V. The Godless Octopus
Before setting religion aside, I may mention that the
Tao notion has led me to certain reflections about the
history of Protestantism and the dogma of justification
by faith that will be omitted here since they would
interest only Christojudaeans and/or intellectuals.
Looking through three or four CSL biographies in the
local public library for references to _The Abolition of
Man_ revealed that the man has had some very lousy
biographers. The one with the most references to
various works, including essays so minor I wondered why
they got mentioned, did not mention TAOM at all. (Aha!
now I see why Lewis wanted to tao 'em.) The one that
discussed it at greatest length said things very similar
to what is found at the following URL:
http://www.discovery.org/lewis/abolition.html
I shall quote only the first sentence of this. "The
Abolition of Man is perhaps the best defense of natural
law to be published in the twentieth century." My
not-quite-so-bad biographer said the same, and also
remarked that TAOM is considered a difficult work by
fandom.
Of course the book is as easy as pie, even though
Natural Law is not. The discrepancy is explained by
noticing that TAOM is not, in fact, a defense of Natural
Law, unless that hazy already notion is expanded to
cover any sort of view that makes moral values
"objective." Brought up a Brit Hegelian, Lewis
apparently abandoned philosophy altogether, although
once in a while he made gestures in the direction of
Plato. And in fact Plato helps clarify the distinction
I want to draw, believing firmly in the objectivity of
ethical judgments and yet being in no sense a theorist
of Natural Law. The verbal expression "law of nature"
occurs first in the _Gorgias_, but it means what we
would call the law of the jungle. The NL idea proper is
traced back with certainty to Cicero and then less
certainly to the Stoics. The Stoics, I think, couldn't
have got it off the ground without Aristotle's work on
the idea of "nature."
Not only is TAOM not a defense of Natural Law, it is
not a DEFENSE of the objectivity of ethics either. You
don't understand Lewis's position if you think the Tao
is something that can be propped up with argumentation
or deduced from something else. All one can say of it
is "Behold! there it is!" If you look for reasons
behind it, you are a fool, even if you happen to be a
Natural Lawyer also. Of course if you're a Natural
Lawyer you're probably a traditionalist Western
Civistani fool whom Lewis would never address so
discourteously, but nevertheless....
We Americans had heard something very similar to this
long before Lewis spoke up. Mr. Jefferson wrote for
Congress in the Declaration a very famous long sentence
that mentioned the word "self-evident." If we take the
words at face value (which of course we shouldn't), our
national Thors and Wotans were moral Lewisites. Or put
it the other way around: the Tao is "self-evident" in
the apparent TJ sense. It is evidence of itself, and
outside of itself there exists no evidence for it.
"Self-evident", by the way, seems to be the secularist
Dr. Franklin's happy replacement of TJ's original
"sacred and undeniable," which sounds more edifying but
doesn't mean anything all that different in a Century
XVIII context. There remains the obvious problem,
though, that the propositions in the Declaration
certainly are not self-evident, by which I mean that
nobody regards Lord North and George III as literally
crazy for not assenting to them. And none of us think
Jefferson and Congress crazy enough to think their
alleged oppressors literally crazy. With TJ, at least,
"self-evident" was an excellent rhetorical bluff, or
perhaps rather a way of saying "If you don't assent to
these propositions, we will break off communication with
you." Something like that. (The Master said, "With
those that follow a different Way, it is useless to take
counsel.")
Was Lewis bluffing, then? Well, certainly not
consciously and deliberately. But he equally certainly
was declining to argue about ethics. Everybody knows
all about ethics to start with, and the only practical
purpose of arguing would be to make us forget part of
it. Though very civilly phrased, this comes to "Shut
up, he explained" at the end of the day. Such a
position cannot be assailed, I suppose, in the sense
that I can't prove to Lewis that as a matter of fact I
don't know all about ethics already. But he can
maintain his position at last only by believing that I
am a liar. Oddly enough, Lewis never (that I recall)
makes the parallel and much more familiar gambit about
religionism instead of ethics, the "Oh, of course you're
not REALLY an atheist, you just think you are" move. On
reflection, though, there is nothing odd about it: CSL
requires ethics to be given by Natural Religion, but
theology only by Revealed Religion.
VI. The Historical Octopus
The real purpose of my Jefferson parallel is to place
Ethical Lewisism in intellectual history. Of course no
Lewisite would approve of this act, since the Tao cannot
have a history any more than it can have a rationale.
But of course it does have a history for all that, and
it turns out that Lewisism is a Century XVIII idea,
something nobody earlier would have thought of, no
matter how much one says about "Natural Law" trying to
conceal the evidence. Lewis reveals the evidence
himself, though of course unintentionally, in his
_Studies in Words_. Without the quite late idea of
"conscience" as a private moral sense or pseudo-organ
that secretes moral judgment as the liver secretes bile,
Ethical Lewisism is inconceivable. Since _ex hypothesi_
there cannot be any reason for the Tao, our universal
knowledge of it cannot be reflective and conscious
knowledge. It MUST be unreflective or intuitive
knowledge, and therefore subjective and private as
regards our side of things, even though the ultimate
purpose of the doctrine is to vindicate the objectivity
and therefore (I presume) the public nature of ethics.
_Quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis_,
and the psychological mode of reception required by
Lewisism is not more than two or three centuries old,
conceptually speaking.
It is not necessary to deny that some sort of conscious
and deliberate and discursive knowledge of ethics is
possible under Moral Lewisism, but that sort of thing is
never more than after-the-fact commentary, verbal
generalizations of the Uniform Revelations of
Conscience. Nothing ethical is BASED on such shaky
foundations. What Lewisism is based on, however, turns
out to be speculative psychology. Though the flavor is
different and the grounds for believing different, I see
no radical difference between the Lewis myth about
uniform conscience and the Freud myths about universal
Oedipodism or the "I, Over-I, It" trinity. In both
cases you can manage to explain away everything that
looks to contradict the doctrine, and, although both
doctrines pretend to be empirical, neither really is so.
K. Popper has discussed this sort of thing at length.
VII. The Plausibility of the Octopus
Let us now bulwerize, that being CSL's term for
assuming that an opinion is wrong and then explaining
how not irrational people nevertheless came to believe
it. I shall leave "demystifying" Ethical Lewisism to
people who believe more than I do in that rather
mysterious process. I mean people who are always asking
_cui bono_? Very likely Ethical Lewisism is at bottom a
capitalist plot or something of the sort, but we need
not here look into things so deeply as all that. At the
shallow extreme, we have already mentioned how useful
the Octopus is to Lewis qua apologist.
That leaves a zone of medium shallowness to be
explored. The obvious thing to say, I think, is that
lots of modern people believe in the Lewisite sort of
Conscience already, even though they may not yet have
heard about its Uniform Revelations. That is, moral
judgment FEELS to them as one might suppose an internal
secretion to feel. They do not find it plausible that
they arrive at particular moral judgments by way of
syllogizing from general principles. They take a look
at a situation and "just know" the rights and wrongs of
it. Such is their amateur and introspection-guided
theory of moral psychology, and given such a view, it
seems clear that they would be in the market for an
assurance that what they know this way is always known
right. Some of them, unfortunately, become at this
point the cartoon-character "relativists" of our neo-
reactionaries. That it is their own moral judgment
seems to them quite enough to establish the rightness of
such a judgment- -of course at the rather high logical
price of allowing that everybody who intuits otherwise
is "right" also.
People who wish to avoid that obvious nonsense but
believe in the Conscience Organ are the predestined
customers for Ethical Lewisism. They in effect
analogize the CO to the Visual Organ: almost all of us
just see that the sky is blue, and in "the same" way, we
just see that a particular theft (or perhaps even
stealing in general?) is wrong. The explanation for
this situation is assumed to be that the sky is "really"
blue and stealing "really" wrong. We agree about both
sorts of things for the same reason, namely that the
things we agree on are objectively so.
At this point the CSL religionism perhaps leads to a
divergence. Ordinary practitioners can grant that there
is a small percentage of ethics-blind people just as
there is of color-blind people, but this view is
theologically incorrect. It will not do to have things
like consciences and "souls" distributed on bell-curve
lines. Avoiding that requires quite a lot of intricate
and peculiar mythologizing which we need not examine
except to remark that Lewis himself solves the problem
by completely ignoring it. He never suggests that some
people are wrong about the Tao because they are, so to
speak, morally sick, only that learned sophists can talk
themselves into silly theoretical objections to it.
Though these objections can corrupt others, the victims
of sophistry also are never suggested to be "sick."
What is wrong with them, apart from merely being wrong,
is not explained in any detail. The thesis is
apparently that Uniform Conscience is infallible, but
can be ignored --which is different from its being
disobeyed, although the latter is commonplace also and
has always been so. It does seem to be implied that
ignoring Uniform Conscience is a problem that arose only
in Wicked Modern Times. Since the Conscience Organ was
conceptually invented only quite recently, this view is
sound enough, though hardly in the way Lewis means it.
VIII. The Credibility of the Octopus
Since Ethical Lewisism depends on the existence of the
Conscience Organ, which I decline to believe in, its
credibility is indistinguishable from zero. Quite apart
from that, the immense amount of obvious disagreement
about what we should do that actually exists in the
world must be swept under the rug by a Tao-monger. She
must also suppose a conceptual unity that is outside
history. If there is a Tao, then there can hardly be
much in the way of a Moral Education of the Human Race.
Of course the less one knows about history and even
about modern foreign countries, the more plausible
Lewisism seems. Not that CSL was ignorant himself, any
more than Dr. Freud was unaware of the views of those
who rejected psychoanalysis. But it is nevertheless
plain enough that the less you know about what other
people think and have thought, the more acceptable you
will find the claim that we all really think alike.
And to sink straight to the bottom of the barrel, we may
notice the built-in appeal of Ethical Lewisism to folks
who still ferociously dislike Darwin's monkey business.
Of course by the time one is as learned as Mr. Lewis
was, the intellectual's (or Parmenidean) temptation to
believe some fancy doctrine simply because it is so
contrary to appearances begins to enter into the
equation. Lewis elsewhere deals rather extensively in
the notion that Christojudaeanity, like quantum
mechanics, is somehow more rather than less plausible
because, after all, who'd 'a' thunk it? He is, as I
noted, at least temperamentally, a Platonizer, and
therefore fated to rub my Aristotelean fur the wrong
way. In ethics I prefer a WYSIWYG world: it looks like
there is a lot of disagreement about moral questions,
and it looks that way because there really is such
disagreement. Oddly enough.
(regress)
(egress)