“Certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
(C. S. Lewis in Abolition of Man)
My college roommate, the esteemed and Rev. Jim Reed, occasionally chided me along lines like this: “Randy, you are far too black and white in your thinking – there is far more gray than you are willing to allow.” Being, well, “black and white in my thinking” I didn’t like to hear that. Life tosses us around and we discover some things and hopefully grow in wisdom and now, some 20 years later I know there is alot of gray, rightly understood. But I still maintain an outlook weighted to the “black and white”. One of my apologetics for doing so is this: the world is lost in gray thinking. We scarcely believe any boundaries exist at all, much less boundaries that we could know or to which we would be – perish the thought – accountable.
All this comes to mind as I am reading the first chapter in C. S. Lewis’ excellent book Abolition of Man – a book that has proved prophetic over these last several decades. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed Abolition as number 2 in the list of top 50 books of the 20th century. And for good reason. Lewis makes the case that — (while college beginners may not have a clue about where real lines should be drawn) — the influence of gray glasses that would invade everything does nothing less than push us toward demise, toward a loss of knowing there is anything really human, toward a denial that immutable and universal values exist. (I should say before continuing that my friend Jim is unusually bright and probably sees better everything I will try to say. I just found it fun to reflect on our ‘deeply enlightening’ conversations from year’s past. 
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The point of Lewis’ first chapter is this: we establish all value statements from within. Whatever we feel about something, that is what it is, so that the estimation of a thing’s value can have as many grades as half the number of human eyes (or ears) in existence. This, he says, so far from valuing sentiment or emotion, is to leave it utterly untrained, master instead of pupil. Instead, Lewis says, the feelings are to be trained to appreciate what is good, to value what is valuable and shun what is worthy of being shunned. Foreign concepts, those, to much of the modern mind.
I am blessed to work with this book every year in a class I teach here at KMBC, and it is always a fun challenge. But the most helpful section, the one that fired my imagination for this post, is best given in a few excerpts, as follows: (all quotes from the 2001 HarperCollins ed.)
“All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.”
“St. Augustine defines virtue as…the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.”
“Aristotle said that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” (16)
This is all to say 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.” (18)
“I myself do not enjoy the society of small children. [But because I believe in objective value on the matter] I recognize this as a defect in myself.” (19)
If you know Abolition, you remember the famous lines at the end of the first chapter. He says we have made value subject to the emotions rather than vis a` vis, thus giving emotions nothing objective to guide them. And so we give persons no intrinsic basis to rise to ideas of goodness that previous generations knew were essential to being truly human. In Lewis’ words, “we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible….In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” (26)
Lewis’ point, as I understand it, is a picture of the modern problem. Values are subject to each person, with the highest possible value being what we call tolerance. And the ‘objective’ value of tolerance has not more basis to it than that which we assign it – it has not the force of universal, innate law behind it because there is no such thing. Rather, it is enforced by a legal fiction with no objective basis in reality.
This is all reflected in a troubling interaction I observed on an online forum. On the assumption that values are always developing, a person refused to deny that sometime hence – say 2000 years from now – rape may indeed be deemed good. Since goodness is subject to us, those in power will decide what good is and the terms good and evil will have no grounding in immutable reality. Lewis says that is exactly where we are headed when we deny objective values — and he was right.