Traditional Values vs. Innovation Theme Analysis

After arguing for the existence of the “Tao,” or the objectivity of value and ethics, Lewis goes on, “Let us suppose that an Innovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greater love hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped off in order that we may get down to the ‘realistic’ or ‘basic’ ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground?” Here, Lewis cites two culturally familiar sayings—the first, from Horace, “It is sweet and seemly [to die for one’s country],” and the second from the New Testament, “Greater love hath no man than this, that [he] lay down his life for his friends.” Then, Lewis examines whether a hypothetical “Innovator”—a person who wishes to get beyond the Tao in order to build an alternative value system—can defend the idea of putting one’s life on the line for one’s country without recourse to traditional sentiments, or teachings of the “Tao.” Lewis comes to the conclusion that neither rationality nor instinct can provide the basis for such an alternate value system and therefore that even such an Innovator cannot avoid appealing to the Tao. By demonstrating that neither reason nor instinct alone can motivate action, Lewis argues that belief in traditional value systems like those that make up the Tao is indispensable, no matter how an innovator tries to find alternatives to it.

Lewis argues that pure reasoning isn’t a sufficient basis for a sustainable value system. Lewis contends that, if an Innovator tries to eradicate sentiment from his argument, he will be helpless to defend a value such as dying for one’s country: “Every appeal to pride, honour, shame, or love is excluded by hypothesis. To use these would be to return to sentiment and the Innovator’s task is, having cut all that away, to explain to men, in terms of pure reasoning, why they will be well advised to die that others may live.”

Having shorn his argument of sentiment, an Innovator has no basis to defend either dying or not dying for one’s country: “From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this.” Lewis means that bare, unadorned fact must be supported by sentiment in order to proceed to a clear course of action. In other words, why would someone choose to put his life at risk in order to preserve society, unless he believed that society was worth it? Or conversely, why would he not put his life at risk unless he believed that society isn’t worth the cost of his life? By relying on reason alone, the Innovator can never get where he wishes to go; he can never figure out how to act.

When the Innovator finds that pure reason fails, Lewis argues, the Innovator will then attempt to find a basis for an alternate value system in instinct. Lewis argues that the Innovator will reject the path of reason anyway, because “practical principles known to all men by Reason are simply the Tao [or natural law] which he has set out to supersede.” In seeking alternate grounds for commending a certain value, “he is more likely […] to hunt for some other ground even more ‘basic’ and ‘realistic’. […] This he will probably feel that he has found in Instinct.”

To an extent, instinct seems to serve the Innovator’s purposes much better than mere reason. “We have an instinctive urge to preserve our own species […] that is why scruples of justice and humanity—in fact the Tao—can be properly swept away when they conflict with our real end, the preservation of the species […] For of course sexual desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with the preservation of the species. It looks, in fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that he does not want.” The Innovator, in other words, finds justification for rejecting social norms where they seem to get in the way of instinct.

The innovator runs into difficulty, however, in that this approach gives him no basis for choosing between competing instincts. In fact, what he is doing is favoring one bit of the Tao over another, with no apparent justification. For example, duty to one’s kin “because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator’s authority to pick and choose?” Once again, according to Lewis, the Innovator who rejects the Tao is at an impasse.

According to Lewis, then, the Tao must be taken or rejected as a whole. Lewis concludes that “This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality […] is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.” Any single component of the Tao, in other words, can only be understood in relation to and in the context of the rest. Without being properly situated in this way, any bit of the Tao becomes nonsense.

When fragments of the Tao are “arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation,” innovations collapse; “the rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree.” According to Lewis, an innovator cannot reject one bit of the Tao as mere superstition without relegating all of it to the realm of superstition; similarly, he can’t elevate another portion of it above the rest without validating the whole. Ultimately, then, innovation simply isn’t sustainable against the weight and comprehensiveness of traditional morality, whether one calls it the Tao, natural law, or something else.

Finally, it is worth nothing that, by commending traditional morality, Lewis isn’t arguing that no ethical advances are possible. For an example, he argues that the Confucian saying, “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you,” was later advanced upon by the Christian teaching, “Do as you would be done by.” That is, the latter could not be advanced without acknowledging the validity of the former, which provides a basis for its own later expansion. By contrast, the ethics of a modern thinker like Nietzsche only work if one accepts that there is no basis for value judgments whatsoever. The Tao, in Lewis’s view, is enduring precisely because it contains the resources for its own creative development.