The Abolition of Man. The Truest Prophecy of the Twenty-First Century, Written in the Middle of the Twentieth

Begin with a school textbook. It is 1939, and two men – Alec King, a university lecturer, and Martin Ketley – have published a small book on how to read and write well, The Control of Language. Lewis, reviewing it, hides their names and calls the authors Gaius and Titius; the book itself, for its green cover, he calls the Green Book. It looks perfectly harmless. It is a primer in language, the sort of thing a fifteen-year-old works through without noticing for a moment what the book is doing to him.

On one of its pages the authors retell an old story – or rather, they garble one. The poet Coleridge is standing at a waterfall. Two tourists are beside him. One calls the waterfall “sublime.” The other calls it “pretty.” Coleridge silently approves the first and is revolted by the second. (The real episode, set down by Dorothy Wordsworth, had a single tourist and a Coleridge who walked off laughing; the textbook mangled its own source. Take the scene, as Lewis did, in the shape the Green Book gave it.)

The two authors then deliver their lesson. When the tourist said “this is sublime,” they explain, he appeared to be saying something about the waterfall. In fact he was only saying something about his own feelings. What he really meant was: “I have sublime feelings.” The predicate has been quietly lifted off the world and set down on the man.

Read that again, because a murder has just been committed inside a grammar lesson and no one heard the shot. Nobody burned a book. Nobody argued that beauty and worth do not exist. They simply rewrote the sentence and moved on to the next exercise. The child does not learn a philosophy. He absorbs an assumption – that every judgement of worth he will ever make is a report on his own insides – and he absorbs it while he believes he is only learning to punctuate. Lewis saw what that assumption would do once a whole generation had swallowed it. This little book is the seed of everything that follows. Lewis spent his whole life performing the opposite operation, one pupil at a time; George Sayer, who sat in his tutorials, never forgot the quiet knife of it.

What exactly have you done to a child by teaching him that? Lewis answers with a picture of the human being he takes from Plato and from Aquinas, both of whom this course has already met.

At the top sits the head: reason, the calculating intellect. At the bottom sits the belly: appetite, the raw wants of the animal. On their own these two cannot cooperate, because reason has no desires and the belly has no arguments. Something must stand between them and translate. That middle organ – trained emotion, disciplined feeling, the sentiment that has been taught to love what is lovely and to loathe what is vile – Lewis calls the chest. It is the seat of what older writers named Magnanimity, and of what Augustine called ordo amoris – the ordinate love that grants each thing the exact degree of liking it deserves. It is the part of you that feels honour before you can prove it and recoils from cowardice before you can define it.

The Green Book cuts the chest out. It teaches the child that his loyalties and his disgusts are only weather passing through his nervous system, with no answering reality outside him. And then the same civilization turns round and demands that this hollowed-out creature behave well: that he keep his word, that he run toward the burning building. Lewis's sentence on this is the coldest thing he ever wrote, and eight decades of history have not dulled it.

So Lewis has to name what the Green Book denies. He needs a word for the thing – the claim that some responses to the world are correct and others are wrong, that the waterfall really does deserve awe and a drowning child really does deserve rescue, whether or not you happen at that moment to feel it. He could have called it Natural Law, the phrase Cicero used and Aquinas built upon. He could have called it the moral law. He chooses, deliberately, a word from outside his own religion, so that no reader can dismiss it as smuggled Christianity. He calls it the Tao – the Way.

Then he does something no other book of moral philosophy does. He appends a list. Page after page of quotations, laid side by side: Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Jewish, the Native American, the Australian Aborigine. The duty of mercy to the weak. The wrongness of murder. The claim your parents and your children have on you. Honesty in speech. The same handful of commands, surfacing independently on every continent, in cultures that never met.

Set the pages beside one another and the echo is uncanny. Confucius, five centuries before Christ: “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” The Gospel of Matthew, out of another world entirely: “Do to men what you wish men to do to you.” Or take the law of mercy. Juvenal the Roman: “Nature confesses that she has given to the human race the tenderest hearts, by giving us the power to weep. This is the best part of us.” And from an Australian people Rome never heard of, the Dalebura, whom Lewis quotes on that same law: “a woman, a cripple from birth, was carried about by the tribes-people in turn until her death at the age of sixty-six… They never desert the sick.”

His point is not that everyone has always obeyed them. His point is that everyone has always known them, and that you cannot get behind them to some deeper ground. Every attempt to invent a “new” morality, Lewis argues, is only a scrap torn out of the Tao and blown up out of all proportion. The cult of progress is the old duty to your descendants, wrenched loose from every other duty and swollen until it eats them. The cult of blood and race is the old loyalty to your kin, torn from its setting and pumped up to the size of a monster. You cannot step outside the Tao and build a rival to it. You can only smash it and call the wreckage new.

Who was writing this? A large, loud, beer-drinking Oxford tutor who had spent his twenties as a convinced atheist. Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, went into the trenches of the First World War at nineteen, was wounded on the French front, and came out certain that the universe was a cruel accident and God a comforting lie.

Two things undid him. The first was his reading. He kept picking up authors who had the one thing his atheism lacked – a sane, roomy joy – and every one of them turned out to be a believer. Of one of them, Chesterton, whose Everlasting Man reframed the whole human story around Bethlehem, Lewis would later write a warning addressed to his younger self.

The second thing was a walk. On the night of 19 September 1931, Lewis paced Addison's Walk, a tree-lined path along the river at his Oxford college, with two friends – J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, a lecturer in English at nearby Reading. Far past midnight, Tolkien pressed a strange claim: the dying-and-rising gods Lewis loved in pagan myth were shadows of a thing that had, once, actually happened – the myth had become fact, in history, under Pontius Pilate. Tolkien left at three in the morning; Lewis and Dyson kept walking and talking until four. Something in Lewis gave way. Within days he had moved from believing in God to believing in Christ.

The rest you may know from the outside. During the Second World War the BBC put him on the radio, and his wartime talks became Mere Christianity. His former pupil George Sayer once sat in a pub full of soldiers when the barman reached up and turned the wireless louder – “You listen to this bloke. He's really worth listening to” – and the whole room listened for the full fifteen minutes. Its opening is pure Abolition of Man run backwards. Listen to any two people quarrelling, Lewis says. Each is appealing to a standard of fair play he expects the other already to accept. Neither of them invented it. That shared, unwritten standard both men assume even while breaking it – Paul called it the law written on the heart, Cicero called it right reason, Aquinas called it natural law. Lewis simply pointed at it over the wireless, while the sirens sounded.

Now the argument turns, and this is the turn that made the book a prophecy.

For four centuries the West has told itself a heroic story called the Conquest of Nature. We have bent rivers, driven out plagues, split the atom. Lewis puts a flat question to this power. Who wields it, and over whom? Look closely at any single “human” victory over Nature, he says – the aeroplane, the contraceptive, the wireless – and you find it is really a power some men hold over other men, with Nature for a tool. The men who own the aircraft decide who flies and who is bombed.

Carry that forward to its last step. Suppose the science of conditioning matures: eugenics to select which humans are born, propaganda and schooling to shape what they will want and believe. Then one generation gains the power to decide what every following generation shall be. Lewis calls these final masters the Conditioners. And here is the trap he watches close. To engineer the values of the human race, the Conditioners must first step outside all values – outside the Tao – and treat morality itself as raw material to be moulded. But once you are outside the Tao, you have no reason to prefer one goal to another. Nothing tells the Conditioner what to make of humanity except his own leftover impulses: whatever he happens, at that moment, to want. The masters of the human species turn out to be slaves of their own glands.

He was writing in 1943, with full knowledge of what was being done across the Channel to breed and school a master race. But he aimed past Berlin, and said so in the book itself: the process “goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists.” He aimed at every future that would hold this power in its hands.

Lewis had eugenics and state propaganda in view, and both dated badly enough that a lazy reader in 1990 could file the book under the alarms of the past. And then the machine he was describing was actually built, out of different parts.

You carry a Conditioner in your pocket. The feed on your phone is trained on one measurable goal – to hold your attention – and it selects, from a near-infinite supply, exactly the images and sentences that move your appetites most reliably. It does not argue that honour is a delusion or that pity is weakness. It never states a philosophy at all. It simply arranges what you see, a thousand times a day, until your reactions have been retuned below the level at which you would notice. This is the Green Book grown to planetary scale: a curriculum that shapes the chest of a whole generation while everyone believes they are merely being entertained.

And the people who tune it stand precisely where Lewis put the Conditioners. They optimise for engagement because engagement is measurable, and they have no standard above engagement to appeal to, because the reigning philosophy told them every standard is private feeling. So the machine drifts toward whatever inflames – toward the swollen fragment of the Tao, the outrage torn out of justice, the tribe torn out of love. A young man raised inside it has been given a very definite training in what to want. He was simply never told it was happening.

Two years later Lewis wrote the same argument as a novel, so that you could watch it walk. That Hideous Strength (1945) is a story about an institute with a bland acronym for a name: the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It speaks an unbroken language of progress and humanity and the future of the species. It is also, quietly, in the business of dissolving actual human beings into material.

At the centre of the institute is its holiest object: a human head, severed from an executed criminal, kept breathing by tubes and machinery and made to speak. The scientists believe they are preserving a great mind past death. They are wrong about what is using its mouth. Here is Lewis's whole thesis in a single image – a head kept alive above a body it no longer needs, reason cut off from the chest and the belly, intellect running on with nothing human left underneath. The institute that talks without end about Man is exactly the place where men are being abolished, one clerk and one prisoner at a time. Lewis said as much in the preface himself.

This course keeps a rule: when a thinker is great, look hard for where he is thin. With Lewis the honest complications are real, and the sharpest of them he handled better than most men would.

He argued about pain as a bachelor. The Problem of Pain (1940) is a clean, confident theodicy, all its edges filed smooth – written by a man grief had not yet broken. Then, late, he married Joy Davidman, and within a few years she died of cancer. Out of that he wrote A Grief Observed (1961), and it is the sound of the earlier book coming apart in his hands. The tidy apologist is gone. What is left is a man hammering on a bolted door. The remarkable thing is that he published it. He let the unsaying stand next to the saying, under a thin pseudonym, and never once pretended the smooth book had been adequate.

The second thinness is smaller and dates worse: his asides about women, the offhand certainties of an Edwardian bachelor about wives and heads of households, which read now as the period speaking through him.

The third runs to his credit. On 2 February 1948, at the Oxford Socratic Club, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe challenged a key argument in his book Miracles. She granted his conclusion – she thought naturalism untenable too – and then showed that one step was imprecisely built: not every cause outside reason is irrational; most are merely non-rational, and a non-rational cause need not discredit the thought it produces. It was a refinement rather than a defeat, a sound argument caught being carelessly stated. Lewis did not bluster and did not retreat into faith. He went home and, over the years, rebuilt the chapter into something stronger, published in 1960. He kept his humour about it, too, later proposing Anscombe as his own successor at the club: “Having obliterated me as an Apologist, ought she not to succeed me?” An apologist who revises his proof under fire is worth more than one who never met a real objection.

Hold the two dates together. Lewis delivered these lectures – the Riddell Memorial Lectures – on three winter evenings, 24 to 26 February 1943, at the Newcastle campus of the University of Durham, his brother Warren along for the journey north. The halls were full: 520, 432, and 391 across the three nights, nearly double the draw of the lecturers on either side of him. Across the Channel a regime had spent ten years doing openly what his last chapter described: standing outside the Tao, calling mercy a weakness and pity a disease, conditioning a generation of the young to feel strength as the only good. He was not writing theory. He was naming, in the middle of the war, the exact spiritual machinery of the enemy his students were dying to stop.

The book that followed sold out its first printing almost at once and ran through three reprints inside ten months – and still Lewis, measuring it against his Narnia sales, decided it had failed. There is the quiet irony of the whole thing: the prophet who read our century correctly was wrong about the one future nearest to hand, the fate of his own small book.

Read it now, in this country, in this decade. Across a different border sits another regime built on the same denial – that there is no law above force, that the strong write morality and the weak obey it, that talk of the innocent victim is sentiment for the defeated. It is the oldest lie, the one this course has tracked from its first lecture, wearing a new uniform. And Lewis's warning lands with a second edge. A civilization carefully taught that its own values are only feelings will not defend them for long, because you do not bleed for a preference. Men without chests do not hold a line.

So the real question under this war is not only how many shells reach the front. It is whether the free world still believes that the dignity of a person, and the wrongness of murdering him, are true the way the waterfall is really sublime – true out there, in the structure of things, and not merely warm inside the skull. If those are only feelings, they will be conditioned away, on schedule. If they are the Tao, they can be defended, and dying for them is not absurd.

Lewis ended the book on that knife-edge. Debunk the sublime and honour as illusions, keep the debunking going, and eventually there is nothing left to look at. “You cannot go on ‘seeing through' things for ever,” he wrote. “To ‘see through' all things is the same as not to see.”

One Oxford don, in one bombed year, saw the whole of it and wrote it down for you. He died quietly at home on 22 November 1963 – the day the world was turned toward Dallas – and the friends who buried him set a lighted candle on the coffin, and in the still air its flame never wavered. The prophet of men without chests went out with his chest intact. He wrote it during a war. You are reading it during another. Do not mistake that for coincidence.