An Anthology In Natural Relations

From the Foreword

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Some time ago, the West lost its way in the order of things.

This Way was a long-known set of experiences concerning the world’s shared perception of being human. The modern mind imagines a grand diversity of interpretations of these once-given axioms. With such variance comes doubt of truth and skepticism of traditional knowledge. These, in turn, misdirect our political and social life from objective and formalized to subjective and relativized. Once-strong structures guided our being in the world, but now all that is solid melts into air.

C.S. Lewis's Abolition Of Man argued against this pluralist, subjectivized view, claiming that all humans have known some things to be universally true. This universal Way he called the natural law or the Tao. Once known to all humans, modern sentiments challenge this Way, deny it, and replace it with new, abstract ideas of theory or Right. More recently, late modernity replaces it with nothing but perceived reality.

To prove this universal Way and lead us back to it, the appendix of Lewis’ book contains an index of universally acknowledged norms among all human societies. Our present work picks up just one of the themes in his work and continues it more exhaustively in an area particularly under attack in our time: natural social relations.

584 pages