Deconstructing Humanity

If human nature is a social construct, then a cultural shift could dismantle our humanity

Sometimes there are people who can see it coming. No one a hundred years ago thought their great-grandchildren would live in a “post-truth” world. When G.K. Chesterton warned in Orthodoxy that, “the fact that he [the sceptic] doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything,” few in 1908 paid any attention.

But not C.S. Lewis. He saw what Chesterton saw. The Abolition of Man is a book for our times. Lewis published Abolition in the 1940s, and he wrote it as a warning: postmodernism is on the horizon. He doesn’t use that word, which wouldn’t come into vogue for another 30 years. But Lewis describes the emerging subjectivism in academia and illustrates how it was filtering down to secondary education. He points to a children’s textbook, which he calls “the Green Book,” as an example.

Lewis warns his listeners and readers (Abolition originally was a series of three lectures) that a subjectivism which excludes objective values will lead to the destruction of society. If it’s all about “my truth” detached from objective truth, then I stand apart from any value judgments and am left with my emotional impulses. But what about competing impulses? It finally comes down to power. Lewis reminds his audience that this is what the Nazis were about, it’s what the Soviets were about, and we’re fools if we think this can’t happen in a democracy.