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Abstract

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of the third part of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Much ink has been spilled analyzing Lewis’s thoughts on the dangers of subjectivism as outlined in the first two parts of the book, but less so on the endpoint to which Lewis thinks subjectivism leads when whole societies succumb to it. Yet Lewis himself, or at least his editor, thought the final part important enough to name the lecture series after it, and dramatize it in a novel afterward. If Lewis saw the train leaving the station over eighty years ago, we would be wise to consider whether he was right about its direction and its destination. What follows is an attempt to do so, from the perspective of a twenty-plus year veteran of America’s high-tech workforce. Having spent two lectures pointing out the dangers of subjectivism, and in particular the dangers of conditioning future generations to be subjectivists, Lewis pulls back the camera in the eponymous Abolition lecture to analyze the concept behind this impulse to condition, namely, the concept of “Man’s conquest of Nature.” He spends some time deconstructing this phrase. First, he makes clear that this was a common euphemism in his time which really meant “the progress of applied science.”1 Today this term is no longer in vogue; rather we use the more generic “technology” to refer to the same concept. It is relevant to note that as our power has increased through applied science, our notion of what this means in detail has become less specific. We no longer speak of “Man’s conquest of Nature,” which conjures a vision of ever-expanding power and control over the environment in which humans live. Instead, we use the mere “high-tech,” which only makes one think of seemingly—but not truly—less weighty concepts such as computers and smartphones. Already in our euphemisms subjectivism has fundamentally influenced the way we think about the future.

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