C.S. Lewis: the Abolition of M

C.S. The Abolition of Man While reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, I encountered a few questions concerning his view on Ethical Innovation and the dilemma conditioners face. It was a difficult book with many ideas that didn’t come completely clear to me at times. I agree with Lewis theory that ethical innovation is impossible. Everything we base ourselves on according to rational thought, morals, ethics, what is right and wrong, has been passed down to us in every kind of information from oratory to internet. We have not come up with a new creative idea of how to act in ethics. You don’t read in a screaming headline,’ NEW WAY TO BE ETHICAL. We have just acquired the way to act through the way mankind has evolved. Maybe if we live around the beginning then we might be able to be innovative but human nature contains all types of reasoning in which the way we act. We all are different in many ways but we all know the ways we could be also. We observe others and know what kind of character, personality, values and some of them we copy from them. We are not being innovative but adaptive of thought. We look at others and sometimes act accordingly to their nature. We all have a personalized nature but we tend to identify and be changeable to other ways besides your own. I can relate to Lewis’ idea of science and magic to what ethical innovators are really doing. Magic is something that happens that is impossible much like the innovation of ethics. Just like there is no innovation for ethics then there is none for science. My idea is that everything is already created, we just have to find it. How many times have you thought about some cool thing that you could make and would be useful in some way? Of course you probably never attempt doing it but the idea is there. Not necessarily created by you but by something else that made you think about it. We are not really original in thought. Conditioners are the