Historian RIchard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, has a fine review up at Credo of The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society (Discovery Institute Press), edited by John West.
Of the “uniformly top-notch essays” in the collection, Weikart finds the “most fascinating” the book’s final section on “Society” and scientism. He intrigues us with a hint about his own current writing project:
[B]ut perhaps this is because I’m working on a book project that intersects with Lewis’s Abolition of Man, which plays a central role in this section (my project is tentatively entitled, The Death of Humanity: Are You a Cosmic Accident?). The opening essay by James Herrick applies Lewis’s insights to today’s transhumanist movement, which aspires to help humans evolve to higher levels. Lewis’s critique of the reduction of humans to material objects is still a powerful blast to such genetic tinkering. Further, Lewis pointed out that by manipulating human nature, technocrats are reducing future humans to the objects of their experimentation. An erudite essay by M. D. Aeschliman reinforces Herrick’s conclusions by explaining the significance of Abolition of Man in combating the dehumanizing tendencies in Lewis’s time and in ours.