2011

Was C. S. Lewis Right?

C. S. Lewis said morality is real.

C. S. Lewis was right. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, you can imagine how it galls me to admit that Lewis was right about anything. After all, it’s Lewis who tried to trick kids into believing in Christ the magic lion. He also waged a losing battle against the historical understanding of Jesus, a topic dear to my heart. He even popularized the falsehood that Jesus couldn’t have been a wise mortal teacher because he claimed to be God. His Narnia books creeped me out a little, but his masterwork, Abolition of Man (1943), made my teenage soul burn with indignation. So how could I ever concede that Lewis was right about anything? Strangely enough, my reading in evolutionary psychology has given me a new appreciation of the argument in Abolition of Man. When Lewis defended morality as based on something real rather than arbitrary, he was onto something, even if he ended up only half right overall.

Lewis championed old-fashioned values, and he opposed the trendy idea that morality, like all culture, is arbitrary. To support his thesis that values were objective, he amassed evidence from around the world that different cultures have similar moral codes. He refers to these universal moral concepts as the “Tao” (meaning “Way”). In arguing that morality is real, Lewis is right. Morality isn’t just something we humans made up, like alphabets or the rules of chess.

But Lewis is only half right. Like the cultural relativists of his time, he attributed morality rather strictly to learning. In Abolition, he wrote that modern education was creating “men without chests.” These disastrously modern people reportedly had an intellect (the head) that was divorced from their animal nature (the guts), with no trunk to unite these two parts of the human being. He wrote that the wrong sort of education was creating people incapable of virtue. Like George Orwell after him, he prophesied a future in which a cadre of clinical experts could control the masses by controlling their education. The rank and file, in this view, could be reduced to living robots. On this point, Lewis is wrong.

After these dire warnings, the rest of the 20th century showed that humans are built of sterner stuff than Lewis imagined. Every new campaign to revolutionize human society fell in the face of primeval human nature. Reformers have improved society dramatically, but the revolutionaries all failed to reprogram human psychology. Even B. F. Skinner’s learned, modern utopian dream proved to be just that—a dream. The mind control experiments of the Cold War failed. Communism failed to create the new man, and now man is creating the new Communism. We humans didn’t get where we are by being easy to control. Sure, we adapt to the lives we’re born to, but we adapt to pursue our own instinctive goals. That’s why totalitarian regimes have always failed to get people to care more about the State than about their friends and their family. We evolved to have friends and family but not to have a State. Cultural relativists say that the social environment defines human personality. Certainly we individual humans do turn out differently in part based on our different social environments. But society shapes the individual along lines that evolution laid out for us long ago. Like Orwell, B. F. Skinner, and Mao, Lewis underestimated the resilience of human nature.

Morality isn't merely inculcated fresh into each new juvenile brain. Evolutionary psychologists have revealed morality to consist of evolved adaptations. Traits such as sympathy, the conscience, concern for the young, a sense of justice, and the urge to punish cheaters turn out to be social instincts built into us by thousands of generations of natural selection. The Tao that Lewis identified is real even if no one teaches it to you. Lewis thought that morality was separate from one’s natural, animal self because his morality was supernatural. Now we can see that morality evolved naturally. The human ape is incredibly social and incredibly intelligent, so moral behavior has long helped our ancestors get their genes into succeeding generations. Since morality is natural instead of magical, maybe Lewis was not even half right, but only a third. That much I can admit with minimum heartburn.

Related post: Reading About Religion, with a good dose of social instincts.