Marx, Moral Responsibility, and the Cambodian Revolution

It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere “natural object” and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that his point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will he: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his dehumanized Conditioners. — C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

If one examines the main contours of twentieth century history without preconceptions, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there has been an internal progressive logic in the development of Marxist revolutionary theory and practice. The permutations Marxism has undergone have tended to make it more violent, more voluntaristic, and more “value-free.” Simultaneously, Marxism has become increasingly comprehensive in its demands upon the individual, as its self-appointed agents have sought to gain revolutionary fame by imposing a progressively more radical vision of social equality upon the atomized masses.

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Thomas M. Magstadt

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It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere “natural object” and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that his point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will he: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his dehumanized Conditioners. — C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

If one examines the main contours of twentieth century history without preconceptions, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there has been an internal progressive logic in the development of Marxist revolutionary theory and practice. The permutations Marxism has undergone have tended to make it more violent, more voluntaristic, and more “value-free.” Simultaneously, Marxism has become increasingly comprehensive in its demands upon the individual, as its self-appointed agents have sought to gain revolutionary fame by imposing a progressively more radical vision of social equality upon the atomized masses.