Moorlock reviewed After Humanity by Michael Ward
Review of 'After Humanity' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This isn’t “about education” any more than [a:George Orwell|3706|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175614486p2/3706.jpg]’s [b:Politics and the English Language|6324725|Politics and the English Language|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1260733026s/6324725.jpg|6510269] was about grammar. It’s really a defense of traditional morality against sloppy skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.
In our moral reasoning, Lewis thinks, we must necessarily build on the values we have inherited from the attempts of our ancestors to grapple with moral issues and get closer to a framework for understanding what is valuable. People who pretend we can carelessly cast traditional morality aside and start afresh with modern, rational, scientific notions, don’t have any idea what they’re doing. It’s not that you cannot criticize or attempt to reform traditional moral values, but that you cannot claim to stand outside of them and judge them from a more exalted place those values don’t reach (or from which values can be derived or invented afresh).
It’s ridiculous to claim you’re going …
This isn’t “about education” any more than [a:George Orwell|3706|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175614486p2/3706.jpg]’s [b:Politics and the English Language|6324725|Politics and the English Language|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1260733026s/6324725.jpg|6510269] was about grammar. It’s really a defense of traditional morality against sloppy skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.
In our moral reasoning, Lewis thinks, we must necessarily build on the values we have inherited from the attempts of our ancestors to grapple with moral issues and get closer to a framework for understanding what is valuable. People who pretend we can carelessly cast traditional morality aside and start afresh with modern, rational, scientific notions, don’t have any idea what they’re doing. It’s not that you cannot criticize or attempt to reform traditional moral values, but that you cannot claim to stand outside of them and judge them from a more exalted place those values don’t reach (or from which values can be derived or invented afresh).
It’s ridiculous to claim you’re going to bravely and iconoclastically question all values, because if you’re challenged with a “why?” you’ll find you’ve got nothing left to answer with.
If you try to choose your own values, [a:Nietzsche|1938|Friedrich Nietzsche|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1291157969p2/1938.jpg]-style, you find that you have nothing left to base your choice of values on but whim and sense-gratification — your “choice” has evaporated into a slavish following of arbitrary inclinations.
Lewis borrows the word Tao to describe the objectively true right way of living that our worldly ethical systems grope toward describing. I wish he’d made up a new word or borrowed another one, as tao is confusing in this context, as it has a bunch of other baggage attached to it by the Taoists who, I think, have precedence.
