Postmodernism: The Abolition of Man

 

We need to understand the psychology of people who seek to control everything while themselves are totally unrestrained in their own behaviour. C.S. Lewis explains this in his book the “Abolition of Man”. It was C.S. Lewis's primary thesis in that book that modern education and culture are quietly dismantling the very idea of objective moral truth—what he calls the "Tao," a universal natural law of right and wrong that cuts across all civilizations. 

He argues that when we treat values as mere subjective feelings (or "preferences") rather than real truths, we end up producing "men without chests"—people who have intellect and appetite but no moral backbone. The final twist: the very elites who push this relativism will eventually use science and technology to remake humanity itself, abolishing real human nature in the process. 

In short: reject the Tao, and you don't just lose morality—you lose the capacity to be human.

So let me map this directly onto Canadian public-sector governance frameworks:

Here is a “concise but rigorous explanation”, framed explicitly through “C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Tao” and its relevance to “Postmodern governance and Critical Theory” showing the structural consequences.

1. What Lewis means by “the Tao” (the starting point)

By “the Tao”, Lewis does “not” mean Taoism as a religion, but what he calls “objective value”: the shared moral grammar found across civilizations—natural law, traditional morality, or the belief that some things are “really” good, just, noble, or evil, regardless of preference or power. Lewis argues that reason itself depends on this moral backdrop: we cannot reason about what “ought” to be unless we already accept some values as given rather than constructed. (https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-abolition-of-man/terms/the-tao), (https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Abolition-of-Man )

When Lewis says rejecting the Tao leads to the “abolition of man,” he is not claiming people become immoral monsters overnight. He is saying something subtler and more devastating: Namely the loss of the conditions that make moral reasoning, human dignity, and even disagreement intelligible at all. (https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/abolition-of-man-according-to-angus-menuge.pdf )

2. What “rejecting the Tao” looks like in Postmodern and Critical frameworks

Postmodernism and many strands of Critical Theory are explicitly “anti-foundational”.

They reject:

*   Objective or universal moral standards

*   Stable meanings (truth as something discovered rather than constructed)

*   Appeals to “nature,” “human essence,” or “natural law”

Instead, values are treated as:

*   Products of “power relations” (Foucault)

* “Social constructions” contingent on discourse

*  Historically situated narratives with no privileged standpoint. (https://ispcjournal.org/32-5/ ), (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-349-21718-2_7.pdf )

In governance, this translates into administrative and policy frameworks that emphasize:

*   Narrative over norm

*   Lived experience over shared standards

*   Equity outcomes over principled constraints

*   Power analysis over moral evaluation. (https://polsci.institute/perspectives-public-administration/postmodern-approach-in-governance/), (https://midwest.edu/upload/07library_05-04-02thesis/Public%20Administration%20English%20Thesis%28PA%29/5_critical%20management%20studies%20and%20public%20administration%282015%29.pdf )

This is not accidental; it flows directly from Postmodern epistemology.

3. Why Lewis would say this erodes “the capacity to be human”

Lewis’s core claim is that “values are not optional add-ons to reason”. They are its precondition. Once value judgments are treated as merely subjective or political, several things follow:

a. Moral language collapses into technique

If “good” means “what advances an approved framework”, then ethics becomes “instrumental”—a matter of policy optimization, not moral truth. Governance becomes management of outcomes, not judgment of right and wrong. Lewis foresaw this as the rise of “Conditioners”: elites who shape behaviour without reference to objective standards. (https://www.studyguides.blog/abolition-of-man-summary-analysis-lewis )

b. Power replaces persuasion

In a post-Tao system, disagreement is no longer about truth but about “positionality”. Those who dissent are not “wrong” but “problematic”. This aligns closely with Postmodern governance models that treat resistance as something to be managed rather than reasoned with. (https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781040287156_A49841261/preview-9781040287156_A49841261.pdf )

c. The “chest” disappears

Lewis’s famous image of “men without chests” refers to people who can calculate (head) and desire (belly) but lack trained moral sentiment—the ability to “recognize” what is worthy of admiration or contempt. Postmodern systems often explicitly distrust such judgments as biased or oppressive, hollowing out the very faculty that makes moral agency possible. (https://samselikoff.com/writings/cs-lewis-abolition-of-man ), (https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/abolition-of-man-according-to-angus-menuge.pdf )

4. How this plays out when injected into “all facets of governance”

When Critical-Postmodern assumptions become “totalizing”—embedded in law, education, HR, public administration, and policy design—the result is not neutrality but a new orthodoxy:

* “Rules without roots”: Norms enforced without appeal to shared human goods

* “Rights without duties”: Claims severed from obligations grounded in human nature

* “Equity without limits”: No principled stopping point, because no objective telos exists

* “Inclusion without truth”: Belonging prioritized over whether beliefs correspond to reality

Lewis’s warning is that this does not free humanity from constraint; it “subjects humanity to whoever controls the framework”. The conquest of nature becomes the conquest of man by man, justified not by truth but by theory. (https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/abolition-of-man-according-to-angus-menuge.pdf), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Man )

5. The core insight, restated plainly

To reject the Tao is not merely to lose “traditional morality.” It is to deny that humans share a nature that makes moral reasoning possible. In postmodern governance, this denial manifests as systems that still command, judge, and punish—but no longer in the name of truth, only in the name of power, process, or progress.

Lewis’s claim is stark but precise: “once you deny objective value, you do not get a better kind of human—you get a manipulable one”. So how does “Postmodern governance unintentionally recreate moral absolutism under a different name”?

Below is a “conceptually rigorous explanation” of this phenomenon:

Postmodern governance unintentionally recreates moral absolutism under a different name, since it is grounded in “mainstream scholarship on Postmodernism, i.e. Foucault, Lyotard, and Habermas”, and then explicitly connected this to governance.

Here are four steps related to this connection:

1. Postmodernism’s stated aim: rejection of moral absolutes

Classical Postmodern theory explicitly rejects:

* “Objective truth”

* “Universal moral values”

* “Foundational moral authority”

As summarized by “Encyclopaedia Britannica”, Postmodernism treats reality, knowledge, and “value as constructed by discourse”, denying the existence of objective or absolute moral values. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy/Postmodernism-and-relativism )

Lyotard famously defines Postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives”—that is, toward any universal moral or historical story claiming authority over others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition )

“In theory”, this leads to moral pluralism and humility but in reality, it does the opposite.

2. The internal contradiction: critique requires normativity

Here is the pivot point. Postmodern and Critical Theories “continuously condemn”:

*   Oppression

*   Exclusion

*   Injustice

*   Harm

*   Domination

But condemnation is “not morally neutral”. To say something “ought not” exist presupposes a standard by which it is wrong.

This is what critics call “the self‑refutation or “cryptonormativity” problem”:

*   Postmodernism denies universal moral standards

*   Yet it relies on “strong moral judgments” to function at all

This paradox is widely documented by critics of Postmodernism, including political theorists and philosophers. (https://polsci.institute/understanding-political-theory/critiques-postmodernism-grand-narratives-inconsistencies/ ), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_postmodernism )

3. How power quietly replaces truth (Foucault’s contribution)

Foucault resolves the contradiction by “replacing truth with power”.

In his power/knowledge framework:

*   Truth is not discovered but “produced”

*   Norms emerge from discursive and institutional power

*   Knowledge is inseparable from governance and control (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/powerknowledge-michel-foucault ), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-knowledge )

Importantly, Foucault does “not” deny norms—he relocates them. They are no longer “true”; they are “enforced” and therefore illiberal.

Habermas explicitly criticizes Foucault for this move, arguing that Foucault smuggles in moral judgments he cannot justify—what Habermas calls “cryptonormativity”. (https://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol4.1/01_powell.html )

4. What happens when this enters governance

When Postmodern assumptions are operationalized in governance, four things happen simultaneously:

a. Absolutes return — but disguised as process

Governance frameworks assert “non‑negotiable commitments” (e.g., equity, inclusion, harm reduction), but explicitly deny grounding them in universal human goods.

They become:

*   Mandatory

*   Enforced

*   Non‑contestable

This is moral absolutism “without metaphysics”.

b. Disagreement becomes pathology

Because norms are framed as outcomes of justice rather than moral claims, dissent is reinterpreted as:

*   Ignorance

*   Bias

*   Harm

*   Resistance to progress

This follows directly from power/knowledge logic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-knowledge )

c. Moral language therefore loses appeal to reason. Debate no longer asks “Is this true or good?”  Rather it asks, “Who is harmed?” or “Which group is marginalized?”

These are “important questions”, but they are not sufficient as universal moral criteria—and they are not open to rational falsification!

d. Enforcement replaces persuasion

Without shared moral truth, governance relies on:

*   Compliance mechanisms

*   Training and re‑education

*   Performance metrics

*   Cultural enforcement

Exactly the outcome critics of postmodernism warn about. (https://www.colorado.edu/education/sites/default/files/attached-files/Beyer_Liston_Discourse_or_Moral_Action.pdf )

5. Why this is absolutism, not relativism

Moral absolutism is defined by “three features”:

1.  Claims that cannot be overridden

2.  Norms that apply regardless of individual judgment

3.  Sanctions for dissent

Postmodern governance meets all three: “it simply relocates authority from truth to power”.

As critics note, postmodernism often becomes the very “grand narrative” it sought to dismantle: a universal story about power, oppression, and legitimacy that admits no external challenge. (https://polsci.institute/understanding-political-theory/critiques-postmodernism-grand-narratives-inconsistencies/ )

6. Lewis’s insight, confirmed philosophically

C. S. Lewis predicted this exact pattern: When objective value is denied, values do not disappear—they are imposed.

Postmodern governance does not abolish morality. It “centralizes it”, bureaucratizes it, and immunizes it from critique.

Habermas—no conservative—arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle: without shared rational norms, critique collapses into power struggles dressed as ethics. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20152793 )

7. The distilled conclusion

Postmodern governance rejects moral absolutes in theory, but recreates them in practice—grounded not in truth or human nature, but in institutional power and moralized outcomes.

That is why it feels simultaneously:

*   Relativistic in philosophy

*   Absolutist in enforcement

Which is why everything in Postmodern Canada feels fake, like false and enforced conformity that denies the very foundational principles of our Western philosophical underpinnings. Postmodernism is anti-Christian to its ideological core and must be denounced and exposed for the manipulative falsehood that it is! It is indeed the manifestation of what C.S. Lewis explained in the Abolition of Man!