S9E16: Abolition – Ch. 2, Pt. 3 (“The Tao or… Nothing”)

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Can we reject the Tao and still have morality? Does affirming the Tao stifle moral progress? Is arguing for the Tao a religious or even a Christian argument? We dive in to these questions and more as we wrap up Chapter 2 of “The Abolition of Man”.

 Click here to download audio for S9E16: “The Tao Or… Nothing”

Show Notes

Quote-of-the-Week

The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)

Introduction

Welcome friends to Pints With Jack! This season we’ve been reading “The Abolition of Man” by C. S. Lewis and today we’re wrapping up Chapter 2 (“The Tao”)!

Chit Chat

  • Andrew and his wife went to a celebration for our good friend Dr. Diana Glyer’s birthday. It was a very eventful weekend filled with friends, good food, and outdoor exploration.
  • For David, work’s been exceptionally busy with big project deadlines approaching. In his free time, he’s been working on designing a new mug for this season!
    • The new mug will be very “Tao-centric”.
  • Matt and his wife are still eagerly awaiting the arrival of their baby.
  • For anyone who’s interested, from March 13-14 in Chicago, Ballet 5:8 is hosting The Thick and the Clear conference following their “BareFace” performance, the stage adaptation of “Till We Have Faces”. Featured speakers include Terry Glaspey, Dr. Jim Beitler, Karl Johnson, and a certain Lewis podcaster with an English accent…

Toast

  • Andrew sipped the remainder of his gift of Aberfeldy 12.
  • David joined Andrew with his own glass of Aberfeldy.
  • Matt also jumped on the scotch bandwagon and had some Lagavulin Limited Edition.
  • Today we toast our latest Patreon supporter, Keith Herwig. Cheers!

Discussion

Recap

As we’ve said before, “The Abolition of Man” is quite a dense work, and we’re taking our time moving through it, so at the start of each of these episodes we want to situate us and recap how the argument has built up so far… 

  • “The Abolition of Man” begins with Lewis reviewing “The Green Book”, an English school textbook which, rather than teaching English composition, sets about debunking all sentiments and covertly teaching subjectivism.
    • Jack rejects this and counters by teaching a doctrine of objective value which he describes using the Confusion term, “the Tao”.
    • To demonstrate the existence of the Tao, Lewis gives numerous cross-cultural examples from world history. He continues this in the Appendix, demonstrating universal duties to Ancestors and to Posterity, laws of Justice, Mercy, Magnanimity and so on.
  • At the start of Chapter 2, Lewis points out that the very fact that “The Green Book” has been written shows that the authors aren’t entirely subjective, as they think society would be “better” if it imbibed the book’s message.
  • Lewis considers how the textbook authors might try to justify their own system of values, particularly when it comes to suffering or dying for a good cause.
    • First, utilitarianism fails, because it fails to supply personal motivation. It may indeed be useful if some die so that society can be preserved, but why should I be the one to make that sacrifice?!
    • Reason likewise fails, because simple statements of fact are insufficient for building a system of values because you can’t get from empirical statements to a moral obligation –  you can’t get from an is to an ought.
      • …that is, unless “Reason” is expanded to include an older conception of reason… which is the Tao!
    • Finally, last week we saw that instinct also fails.
      • If we think our instincts necessarily force us to follow them, resistance to them would be futile and exhortation to follow them pointless!
      • If we do have the ability to resist our instincts, we have the is/ought fallacy again. Just because of the fact that I have an instinct in no way means that I should follow it! What do I even do when my instincts conflict with each other? 
      • If, however, the argument is that following our instincts will make us happy, then where is the happiness experienced in suffering or dying for a good cause?
    • In summary, neither factual propositions nor appeals to instinct are sufficient as a basis for a system of values. The principles of the Tao have to be our starting premisses – they cannot be reasoned to as conclusions.
      • The Innovator who attacks the Tao does so by appropriating some aspect of the Tao and rejecting the others. However, this is incoherent, for if the parts that are rejected have no authority, neither do the parts which are retained… 

01. “The sole source”

Q. In this portion of his lecture he calls the Tao several other names – what are they?

  • The other names are as follows:
    • Natural Law
    • Traditional Morality
    • The First Principles of Practical Reason
    • The First Platitudes.
  • Lewis has other names for this concept in his more well known book “Mere Christianity”:
    • The Law of Human Nature
    • The Law of Right and Wrong
    • The Law of Decent Behavior
    • The Moral Law
  • By these names, he intuits that there is a sense of right and wrong, and it comes from somewhere outside ourselves. He also implies that certain behaviors and objects might not simply elicit a particular response, they might merit it on its own.
    • This is also where he gets the idea of “stock responses”. A stock response is the response that we should have to something, and if we fail to exhibit that response, well, there’s something wrong with us!
      • For an even deeper understanding of this concept and of Lewis in general, Andrew highly recommends “C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide” by Walter Hooper. It’s a massive encyclopedia of Lewis, with a biography, sections of his books along with summaries and reviews, and key ideas, including on stock responses.

Q. Lewis says that he doesn’t see any possible answer as to why someone could cherry-pick the Tao. He starts drawing some conclusions… If we reject the Tao, what other options does Lewis say we have for value judgements?

  • There’s none! The three other approaches we discussed don’t work.

[The Tao] is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. 

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • Jack says it’s self-contradictory to try and set up a new ideology, as all new systems would depend upon fragments of the Tao! There are no “new” values – that’d be like saying there could be a new primary colour. He says:

What purport to be new systems… all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • Even if one were to come up with a new system, it would need to be balanced by the Tao. For example, if compassion was held as our highest virtue, it must be balanced by justice, or it falls apart.
    • Lewis talks about this in “Mere Christianity”, where certain virtues (like mother love) that elevated beyond their station become disordered.

For example, some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. 

But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self- preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
  • Take love of country as another example. Love of neighbor and your nation is a good thing, so long as it is balanced out by justice, truth, and mercy, but taken out of proportion it becomes a god. The same is true of sexual love.
    • When you hold up a virtue above love of the one true God, things go south very quickly. Conversely, when you look to God first, the natural loves are elevated.
  • Jack says something else that’s interesting: you can’t take some parts of the Tao and reject others. You can’t reject duties to parents and retain duty to posterity. You can’t reject the notion of justice and retain the notion of duty to one’s country. You can’t say scientific knowledge is a real value while denying conjugal fidelity.
  • He ends this section with a real banger:

The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)

02. “Is progress possible?”

Q. To quote the Episcopal Ghost from Lewis’s (best) book “The Great Divorce“, ‘But you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?’ If all we can ever do is go to the Tao, does that mean that there’s no progress?

  • Jack says that’s incorrect. He points out that if our understanding of the Tao is drawn from moralities of East, West, Christians, Pagans, and Jews.

Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • Though the Tao itself doesn’t change, our understanding and application of it can grow.
    • Think of it like bowling. You can roll the ball down the lane and not land in a gutter, and you can hit a number of pins. But there is a way you can roll the ball and have it be more accurate, knocking over all of the pins.
    • Or, think of it like archery. You can shoot and hit the target without missing, but you want a close arrow grouping as close to the center as you can.
    • This is what happens with doctrinal development in the Church. The apostles might not have been able to express the doctrine of the Trinity (though they experienced it), but with proceeding councils, the more accurate Nicene understanding was formed. As the body of Christ grows and more questions are asked, our collective knowledge is expanded.
    • We’ll talk later about the distinctions between real moral development and making things up.

03. “Two kinds of criticism”

Q. But not all kinds of criticism are made equal. Lewis identifies two kinds of criticism. What are they?

  • Jack has a few terms and definitions:
    • Alterations from within and alterations from without
    • “Organic” and “surgical” change
  • As noted already, there can be development within the Tao, but Lewis says that the person who tries to change it surgically from the outside is going to produce contradictions:

…he merely snatches at some one precept, on which the accidents of time and place happen to have riveted his attention, and then rides it to death—for no reason that he can give… 

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • On the flip side…

From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao. This is what Confucius meant when he said ‘With those who follow a different Way it is useless to take counsel. This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • The more formed you are, the more you can engage in the practices (or alternatively the objections) to this philosophy. Converts and reverts typically experience this in their faith journeys.
    • In fact, the Greeks thought if you weren’t brought up in studies of philosophy and ethics, it would be too difficult to begin later down the line, because by starting too late, you couldn’t become well formed enough.
  • The only way you can begin is with the Tao:

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)

Q. Is it always easy to distinguish between internal, organic criticism and external, surgical one?

  • Not always. Lewis puts it this way:

[If] any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position… The direct frontal attack ‘Why?’—‘What good does it do?’—‘Who said so?’ is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • You don’t have to have everything straightened out and have all the answers in order to begin practicing the Tao. You learn it by following it.
    • You won’t wish that you would have spent less time practicing your moral code. People usually regret the opposite.
  • To put a bow on it, Lewis says that a true reformer tries to show how…

…the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)

04. “Is this a Christian argument?”

Q. Is this a Christian argument?

  • Actually no! It’s simply an argument for objective value. Lewis says we “must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity”… and by this, he means The Tao.
  • The origin of the Tao is a separate question… which he points to more clearly in “Mere Christianity”:

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But, of course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book I Chapter IV)
  • However, understanding objective value is a step in the direction of Christianity, and naturally, Lewis goes on to point the reader in that direction.

05. “Mastering Nature”

Q. How does Lewis say modern man will respond to the absolute requirements of the Tao?

  • Why should we let it master us?! It’s just some mix of nature or nurture…

[It] is simply a phenomenon like any other—the reflection upon the minds of our ancestors of the agricultural rhythm in which they lived or even of their physiology.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • …and we partially understand how this happened and some day we will have complete power over it. He then asks:

Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man? 

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • There are always people trying to stop progress and foretelling some disaster, yet we continue to survive and even thrive!

Q. Okay, so we step outside the Tao, what do we do?

  • Whatever we want! our values are based on nothing other than what we desire.

You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao. Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them…let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny!

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • Unlike those who hope to find the “real” values after debunking the traditional ones, those who want to reject value altogether don’t appear to contradict themselves!

This is a very possible position: and those who hold it cannot be accused of self-contradiction like the half-hearted sceptics who still hope to find ‘real’ values when they have debunked the traditional ones. This is the rejection of the concept of value altogether. I shall need another lecture to consider it.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (The Tao)
  • We’ll learn more of Lewis’ thoughts on that in the next chapter… and since it’s entitled “The Abolition of Man”, we can assume that he doesn’t think it’s going to end well…

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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David

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After working as a Software Engineer in England for several years, David moved to the United States in 2008, where he settled in San Diego. Then, in 2020 he married his wife, Marie, and moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Together they have a son, Alexander, who is adamant that Narnia should be read publication order.

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