Here’s a way to tell one is in the presence of genius: they can foretell the future.
In 1947 British author C.S. Lewis completed and published “The Abolition of Man.” The slim volume was a collection of three lectures he gave at the University of Durham focusing on education. It makes chilling reading today because he very clearly saw not only the flawed methodology and reasoning, but the inhumane and vicious purposes behind much of what passes for what we might call “woke education” today.
Lewis notes – and summarily destroys – the linguistic tricks of leftist academicians: the false analogies, self-proving theses, non sequiturs and internally contradictory arguments. He also sets out the disreputable and anti-human goals toward which they labor: the destruction of durable moral and philosophical values, and their replacement by a protean system of “real” or “deeper” values which he shows to be a mirage.
Most importantly he reveals the purpose of the entire enterprise: to construct a humanity bereft of any fundamental principles save those programmed into them by a small elite of leaders. This is possible, he admits; increasing knowledge of the physical world may bring us to a point at which mastery even of the human intellect and emotion are possible. To use a term popular at the time, think of efforts to create the “New Soviet Man.” Consider the “Social Score” of Communist China. Or the anthill that is North Korea.
Think of education today. It is rife with smooth-faced apologists who insist that modern American children are being taught “how to think” not “how to memorize facts.” But without a reliable reservoir of commonly-agreed-upon facts (12 times 12 really is 144; any other number is an error. The Spanish enslaved native Americans, but later abolished all slavery in Hispanic America – including that practiced by native Americans.) the instrumentalities of “how to think” can quickly and easily become those of “what to think.” When no one is looking.
Review today’s media, most of which speaks with a single accent, if not with a single voice. With a few exceptions they are servants of the political and economic elite, whose attitudes they slavishly reflect and promote. Media outlets, together with most of the thought factory that is Hollywood, are very close to becoming the propaganda apparatus necessary to accomplish the end Lewis warns us about: creation of a great mass of human automata, ruled by an small and unrestrained elite.
The problem, Lewis notes, is simple: when all dignity, morality, forbearance, virtue and honor are stripped away from the “Natural Law” governing humanity and its works, what is left? Only ego. That is, the ego of the leadership elite. Most of humanity will become a plaything of adult children, who will recognize no limits on the eternal principle of “I want.” A more horrific end to human existence is difficult to imagine.
A paragraph from Lewis’ third and last lecture making up the book deserves quotation at length.
“The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Democrats and Communists no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in a pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst means in the long run just the same thing as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be debunked and mankind is to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (and it must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent “ideologies” at pleasure and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens or preparations begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements…”
Lewis’ warning is perhaps the most eloquent but by no means the only warning about the dangers with which our society is rife – dangers which are difficult to oppose because decades of linguistic gymnastics have made them appear virtuous. But the time is now to oppose these tendencies, or at least no longer to acquiesce in their dismantling of the society which stands athwart their efforts to create a state and a government which will sweep away everything the past thousand years have produced in the West. Including the individual and the right to dissent.
We’ll all miss it if it goes, but by then it will be too late. To borrow an image from one of Lewis’ contemporaries, the boot will be in our faces. Forever.
