It is a rare treat to dive into the deep end of the “sovereignty of the self” with a student before they head off to the university “jungle.” Recently, I’ve been reading through Nietzsche with a Grade 12 student who was eager to tackle the heavy hitters before her first year of university.
I have to admit, I am consistently impressed by Nietzsche’s sharp wit and the sheer clarity of his prose; he doesn’t just write, he wields a hammer. One of the biggest surprises for my student, however, was Nietzsche’s visceral distaste for objective morality. To Nietzsche, these “old-fashioned” morals are often just a “herd mentality”—a set of invisible shackles designed to hold back the brightest and most innovative people in our society. He wanted us to step outside the cave of tradition and invent our own values.
But as I told my student, once you step outside that cave, you’d better be prepared for the cold. Eighty years ago, C.S. Lewis identified this exact crisis in his landmark work, The Abolition of Man. He proposed a forgotten middle ground between Nietzsche’s radical autonomy and empty relativism: The Tao.
The Innovator’s Trap: The “Is” and the “Ought”
In our data-driven age, we often fall into the trap of thinking that if we just collect enough “facts” about human biology or behavior, we’ll eventually discover how we should live.
Lewis exposes this as a logical impossibility. Facts exist in the indicative mood (stating what is), while morality exists in the imperative mood (stating what should be). You can’t get a “should” from an “is.” It’s a “Handshake Problem”: logic can tell you how to preserve the species, but it can never tell you why you ought to care in the first place. Without the Tao, you’re stuck in an infinite loop. As Lewis notes, nothing is obligatory unless something is obligatory for its own sake.
The Piano Analogy: Why “Trusting Your Gut” is Bad Advice
When modern reason fails to provide us with values, we often resort to “instinct,” urging people to simply “trust their gut.” However, Lewis employs a brilliant analogy to illustrate why instincts make a terrible compass.
He compares our instincts to the keys on a piano. A piano doesn’t have “right” or “wrong” notes; every note is right at a certain time and wrong at another. Our impulses—the urge to fight, the urge to flee, the urge to protect—are just keys. Morality isn’t a key on the piano; morality is the sheet music. It’s the separate thing that tells us which instinct to play and which to silence in a given moment. You can’t ask the keys how to play the tune; you need the “Wise Imagination” of the Tao to provide the order.
The Parasite Problem: Rebellion of the Branches
Lewis noticed a recurring hypocrisy among people who try to “debunk” traditional values. They treat ancient virtues as subjective “nonsense,” yet they always have a hidden set of their own values they think are “scientific” and immune to the same process.
He calls this the “rebellion of the branches against the tree.” Most modern ideologies are just “shreds” of the Tao wrenched out of context. For example, an “Innovator” might debunk the “sentimental” duty we have to our ancestors, while simultaneously insisting we have a “rational” duty to future generations. But by what authority? Both are rooted in the same moral soil. When you cut down the tree of traditional morality, you eventually fall with the very branch you’re sitting on.
Moral Progress vs. Mere Innovation
If the foundation is fixed, does that mean we can never grow? Lewis argues there’s a massive difference between a Real Moral Advance and Mere Innovation.
- Real Advance: This is organic. It’s taking a principle we already have and seeing it more clearly, like moving from “don’t harm others” to the “Golden Rule.”
- Mere Innovation: This is an attack from the outside. It’s trying to scrap the foundation entirely.
Lewis puts it in “coach” terms: “It’s the difference between a man who says, ‘Your vegetables are okay, but why not grow your own so they’re perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf of bread and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.’”
From Surveillance Capitalism to the Sacred
This warning hits home in the digital age. When we step outside the Tao, we lose the ability to see human beings as fundamentally sacred.
Think about Surveillance Capitalism. It uses the “indicative”—the raw data of what you’re clicking on—to manipulate your “imperatives.” It bypasses your “Chest” (your conscience) and treats you as a “source of data” to be harvested. If we don’t believe in intrinsic, non-quantifiable values, we have no reason to resist a world where human life is managed like a commodity rather than honored as a mystery.
The Open Mind vs. The Open Mouth
Lewis is clear: we can’t “master” human nature by stepping outside the values that make us human. If we debunk our own conscience, we don’t become more “rational”; we just become puppets for whoever controls the data.
Lewis famously remarked that while an open mind is great for most questions, it’s a sign of “intellectual idiocy” when applied to the foundations of morality.
“An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations… is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.”
Without the Tao, we aren’t just losing our morals; we’re losing the very thing that makes us human.
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