The seemingly modest, modernist claim that value judgments are merely subjective feelings, if followed through consistently, ends not in enlightenment but in the destruction of the very humanity that was supposed to be liberated.

In 1943, C. S. Lewis wrote a book with incredible predictive power, The Abolition of Man. He was able to predict what accelerating technology would do in the next century. And it began with his annoyance at an English textbook.

Here’s how his argument unfolded. A school textbook smuggled in a philosophical claim: that statements like “this waterfall is beautiful” tell us nothing about the waterfall but only about the speaker’s feelings. Lewis pointed out that this was teaching students that there are no objective values like truth, goodness or beauty in the world.

Lewis then went on to show that this was at odds with centuries of human thinking. Lewis draws on Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Hindu scripture, and Norse tradition to show that virtually all human cultures and traditions have believed in real, objective values. He uses the Chinese term “Tao” (or Dao) to designate this natural revelation.

Next, Lewis shows that pure fact-collecting cannot give you values of good and evil, true or false, beautiful or ugly. No set of facts about nature or human psychology—can by itself generate an “ought.” No amount of facts can tell us how life should be lived.

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