The Western tradition affirms not just the reality of a divine order but its primacy over our choices. ‘Sustain the order, keep it in your way of life’, is above all a message to us.
If the question we face, as things change ever more rapidly, is What are we to do, an odd experience of bafflement is complicating our answer. As we see things happen that people we credited with foresight warned us of decades ago, we are startled: effects that we agreed would come seem to surprise us when they do.
This perplexity is a sign that, while we endorsed the prognoses of observers (insightful writers like C.S. Lewis), we did not believe that the calamity they warned of – that man will be abolished if the debunking of traditional values is not reversed – would ever come about. We could never picture this actually happening – perhaps in the way we do not believe there will ever be a nuclear war: the greater the horror, the more certain we are that, on both sides of the conflict, we will back away from the brink.
But if this is what explains our current bafflement at events this signals confusion. Suppose we agree (for argument’s sake) that it is true that ‘we’, all of us, are equipped to appreciate the horror of a nuclear war; it is not correspondingly true that everyone is poised to see horror in “the abolition of man”. On the contrary, it is blindingly clear today that in the eyes of countless reformers that very ideal of man is a kind of atrocity. It can’t be abolished fast enough.
Lewis did not predict the startling conditions of the 2020s, because prediction was not his affair: it was not his purpose to guess at how his words would be received by those he was writing for. Rather, he explained where the conditions we are now seeing would come from – and that they have come is surely linked in some way to that disturbing line of Yeats, “the best lack all conviction”.
Ask yourself, what has it meant that readers of Lewis have so often responded to his warning by saying ‘we’, in a particular sense. Agreeing with Lewis we said, ‘We’ – we as a society – ‘must stop breaking up the foundations on which we stand’. But we as a society cannot now (and could not even in Lewis’s day) back away from the brink, because when The Abolition of Man was written, in 1944, a major part of society was seriously dedicated to the New Man promised by the Enlightenment (quite an old dream by now). But even if this is wrong and we were not divided in 1944, in the eighty years since then that brink that Lewis warned of has been made completely invisible to the masses by the industrious activity he was pointing out: by the “Green Books” of educators, and all the analogous works of culture devised to the same end, seeding in innocent minds a new conception of reality. It may actually startle some to be reminded that Lewis’s opening sentence was,
“I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1944; New York: HarperOne, 2001), 1
Lewis’s most basic claim in The Abolition of Man was that curricula (etc.) are instruments of a way of life made possible by plowing out of its way the barrier of the Western tradition.
The issue that emerges from that misconceived use of ‘We’ might be put as follows – if, for economy’s sake, I may be so blunt. Lewis wasn’t writing to ‘us’ in the above sense; he was writing to you: he was writing not to society at all but to people like you, people who hold your convictions. (He was far too sharp to think that the functionaries of the new order he called “Gaius and Titius” could even so much as hear him.) Which means that the true question is why we have not heard him, why we have not grasped that it was and is our business, no one else’s, to educate correctly. (And Lewis would surely add that it is not too late.)
In the last thing he wrote for publication Lewis again noted that if the new culture continues on its path “our civilization will have died at the heart and will … be swept away” (C.S. Lewis, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’,” Saturday Evening Post 236 [1963], in God In the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper [London: HarperCollins, 1979], 108). To hear what he proclaimed is to understand that you are called to sustain the order at every turn of your life.
To amplify this point in the space I have left I can turn back to the civilization under threat. In The Abolition of Man Lewis lifted from Confucian China the notion of the ‘Tao’, the term he relied on for the supreme Order, “the Way which every man should tread”, “which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality” (The Abolition of Man, 18, 43). Lewis noted that this conception could be found also in the wisdom of Egypt.
In ancient Egypt the image of the Order, the kernel of civilization itself, was an ostrich feather, standing upright; the Order was personified by a goddess whose headdress was nothing but that perfectly aligned feather. Egyptians called the divine order Ma’at, “a concept so fundamental to Egyptian culture,” writes Egyptologist Ogden Goelet,
that a thorough description could easily consume this entire paper. In short, Ma’at was a principle roughly akin to the Tao, a central guiding principle of fairness, measure, and balance in all things.
Ogden Goelet, “Memphis and Thebes: Disaster and Renewal in Ancient Egyptian Consciousness,” The Classical World 97:1 (2003), 19
Another scholar characterizes it as “the rightness of things,” meaning “rightness in the spiritual and moral sense in three realms: the Divine, the natural, and the social.” He finds the word Ma’at to be derived from a term for “straightness, evenness, levelness, correctness” (versus crookedness, incorrectness, etc.)
Maulana Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10, 6
That is to say, the Order could be disturbed. But here is the point: it was represented by a feather: it could easily be disturbed!
Another writer nicely sums up the second aspect of Ma’at, which follows from this very sensitivity.
It is Ma’at that regulates the seasons, the movements of the stars, the inundation of the Nile, the cycle of days and nights…. So Ma’at permeates the whole universe, but it’s not something that just ‘is’, it’s something that needs to be maintained and it’s in that context that it affects the lives of humanity.
Margaret Lucy Patterson, “The Way Things Ought To Be,” Tales From the Two Lands.org (1 June 2020)
So there were two sides to Ma’at: a divine condition of stability (that balance always presented to us in the image of the goddess), but also the achievement of this state, which lay in the hands of the people of Egypt.
That is, the order that was meant to reign in Egypt was placed in the hands of Egyptians. “Ma’at was the divine gift of order,” writes Goelet, “which all Egyptians were charged with defending against the unrelenting efforts of the disruptive forces of Isfet, … disorder” (20).
We are not the first to complain that “the old social order has been overturned,” writes Goelet; that was the prime lament of ancient Egyptians, for whom the “paradigm for social and political disaster” was the era that followed the slow collapse of the Old Kingdom, triggered from within. Before Egypt rose again (and it was reborn) it suffered internal collapse. When the poets wrote, “gone is what yesterday has seen” they were writing about Egyptians who had let the ways slide. Egypt did not regard societal decay “as the natural course of events: it arose from neglect,” writes Goelet (24).
Temples do not rise by themselves, rebels do not suddenly put aside their grievances, and order – Ma’at – does not evolve naturally from chaos.
Goelet, 23
Twenty-first century Christians have forgotten what Egyptians once knew – it is the eighty-year-old message in Lewis’s discussion of the Tao: not simply that the moral law is objective (reigns over all to be honoured by all) but that it in fact governs the faithful. When an ancient Egyptian said, “Speak Ma’at (truth), let it cling to your speech” (The Sebait of Pahebhor, cited by Karenga, 130), the call was to speak and to act: to say ‘Yes’ to (in word and deed) all that ‘maintains the order’ in Egyptian society. The call was to be an Egyptian, letting what truly governs Egypt prevail in your own life. To complain that the society in rebellion will not help you would be asinine.
Ma’at shines on us like the sun, said Egyptians: “Speak Ma’at” to your children; teach it in their schools, so that their lives might fit reality.
I am certain that Lewis would say that it is not too late simply because it is never too late to be what you are, to be a mirror and sustainer of the Order in every way that is up to you.
Edward Tingley
