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.

This doesn’t mean subjectivity must be discarded. Instead, subjectivity and objectivity need each other. But Lewis predicts that the rejection of objective value, which includes natural law, will lead us to try to conquer human nature instead of realizing that we are subject to human nature.

Indeed, a few years after Lewis wrote Abolition, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex where she claims that, “One is not born but becomes a woman.” This inspired Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique in the early 1960s, launching the modern feminist movement. That gender (the quality of something being masculine or feminine) is a social construct, a matter of cultural biases with biology playing little or no role, became a cultural belief that only a misogynist would question. Less than 30 years after Friedan, Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble where she claimed that sex too is a social construct. The idea that biology determines whether you are a woman or a man is cultural. Being a woman, for Butler, is performative.

So, here we are today. Questions like, “If your body doesn’t determine your gender, then how can altering your body with hormones or surgery be ‘gender affirming’?” must not be asked. You are a bigot and probably a fascist.

It’s no coincidence that the deconstruction of humanity begins with women, through whom new life enters the world. God promised that a woman would crush Satan: “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (Genesis 3:15). The Virgin Mary’s humble submission to God, becoming the mother of Christ, stands athwart Satan’s prideful rebellion against God.

We are told that feminism is about equality, but we rarely ask: In what way? Women and men have equal rights in the West today, and sexism against women is socially unacceptable. But true equality allegedly remains elusive. Liberation from oppression has become a quest for freedom from any undesired obligations. Abortion remains the primary feminist issue because women carry babies in utero, and this entails physical considerations that men don’t have. Nature failed to provide the desired existential equality. But is the ability to give birth to new life really a barrier to equality? Men should stand in awe of women’s sacred place in creation.

Transhumanism could be the next big cause. The word “transhuman” traces its origin to Henry Francis Cary’s 1814 English translation of Dante’s Paradiso. It’s a reference to the resurrection at the end of time. Later, Julian Huxley used the word “transhumanism” to refer to a time when “the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence.” It’s secularism saying that we don’t need Jesus Christ. Our mastery over human nature is the final frontier.

Lewis summarizes this ethos as, “Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that…and choose our own destiny.” But he warns that in the end we will see that, “Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”

He quotes St. Augustine as saying that virtue is ordo amoris—according the kind of love that is appropriate to something. Lewis’s view presupposes that everything was created for a purpose and has value that is part of its essence. But in an age of random existence and social constructionism, nothing has any value beyond the eye of the beholder. A waterfall cannot be sublime—you can only have sublime feelings about it.

The notion that we can apply our truth in order to socially engineer the ideal society, rather than discerning (albeit imperfectly) the values which pertain always and everywhere, and to which we must accede for a just society, will only revisit 20th century dystopias. Lewis starkly explains the contrast this way: “[W]ise men…conform the soul to reality” with “knowledge, self-discipline and virtue.” But magic and science try “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

We already see collapsing birth rates leading to depopulation in some parts of the world. Could this eventually result in economic or even political collapse? If it does, this will limit, not expand, the choices of future generations. That is, today’s quest for liberation from any undesired obligations could impose many more undesired obligations on tomorrow’s children, thus in the long run achieving the opposite of what liberation intended. As Lewis puts it, “The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”