What is Reddit's opinion of The Abolition of Man?

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Because I think the greatest threat to the modern Western world is what C. S. Lewis called "The Abolition of Man", and more generally the denial of the created order. White supremacy, for all its manifest sinfulness and absurdity, is doing something totally different that I don't think has half as much destructive potential(not least because it has so much less chance at becoming the dominant view) in our modern world.

C.S. Lewis was either a twentieth-century prophet, or he was an intelligent man who could read the signs of the times. As a charismatic Christian, I'm open to either option. 😉

Seriously, though, The Abolition of Man should be required reading for anyone who wants to think about thinking. It explains how the intellectual and societal foundations were built to give us... what we have today. Lewis saw the birth pains of our current insanity.

It's even short! https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Man-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652942

For me I'm going to go a bit old school. First "The Abolition of Man" by C. S. Lewis, which argues for a sort of 'Universal Truth'. I thought it was endlessly fascinating, and it's really an easy, short read. (The audio book was only an few hours long). There's also Lewis's "Mere Christianity" which is once again easy and short. In it he sort of starts with a shortened version of the argument found in Abolition, and from there discusses why Christianity itself works as the 'Universal Truth'.

If your looking for something thicker, I would suggest G. K. Chesterton's "Heretics", which blasts away the philosophy of his contemporaries (Which is still applicable today), "Orthodoxy" which discusses his own conversion and his own search for truth, and "The Everlasting Man" which discusses the history of mankind and Christianity's role in it. (This was also the book that converted Lewis' intellect).

Chesterton is not necessarily a difficult read because of lengthy words, or because he references something no longer fashionable, but because of his ideas. I like to think I can understand things fairly well, but I had to pause often to go over a phrase, or to really think about a thought he presented. But both authors are very enjoyable.

> but then, on the other hand, I find it very difficult to fathom that an objective moral truth exists, because if it does, what is it? I think it's a very difficult thing to conceptualize.

You may not find it convincing but the Western idea of the "natural law" is the product upon people trying to think about morality in an objective rational fashion. People associate the term with Catholicism but they really shouldn't because Catholics inherited it from Aristotle and the Stoics even more so than from Paul the Apostle and Protestants believed in the concept just as much. The Roman Stoics in particular based their theory of natural law on their observations as part of a vast wildly multicultural empire where despite moral codes being wildly different in the particulars of how morality should apply in given situations and which virtues are emphasize or deemphasize nevertheless consistently still shared all the same foundational ideas of what was and what was not virtuous... from this and from the testimony of their own conscience to them testified to the reality of Aristotle's natural law as distinct from the particular laws of a state or specific iteration of it in any given culture. The liberal philosophers arrived at similar conclusions through their own attempts at trying to figure things out "tabula rasa".... As did the Chinese who mean much the same thing by the Tao: a transcendent moral order above and distinct from the positive law or opinions of men.

> but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. We can passionately believe something is morally right while acknowledging it isn't necessarily right.

No. but "necessarily right" implies an open mind which acknowledges that you might be wrong about something... NOT that right and wrong don't exist at all. You can't passionately believe something is morally right is you don't believe there IS a "morally right" for that something to BE.

As C.S. Lewis said:

> You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

...and another quote from the him which I think is relevant to the larger conversation:

> The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.

Really the entirety of The Abolition of Man is relevant to this discussion.

Very interesting. I am a Catholic convert myself, and have been thinking of trying psychedelics. Like you were, I am convinced of the absolute truth of the faith. Something interesting that I will share, and then a book recommendation. You wrote:

>I see that the parables of all religions share the same half-truths and warrant the same general ethics and that when you break down creationist symbolism it is well paralleled with the modern paradigm of science.

C.S. Lewis in the late 1940s gave a series of three lectures which he then re-formatted into a book called The Abolition of Man. The book is heavy, but quite readable. It's broken into three chapters, one for each lecture. I believe that the entire book would scratch your itch, but in particular the second chapter, titled "The Way", which is all about the "tao", which he describes in accordance with history as:

>"It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, the Way, the Road. It is the way in which the Universe goes on, the way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the way in which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar."

This description will make more sense in the wider context of the book, but this idea he expands on profoundly in his second chapter. I believe you can see how this idea is relevant to existential anxiety you're now experiencing. I would highly encourage you to read this book. You may well find that what you experienced on that trip is not quite as irreconcilable to your Catholic beliefs as you presently think.

You can read this book in a day if you really sit down with it, and I suspect that you will be lost in it within the first 10 pages. I hope you will genuinely consider reading it, and then re-reading it a few more times. If you do, be sure to read the appendix.

The conservative viewpoint of the humanities tends to be focussed on the Western Canon and the great books curriculum or Classical education. A common conservatives opinion is that a classical liberal arts education is critically important and valuable, but that modern Academia mired in revisionist theories and nihilism and leaving students adrift in a sea of electives taught by radicals has lost the thread and are now largely useless at best and more often than not are actively destructive.

A few books about the humanities, philosophy, art & education by conservatives and/or approvingly cited by conservatives.

• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

• The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

• God and Man at Yale By William F. Buckley

• The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by Russel Kirke

• How Should we Then Live by Francis Schaeffer

• Modern Times By Paul Johnson.

• The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer

• The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

It's the same as when you taste a blueberry you know it's a blueberry or when you put chocolate in your mouth it's chocolate. No one eats chocolate and goes, 'My chemo-receptors are working adequately and I am sensing chocolate'! You're not Data from Star Trek, but what you're experiencing is the loss of your humanity. You gotta take a first step and if you can't start with a Christian book because maybe you've been hurt by some or can't stand hypocrisy. God knows I can't and knows I'm not there yet. Then start here, here (CS Lewis is a Christian and I gurantee you it'll speak to what you're going through) or here. Yet, you will never know how to awake with this philosophy. If you can't get out and someday come to the end of yourself then call on the name of Jesus. Your suffering must be very great to make reality as such so you can bare it. You must be very strong.

Edit: When you read let the book let it be the subject and you be the object. It's called formation reading. Let it become something that is speaking to you. This alone will help you start to move away from just subjective thought and action. Instead of the text being an object we control and manipulate according to our own insight and purposes, the text becomes the subject of the reading relationship; we are the object that is shaped by the text. Just make sure you're reading good stuff when you do this.. don't do this with like google news

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http://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Man-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652942