Turley’s short work is founded on lectures explaining C.S. Lewis’ opus ‘The Abolition of Man’ to the modern ear, interpreting prescience to the secular religious devotee, devoted as most are to technology, government and self-obsessions of various hues.  Today’s secular religion has little patience for faith, spiritual development, rationality, or consistency in standards and appraisals.  Lewis expected and predicted the carnage which follows when Western society jettisons its Christian heritage and foundation, a process he discerned with alarm 90 years ago.  So today the Western world writhes in agony with a government sponsored ‘pandemic’, societal closure, anti-White racist violence (BLM and anti-Fa); and a river of Fake News and Fake Science.  Rejecting reality and Western Christian civilisation has consequences.

What does Lewis mean by the abolition of man?

Lewis argues that because we have self-consciously left the world of value and virtue in favor of a world of science and technology, we have left a very definite definition of what it meant to be human for another definition of our humanity, or what Lewis might call post-humanity. Speaking of this new race, Lewis writes: “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, 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.”

Lewis knew that serving the Mammon Gods of Science and Technology would lead to strife and dehumanisation.  Technology used to control and manipulate.  Science or variants of fiction which parade around as ‘science’, used as reasons to dominate and destroy.  The human rendered as just another animal.  The ‘experts’ elevated to God status.  Mammon does not share power.

Lewis recognized that technological societies succeed by convincing the masses that their highest happiness and freedom is found in their reliance on a class of experts and technicians who have the specialized competency to conform the world to their desires and ambitions.

Science – much of it fake – and technology, have now replaced human relationships, privilege, morality and gratitude.

Natural law theory recognizes that to be human means that we are endowed with a moral conscience which knows innately the moral order of the universe as God has created it.

Natural law is not taught.  It is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence as a truism from the Middle Ages, pre-dating its explication by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century.  It is the basis of freedom and states that God has granted free-will and the capability of action and thought.  It is up to the individual to choose wisely.  Now, natural law is superseded by the ‘law of science’ and the ‘statutes of technology’.  In essence ‘I post on Facebook, so therefore I am’.  And when I post something that an ‘expert’ or censor does not support, the offending thought crime is briskly torn down.  Now a technocratic elite will tell me what is acceptable and what is a criminal act. A moral order does not exist. 

What Lewis is arguing is that this cosmic piety is true for all the major worldviews of the classical world: Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Asian. Now, these cultures may work out cosmic piety differently, with different variables and constituents that are culturally specific, but the fact that humans belong to a divine moral order appears ubiquitous throughout the ancient world.

Destroy natural law and the moral-God given order, and you begin to ignore reality.  You now engage in pagan concepts and elevate yourself to a God.  ‘Science’ cannot explain the brain nor its ‘evolution’ from nothing.  Neither can ‘science’ explain morality, a consciousness, intuition, feeling or emotions.  ‘Science’ cannot explain the unexplainable complexity of the human body and the natural world at large.  Just saying ‘it evolved’ due to ‘natural selection’ is about as intelligent a view to describing the world as stating, ‘stuff happened and so here we are’.  Yet you must pray to this and other technocratic shrines, you must attend the Church of Things-happen or ‘evolve’ (by magic); Plant-Food-causes-everything; multi-culturalism is a fact and benign; all-religion-is-bad; there-are-160-genders; or any host of religious denominations which scream and caper within the Church of ‘Science’ and Technology.

the dehumanizing nature of idolatry is that we actually become what we worship. Lewis finishes The Abolition of Man with this very observation: Humanity’s obsession with conquering nature has, in fact, reduced all of humanity to mere nature.

By de-humanising society and  believing that we are just ‘apes’ without hair, the destruction of civilisation is just a matter of time.  

In an age of egoistic obsession and debt-driven material-munificence why should anyone care about C.S. Lewis?  After all isn’t he just another dead-White-male, who used his White privilege to explicate philosophies which enslave non-Whites and which promote modern thought crimes and anti-‘science’?

And Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and The King’s College, considers The Abolition of Man one of six books that if read will save Western Civilization.  Kreeft observes: [The Abolition of Man] is prophetic; it is couched in scholarly language; in fact, its plethora of learned Latinate references scare away even college students today, for this is the first generation in American history that is less well educated than its parents, but its content is a terrifying prophecy of mortality, not just the mortality of modern western civilization .. … but the mortality of human nature itself if we do not recapture belief in [what Lewis calls] the Tao, the natural law, the doctrine of objective values.

Lewis’ doctrine of objective values based on Christianity and the natural Tao or logic of the real world.  The further removed from nature, natural law, logic and Western Civilisation, the faster the decline into madness and death.