The Poison of Subjectivism

Towards the beginning of this essay, Lewis talks about something that I found interesting and that I have never really thought of before. He says, "Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, taht a community can choose its "ideology" as men choose clothes." I found this quote interesting because here he talks about the fact that we, as humans, can't make up our own morals, they have always been there and they will remain in place. Still in that same paragraph he goes on to say, "Unless the measuring rod is independant of the things measured, we can do no measuring. For some reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age with those of another: progress and decadence are alike meaningless words." I think that this set of quotes is interesting because here he talks about how we shouldn't, and can't, compare the morals we have today with the morals from long ago. It doesn't matter anymore.

Another section of this essay that I found particularly interesting was when he talked about looking into the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. He says that people of all different cultures, ethnicities, and religions, from the Babylonians to the Australian aborigines and Redskins, are similar in many ways, despite their backgrounds. He says, "...he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of opression, murder, treachery, and falsehood, the same injunctions of kindness to the aged, the young and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty." I never really thought that so many different kinds of people could be so similar to each other in so many ways. After he talks about the similarities of these people, he then goes on to say one of my favorite quotes from this essay. He says, "He may be surprised (I certainly was) to find that precepts of mercy are more frequent than precepts of justice; but he will no longer doubt that there is such a thing as the Law of Nature." This quote hit me because it just made me realize that he was talking about all of the similarities between these different cultures to show that morality must be present because most people have the same core set of moral beliefs. I had never thought of it this way before. Because these people are so similar, this shows that there must be some sort of a moral law or moral code, I had never thought of it this way before, but it makes a lot of sense to me.