This book, a small primer against relativism by that intellectual giant of 20th-century Christendom, yes, none other than Clive Staples Lewis, wasn't as good as I'd expected. An interesting but entirely supererogatory pair of facts about the particular copy I read are that it (a) is 60 years old and (b) belongs to Portrush Presbyterian Church: my friend Dave accidentally stole it, brought it back from Northern Ireland to Sheffield where he goes to uni with me, read it, lent it to me, and now presumably intends to return it quietly to its rightful place across the narrow sea.
The book itself is more academic and targeted than Lewis's usual nonfiction; rather than writing an uplifting and convincing Christian message to a general audience, here he seeks to resolutely sort out an important argument for a more educated audience. While he was without a doubt a formidable intellectual, I don't think this is his forté - especially given the subject matter. At the height of modernism which gave rise to post-modernism and the explosion of critical sociocultural theories that make winning arguments so much the harder, here we see him writing about the dangers of subjectivism in a compelling, but nowhere near tight enough, little mess of three essays.
His first essay concerns education, and how values of subjectivism secretly embedded in texts will yield a nefariously relativistic pull on the consciences and judgements of the educated in years to come. His second essay considers how, through the modernistic reduction of things with values to mere things for scrutiny, such a relativistic hegemony could grow and win; he frames such a process as the continuation of man's dominance over nature into man's dominance over metaphysics. His third essay laments this predicted victory, as the prevalence of relativism as an intellectual and moral habit for human thinkers would, he sees it, be 'the abolition of man', as by separating from absolute value (a set of fundamental moral truths that he refers to, interestingly, as the Tao) our own capacity for decision and analysis, we're effectively surrendering to a free-for-all, a constructivist postmodern landscape in which anything goes, which means nothing goes. In an appendix, he leaves us with a compilation of snippets of wisdom* from a variety of civilisatons round the world, that he considers to contain something of the Tao: these universal values underpinning human moral agency, thinks Lewis, are something that have been noted and prized by almost every society, and that is reflected in their great wisdom texts.
It's worth pointing out that largely, I agree with him. Objective truth does exist, modernism did seek in its quest for progress and human flourishing to prod questioningly at it, and this was reflected strongly in educational and intellectual developments. However, the breadth and simplicity of the points Lewis makes in this book reveal that he is actually just quite weak at doing analytical philosophy and very weak at writing about critical theory, so we can't expect his attempt to bring down major trends in both of them from within to be a resounding success. Even though a lot of it seems to make intuitive sense, his arguments are sloppy and even his framing and understanding of the philosophical and theoretical trends he's lambasting not nuanced enough to take seriously as a full critique. His style, which strives for openness and clarity while at the same time verging on metaphorical phrasing and depending too much on imagery and convention, doesn't help here at all. Subjectivism (not to mention its myriad offspring schools-of-thought) isn't, I don't think, the correct or best broad view we should have about morality or any sociocultural issue, but rejecting all critical and postmodernistic theories out of hand because they smell of it simply isn't an option. Reality, especially in this kind of normative realm, is incredibly horribly multifariously complex, and we need subjective viewpoints, we need a wide array of theories and responses, not only just to try to work out answers to these kinds of issues but to understand them in a helpful way at all.**
So, this is a pretty interesting read, but I'm not sure what for. For a defense of objectivism, especially regarding morality, there are others that far better engage with the real intellectual climate and may even be easier-going. For a critical discussion of modern theoretical developments in the general field, there are literally thousands of better books. Christian readers might appreciate it as an often-unseen philosophical facet of the brilliant accessible apologist, though be warned, this is nowhere near as brilliant and nowhere near as accessible as his Christian writings. I'm not sure if it's even in print anymore, but here's a link to the full text online if you want to have a read:
* Some of the implied 'wisdom' here I find a bit suspect, but that's not a new surprise: C.S. Lewis's thinking has a few tendencies that I, were he alive and predisposed to converse with 21-year-old Yorkshiremen who think they're cleverer than they are and far less intellectually intimidating, would press him on. His writings reflect a patriarchal, militaristic, patriotic tendency that sit quite at odds with my effeminate cosmopolitan pacifism. Most of the 'wisdom' he's picked seems pretty legit though, and I do appreciate his sourcing it from more places than just Leviticus and Locke.
** I was a philosophy student, can you tell?
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