It is eighty years since C. S. Lewis delivered the lectures that were eventually to be published as his remarkable book
The Abolition of Man
. I place it in the same category as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Demons
, Wilhelm Reich’s
The Sexual Revolution
, and Philip Rieff’s
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
: volumes whose authors could not possibly have known just how prophetically accurate their analysis of human life would prove to be. And all of them also share something else: At the core of their arguments, the point of real contention is the question of what it means to be a human being. Lewis pinpointed this as the key issue in the 1940s. In 2023, it is still the key question, only now it is far more complicated and of far more immediate political significance than Lewis could ever have anticipated.