The Abolition of Liberty? Religious Freedom and Education Amid Today’s Intellectual Confusion

Jan 9, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By Todd Huizinga, European Conservative.

Although C. S. Lewis died in 1963, the arguments in his The Abolition of Man, published in 1943, still apply to us today. One of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th century, Lewis argues in Abolition that a recognition of objective truth, and a desire to live according to it, are both necessary for a pursuit of true morality, true freedom, and true education.

The subtitle of the book is Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School. Lewis’s comments focus on the plight of education in an age of scientistic relativism, in which students learn to value the project of subjecting nature to the human will through science, while also subtly rejecting the objective values of nature itself and the objective truths of natural law. Nothing, it is implied, is outside the realm of human manipulation. There is nothing in the world whose value is not subject to human perspectives, and no truths in the universe which are beyond being reshaped and re-formed through human will.

Lewis decries such scientistic relativism. With an appendix quoting documents from diverse civilizations ancient to modern, all praising such objective goods as love of children, spouse, and kin; honoring parents and elders; speaking the truth; keeping promises; etc., he asserts persuasively in Abolition that the modern West is the first society in human history to reject what he calls the Tao. This concept of Tao he describes as “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” In his description of attitudes that are either true or false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things human beings are, Lewis is intimating the connection of truth to morality. The rejection of truth entails also the rejection of true morality. And Lewis recognizes that the decoupling of education from truth and true morality is fated to bring the most dire of consequences. He writes: “The practical result of education [amid today’s rejection of the doctrine of objective value] is the destruction of the society which accepts it.”

Lewis goes on to argue that this denial of the existence and necessity of truth—whether deliberate or not—cannot but result in an increasing loss of freedom. Toward the end of the book, Lewis concludes that “a dogmatic belief in objective value [i.e., objective truth] is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

Now, eighty years after the publication of The Abolition of Man, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Lewis’ diagnosis was correct. Our Western societies have become ever more determined in their rejection of truth and of true freedom. The most fundamental freedom, namely freedom of religion, has perhaps suffered the most. Because the notion of objective truth has fallen into disrepute, the contemporary conception of religious freedom bears little similarity to what religious freedom actually is. And all of this has gone hand in hand with the increasing decadence of our educational institutions.

Read here.