This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and 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 (as they now call them) ‘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…The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)
I recently reread C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and, though he was writing in 1943, his warning about the eschewing of traditional morality by ‘Conditioners’, who take it upon themselves to teach us the new ways, struck me as extraordinarily prescient.
Thus I have attempted a video on why we should all read this book, and how it applies to our current moment, where amoral elites threaten to destroy us.
I am sending this to my legendary paid subscribers only.
Happy Christmas!
Nick
