‘The Abolition of Man’ Chapter 3: Misguided, Progress Can Become Regress

“Conditioners” use technology to control humanity in the last chapter of this groundbreaking essay.

C.S. Lewis discusses the bad effects of those he calls "Conditioners" in Chapter 3 of his essay "The Abolition of Man." Man is capable of bringing about the dawn of a new era, a world in which humans shape the destiny of humanity. Shutterstock AI Generator

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

Following his takedown of propagandist “Educators” and their “Green Book” in his first chapter, and moral relativist “Innovators” in his second chapter, Lewis’s final chapter tears into “Conditioners.” By that, he means men, or humans, who are supposedly the technological masters of their destiny.

Lewis asks: Is man’s progress, frankly, regress? Is his conquest of nature more akin to conquest by it? Lewis answers that man’s boast of conquering time-space-knowledge barriers erodes rather than enhances his stature.

Three technologies—the airplane, wireless, and contraceptives—suggest to Lewis a linearity to man’s alleged control over his fate. It presupposes that technology makes a city more powerful than a village, a nation more powerful than other nations, and one generation more powerful than its predecessors.

C.S. Lewis questions whether we control technology or it controls us. Shutterstock AI

But, Lewis predicts that future “man-moulders” will be unique, wielding unprecedented supremacy. Rather than bequeathing the Tao they’ve received to others, however, they will seek to make it in their own image and likeness as “the motivators, the creators of motives.”

Worse, successive generations will be more, not less, limited by the fewer choices they’ve been left with, as the author says: “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.”

Technology may be a leveler. But it empowers an increasingly shrinking minority who will shape the freedoms of a billowing majority. Counterintuitively, that technology will produce progressively more powerless generations. The majority will be beholden, if not subject, to the minority.

Through eugenics, prenatal conditioning, propaganda, or applied psychology, man may claim “complete” control over himself. The “human” aspect of his nature will be the last part to surrender to him. As Lewis says: “The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?” When man is reinventing values on the go, how will any value govern him?

Magician’s Bargain

That may be the magician’s bargain, Lewis suspects. “But once our souls ... have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls,” he says.

Nietzsche’s 19th-century superman (the ubermensch) was valorized by the Nazis in the 20th century. It embodied this imagined linearity. Man, supposedly sculpting out the ignominious in himself and his fellow men, actually sculpted the ideal to produce progressively “perfect” generations.

Who are today’s Conditioners that sculpt humans in their own perverted image and likeness? This was poseur Judith Butler, who twisted the minds of generations of women with gender/queer ideas. This could also be charlatan Yuval Noah Harari who’s contorted the minds of men and women with his misanthropy.

To Lewis, it’s outrageous that their kind are considered “intellectuals” at all. Their doctrinaire Green Books, about subjective value, advocate for nothing short of “the abolition of Man.”

Temptations

Now, consider the temptations of Christ in the desert. The first temptation celebrates instant gratification, materialism: Hungry? He should satiate himself. The second pursues fame, success to obtain infinite power. The third treats the gift of life as a tradable commodity or currency. If a man threatens suicide, surely, God won’t let him die.

"The Temptations of Christ," by Sandro Botticelli. Public Domain

In form and content, these taunts resemble those of atheists and agnostics. They believe in God if only he shows himself first. That’s the lie, of course. Like any temptation, it’s disguised as a taunt. Christ’s response is instructive. “It is written,” Christ says.

On each occasion, Christ points to the Tao, which in Biblical terms is, The Word. Even when the mob on Calvary taunted Christ that they’d believe if only he’d miraculously come down from the cross, he didn’t take the bait.

Today’s Conditioners, Educators, and Innovators, aren’t interested in truth that’s been written. They’re busy rewriting it. To them, harm and wickedness are welfare and health. Abortion is “reproductive health.” Transgender medical procedures are “sexual health.” Abetted suicide is “assisted dying.” Prostitution is “sex work.”

If there’s consent, everything is allowed; if there isn’t, nothing should be. Absolutism upholds their rights, but relativism will suffice for their responsibilities. Bound by their impulses, only the stronger, louder, more pleasurable impulse must win.

Humanity Sacrificed

Lewis does not imagine future generations will be “bad men.” In fact, they’re “not men (in the old sense) at all.” They’ve sacrificed their humanity, unbound by the Tao’s values of duty or goodness.

Transhumanists and posthumanists represent the fulfillment of the self-worshipping dystopia that Lewis warned of. They seem to praise their products, but it’s themselves and their prowess that they really praise; their products are mere extensions of themselves. How breathlessly Cortical Labs’s Hon Wen Chong describes his new computer powered by human neurons, “The neuron is self-programmable, infinitely flexible, and the result of four billion years of evolution.”

In his superciliously inane book “Sapiens,” Harari dismisses the prospect of a soul because “scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there.” He rejects the immutability of sex by saying, “We can today not merely castrate a man, but also change his sex through surgical and hormonal treatments.”

Never mind that science can do no such thing. He’s transfixed by transhumanism as he says, “Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.” His newfound, pretended concern for the fate of humanity amid the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) barely hides his contempt for homo sapiens. His loyalties lie elsewhere.

As if on cue, the modern age medicalizes reflexively. Natural, sometimes essential, states of the human condition, such as grief, anxiety, or aging, are treated as disorders or disabilities. “Gender affirmation” treats even biology as a limitation that can be transcended, seeking to alter sex the way one might alter a hairstyle. Childhood fads are diagnosed as a disorder (gender dysphoria) that medication and surgery can, and must, “affirm.”

It’s self-defeating. War on manhood (radical feminism) cannot be but a war on womanhood: abortion, so-called incel culture, and the hypersexualization of women. Anti-racism frames whiteness as a crime and anything else as benign.

This cooked-up Tao frames women as “sexual minorities” and blacks as oppressed, and nearly everyone else as oppressors. Climate alarmists, too, sport this binary lens, misreading man as being outside of, and antagonistic to, nature, and not a part of it. All of this obliterates the color and texture that truth allows, leaving no room for subtlety or nuance.

Multitudes are in thrall of what AI can, and will, do; its “intelligence” seems to beat man’s own. But intelligence, no matter how fast or complex, is the mere processing of thought, memory, ideas, and imagination, and a pale reflection of the deeper reality of man.

“Soul Carried to Heaven,” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Public Domain

The Soul

It is man’s soul, his will, and beyond the body, mind, and even thought that decide what he “should” do with his intelligence. The soul informs him that his infinite inheritance overrides, and will outlive, his all-too-finite inheritance.

Man’s mandate is to love and will the good of the other. He is asked to share, even when there’s every incentive not to, and to sacrifice, or to let go, when holding on seems more profitable. The soul places him alone, and above, everything created. Unsurprisingly, the Psalmist cries to God, in wonder and gratitude, “What is man that You are mindful of him?”

Amid the panic around geopolitical or economic emasculation, Lewis shows that moral emasculation is worse. Nations can recover from debt or a market collapse in ways they cannot as easily from a moral collapse.

Incisively, wittily, and prophetically, Lewis delivers one of the strongest cases yet that man is unique in imbuing life with meaning and purpose.

John Milton’s “Paradise Regained” restored to man in verse what had been forfeited in his “Paradise Lost.” Lewis’s prose here lays out who man is and, just as profoundly, who he should be.

Please check the essays on Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 here.

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