The Desecration of Man
By Carl Trueman, First Things.
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the lectures that became C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Speaking to an audience at the height of the Second World War, Lewis identified the central problem of the modern age: The world was losing its sense of what it meant to be human. As man’s technological achievements were once again being used to destroy human life on an industrial scale, Lewis pointed to the dehumanization that was occurring all around. And as the war continued, the Final Solution and the atomic bomb served to reinforce his claims. Yet modern warfare was not the only problem. As Lewis argued, the intellectual and cultural currents of modernity were also culpable. The war was as much a symptom of the problem as a cause. Modernity was abolishing man. It represented nothing less than a crisis of anthropology.
Sociologists have proposed a number of concepts that characterize the modern age. These provide a useful backdrop to Lewis’s observations. Perhaps the most influential is the Weberian thesis of disenchantment. Whereas once the local god or saint kept the water supply fresh and sweet, now the local water purification plant does the same. Village life has been replaced by the anonymity of the city. People have come to be valued not for themselves but for their earning potential or their consumption. And disenchantment has worked its way into every corner of life: Whereas once love was a serendipitous force that culminated in a lifelong bond between two people, now we swipe left or right on our apps for the next hookup.
These changes bring with them a sense of loss. Modernity has shunted religion and the supernatural to the margins, at the cost of stripping the world of its mystery. The sea of faith recedes, Matthew Arnold wrote in a great poem, and we hear only its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
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