A Brief History of Nothing (Part IV): Wars of the Spirit

“Lewis observes that young people are no longer being taught to experience a unity with greater powers but, rather, to accept themselves as separated from greater reality.”

“It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate the brutes!'”

—Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

A World Divided

“I doubt whether we are attentive enough to the importance of elementary textbooks.” Thus begins C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book The Abolition of Man. The attentive Lewis closely examines the language of a common school textbook of his day and discovers certain radical implications. There are implications, he argues, which, carried to their logical end, could lead to the very abolition of man himself.

What Lewis identifies as the “Green Book” teaches that when we describe anything outside of ourselves, we are not so much talking about outer reality as we are talking about ourselves. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously describes a waterfall as being “sublime,” he is not talking about waterfalls; he is talking about his own emotional state. The Green Book, in effect, affirms and cultivates a sense of separation or alienation from the outer world. Greater reality has no qualities until we give it qualities.

Lewis uses the Chinese word Tao for contrast with the divided reality affirmed in the Green Book. Tao is Lewis’ generic term for the interconnectedness of all reality—a concept found in virtually all traditional societies. When Nietzsche writes of the death of God, he is writing in effect about the death of the Tao, the death of our experience of connectivity. Lewis observes that young people are no longer being taught to experience a unity with greater powers but, rather, to accept themselves as separated from greater reality.