Scraps of the Untainted Sky

"When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked,
what says 'I want' remains" (65).
C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943)

Points for Reflection

E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909), PDF

1. Do the narrator, Kuno, and Vashti appear similarly comfortable using similes, metaphors, and analogies?
2. Which of Forster's predictions about an electronic future still seem far-fetched, and which have come to pass?
3. Does technology appear to nurture equally the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual health of humanity?
4. Kuno suggests that his mother's reverence for the Machine must manifest in prayer (2). Is this bit conjecture substantiated?
5. How does Vashti react to her son's observation about a constellation?
6. Which of the Arts appear to have survived, and which have faded, in Forster's fictional future?
7. Why do few folk visit the Earth's surface in this future era?
8. What emotion appears positively correlated with the speed of society's various mechanisms?
9. What parental responsibilities does the Machine encourage?
10. Has The Machine actively encouraged either uniformity or diversity?
11. How do the new forms of transportation accommodate for the weather, natural disasters, as so on?
12. For what array of reasons does Vashti wish to avoid travel in an air-ship?  
13. What constitutes refinement in this new era?
14. Why do humans cease trying to outpace the sun (i.e. the speed of Earth’s revolutions), and what impact does this failure have on human innovation?
15. What do Vashti and others mean whenever they observe that something or other gives them “no ideas”? 
16. For what reasons have Vashti’s fellow travelers boarded the air-ship?
17. Does the narrator use language Vashti herself would consider anathema?  
18. What might Vashti mean by the words “soul” (8) and “spiritually minded” (9)?
19. To what end does this future society use selective abortion?
20. What does Kuno’s mantra of “man is the measure” appear to mean to him?
21. Does the Machine appear to be autonomous, or does it only make changes programmed into it by the Committee?
22. Do either Vashti or Kuno speak or behave in a way that suggests belief in spiritual things, or which recalls religious ritual?
23. What voices does Kuno recount hearing during his journey towards the surface? Is he delusional?
24. What does Kuno mean by his repeated claim that humanity has lost “a sense of space”?
25. When Kuno considers abruptly discontinuing his storytelling, his mother asks him to continue.  She wants to hear about what, and how does this differ from what’s in his mind?
26. Does the push to embrace second-hand and tenth-hand compilations of materials and reject first-hand ideas ring any bells in our own day and age?
27. Why might religion, broadly eliminated alongside technological advancement, reappear as the Machine gains more authority over human lives?
28. At what point does the narrator make an authoritative judgment about the events s/he relates?
29. Under what circumstances do these future folk request death?
30. Does the narrator at any point echo ideas central to Walt Whitman’s oeuvre?
31. Is the conclusion hopeful, tragic, or both?

C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943)

1. In what ways do you think your education (primary, secondary, collegiate) has shaped your values?
2. Lewis’s book responds to a particular trend in not only education but modern culture writ large.  What dystopia might come about if the ideas he identifies as problems instead became the basis for a new model of society?
3. What role do you think your emotions play in the value systems you hld dear? Do you agree with Lewis’s suggestion that attempting to force emotion and reason apart, and treating them as hostile adversaries (20-21), dismantles the very notion of moral value?
4. Lewis’s argument rests on the premise that emotional experience matters deeply, and should be nurtured and trained instead of disparaged and dismissed. Can you think of any dystopic tales that dramatize the dangers of trying to suppress and/or control an individual’s emotional experience?
5. The Abolition of Man was written and published during WWII.  Does this global conflict find its way into Lewis’s examples and rhetoric, either directly or indirectly?
6. Sigmund Freud proposed a tripartite model of human function involving the id (unconscious desires), ego (conscious decision-making), and superego (moral arbiter).  Lewis suggests another tripartite model (24-25), one involving the head (reason/logic), the belly (visceral impulse and untrained emotion), and the chest (stable sentiment & moral impulse).  Which model do you find most useful in explaining your own experience?
7. Does Lewis exaggerate when according teachers the ability to profoundly shape each student, to “cut out of his soul” (8-9) certain cognitive possibilities?
8. Does Lewis appear ambivalent about the power and importance of human emotion?
9. How might one’s starved sensibility make them more vulnerable to outside influence?
10. What does Lewis mean by the phrase “trained emotions” (24)?
11. Does Lewis believe that parental instinct and affection should trump all other concerns?
12. Do you agree that “the human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour” (44), that any value we uphold can be traced back to preexisting values (the “Tao”)—that core, practical moral principles are intuited by everyone regardless of their culture or philosophy, era or religion?
13. What problems does Lewis identify in the determination to live according to one's instincts?
14. Does Lewis consider all feeling/sentiment to be merely subjective?
15. Does Lewis contend that discrete moral systems share more features than differentiate them?
16. Does Lewis believe that our altruistic impulses can powerfully shape our behavior without the assistance of “practical reason”?
17. What qualms does Lewis have with classifying humanity as merely another part of Nature?
18. Why does Lewis conclude that there is, really, no such thing as “Man’s power over Nature”?
19. Does Lewis imagine that science which helps us shape our human descendants grants those descendants more power over themselves, or less power?
20. What does Lewis imagine will truly govern the motives of the eugenicists, or “Conditioners,” who try to predetermine humanity’s future?
21. Lewis contents that Conditioners of the sort he has described are proceeding apace in all cultures throughout the world, moving to create a “world of post-humanity” (75).  Do you see any signs of what he has described in our own culture in the twenty-first century?
22. Lewis hopes that a new, “regenerate” science might come from Science itself (76), a science which “when it explained [. . .] would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole” (79). He recognizes, though, that this might be a pipe dream, and wonders whether analytical understanding always kills what it sees in order to understand it (80).  Do you, personally, believe that scientific progress and innovation tend to, in the words of Wordsworth, “murder to dissect,” or do you eagerly anticipate where scientific progress will take us in the coming years?
23. On what various cultures’ moral traditions does Lewis draw in the Appendix when providing examples of what he calls the Tao, that “law of beneficence”?

The Abolition of Man (1943)

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu