Journal 2: Modernism and The Abolition of Man

My second effort to engage with the texts for class. I enjoyed it a great deal.
In this journal entry, I want to examine in what way the philosophy which Lewis criticizes in The Abolition of Man relates to the modernist struggle to recreate metanarratives for their lives, how it mirrors the reigning philosophy in our society, and how likely the consequences which he predicts will arise from this view of the world are to occur.

In the first lecture of the book, Lewis sets out to demonstrate the fatal flaw in the modern education system, which sought to convince students that their affections and emotional judgments should not define their view of reality. Gaius and Titius, the renamed authors of a textbook which Lewis considers a particularly egregious example of this sort of skepticism, serve as his case-study, and their worldview seems to be closely connected with that of the prominent modernists. In the beginning of his second lecture, Lewis states,
“In actual fact Gaius and Titius will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars. Their skepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly skeptical enough. A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge.”
This quote is particularly interesting in two ways: first, because it illustrates an intellectual attitude which seems to mirror that of many of the great modernist writers, and second, because I believe it describes very accurately the philosophical situation in the United States at present. More on that later.
As we talked about in class, a major philosophical trend among the high modernists was the rejection of inherited belief systems, particularly Christianity, in favor of a personally constructed metanarrative—believed, or only maintained as a convenient framework for understanding reality. Writers like Yeats, Woolf, and Eliot were seeking new ways to approach their craft without the centuries-old metanarrative of Christianity arranging their perceptions of truth. They, like Gaius and Titius, would reject religious sanction and inherited taboos, although I do not believe that they would reject emotion (Eliot seems to in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” when he states that poets should try to escape from their own personality, but I think he would define emotion in a different sense than Lewis does).
The difference between the great modernists and The Green Book lies in the tone of their skepticism. Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and even Woolf recognize the philosophical catastrophe that the loss of faith after the Great War truly was. This is manifest in idealization of past literary eras as well as in the frank recognition that their fragmented view of reality demands new and difficult innovations in literary method. Writing in the fallout of World War I, each of these intellectuals expresses in their own way how utterly devastating the conflict was for the spiritual and intellectual environment of their nation.
Gaius and Titius obviously lack this sense of regret over the pervasive skepticism that arose after the war. The passages of The Green Book which Lewis references drip with the smug self-assurance of the authors. Of course, this would be affected by the fact that they are writing in the 1940s, well after the end of the Great War. Also, Gaius and Titius are obviously not great scholars or thinkers, as Lewis noted so succinctly in the margins of their text. As he says, they wholeheartedly adopt the fashionable view of the post-war era—a view which would have been a crude popularization of that of prominent intellectual figures like Woolf, Eliot, and Yeats.
Nevertheless, the idea they teach is only a fairly ignoble adaptation of the concept of supreme fiction: that each person must construct their own framework for viewing reality, which they oughtn’t to impose on others. I think the distinction is that thinkers like Wallace Stevens would not specifically reject the affections as a method of judgment, but rather say that no individual, no matter their reason for accepting a metanarrative, can, with integrity, hold it as anything besides a construct devised to make sense of their lives. Imposing that metanarrative on anyone else would contradict its artificial nature and therefore prove intellectually contemptible. Other modernists sought metanarratives which they could look to as objectively true, and certainly harnessed their emotions in this search. In fact, some looked to the affections and the subjective judgments of mankind to provide that metanarrative. Such is the case with Woolf’s work, which focuses on the inner perceptions to give meaning to events and objects. In contrast, thinkers like Yeats and Eliot looked to the great mythological narratives to imbue their lives and writing with meaning. Although these two options are opposites in this situation, they share a very significant characteristic which Gaius and Titius lack: they both recognize the importance of the affections. The writers recognize their need for beauty and order, for truths that cannot be proven intellectually and ideals that the mind alone cannot provide.
The authors’ philosophical position might be called an alternate, lower and nastier, form of modernism: the form that adopts or criticizes ideas according to fashion, essentially born of pride. Like all instances of intellectual pride, it is soul-destroying. It is skepticism for its own sake, skepticism without considering the consequences. Gaius and Titius never shared Yeats’ fury over the deprivation of his faith or Eliot’s regret that he cannot write with the same unity of sensibility that was possible for the Metaphysical Poets. These authors saw the consequences and honestly accepted them.
By the time Gaius and Titius published their Green Book, modernist intellectuals would have moved in one of two directions: either towards a postmodern denial of any metanarrative at all or towards moral tradition in general, Christian tradition particularly, as a source of truth, as Lewis himself did. Being only moderately educated, as Lewis points out, the authors are necessarily behind the intellectual curve—their breezy dismissal of religious dogmatism and pedantic rejection of “emotional” evaluations by means of horribly clinical rationalization make them outsiders to both philosophical camps.
I want to take some time to consider the practical consequences of postmodernism, the high modernism expressed by Stevens, and the skeptical, views of Gaius and Titius, which I will call low modernism, in how they relate to Lewis’ idea of the Conditioners. He describes their eventual ethical and philosophical position this way:
“By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all ‘rational’ motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behavior. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere ‘nature’) is the only course left open.”
This sounds like postmodernism taken to its absolute extreme. The Conditioners have denied any natural moral law or inherited truth along with any overarching metanarrative. They can, without compunction, do anything they feel like, and in fact, what they feel like is the only thing worth doing. Their philosophy provides no other foundation for their actions. Of course, in order for people to truly abandon traditional morality, they must have their conscience and affections completely snuffed out.
I think postmodernism on a pure, philosophical level would only be the product of high modernism, but practically, it is much more likely to be lived out in a society conditioned by low modernist viewpoints. This seems to be the case for two reasons. First, high modernism is characterized by an intellectual honesty which our dear, soul-destroying, moderately-educated schoolmasters seem incapable of displaying. The high modernists embraced a philosophy which they frankly disliked or at least found difficult, because they believed it was required of them. Because they adopted these views knowingly, they would not enter into a postmodern worldview emotionally sterilized. Because high modernists constructed belief frameworks to make sense of their surroundings and therefore in some way preserve beauty and order, their views of the world would be defined by their affections, making it very difficult for them to discard those and adopt a truly postmodernist worldview.
Herein lies low modernism’s more convenient environment for the Conditioners. The insidious effect of low modernism’s philosophy lies in the fact that it operates upon people before they are old enough to fully understand the message implicit within texts like The Green Book. They would adopt an unfounded attitude of superiority towards emotional judgment before they could possibly realize the implications of that attitude. Generations would be raised without chests, blindly adopting the intellectual presuppositions of those around them. I do not believe that real postmodernism can exist until people are conditioned into it—until their conscience and knowledge of the natural law is smothered within them from birth.
Of course, as Lewis points in the first quote, even individuals who suffer from atrophy of the chest are equally susceptible to a set of values and beliefs. It is merely the set of beliefs implicitly held by people of similar social and educational position to themselves. Gaius and Titius teach skepticism to emotion because skepticism was in vogue with men of their age. They can claim to be beyond traditional values, but really, they are subject to a narrow and mean set of values which must be a practical result of the Tao. I think this is the case with most people who claim to be postmodernists. What they really mean when they deny absolute truth or metanarrative of any sort that they don’t want to be encumbered by the majority of inherited morality. They still expect everyone to abide by certain values of their own. I think this is true of culture in the United States today. Many people claim a worldview which sounds like postmodernism—denying that anyone has the right to judge anyone else. However, those are the same people who seem to express outrage the most vehemently when anyone ventures to contradict their pet values, generally tolerance in this case.
So, practically, it seems as if real postmodernism is not possible, because we cannot seem to be rid of our inherited values without a system of indoctrination, but even those systems come with inherent values. This seems to pose a significant obstacle to the existence of the Conditioners, for if practical postmodernism is only achieved by indoctrination and assimilation of sorts, and if that assimilation almost inevitably involves subconsciously accepted values, how would the Conditioners ever be produced? Their point is that they consider themselves free from moral constraints and that they consciously redefine humanity. In other words, they would have to have the atrophied chest that would result from low modernism along with the intellectual independence of the high modernists, a combination rather difficult to come by. We can count ourselves fortunate that it would be very hard to produce.
Lewis predicts that in trying to escape the Tao, men will become irrational creatures, overmastered. He illustrates this with the fall of the NICE in That Hideous Strength, and I see it in Ginger’s transformation into a dumb beast in The Last Battle as well. I wonder if men who set out to evade the moral law could even get so far as having the power to reshape the human race. Romans 1:20-23 (NIV) says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” This seems to be a description of how men who totally deny God’s law eventually lose their rationality, as Lewis describes. It is reminiscent of Dante’s idea that the deeper a person delves into sin, the less rational and the less human they become. I am not certain that a man can even exist completely apart from the Tao, because we were created to operate according to certain laws with certain motivations. To have no aspect of the Tao as a motivation is to have no reason to do anything, no reason to exist at all. Lewis wrote:
“They are the motivators, the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves? For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within their own minds, of the old ‘natural’ Tao. Thus at first they may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a ‘duty’ to do it ‘good’. But it is only by confusion that they can remain in this state.”
It is only by confusion, essentially, that the Conditioners can have any reason at all for existing. Even an evil purpose can only be justified by arguments built on the foundation of the Tao. Like Lewis points out in The Screwtape Letters, the devil cannot actually create any evil—he can only corrupt the good which God has created. He can only entrance men with sin by appealing to desires which find their root in God’s own natural law. To be a Conditioner then must mean to be a non-person. Of course, that is what Lewis set out to say in the first place, so I really cannot critique his conclusions. The bottom line is that, “To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” To escape all inherited motivations is the same as not to have a motivation at all.
Despite the false philosophies held by many of the high modernists, I think we can be grateful that they saw the value of the inherited traditions in which they disbelieved. They very courageously sought to reconstruct a world where the goods they loved could be explained and valued. In many ways, this was a tragic and noble battle—many of them never found the truth. Nevertheless, they refused to surrender beauty and order merely because they could no longer explain it. In that devastating period, their determination may be credited with helping to preserve, in part, a crucial element of humanity. Their work, unlike that of their coarser counterparts, Gaius and Titius, cannot be said to create men without chests. They sought to preserve the soul in troubled times. I wonder to what extent one could say that their souls were damaged by the undercurrent of skepticism growing in the generations before them? That of course would be connected with the point mentioned earlier regarding their regret at the loss of the Christian tradition—they recognized the loss to themselves spiritually. Anyway, that question will have to wait for another time to receive a thorough treatment. For now, it is enough to say that Lewis’ work adroitly comments on a popular philosophy closely connected with that of the high modernists. I hope that it will serve as a protective enchantment against all such philosophies for many years to come.