The objective nature of things that the human race calls Normal

The Normal and the Perverse


By Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis distinguishes between two statements that illustrate an important moral distinction. To say in response to a waterfall “This is sublime” does not have the same meaning as “I have sublime feelings.” Likewise, to state “Children are delightful” or “Old men are venerable” does not carry the same weight of meaning as “I enjoy children” or “I revere old men”. Lewis argues that the emotional reaction or psychological state of the person expressing his feelings does not determine the sublimity of the waterfall, the charm of children, or the venerability of the elderly. These qualities already reside in the nature of the things as intrinsic and given. They are objectively real, not dependent on the subjective responses to them. Lewis calls the proper response to waterfalls, children, and the elderly “ordinate affections,” “just sentiments,” or proper natural stock responses—like seeking medical help for the wounded or offering food to the hungry. Lewis explains that men who lack these natural human reactions to the objective reality of waterfalls, children, the old, the suffering, and the hungry are “Men without Chests”—without human hearts, moral sentiments, or magnanimous souls. Without this ability to distinguish between the objective and the subjective, the idea of the Normal loses its measure as a standard for judgment.

In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength Mark Studdock undergoes an indoctrination into the perverse called “a systematic training in objectivity” that is compared to “killing a nerve”. As Frost, one of the influential members of the intelligentsia, explains, the acquisition of the higher knowledge of the elite demands that the novices acquire a new sensibility: “That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, aesthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.” Frost leads Studdock into a room designed for a committee meeting, a stark place with no windows and no fireplace. Abnormally high and claustrophobically narrow, the room is deliberately “ill-proportioned”, just slightly skewed so as not to be strange. Studdock then notices a door that also appears slightly odd but not too distorted: “The point of the arch was not in the center: the whole thing was lop-sided.” Then, Studdock observes a number of random black spots on the ceiling that “hover on the verge of regularity”, suggesting some design or order “and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused.”

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