The abolition of man

The Abolition of Man in Summary With the end of World War II and the mounting of the Cold War, the world was bitterly divided along ideological and political lines. The extent of horrors seen and the tension between value systems and power demands projected into the immediate future would provokes such works as C.S. Lewis' 1943 text, The Abolition of Man. The text begins deceptively as a discussion on instruction in the English language but soon careens into a dramatic philosophical hypothetical. This is well captured by the conflict which is introduced during the opening discussion on English, where Lewis derides the grammarian for his dogmatic approach to instruction. Here, Lewis accuses, "it is not a theory they put into his mind but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all." (5) In a manner, Lewis enters into a discussion on the threat of ethnocentrism as provoked by linguistic instruction. This leads him to a key precept of the text, that grammar education is far too deeply biased by its philosophical conceits, rendering it a poor educational standard in both disciplines. Such is the launching point for the larger focal point of the text, which revolves upon the argument that natural law such as that implicated by Judeo-Christian and Eastern philosophical value systems must be preserved against the dehumanizing impact of exclusively rationalist thought. This drives a vision of the future which echoes the presentation in such seminal dystopian texts as Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. As with these familiar texts, Lewis describes a bleak future in which rationalism has shifted into aggressive social, psychological and behavioral control which essentially relieves us of our humanity. At the crux of the text is a somewhat alarmist and emotionally driven discourse that transitions from a meditation on education into a missive on the need to preserve traditional values, classical thought and humanizing interaction with one another.