The New Humanity
On Smartphones, the Tao, and The Abolition of Man
Most sustained critiques of technology become dated and irrelevant before they have been sufficiently received and considered. A notable exception to this rule, if an unexpected one, is C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. Lewis’ book is often praised but seldom closely read. For a book heralded primarily as a “defense of objective value”, the volume is conspicuously thin on that very apologetic. Furthermore, very few notice the nuanced, timeless, and scathing critique which Lewis deploys against modern technology, which, given its placement in the book and its rhetorical force, is clearly Lewis’ driving concern.
In fact, the universality of Lewis’ insight is apparent by how readily his comments apply to the smartphone. To apply Lewis’ language to a device he could hardly have conceived, the smartphone is the ultimate tool of the “Conditioners,” the most potent technological mold by which an ascendant minority re-shapes human nature according to their fluctuating impulses and passions. The smartphone enables its creators to construct a false Tao, a virtual reality of shadow truths and their corresponding artificial desires, and an alternate set of practical principles mediating between, aimed no longer toward the flourishing of the human person traditionally conceived, but at the sensate satisfaction of the Conditioners base desires.
A brief recapitulation of Lewis’ general argument is necessary to justify such an apocalyptic claim. The Abolition of Man famously begins with some critical observations about an English grammar book. Lewis, on account of the forthcoming diatribe, leaves the real name of the book and authors anonymous, rendering them rather as The Green Book by Gaius and Titius. He writes:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgment and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'1
Lewis summarizes the speculative thrust of Gaius and Titius’ claims thus: “The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”2
For Gaius and Titius, all descriptions of reality which appear to transcend empirical fact are simply elaborate disguises for opinion, for the subjective emotional reaction of the individual. The good, true, and beautiful do not inhere in objects, but are nothing more than convenient names for diverse psychological phenomena.
Lewis contrasts these propositions with his own understanding, one which he attributes to the general consensus of all thoughtful men “until quite modern times”. He writes:
Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.3
According to Lewis, Gaius and Titius are wrong, not because they associate predicates of value with emotional states, but because they reduce these statements down to only emotions which are unrelated in themselves to the external realities which elicit them.
For Lewis, the cosmos and the parts which constitute it have intrinsic goodness, truth, and beauty, and, because of this innate value, merit certain definite responses of our interior life. This set of proper interior responses to the cosmos, this matrix of appropriate moral reactions to the nature of reality, is what Lewis calls the Tao.
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'.... It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.4
Lewis sees in the quasi-philosophical claims about language which Gaius and Titius put forward another instance of modernist “debunking,” an attempt to get underneath the accretions of sentiment, religious fancy, and unintentional linguistic obscurity. He claims that, while Gaius, Titius, and others like them wish to rid themselves of the apparently fantastical notion of intrinsic value, they still wish to retain many of the logically consequent moral practices. To the extent that Gaius and Titus wish to reject the Tao and to retain the corresponding ethical imperatives (in the context below, that of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori):
[They] must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it. If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.5
If Gaius and Titius wish to dissolve the doctrine of objective value, then they must either proceed to dissolve all moral mandates also, or they must construct an artificial system of justifications for why people ought to live as if the Tao were true. It is this latter option that concerns Lewis.
According to Lewis, modern thinkers who attempt to debunk the Tao seek for a more fundamental explanatory principle that guides moral action. He gives two examples of this search: utility and instinct. Regarding utility, Lewis writes:
Let us suppose that an Innovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greater love hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped off in order that we may get down to the 'realistic' or 'basic' ground of this value…First of all, he might say that the real value lay in the utility of such sacrifice to the community. 'Good', he might say, 'means what is useful to the community.' But of course the death of the community is not useful to the community—only the death of some of its members. What is really meant is that the death of some men is useful to other men. That is very true. But on what ground are some men being asked to die for the benefit of others? Every appeal to pride, honour, shame, or love is excluded by hypothesis.6
Attempts to ground moral action in utility alone are ultimately incoherent. In abstraction, utility appears to have real moral purchasing power. But, as Lewis demonstrates, it immediately breaks down when applied to concrete situations. Any appeal to utility as a moral standard has an inchoate appeal to sacrifice as something noble, which is in itself simply a cloaked appeal to the Tao.
Lewis finds instinct as a ground for moral action equally untenable for two reasons. First, he claims that instinct cannot arbitrate between right and wrong actions precisely because all actions are justified by the prerequisite desire to do them.
In what way does Instinct, thus conceived, help us to find 'real' values? Is it maintained that we must obey Instinct, that we cannot do otherwise? But if so, why are Green Books and the like written? Why this stream of exhortation to drive us where we cannot help going? Why such praise for those who have submitted to the inevitable?7
Secondly, Lewis points out that instincts are diverse and often contradictory. Furthermore, the dictate to “follow instinct” does not contain in itself a principle for discerning between which instincts ought to take precedence.
Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case.8
In response to the failure of both utility and instinct as basic rules of moral practice, Lewis presents the Tao again, with an emphasis on the way in which it is received by those who participate in it.
All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case…are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses. You may, since they can give no 'reason' for themselves of a kind to silence Gaius and Titius, regard them as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting 'real' or 'rational' value with sentimental value... You may, on the other hand, regard them as rational—nay as rationality itself—as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof. But then you must allow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dismissed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.9
For Lewis, there is no logic of human living beneath the facade of the Tao, no more basic principle for existing well that we can uncover through systematic doubt or analytic scrutiny. The Tao is given, self-evident, fundamental, simple, inalterable, and an indispensable constituent of reason itself. There is, for Lewis, no other possible, harmonious system of values, and he claims that all attempts to fabricate one ends in ideologies consisting “of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.”10
It is here that Lewis begins to mount his brilliant critique of modern technology. In the wake of modernity’s rejection of the Tao and its failure to produce a coherent replacement, man is left without a moral compass. It is undeniable that human persons require some guide in order to discern between mutually exclusive decisions. Yet, without a philosophically comprehensive conception of the cosmos and of the human person as an integral part of that cosmos, man must abandon his search for something by which he may be formed, and must form something himself. If no warrant can be discovered for abiding by the old moral code, then man must set out the task of erecting a new code. He must export his duty of mimesis to a techne of his own devising.
Lewis begins the final movement of his argument with some considerations on a common epithet used to describe technology—“Man’s conquest over Nature”:
Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive…Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men—by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods. What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.11
To say that technology is a victory over nature which is shared by mankind collectively is an obvious misnomer. Technology, while widely used, is owned by very few people. However. the deception is deeper still, for man is “as much the patient or subject as the possessor” of technology.12
Man is not only the patient of technology to the extent that he suffers displeasure or pain because of it—think the nuclear bomb, the hand gun, traffic jams, or digital bureaucracy. He is also the patient of technology to the extent that he is irresistibly shaped by the technology which he uses or possesses. One need only consider for a moment the ways in which our daily lives are radically transformed by the inventions of the car, the debit card, or the smartphone to see the clear truth of Lewis’ claim.
For Lewis, because Man is so irresistibly configured by every conquest over nature, the inevitable end of technological development is the intentional reconstitution of man by man. “The final stage is come,” Lewis writes, “when Man…has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.” If the Tao was that transcendent standard by which Man through participation becomes truly Man, so modern technology, in the absence of the Tao, becomes the ready substitute which reconstructs man according to the desires of those who possesses the technology.
The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race…It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.13
While this passage certainly brings to our minds contemporary debates about the ethics of genetic modification, transhumanism, and gender reassignment surgeries, I want to argue that the most potent device by which a small minority of Conditioners are intentionally recreating human nature is the smartphone. The smartphone creates the most persuasive alternate Tao, for it immediately, consistently, and alluringly presents an artificial set of values as if they were self-evident facts and thereby elicits desires ordered primarily to the benefit of those who own the technology.
There are three parts to this argument. I will show: first, that the elevation or degradation of human nature consists first and foremost in the proper functioning of his knowledge and his desire; second, that the smartphone, though it seems to present reality as such, presents reality re-formed, re-packaged, and reinterpreted; and, finally, that this false presentation of the nature of things elicits from those who use smartphones corresponding false desires which have their origin and end in the unmoored desires of the Conditioners.
Classical philosophy and the Christian tradition that received it agree that human nature is not solely or even primarily the mere state of possessing both a body and a soul. Instead, they insist that the perfection of one’s soul is necessary to become fully human. The inverse is equally true, for the state of lacking perfection is not moral neutrality, but rather to descend into the sub-human.
This conception is given classical expression by Boethius in the third book of his Consolation of Philosophy:
For you learned a little earlier that everything that exists is one, and that oneness itself is good, so it follows that everything that exists would also seem to be good. In this way, therefore, whatever falls short of the Good ceases to be. Thus it happens that evil men cease to be what they had been—though the remaining appearance of the human body shows that these men had once been humans. And so, since they turned to evil, they have also lost their human nature.14
Full participation in human nature, then, is not simply to exist as a human, but to perfect the human soul through those operations which are specially attributable to it: knowledge and love. Both knowledge and love are ultimately ordered toward that which is most intelligible and most desirable, God himself, but are approximately ordered and perfected by the created realities which reveal their Creator.
The problems with the smartphone begin to become visible, if only slightly. If God has designed man such that he is perfected by the knowledge and love of Himself, and if God mediates that knowledge and love through those things which He has made, then we ought to expect that, to the extent we are thwarted from contact with the real, we will fail to obtain perfect humanity.
The smartphone has an exceptionally deceptive mode by which it thwarts us from this encounter with true existence, and it is by giving it to us, but only on its terms. Anything you could ever wish to see, hear, and know is only a few silent taps away, presented with unsurpassed splendor—all received, however, through a particular lens, a frame which simultaneously reveals and conceals.
The reconfiguration of reality through the screen of the smartphone elicits new, inherently disordered desires. The metaphysics of this claim are important to understand. As Boethius eludes to above, all things that are, insofar as they are, are one (unity), knowable (true), and desirable (good). All things which we can come to know, we also desire to possess in some way. Therefore, to the extent that the smartphone presents to the user an artificial truth, it produces a consequent set of corresponding, artificial desires. Thus the smartphone presents, in a way Lewis could hardly have imagined, an alternate Tao.
A return to the example of the waterfall from The Green Book illustrates this point well. Recall that Coleridge endorsed the sentiment of the tourist which declared that the waterfall was sublime, but not the one which declared that the waterfall was pretty. The obvious reason for this was precisely the opposite of the one which Gaius and Titius posit; namely, that Coleridge thought that the appropriate feeling toward the waterfall was one of reverent humility and not ocular pleasure.
Imagine instead the experience of seeing the same waterfall on a smartphone. One can invent a number of plausible situations in which this might occur. Perhaps a friend sends you a picture from their recent hiking expedition. What are you likely to feel? If you are a saint, maybe you only feel the joy of one you love enjoying nature. But likely you are not a saint, and instead you feel the envy of not being present at the waterfall yourself. In the universe of the smartphone, you have “seen” the waterfall. But it has not elicited the reverent humility which it ought, but rather envy.
This is because within the universe of the smartphone, the Conditioners have invented an alternate Tao in which external realities merit emotional states other than they would elicit in reality. But what is the inner logic of this alternate Tao?
A final invocation of Coleridge’s waterfall shall suffice to illuminate this question. Suppose that instead of receiving a picture of this waterfall from your friend, you came across it in an advertisement for a travel company while on social media. Imagine then that, following the persuasion of the travel company, you were overcome with a desire to see this waterfall. You buy the ticket, take the flight, make the hike, and come to the foot of this great waterfall. And you find that you are sorely disappointed.
This is a common enough experience among tourists, but the explanation requires some digging. In a word, it is because the kind of desire for the waterfall that the social media advertisement elicits does not correspond to the kind of thing which the waterfall is. The moment in which I come to desire the waterfall through the instrument of the advertisement, the waterfall has become a product, a commodity, something whose purpose is to satisfy my desire. But to approach the waterfall with this kind of desire in itself excludes the possibility of experiencing the sublime, of feeling the reverent humility one ought to feel in the presence of a great waterfall. The waterfall will not satisfy the very thing which the waterfall seemed to elicit.
But this is because the waterfall did not elicit the desire, but rather the waterfall analogue in the Tao of the smartphone. And this false waterfall was not made to satisfy your desire, but theirs, the Creators, the Conditioners, those who own the technology and therefore possess the power to remake mankind in their own image. It is most truly in the smartphone that Man has conquered Nature, for through the smartphone Man is able to make all things profitable. Every image, every word, every sound has become a tool by which the few can render the many as nothing more than consuming machines.
But this is precisely, as Lewis pointed out, where the irony lies. For those who have most completely conquered Nature, even Human Nature, have themselves become enslaved to the ones they conquered. For they too have stepped outside the Tao, and they too have no guide to their multifarious and contradictory passions. To what shall they then turn to lead them? They turn to the same glowing idols by which they shackled the world.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 2-3.
Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 14.
Ibid, 18.
Ibid, 23.
Ibid, 31.
Ibid, 34.
Ibid, 35-36.
Ibid, 39-40.
Ibid, 44.
Ibid, 54.
Ibid, 55.
Ibid, 61-62.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Scott Goins and Barabara H. Wyman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 120.