to cover up with.

In order for people to consistently live out moral relativism, they may promote their issues and try to convince people that it’s in their best interest to support the position, but the moment that they paint the debate in terms of right and wrong, they’ve adopted an absolute framework. What’s more, although people may not like the fact that someone disagrees with their perspective, true relativists must shrug their shoulders and utter, “To each his own.” Yet, I’ve not heard of one person who can actually pull that off consistently on every issue in life.

Author Francis Schaffer looked at contemporary society and concluded that many people today are forced to take a leap of faith. On one hand, they want to believe that absolutes don’t exist. But they find that they can’t live there, so they take an irrational leap of faith toward absolutes that they profess don’t exist. In other words, they claim to have no moral absolutes, yet live their lives holding on to them just the same.
Biblical, historical Christianity is wholly incompatible with the idea of relative right and wrong. In fact, you simply can’t reconcile relativism with Christianity unless you completely change the meaning of one of those two words. Christianity says that morality and truth are based on God’s unchanging character and holiness, as expressed in the Bible. It’s also based on an absolute definition of sin; for if sin is in the eye of the beholder, then Christ didn’t really need to die, and God can’t judge the world. Ultimately, Christianity says that God has the final say and that humans are under his authority, making people accountable to his absolutes.

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