C.S. Lewis & G.K. Chesterton ~ The Abolition of Man: Stepping outside the moral law into the void, irrational impulses

   Stepping outside the [moral law], they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man... Yet the conditioners will act ... All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them ... but what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism ... the Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasures [or fears] ... those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.

 

Therefore, at the moment of man’s conquest of nature, we may find the human race in general subjected to some individuals, and those individuals subjected ‘to that in themselves which is purely “natural”—to their irrational impulses’. Nature rules the conditioners, and through them, humanity:

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man... Either we are... obliged for ever to obey the absolute value... or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own “natural” impulses. Only the [objective Moral Law] provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective values is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

 

Taking Stock of The Abolition of Man

G.K. Chesterton, a formative influence upon Lewis, observed that:

when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes... It is a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau.” ... Whatever wild image one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed... That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of adaption threatens us. This is the nightmare that is not so very far from the reality. It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we should become in any way unhuman... but this is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some of the tamest evolutionists...[xliv]

http://www.lewissociety.org/abolition.php