The Moral and Political Wisdom of C.S. Lewis

The great Christian apologist and literary critic C.S. Lewis provides a surprising amount of moral and political wisdom despite not being a political thinker in any formal sense of the term. For example, the three lectures that form The Abolition of Man remain a must-read for understanding the crisis of our time, as well as the path to recovering the wisdom that will allow us to overcome it.

Without relying on divine revelation or biblical faith per se, Lewis takes aim at what he elsewhere calls “the poison of subjectivism,” and also makes a compelling defense of the existence of a moral consensus among mankind that transcends cultures, polities, and historical epochs. In the book’s final section, he provides a searing analysis of the profound tendency of the modern project “to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate,” which leads to the temptation to conquer human nature in the name of illusory “progress”—that is, to abolish human beings once and for all.

As this example illustrates, in The Abolition of Man Lewis identifies and lays out the pathologies of the age with remarkable insight and clarity. He makes his prescience seem all too easy, precisely because it is in decisive respects the common sense of the matter. Indeed, our crisis might be defined by the very effort to expunge common sense and “right reason” about good and evil (recta ratio as Cicero called it) from the hearts and minds of modern men and women. The Abolition of Man reveals a Lewis who, while an amateur moral and political philosopher, puts his finger on essentials.

A quick perusal of Compelling Reason, a collection of Lewis’s “Essays on Ethics and Theology,” shows that The Abolition of Man does not stand alone as a contribution to first-rate moral and political reflection