is the same as not to see
Areader recently took me to task for not delivering on a promise to complete recently took me to task for not delivering on a promise to complete the discussion concerning the conquest of Nature and C. S. Lewis’ prophetic warning of the dangers such conquests will inevitably bring. To that reader I must offer my sincere gratitude for reminding me of that promise for I confess it had slipped my mind.
What God intends man amends
In his reply to a letter writer concerning an opinion piece on Marquette University1, Mickey Mattox wrote:
What Mattox says serves to support and validate exactly what Lewis so prophetically wrote nearly three-quarters of a century ago:
“The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.
We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible.
Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some lucky few people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere … specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism…. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.”4
What Lewis prophesied and what Mattox has confirmed ought to be alarming to us all, but tragically it barely gets a ho-hum response or even a ‘whatever.’ Perhaps it is too late to halt the progress, to stop the madness that lives by the credo, “What God intends man amends.” Let us hope that is not the case.
Lewis concludes:
1 Mickey L. Mattox, Professor of Theology at Marquette University; Marquette’s Gender Regime, First Things, April 2016.
2 Philosophical term often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art.
3 Letters: Marquette, First Things, June/July 2016.
4 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943.
