The Abolition of Man: C.S. Lewis's Most Prophetic Work of Non-Fiction

Lewis’s contemporaries immediately recognized the book’s significance. His friend Owen Barfield remarked,

there may be a piece of contemporary writing in which precision of thought, liveliness of expression and depth of meaning unite with the same felicity, but I have not come across it.

Today, The Abolition of Man ranks seventh on National Review’s list of the most important nonfiction works of the 20th century. The philosopher Peter Kreeft lists it among six “books to read to save Western Civilization.”

The work is crucial for our time because it diagnoses a philosophical shift that had begun in Lewis’s era but has reached a full flowering in our own. Carl Trueman and others describe this development as “expressive individualism.” If you read The Abolition of Man, then you’ll know that Lewis identified the poisonous seeds of a contemporary truism: that truth and meaning come from within us rather than from an objective “given” that precedes and transcends us. This “expressive individualism” now dominates our culture, from educational theory to gender ideology to popular therapeutic approaches that place self-expression and “authenticity” above all other values.

Coleridge and the Waterfall

The book opens with what seems like an academic quibble. Namely, Lewis examines how the authors of a school textbook (whom he calls “Gaius and Titius”) analyze a well-known story about Coleridge at a waterfall. In this story, two tourists are present: one calls the waterfall “sublime,” while the other calls it “pretty.” Coleridge himself mentally endorsed the first judgment and rejected the second with disgust. However, Gaius and Titius use this story to teach students that such value statements reveal nothing about the waterfall itself but express only the speakers’ feelings.

The implications for education are profound. As Lewis explains, “The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.” (pg. 4)

Not only does this teaching suggest that value judgments are merely subjective, but it implies they are trivial–mere expressions of feeling rather than claims about reality.

Lewis saw this rejection of objective value as fundamentally dishonest. If someone says, “This is sublime,” they are making a claim about the waterfall’s objective qualities, not merely reporting their emotional state. As Lewis notes, “If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings” (p. 3). The absurdity of this translation reveals the flaw in reducing all value statements to subjective feelings. This flaw becomes even more apparent when applied to contemporary moral claims about human rights, justice, or dignity.

The Pitfalls of Modern Subjectivism

Modern education, having embraced this subjectivism, actively deforms character rather than forming it. Lewis writes,

Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters, have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane. (pg. 9)

We see this deformation clearly today when education presents all traditional understandings of human nature–whether about sex, marriage, family, or cultural heritage–as mere social constructs to be deconstructed and replaced with purely subjective self-definition. Instead of helping students recognize enduring truths about human nature and flourishing, modern education teaches them to see all inherited wisdom as suspect and all moral claims as expressions of power.

The contrast with classical education could not be starker. Lewis explains, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it– believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” (pp. 14-15)

This classical understanding saw education as the formation of proper sentiments in accordance with reality–not simply learning facts but learning to participate harmoniously in an ordered cosmos. Like musicians learning to play their parts in a grand symphony, students were taught to align their thoughts and feelings with the actual nature of things–a nature that finds its source and summit in Christ, the divine Logos who orders all creation (John 1:1-18; Colossians 1:15-20).

The Case for Objective Value

Drawing from multiple traditions, Lewis builds his case for objective value. He cites Augustine’s definition of virtue as ordo amoris–”the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.” He points to Aristotle’s insight that “the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Most powerfully, he quotes Plato’s vision of the well-nurtured youth” as one “who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it. (pg. 16)

Modern education, having rejected this classical understanding, can only “debunk” traditional sentiments without offering anything substantial in their place. As Lewis observes, For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility, there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. (pg. 13)

This desert of meaning has only grown more barren in our digital age, where what Lewis calls “the Conditioners” have gained unprecedented power to shape human nature.

The Man-Moulders

Lewis warned that “the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please” (pg. 60). Today, these conditioners include not just state actors but also Big Tech executives, social media influencers, and educational bureaucrats who, while claiming to liberate us, actually subject us to new forms of control. As Lewis observes, “Their rebellion against traditional values is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed, they would find that they had destroyed themselves” (pg. 44). We see this paradox clearly in social media platforms that promise self-expression while actually molding users’ thoughts and desires through addictive design patterns and curated content feeds.

Lewis warns that the final stage of this process comes when “Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself” (pg. 59). Today’s transgender ideology, with its promise that we can completely remake our bodies and identities according to our desires, represents precisely this kind of attempted conquest of human nature. Yet, as Lewis predicted, this apparent victory over nature becomes nature’s conquest of man, as biological reality reasserts itself despite our attempts at denial.

Lewis’s Tao

Lewis’s solution points to what he calls the Tao: the universal moral law recognized across cultures and throughout history. He argues that “the Tao admits development from within” (pg. 45), meaning that genuine moral progress happens not by rejecting traditional wisdom but by deepening our understanding of it. This insight offers hope for our current cultural moment. Rather than simply opposing modern confusion with reactionary fundamentalism, we can demonstrate how classical wisdom better answers contemporary questions about identity, meaning, and human flourishing.

For Lewis, the Tao was not merely a set of static principles but rather something like a divine symphony conducted by Christ himself, the eternal Logos through whom “all things were created” and in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). Drawing from the medieval Christian understanding he would later explore in The Discarded Image, Lewis saw reality as an ordered cosmos–a universe vibrant with meaning, hierarchy, and divine purpose, with Christ at its center. Just as a musician must learn to play in harmony with others in an orchestra, humans must learn to align themselves with this cosmic order or rebel against it to their ultimate destruction.

A Message for Our Moment: Belbury and St. Anne’s

This is where Lewis’s companion novel, That Hideous Strength, becomes particularly relevant. Written in the same year as The Abolition of Man, it contrasts two communities: Belbury (representing modern technocratic control) and St. Anne’s (representing classical wisdom and authentic community). While Belbury promises progress through scientific management of human nature, it delivers only confusion and destruction. St. Anne’s, grounded in permanent things, offers genuine human flourishing.

The parallel to our own time is striking. We can find today’s equivalent of Belbury in the sterile corporate campuses of Big Tech companies, in bureaucratic educational institutions, and in medical establishments that promise to liberate us from the constraints of biology. Yet alongside these, we find contemporary versions of St. Anne’s–classical schools, intentional communities, and religious institutions committed to transcendent truth while engaging thoughtfully with modern challenges.

Preserving Classical Wisdom

The hope Lewis offers is not in withdrawal from modern life but in the creation of communities and institutions that can preserve and transmit classical wisdom. Lewis contends that the classical path of conforming ourselves to objective reality, though it may seem restrictive, actually leads to genuine freedom and flourishing.

Lewis’s warning has only grown in relevance with time. Our culture’s rejection of objective truth and value has produced exactly the consequences he predicted: confusion about fundamental human realities, the rise of technological and bureaucratic control mechanisms, and widespread despair as people discover that moral subjectivism leads to disorder and despair. Yet his work also points the way forward, showing how we might recover classical wisdom while thoughtfully engaging modern challenges.

The Task Before Us

The task before us, then, is not only to critique expressive individualism but to offer a vision of life as joyful participation in God’s ordered creation. As Lewis reminds us, Medieval Christians found delight and humility in recognizing their place within a cosmos brimming with divine purpose–a “stairway” leading upward to God (The Discarded Image, 185). This recovery of delight in the givenness of creation requires more than critique; it demands building institutions and communities that embody this vision. Such communities, like the one at St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength, help people rediscover their true identity–not as isolated individuals generating meaning, but as participants in a divinely orchestrated reality. In this divine “symphony,” Christ is both composer and conductor, harmonizing all things.

This is why the hope represented by St. Anne’s transcends mere nostalgia to embody a profoundly Christian vision. Belbury, by contrast, exemplifies humanity’s attempt to master creation while ignoring its divine order, producing dissonance and despair. At St. Anne’s, we see the opposite: a harmony rooted in Christ, in whom “all things hold together.” As Lewis shows, authentic freedom is not found in radical autonomy but in recovering our place in the divine order. This path forward does not require rejecting modernity wholesale but learning to hear again the “divine music”–an eternal melody that reconciles all things in Christ, “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20).

With the C.S. Lewis Institute, Dr. Hollon produced a four-part video curriculum on C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, which you can find here. https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources-category/study-courses/cs-lewis-works-study-courses/the-abolition-of-man/

The Very Rev. Cn. Dr. Bryan Hollon is the Dean and President of Trinity Anglican Seminary, an institution deeply committed to transcendent truth and a thoughtful engagement with modern challenges.

The Abolition of Man: C.S. Lewis’s Most Prophetic Work of Non-Fiction

By Bryan Hollon
ANGLICAN COMPASS
November 30, 2024

“You do you.” “Live your truth.” “Be true to yourself.” These popular mantras would have horrified C.S. Lewis, who saw with remarkable clarity where such radical subjectivism would lead. In late February 1943, as World War II raged across Europe, Lewis traveled from Oxford to Durham to deliver what would become his most celebrated and prophetic work of non-fiction. Published as The Abolition of Man, his lectures offered a stark warning: Western civilization was abandoning its commitment to objective truth and moral value in favor of moral relativism. The consequences, Lewis argued, would be devastating.

Eighty years later, as we navigate bitter culture wars over sexual ethics, gender identity, racial friction, and much more, Lewis’s predictions have proven remarkably accurate. The Abolition of Man may be his most important contribution to Western thought precisely because it so insightfully dissects the philosophical contradictions responsible for our civilizational discord and decline.

A Crucial Book for Our Time