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Abolished?

Abolished?

Postby rumzy » April 5th, 2008, 6:24 am

After some thought over where to post this topic, I finally decided on this forum, because my question really has as much to do with current science and religion as it does with any of Lewis's works.

In the essay, "The Abolition of Man", Lewis talks about the "conquest of nature" that will eventually lead to the dehumanization or "abolition" of mankind. He turns this idea into a story in the final book of the Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. If you have read the book without reading the essay, I really recommend you read the essay. It gives details about many things that Lewis hints at in the story, and I think it is necessary for understanding exactly what Lewis had in mind when he created characters like Filostrato. The question for discussion is this: Do you think the abolition of man is a danger for us today, as Lewis perceived it to be?

I think social trends and trends in science and evolution say yes, but I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on the subject.
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Postby JRosemary » April 5th, 2008, 11:49 am

I'm glad that Lewis brought up Martin Buber's I And Thou in his essay. I don't think we have to worry about the abolition of man so much as our ability to become fully human to begin with. Until we learn to treat every other human (and even the rest of nature--or, rather, the rest of creation) as a 'Thou' instead of an 'It' we're not fully human.

Meanwhile, we've come up with plenty of myths that acknowledge just how dangerous knowledge is, especially scientific knowledge. Remember how angry Zeus and the other gods were when Prometheus stole fire--which represented not only fire itself, but the spark of intelligence and ingenuity--and gave it to humanity.

One of the prime examples of the mixed blessing of our intelligence and ingenuity is atomic power: we can use it for the greater good, by refining our knowledge of how to use it for energy, or we can destroy the world with it. Which path we choose will come down to whether or not we learn how to treat each other--and all of creation--as a 'Thou' instead of an 'It'.
Last edited by JRosemary on April 5th, 2008, 5:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Kolbitar » April 5th, 2008, 5:02 pm

Hi Jrose. I don't remember Buber urging us to treat nature as a Thou, am I wrong? Or maybe you're taking him a step further?

If you said Buber urges us to see nature as a gift from God, to see God in that gift as I might see my daughter in her gift of a stuffed animal, or drawing, which subsequently affects how I treat those gifts; that's a little different than treating nature as a person, isn't it?
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Postby JRosemary » April 5th, 2008, 5:19 pm

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Postby Kolbitar » April 5th, 2008, 9:00 pm

Jrose, I wish we could see things *in relation* to God, which is what I think Buber is saying (though I could be wrong).

I'm reminded of an experience by Raissa Maritain:

“ It happened that by a sudden intuition I experienced the reality of my own being, of the deepest, first principle that placed me outside of nothingness. It was a powerful intuition and its violence often frightened me; that intuition gave me, for the first time, knowledge of a metaphysical absolute.' Or again, at the sight of something or other - a blade of grass, a windmill - a soul may know in an instant that these things do not exist by themselves, and that God exists.” …”I was looking out of the window and thinking of nothing in particular. Suddenly a great change took place in me, as if from the perception of the senses I had passed over to an entirely inward perception. The passing trees suddenly had become much larger than themselves, they assumed a dimension prodigious for its depth. The whole forest seemed to be speaking and to speak of Another, became a forest of symbols, and seemed to have no other function than to signify the Creator."
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

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Postby postodave » April 5th, 2008, 10:56 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Re: Abolished?

Postby Kolbitar » April 5th, 2008, 11:03 pm

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

Sober Inebriation: http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/
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Postby JRosemary » April 6th, 2008, 1:21 am

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Postby JRosemary » April 6th, 2008, 1:37 am

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Postby rumzy » April 6th, 2008, 7:00 am

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Postby postodave » April 6th, 2008, 1:22 pm

Looking at that from an evolutionary point of view - there are some species where a great deal is hardwired, nearly everything is there by instinct and others where a lot more has to be learned. You can see this in the difference between the way a human being learns to walk and the way a horse learns to walk - the horse can walk within a few hours of birth where the human needs to learn. As I understand it that is because a human is born at a much earlier stage of organismic development, because if a human child were to remain in the womb until it had developed its brain to the stage where it could walk soon after birth its head would then be too large to get through the exit from the womb and the human female would need an impossibly large pelvic girdle. This means that the very fact of our increased intellect and brain size means we humans have to learn more as individuals rather than having everything pre-programmed. At that very early stage this individuation may not be a result of conscious choice but of very slight differences in the environment. Hence even before they get to the stage of making choices two twins who are genetically identical can have developed into very different individuals much more so than twin sheep or puppies would have.

Hence it is not true that according to evolution everything about an organism, especially a human organism has to be a product of natural selection in the evolutionary sense. The thing with Skinner is that he puts a great deal down to the control of the environment and his position is deterministic without being biologically deterministic. Human morals can be explained as being a cultural rather than a biological phenomena. Or they can be seen as a product of the interaction between the human organism (with its evolutionary history) and its environment, including the social environment. If seen this way I would not expect the ethics human beings acquired as a result of their social history to be radical different from the ethics acquired through divine commands since God would give commands that fitted our biology and the world created for us. I think the appendix to the Abolition of Man demonstrates the universality of ethical laws.

I think the problem then comes at the level of meta-ethics when someone, say Peter Singer, takes the theory of evolution itself as the basis for a meta-ethical framework and produces a new system of ethics rather than looking at the ethical intuitions that have evolved over the course of our history. So I'm saying that the ethical intuitions programmed into human biological and cultural evolution are largely sound. The hard questions come when there is a cultural or technological change and either our ethics need to be modified or our culture; or when a particular individual is ethically different to the majority. It is easy to recognize the sheer strangeness of psychopathy where people simply lack normal ethical intuitions but there are borderline cases when people are simply a bit less or a bit more ethically sensitive in specific areas. For example are non-deontological vegetarians (those who oppose meat eating not as a general principal but as a response to our current technological and cultural context) simply cranks or people sensitive to ethical nuances other people have missed?
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Postby rumzy » April 6th, 2008, 6:23 pm

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Postby postodave » April 6th, 2008, 9:38 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby rumzy » April 7th, 2008, 4:15 am

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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Postby postodave » April 7th, 2008, 9:32 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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