The Destruction of the Society Without Meaning
This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.
Chapter Five….
The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.
The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
It will be recalled that The Green Book taught the lesson, albeit not overtly and maybe not even consciously, that words need not have meaning, that qualities are nothing more than personal feelings, and that there need not be anything objective in either – in fact, there can be nothing objective in either.
But what does it mean to say “which accepts it”? Accepts what? Accepts the idea that words need not have meaning and accepts the idea that qualities are not more than personal feelings; accepts the idea that there are no such things as objective values.
And what does it mean to say “the destruction of society”? Can a society be destroyed if it is made up of individuals living a life of meaning? (No.) Or is a society destroyed when many living within it live meaningless lives? (Yes.) Can life have meaning if words have no meaning and if nothing is valued objectively? (No.)
In other words, a society is destroyed only when the individuals who make up that society are destroyed. And herein lies the crux of the issue – the connection of the loss of the objective values that underlie the natural law ethic to the meaning crisis that is consuming almost all of Western society.
However subjective they may be about some traditional values, Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all.
This is, of course, the contradiction in which all subjectivists sooner or later are trapped. Ultimately, to say that there are no objective values is a statement of an objective value. But why should anyone buy this? There is no reason, if all values are subjective.
The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all. …And this end must have real value in their eyes.
It is not their own objective values that are being questioned by Gaius and Titius, but yours. And such values must be embraced, not based solely on propositions about facts alone nor solely based on reason. Facts don’t exist in a vacuum (the silliness of “trust the science” has made this clear, as science can be used toward any end); reason also does not exist in a vacuum (a course of action is reasonable or not, depending on the en
Article from LewRockwell
