Stephen R. Turley. The Abolition of Sanity. Turley Talks, 2019.

The Abolition of Sanity is basically an intelligent Cliff’s Notes (or Spark Notes) type of work on C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Lewis (1898-1963) observed that modernism—which today still has a great effect on our culture—is generating “men without chests.” In other words, people with intellect (heads) and bodily urges (stomachs), but with no moral base (chest, or heart). Turley does a nice job of summarizing this in relatively few pages. Hopefully, the book will get people to read the original Lewis work.

One illustration in both books meant a lot to this reader. Lewis cites a cotemporary textbook telling about an experience the great poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge had upon seeing a waterfall. Coleridge called it sublime and felt badly for another person who simply called it pretty.

The book Lewis and Turley quote says, in part, “We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings” (12). This dismisses something potentially uplifting to something merely mechanistic and subjective. (For what it is worth, I have read other similar misunderstandings concerning Coleridge in I. A. Richards and Emerson.)

The problem is not merely that people are missing out or that some folks appreciate nature more than others. The problem is worldview. If we are educating people to see things in a strictly mechanistic and utilitarian way, then they will be far more likely to submit to tyranny. Why? Because morality becomes merely mechanistic and utilitarian. And that leads to horrors.

I recently read something that the largest cause of death in the twentieth century was death by government. When we look at totals from Turkey, Indochina, central Africa, Germany, Russia, and China among others, far more deaths were caused by political executions and imprisonments than any other single cause. If war casualties are included, nothing comes close.

Both authors note that all cultures have had a tradition of some kind of moral code—Lewis uses the word Tao. This moral code is fairly similar across cultures, but since the so-called Enlightenment some people have tried to dismantle it. But what replaces the Tao is not utopia, but tyranny. Both books are timely today. Read Lewis if you can. For a concise interpretation, see Turley.