‘The Way’: C.S. Lewis, on the Only Way of Being Human

Chapter 2 of this groundbreaking essay confronts moral relativism by so-called “Innovators.”

Natural Law, or The Way, is attacked by innovators, according to Chapter 2 of "The Abolition of Man." bpawesome/Shutterstock

Commentary

C.S. Lewis’s trailblazing three-chapter essay, “The Abolition of Man,” uses the fictitious characters Gaius and Titius to skewer moral relativists of his day. His scathing critique unmasks their manifesto on morality as no more than a canon of convenience.

Lewis’s first chapter, “Men Without Chests,” pilloried propagandist “educators” and their “Green Book,” Lewis’s epithet for books by moral relativists. His second chapter denounces moral relativists as “Innovators.” As in the first chapter, he’s being sarcastic.

Revising Moral Values

Lewis critiques Innovators who denounce what he calls “the Tao,” or Natural Law, Traditional Morality, First Principles, or First Platitudes. He adds that, in trying to revise sacred moral values, Innovators can neither refine nor replace them. In seeking societal “destruction,” they aren’t as subjective as they pretend. Their skepticism is superficial. They readily use their skepticism on other people’s values, but deem their own values impervious to challenge, let alone debunking.

Through their “disapprovals” and “approvals,” Innovators signal what’s acceptable to them and what’s not. But their yardstick is what agrees with their standards, not principle. They consider bravery or chivalry nonsensical or vague. They praise those who prefer peace to war but won’t concern themselves with how that peace is preserved, even when it demands pre-emptive or defensive confrontation. They’re more than happy to enjoy the fruit of moral values or codes but unwilling to pay the price to earn that fruit.

To Lewis, operating within the Tao is the only way to hold human dignity to a standard worthy of it, outside it, we become less than ourselves; not human, but subhuman.

Singling out The Golden Rule, Lewis explains how Innovators arbitrarily scorn martyrdom, whether for one’s country or for one’s God, as “irrational” sentiment. To them, martyrdom is useless unless it’s “useful for the community.” But who decides what’s useful? Since Innovators have rejected objective values of national pride or honor, they can’t possibly use logic: Unless some risk death, all die.

The Golden Rule is used arbitrarily by Innovators, in "The Way." Yury Zap/Shutterstock

For, why should only some die? So Innovators take refuge behind the idea of instinct.

But if everyone’s bound by instinct, why the need for “The Green Book” exhortation? And if one instinct is valid, aren’t all others, too? If not, who decides a hierarchy of instincts? In haughtily trying to avoid appeal to “any court higher,” Innovators thus tie themselves in knots.

The loftiest moral codes have been handed down already, whether Christian (“Do not bear false witness”) or Confucian (“Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you”). And these moral codes have nothing to do with instinct, a species’ “unreflective” impulse.

No primeval impulse insists that we honor pledges, value life, or restrain sexual or violent urges. Demanding obeisance to instinct is as futile as demanding obeisance to anyone. People say different things. So do instincts. Why should obedience to one person outweigh obedience to another? Likewise, with instinct. Nod to one, and you’re bound to nod, senselessly, to an “endless regress of instincts.”

To Lewis, it is we, and our singular humanity, who lend a comparative dignity to our warring instincts, rising above hedonism and self-preservation. If we didn’t, we’d stay savages; our primal instincts would remain primitive and teach us nothing.

Confucius upheld the Tao and Christ upheld the truth as “the” Way, not one of many ways. To Lewis, that doesn’t mean traditional moralities (East and West, Christian or Pagan or Jew) should be unassailable. Such critiques must, however, be constructive within the framework of the Tao and the truth, not plucked from thin air.

Poets or playwrights tease their genius out of a language; they deal with language on its own terms, as composers, working within the grammar of music, to enrich, and not uproot it. Naturally for Innovators, Christian and Confucian edicts about empathy, for instance, are ridiculous.

In contrast, Nietzschean Innovators, unbound by the Tao, are a bundle of contradictions. Far from harmonizing discrepancies in the letter of the Tao by penetrating its spirit, they snatch at one precept, then ride it “to death.”

Behold what new-age Innovators have wrought.

Feminist Perversion

Feminism may have begun legitimately, getting women to vote and partake better in public life alongside men. But many feminists ended up portraying women as superhuman and men as subhuman, but neither as remotely human. To many feminists, women are unimpeachably superior, and men irredeemably inferior. That’s as self-defeating as uplifting the mind through meditation while corrupting the body with mescaline.

A feminist shouting at a gathering. Feminism has become a way to weaken marriage and destroy the family in Chapter 2 of "The Abolition of Man," "The Way." SibRapid/Shutterstock

Much of feminism is now a social contagion, tearing into sacred institutions of marriage, family, parenthood, childhood and infusing into society many of the perversions that Lewis predicted. Disney’s rejection of its source material in its remake of “Snow White” (2025), shows how perverse things can get.

In its extreme form, feminism seeks the abolition of man or the abolition of the human; misandry feeding off misogyny, and both feeding off each other’s hatred.

Truth lies in seeing things as they are, not as they’re not. The Biblical fallen angels fell because they imagined they were more than they were. Men and women fall, too, when they imagine they’re more than they are.

Planned Parenthood may be planned, but was it ever about parenthood? It was founded on the same bedrock of hedonism that extols divorce, single parenthood, and abortion, as well as the construct of gender over the reality of sex.

A Tao unto itself, hedonism frames evil as goodness and recklessness as a right. Witness abortion and sex-change ecosystems masquerading as reproductive or sexual “healthcare,” and permissiveness pretending to be comprehensive sexuality “education.”

NPR’s Katherine Maher once said, without a hint of irony, that there are “different truths.” Innovators lie, by flattening the texture and tone of truth.

People may be fat, thin, short, tall, dark or fair-complexioned. To Innovators, however, only some adjectives amount to “body shaming,” while others are fair descriptors. Under the banner of “body positivity,” what’s ugly they declare beautiful. Witness influencers idolizing clearly unhealthy obesity and anorexia.

Real moral advance clarifies, while alteration merely confuses. Advancement refines rather than repudiates older maxims.

Consider idiomatic responses to the Tao’s values of empathy and sacrifice.

The maritime-era idiom “Women and children first” improved on and advanced the Tao’s ancient other-centeredness. Another idiom, “Every man for himself,” repudiated it, mirroring the newer biological-evolutionary idiom, “survival of the fittest,” instead.

No, sacrifice isn’t a maritime or medieval invention. It draws on more ancient codes. “Women and children first” extended earlier calls to care for others, to more vulnerable others. It nudged evolutionary instincts beyond self-preservation. That the fitter and stronger have a better shot at survival doesn’t mean they must be the ones to survive.

That civilizational spirit has been handed down generations. It has progressed to a point where, in natural disasters, rescuers typically don’t stop at women and children alone but, rightly, fuss over the pregnant, sick, aged, and disabled.

Today’s Innovators, however, are more likely to handpick those deemed worthier from a select color, race, ethnicity, and sex, based on who they label as oppressor and oppressed. Innovators manufacture victimhood on the hoof.

A Higher Way

For all its sway, the Tao needn’t be unchanging or requiring unquestioning obedience. Lewis concedes that, from time to time, it can do with some reform (and without some contradictions). But even here, “the way” of critiquing matters. He warns that only those who honor the Tao can advance it.

Christ exemplified this. He clarified that he’d come not to abolish the law of Moses but to perfect it, fulfil it. He wanted his listeners not to tear up that law but to transcend its letter, and tether themselves to its spirit.

To Christ, “Thou shalt not kill” suited children in faith; Old Testament folk, immature in understanding their God and, therefore, themselves.

To adults or those more grown-up in faith, however, it was too low a bar for morality. Christ raised it to heights more reflective of man’s true dignity. He offered not just a new, but a nobler, morality demanding that his followers embrace, not merely endure, their enemies.

The Tao advocates to do no harm in Chapter 2 of C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man." Lincoln Rogers/Shutterstock

Armed with this higher clarity, does the ancient but still clinical maxim “Do no harm” seem enough? As we’ve seen, it’s not nearly enough.

That’s the Tao in action, advancing rather than altering moral codes, while showing man the way, leading him onward, but somehow always upward, as well.

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