Podcast brief
C.S. Lewis on the Conquest of Nature and the Abolition of Man
Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay close their series on C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man by examining what it means to conquer human nature.
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The Conquest of Nature | The Abolition of Man Part III (Episode 235)
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The brief
Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay argue that C.S. Lewis's real target in the final chapter of The Abolition of Man is not science itself but the fantasy of conquering human nature. What looks like humanity gaining power over nature, they explain, is usually some men gaining power over other men, since new capacities like flight or genetic control are held unevenly and used to shape people, including future generations who never consent.
The hosts trace this through Lewis's account of the "conditioner," a new kind of educator who no longer transmits an inherited moral order, what Lewis calls the Dao, but manufactures values in pupils from the outside. Ontiveros contrasts this with the old picture of teachers as themselves subject to the values they pass on, like birds teaching young birds to fly. Against this, the hosts test a more modest defense: that modern education just answers to shared preferences, food, art, career success, longer life, without imposing any ideology. They conclude Lewis would reject this as false neutrality. Treating value formation as an engineering problem is itself a significant choice, and a thinned-out substitute for cultivating virtues like courage and self-discipline.
The strongest thread in the discussion is Lewis's worry that explanation can slide into explaining away. Trees stop being dryads, lightning stops being Zeus, and something is lost, not just corrected. Tremblay argues this same reduction, applied to the human soul through genetics and conditioning, closes off appeals to conscience or telos, leaving no ground for motivating people toward virtue rather than mere want-satisfaction. The hosts note Lewis is not against inquiry itself, only against closing the book on a phenomenon as if mechanism were the whole story.
They end with Lewis's alternative: a "regenerate science" that explains without explaining away, treating analysis as a partial view rather than the whole of reality. His window metaphor captures this: understanding should make the world clear, not so transparent that nothing meaningful is left to see. The hosts close by noting Lewis's preference for learning virtue from parents over Plato's proposal, in the Republic, to raise children away from family under state conditioning.
Strongest arguments
Conquest of nature is really power of some men over others
8:10Lewis argues that new powers like flight or genetic control are not shared equally by humanity but wielded by some people over others, using nature as the instrument. The airplane illustrates this: some build and control access to the technology while others do not, so apparent conquest of gravity is really a new form of social power.
Eugenics and transhumanism as the same underlying move
6:35Michael Tremblay connects Lewis's argument to early twentieth century eugenics movements and to modern transhumanism, both of which treat human nature as raw material to be corrected or overcome. He argues the same impulse to treat human tendencies as a problem to conquer runs through both, even though transhumanism appears more benign.
Conditioners replace the old model of teaching
13:23Caleb Ontiveros reads Lewis's contrast between old teachers, themselves subject to the Dao and handing down inherited values like birds teaching young birds to fly, and new conditioners, who manufacture values in pupils by design. This shift from receiving values to engineering them marks, for Lewis, a fundamental change in what education does.
A seemingly neutral, preference-based education is still a controversial move
19:55The hosts weigh the objection that modern education just teaches what people already want, food, art, career success, longer life, without imposing a larger ideology. They argue Lewis would call this a thinned-out substitute for cultivating virtues like courage and self-discipline, since treating value formation as engineering is itself a significant and questionable choice, not a neutral default.
Explaining can slide into explaining away
27:05Using Lewis's examples of trees once seen as dryads and lightning once identified with Zeus, the hosts discuss how scientific explanation can strip the world of meaning rather than simply correct false belief. Tremblay argues this reduction, applied to the human soul through genetics and conditioning, closes off appeals to conscience, telos, or the Tao.
Closing the book on human nature removes the grounds for education
38:09Tremblay argues that if human nature is treated as something to explain away and conquer rather than a telos to align with, there is no longer any foundation for motivating people to be good. Without appeal to virtues like justice, courage, or temperance as part of human nature, education can only serve wants and desires, which Lewis denies counts as genuine progress.
A regenerate science would explain without explaining away
41:24Caleb Ontiveros reads Lewis's proposal for a natural philosophy that treats the abstractions of analysis as partial views rather than the whole of reality, preserving categories like conscience and courage when studying humans, minerals, and vegetables alike. Both hosts connect this to a window metaphor: science should make the world clear and visible, not so transparent that nothing meaningful remains to be seen.
Concepts discussed
- Providence The view that everything from the gods, and even fortune, is woven into an orderly, provident universe that works for the good of the whole.
Philosophers and works discussed
- C.S. Lewis
- The Abolition of Man By C.S. Lewis.
Questions this episode answers
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What does C.S. Lewis mean by the conquest of nature in The Abolition of Man?
8:10Lewis argues that apparent human power over nature, such as flight or genetic control, is really power exercised by some men over other men using nature as the instrument, because new capacities are unevenly held and used to shape others, including future generations.
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How does C.S. Lewis connect eugenics and education to the conquest of human nature?
6:35Lewis treats eugenics as a crude but clear example of trying to conquer human nature by controlling future generations, and treats modern conditioning in education as a subtler version of the same move, since conditioners manufacture values in pupils rather than handing down an inherited moral order.
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What is the difference between traditional teachers and conditioners in The Abolition of Man?
13:23Traditional teachers, in Lewis's picture, were themselves subject to the Dao and handed down values they had received, like old birds teaching young birds to fly. Conditioners instead design and install values in pupils as if values were mere natural phenomena to be engineered rather than an inherited moral order to be transmitted.
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Why does C.S. Lewis think scientific explanation can explain things away?
27:05Lewis worries that once trees are no longer seen as dryads and lightning is no longer identified with Zeus, science reduces meaningful, qualitative phenomena to bare quantity, and later generations transmit these reduced abstractions without respecting the reality that has been lost. He does not object to inquiry itself but to closing the book on a phenomenon as if mechanism fully accounts for it.
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What is C.S. Lewis's proposal for a regenerate science?
41:24Lewis imagines a natural philosophy that treats scientific abstraction as a partial view rather than the whole of reality, so that explaining a thing never means explaining it away, and that would preserve categories like conscience and courage even while studying minerals, vegetables, and human beings.
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Why does C.S. Lewis criticize Plato's proposal in the Republic to remove children from their families?
46:05Lewis is glad Plato's plan to take children from their families and raise them in isolation to instill virtue was never realized, because he thinks moral formation is better achieved by learning from parents within real familial relationships than by state conditioning in an academy.