Our 22nd annual Weston Lecture, titled Against the Ongoing Abolition of Man, was given by Dennis Danielson.

Three quarters of a century after the publication of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, proponents of materialism and naturalism still dominate the public square. Their reductionist and nihilistic approach to morality and other things that give meaning to human life also continues to shape what our children are taught in school. There’s every reason, in face of this ongoing dominance, to defend the case that Lewis’s potent little book sketched three quarters of a century ago—a case I seek to reassert in my primer on moral realism, The Tao of Right and Wrong.

Dennis Danielson, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia, is an intellectual historian who has written about literature, religion, and the history of science. He is a past recipient of UBC’s Killam Prize for research in the humanities, and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Konrad Adenauer Research Award. He studied English Literature at Oxford and Stanford before teaching at the University of Ottawa and at UBC from 1986 to 2017. At UBC he was a pioneer member of Foundations, an interdisciplinary integrated First Year program.

His most recent book, The Tao of Right and Wrong, 2018 re-invokes C.S. Lewis’ use of the Tao in the Abolition of Man to show the transcultural ground of moral judgment, codes of ethics, and standards of right and wrong. This book is a rejection of moral nihilism, and a recognition of life-affirming moral realism founded in the Tao.

“Dennis Danielson shows how so-called ‘progressive values’ have been inculcated in young people, swamping the educational system with moral relativism–the philosophy that nothing is absolutely right or wrong, but rather that all depends on your personal preferences or values or the situation–and so abandoning the teaching of traditional wisdom consisting of long-standing, widely shared, principle-based moral truths that are of the essence of our humanness and humanity.”  Margaret Somerville

“The Tao of Right and Wrong is… a recall to the verities that inhabit the genuine, real, moral tradition. It concludes with sayings and axioms gleaned from ‘across cultures and across history’ wherein the range of sources actually underscores the universality of genuine moral wisdom.” Rex Murphy, Commentator for The National Post and formerly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

“Dennis Danielson marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s classic work The Abolition of Man by updating it for our present situation and applying it to current concerns in a skilful and thought-provoking way. Timely, deft, impressive. Read it!” Michael Ward, University of Oxford