EKO: C.S. Lewis: The Cosmology They Kept From You
(ekolovesyou.com)
Comments (7)
sorted by:
From the article:
Which brings us to the book nobody reads.
The Abolition of Man. Published 1943. Sixty-eight pages. Three lectures. The most important thing Lewis ever wrote.
It begins with an English textbook for schoolchildren. Lewis doesn’t name it. He calls it The Green Book and calls its authors Gaius and Titius. They’ve written a grammar text that casually, in passing, demolishes the idea that values are real. A student reads that a waterfall is “sublime” and the textbook explains that this isn’t a statement about the waterfall. It’s a statement about the student’s feelings. The waterfall is just water and gravity. The sublimity is in your head.
Lewis spends sixty-eight pages explaining why this is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.
If values are just feelings, they can be reprogrammed. If beauty is just neurology, it can be engineered. If the sense that certain things are sacred is just cultural conditioning, it can be deconditioned. And the people doing the reprogramming, the engineering, the deconditioning stand outside the system. They have no values of their own, because they’ve explained all values away. They are, Lewis writes, “men without chests.” People with intellect and appetite but nothing in between. No capacity to feel what is true before the mind has time to rationalize it away.
Good article, t/u.
You only have to see how easily "they" have convinced people that the huge butts on women are attractive, and now seem to be trying to make people believe that obesity is attractive. The same could be said for tattoos also. (and socialism)
Agreed.
It’s ironic after a fashion. We still try to explain everything from within the framework of the Philosophers, Secularists and Secret Societies of the enlightenment. When it is arguably the framework and philosophies they established that ultimately lead to many of the problems causing us issues today.
Here are the CS Lewis books mentioned. You can download the pdf's.
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/cosmos/philo/AbolitionofMan.pdf
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/OutofSilentPlanet_CSL.pdf
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/Perelandra_CSL.pdf
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/HideousStrength_CSL.pdf
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/Pilgrims_Regress_CSL.pdf
DS2 thank you for posting.
I am always moved by reading EKO.
I have the substack saved to my homepage.
But this post made me realise something disturbing, for some reason that I cannot explain, I don't check regularly for EKO's latest posts.
I was unconscious to that issue.
Your post has changed that.
Thank you
The Abolition of Man: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88346