Latest / Reformed Thinking / The Law of Human Nature | C. S. Lewis

Transcript

The Law of Human Nature | C. S. Lewis · Reformed Thinking

0:00
Welcome to reform thinking. It's good to be here.
0:02
Today we're doing a deep dive into some foundational thinking
0:05
from CS Lewis. We're not even getting into the
0:08
big theological questions yet. No, not at all.
0:10
This is about the bedrock, the logical starting point he
0:13
establishes before anything else.
0:15
That's right. We've been going through his
0:17
notes and some early writings on, well, on morality and human
0:21
behavior. Specifically, his whole argument
0:24
for a universal sort of built in standard of conduct, the thing
0:28
he calls the law of human nature.
0:30
And our mission for this discussion is pretty clear.
0:33
We want to really unpack his argument, which he says rests on
0:37
2 observable facts about all of us.
0:39
Right. And it leads to the central
0:41
paradox that we want you, the listener, to really grapple
0:44
with. Which is if we all instinctively
0:47
know the difference between right and wrong, if this law is
0:51
universal. Then why do we break it all the
0:53
time? And maybe even more curiously,
0:56
why do we immediately, almost automatically, come up with
0:59
excuses when we do? Yeah, that excuse making is a
1:01
huge part of it. So Lewis basically says these
1:04
two facts, one, that the more law exists, and two, that we all
1:09
fail to keep it, are the absolute starting point for any
1:12
clear thinking about ourselves. You can't skip them, so we'll
1:15
spend a good bit of time just establishing the evidence for
1:18
the law's existence. And then we'll get into the,
1:21
let's say, the more personally challenging part, analyzing what
1:25
it means that we all fail to live up to it.
1:27
Sounds like a plan. OK, so let's start with the
1:29
basics, just with the words themselves.
1:32
Because when Lewis says law of nature, he's not using that
1:35
phrase the way a modern scientist would.
1:37
No, and that's a critical point to get straight from the outset.
1:41
It causes a ton of confusion. The meaning has completely
1:45
shifted over the centuries. So it's a mistake to hear that
1:47
phrase and think he's talking about, I don't know, physics.
1:50
Exactly. We hear law of nature and we
1:52
immediately think of gravity or heredity or the laws of
1:56
chemistry, things you'd study in a lab.
1:58
Things that describe how the physical world has to work.
2:00
Precisely. But older thinkers, when they
2:03
use that exact same phrase, they meant something very specific.
2:08
OK, we're talking about the law of right and wrong.
2:09
Yes, a moral law that they believed applied only to human
2:13
beings. That's why they sometimes called
2:15
it the law of human nature, just to be extra clear.
2:18
So you have two completely different ideas using the same
2:20
label. The modern 1 is about what
2:22
things do right. Lewis is very clear on this.
2:26
When a scientist studies a stone or a star, they're just
2:29
describing its behavior. The law of gravitation is simply
2:32
a summary of what a stone does. It doesn't choose to obey
2:35
gravity of. Course not.
2:37
It can't choose to disobey it either.
2:39
The law is just a description of its necessary actions.
2:42
And this is where the human situation becomes so, so strange
2:45
and unique, right? Because Lewis says we're living
2:48
under multiple sets of laws at the same time.
2:50
He lays it out really clearly at first.
2:52
Just think of yourself as a physical object, a body.
2:55
OK, so in that sense I'm no different from a stone or a
2:58
planet. Not at all.
2:59
As a physical body, you are completely subject to physical
3:02
laws. You get dropped, you fall.
3:04
End of story. I can't just decide to opt out
3:07
of gravity for a minute. You must obey it.
3:08
It's a necessity. It just defines how the physical
3:11
world works. OK.
3:12
So that's layer one physical law.
3:14
Then there's layer 2. Think of yourself as a
3:16
biological Organism. Like an animal or a plant?
3:19
Exactly. This puts you under all the
3:21
biological laws, things like growth, aging, metabolism, the
3:25
need for oxygen. And again, I don't have a choice
3:28
in those matters. I can't just decide not to age
3:31
or to stop needing food. You can't.
3:33
You're not free to disregard those biological rules.
3:35
You are bound by them just like a tree is.
3:38
But then Lewis says there's this third law, a law that doesn't
3:41
apply to stones or trees or animals, only to us.
3:45
The moral law, the law of human nature, and this one is
3:48
fundamentally different from the other two because because this
3:51
third law doesn't describe how we do behave, it describes how
3:56
we ought to behave. It's prescriptive, not
3:59
descriptive. That's the perfect way to put
4:01
it. And because of that, it's the
4:03
one law in the entire universe that a human being is free to
4:06
either obey or disobey. And that single difference, the
4:11
ought versus the must, has massive implication.
4:15
It's everything. Think about it, If the moral law
4:17
was just a description of what humans do, then whatever we did
4:21
would by definition be good. There be no such thing as a
4:24
moral failure. None at all.
4:27
The whole idea of a moral law only makes sense if it's
4:29
possible to break it. It's very existence presupposes
4:33
the freedom to fail. Which is so unlike the laws of
4:36
physics. If physics were about what ought
4:39
to happen, the universe would be in a constant state of chaos,
4:42
with things choosing not to obey.
4:44
Right. But rocks don't have a choice.
4:46
The sun rises because it must. But a man, well, a man is
4:49
supposed to act with justice because he ought.
4:52
The pressure we feel from it is different.
4:53
It's not a physical force pushing us, it's something else.
4:56
It's an obligation, a command that we can feel, we can
5:00
recognize, but we are absolutely free to ignore.
5:03
Which creates this tension inside us, doesn't it?
5:05
Where are these composite creatures Are bodies are just
5:08
machines that have to follow the rules of physics?
5:10
Totally mechanical in that sense.
5:12
But our moral self, our conscience, whatever you want to
5:16
call it, that part has the freedom to choose, to break a
5:20
promise, to lie, to be selfish. And that failure isn't just a
5:24
bug in the system, it's the exercise of a unique capacity
5:28
that only we seem to have. So to sum up this first point,
5:31
Lewis is setting a baseline. The moral law isn't just an
5:34
observation of how people behave.
5:36
It's a standard that exists apart from our behavior, a
5:40
standard that actually judges it.
5:42
And if you can grasp that difference, the laws we can't
5:45
break versus the one moral law we break all the time, then
5:48
you've got the first piece of his argument locked in.
5:50
OK, so if this law of human nature is real, how do we prove
5:54
it? I mean, how do we know it's not
5:56
just something our parents taught us?
5:57
Well, this is where Lewis's argument gets so practical and
6:01
honestly so compelling. He doesn't start with some
6:03
abstract philosophy. No, he starts with something
6:05
incredibly common. The most common thing in the
6:07
world, People quarreling, arguing.
6:10
He's such a keen observer of just of people, he asks us to
6:15
just stop and think about what's actually happening when 2 humans
6:18
argue. Because it's completely
6:19
different from when 2 animals fight.
6:21
Right. Animals fight over food or
6:24
territory or dominance. It's about instinct.
6:27
It's a clash of wills or strength.
6:29
The stronger one wins and that's the end of it.
6:31
The squirrel doesn't try to convince the other squirrel that
6:33
it had a moral right to the acorn.
6:35
But that's exactly what we do. When you and I quarrel, we
6:39
aren't just saying I don't like what you did.
6:41
No, that's not it at all. We are trying to show the other
6:45
person that they are objectively in the wrong.
6:47
And that, for Lewis, is the absolute giveaway.
6:51
It's the smoking gun. The very second you try to argue
6:54
that someone is wrong, you are appealing to a standard that you
6:58
assume you both share. Without that shared rule book,
7:01
you could fight, but you couldn't really quarrel, not in
7:04
the human sense. There'd be no point in trying to
7:05
prove you're right. It's like arguing about a foul
7:08
in a game of soccer. The argument only makes sense if
7:11
everybody on the field agrees on the rules of soccer to begin
7:14
with. If the rules were just whatever
7:16
you felt like they were, arguing about, fairness would be absurd.
7:19
And yet we argue about fairness constantly, every single day.
7:24
Lewis then points to all the little phrases we use in these
7:27
arguments, phrases that just assume the other person knows
7:30
the rules. They're so common we don't even
7:32
notice them. Think about how often you hear
7:33
someone say how would you like it if anyone did that to you?
7:36
It's an appeal to reciprocity, the Golden Rule.
7:40
And it's not just a complaint, it's an appeal to a principle.
7:43
You expect the other person to immediately get why that's
7:46
unfair. You don't have to explain the
7:48
underlying logic. Well, what about hey, that's my
7:50
seat, I was here first. Right.
7:52
That's an appeal to a basic rule of Fair play and precedence.
7:56
It assumes there's a standard beyond just might makes, right?
7:59
I see it with kids all the time. Give me a bit of your orange.
8:01
I give you a bit of mine. That's a tiny, perfect example
8:05
of a social contract, an understanding of debt and
8:08
exchange. It's incredibly sophisticated
8:11
when you think about it. And maybe the biggest one is the
8:13
appeal to a promise. Oh.
8:14
Absolutely. Come on, you promised.
8:16
That appeal doesn't rest on anything physical.
8:19
It's not a legal document. It rests entirely on the shared
8:23
moral understanding that a promise creates an obligation.
8:27
And you expect that obligation to bind the other person even if
8:32
it's not convenient for them anymore?
8:34
OK, so that's the accuser side. But then Lewis takes it a step
8:37
further and this is the really clever part.
8:40
He looks at the person being accused.
8:42
Yes. How does that person respond
8:44
when you say you broke your promise?
8:46
What's the one thing they almost never say?
8:48
They never ever say to hell with your standard or what is this
8:53
promise you speak of? It has no meaning to me.
8:55
If they really believed morality was just a personal preference,
8:58
like your taste in music, that would be the only logical
9:01
response. I don't share your preference
9:03
for promise keeping. But that's not what happens.
9:05
Instead, they immediately start playing the game.
9:08
They engage with the law. They start making excuses.
9:10
Exactly. They try to argue that what they
9:12
did wasn't really a violation of the standard.
9:15
Or they'll say there was some special reasons, some
9:18
extenuating circumstance. So they'll say, I know I
9:21
promised, but something came up that I couldn't have predicted.
9:23
Or yes, I know I gave you a bit of my orange yesterday, but that
9:27
was different because then you had plenty of your own food.
9:29
They're trying to find a loophole in the rulebook.
9:32
And that very attempt to find a loophole is the most powerful
9:35
proof that they believe the rulebook is real.
9:38
You wouldn't bother trying to find a loophole in a rule you
9:40
didn't believe existed in the first place.
9:42
Why would you work so hard to prove your indecent behavior
9:45
wasn't really indecent if you didn't deep down believe in the
9:49
standard of decent behavior? It's a tacit admission.
9:52
Completely. The act of making an excuse
9:55
shows that both people in the quarrel are operating inside the
9:58
same moral framework. The law is so real that even the
10:03
person breaking it feels compelled to pay respect to it
10:06
by explaining why this one time shouldn't count.
10:10
That need to seem like you're not in the wrong, it just
10:13
reveals how deeply this standard is embedded in us.
10:17
It's not just learned, it feels like it's part of our source
10:19
code. That's a good way to put it.
10:20
It presses on us from the inside.
10:22
OK, but this is where the big objection always comes in.
10:26
People say, sure, maybe people in my neighborhood agree on the
10:28
rules, but what about other cultures?
10:30
What about other times in history?
10:31
The relativism argument. The idea that morality is just a
10:35
local custom, like how you dress or what side of the road you
10:38
drive on. And critics will say different
10:41
civilizations have had completely different morality,
10:44
so there's no such thing as a universal law.
10:47
And Lewis meets this objection head on.
10:49
He fully concedes that customs and the way rules are applied
10:54
can look wildly different. Of course they would.
10:57
Different circumstances are going to lead to different
10:59
specific rules. But he insists that if you look
11:01
past the surface level differences, the underlying
11:04
moral structure is incredibly consistent.
11:07
Shockingly so. The key is not to confuse a
11:10
difference in application with a difference in the actual core
11:13
principle. Exactly, he says.
11:15
If you actually go and read the moral teachings from ancient
11:18
Egypt or Babylon or the Hindus or the Chinese or the Greeks.
11:22
What you find isn't some bizarre alien morality.
11:25
No, what stands out, what's truly striking, are the
11:29
similarities to our own, the echoes of the same fundamental
11:33
law. We tend to fixate on the weird
11:35
stuff, you know, the specific rituals or marriage customs that
11:39
seem strange to us. When we miss the forest for the
11:42
trees, we miss the fact that no society in human history has
11:46
ever held up treachery as a noble virtue.
11:49
No culture has ever said that cowardice in the face of danger
11:53
is the highest good. It's just unthinkable.
11:56
And Lewis pushes this with a really powerful thought
11:58
experiment. He says, OK, try.
12:01
Try to genuinely imagine a country that has a truly
12:04
opposite morality. Not just slightly different, but
12:07
the complete reverse. Right.
12:09
Try to picture a place where a soldier is admired for running
12:12
away in battle, or where a man is praised and honored for
12:15
betraying the people who have been kindest to him.
12:18
It's impossible. You can't actually make it work
12:20
in your head. Lewis says it's as impossible as
12:22
trying to imagine a country where 2 + 2 makes 5.
12:25
It breaks the basic logic of reality.
12:28
And why is it impossible? Is it just a failure of our
12:30
imagination? No, it's because those core
12:32
principles, things like fairness, loyalty, courage,
12:37
basic self sacrifice, they aren't just nice ideas, they're
12:41
the absolute minimum requirements for any society to
12:44
even exist. It's the operating system for
12:46
human life. A.
12:47
Community that was built on a foundation of everyone betraying
12:50
everyone else would just dissolve.
12:53
It would collapse in on itself in 5 minutes.
12:55
So the moral law isn't arbitrary, it's necessary.
12:58
Let's just dig into a couple of specific examples he uses.
13:02
Take selfishness. OK, now have people differed on
13:05
who you should be unselfish to? Absolutely.
13:07
Sure, some cultures might say your duty is only to your
13:09
immediate family. Others might say it's to your
13:12
whole tribe or your nation. And ideally today we'd say it
13:15
should extend to all of humanity.
13:16
So the scope, the circle of obligation, that has definitely
13:19
varied, but the core principle has been absolute.
13:23
Every culture has agreed that you ought not to put yourself
13:25
first. Selfishness, pure and simple,
13:28
has never been an admired trait. Nobody builds a statue to the
13:32
man who hoarded all the food while his neighbor starved.
13:35
Never. The principle that self-interest
13:38
has to be checked by duty to others.
13:40
That's ironclad. It's universal.
13:43
And he says the same pattern holds for something like sexual
13:46
morality. Right marriage customs have been
13:48
all over the map. One wife, 4 wives, all sorts of
13:51
different arrangements throughout history.
13:53
The specific rules change. But the underlying idea is
13:57
always there. The idea that your impulses have
14:00
to be constrained by some kind of rule or contract.
14:04
No society has ever existed where the rule was.
14:06
Just have any person you want anytime you want.
14:09
There's always been a sense that restraint is a necessary part of
14:12
a functioning society. So if morality were really just
14:15
a matter of taste, like your favorite food, you expect to
14:19
find some cultures that, I don't know, celebrated random cruelty,
14:22
you would. But we don't.
14:24
And the fact that we can't even coherently imagine a successful
14:27
society built on those principles tells you that this
14:29
law is objective. It's real.
14:31
It's not a preference, it's a feature of our nature.
14:34
The differences are more like dialects of the same language.
14:37
That's a great analogy. The accents change, but the
14:40
grammar, the deep structure of fairness and justice is spoken
14:44
everywhere. OK, so even with all that
14:46
evidence, the quarreling, the universality, you still have
14:50
people who will say Nope, it's all an illusion, right and
14:54
wrong, or just fictions? We made-up the moral skeptic,
14:58
right? The person who, intellectually
15:00
at least, denies the whole thing and.
15:02
Lewis has this brilliant psychological insight into that
15:05
position. He says that people can actually
15:07
live that way. They can hold it as a theory in
15:10
their heads, but they contradict it with their own behavior the
15:13
moment they feel they've been treated unjustly.
15:15
It's a predictable pattern. You find someone who says
15:17
there's no real moral law and all you have to do is wait.
15:20
Just wait for someone to cut them in line or steal their
15:23
parking spot or break a promise to them.
15:25
And their whole intellectual theory just evaporates.
15:27
Instantly think about the person who tells you promises are just
15:30
words. Morality is a social construct.
15:33
Fine, but then later you break a promise you made to him.
15:36
What's his first reaction? It's outrage.
15:39
Hey, that's not fair. You said you would do that for
15:42
me. He's appealing to the very
15:44
standard of fairness that he just claimed doesn't exist.
15:47
He's just confessed the whole thing.
15:49
The gut level feeling of being wronged completely overrides the
15:53
sophisticated theory he was holding a minute ago.
15:55
And that reaction is almost like a reflex.
15:58
It's not a calculated argument. It's the law bubbling up from
16:02
underneath all the intellectual layers.
16:04
You can't argue away the feeling of injustice.
16:06
It's too real. And Lewis points out this isn't
16:09
just about individuals. You see the same contradiction
16:11
happen with nations. Oh, all the time.
16:14
A powerful nation might act as if international treaties are
16:17
meaningless. You know, we only follow them
16:19
when it's in our self-interest. Moralities for the weak, that
16:22
kind of argument. But then, as Lewis puts it, they
16:25
always spoil their case. When they go to break a treaty,
16:28
they'll start making moral arguments.
16:30
They'll say the treaty was unfair to begin with, or that
16:33
the other side was acting unjustly so we don't have to
16:35
follow it anymore. And the moment they use a word
16:38
like unfair, they've given the game away.
16:41
Because if morality is meaningless and it's all just
16:44
about power, then the concept of a fair treaty makes no sense.
16:49
It's a meaningless category. Why would you appeal to it?
16:52
It's what Lewis calls letting the cat out of the bag.
16:54
I love that phrase. It shows that no matter what we
16:56
profess, no matter what our official philosophy is, deep
17:00
down we know the law of nature is real.
17:02
We know it just like everyone else.
17:04
The sting of being wrong is the proof.
17:06
It is, and that leads Lewis to his final conclusion on this
17:10
point. Right and wrong are not just
17:13
matters of opinion or taste. They're objective.
17:15
They are real. He compares them to the
17:17
multiplication table. People can get their sums wrong.
17:19
Sure, we can miss apply the rule, but the rule itself exists
17:23
independently of our opinions about it.
17:26
So. This law isn't something
17:27
humanity invented, it's something we discovered, or
17:31
maybe something that was revealed to us.
17:33
And it's something we consistently fail to live up to.
17:36
Which is the perfect pivot to the second-half of his argument?
17:38
So just to recap, we've spent all this time building the case
17:42
for what Lewis calls his first foundational fact.
17:44
Fact one all human beings everywhere have this idea that
17:50
they ought to behave in a certain way.
17:52
This law is pressing on us and we can't get rid of it.
17:54
The evidence from our own arguments and from history is
17:57
just overwhelming. But now we have to turn to the
18:00
second fact. And this is this is the hard
18:02
one. This is where it shifts from
18:04
being an observation about society to a really personal
18:07
self-assessment. Fact 2 is very simple and very
18:10
blunt. Lewis's They do not in fact
18:13
behave in that way. They know the law of nature.
18:16
They break it. And he's so careful to say this
18:18
isn't him lecturing from on high.
18:20
He's not trying to moralize. He's just stating what he sees
18:23
as a universal, observable fact about the human condition.
18:27
A shared failure. He puts himself right in the
18:29
middle of it, he says. None of us are really keeping
18:31
the law of nature. Just think how strange that is.
18:34
If we were talking about any other law, like a physical law,
18:37
this would be total nonsense. It would be if stones only
18:40
obeyed gravity sometimes, or if water decided to flow uphill on
18:43
Tuesdays. The entire universe would be
18:45
incoherent. But with the moral law, this one
18:49
special law for humans, consistent failure is not the
18:52
exception, it's the rule. Every single one of us has
18:55
failed, probably in the last 24 hours, to live up to the
18:59
standard of behavior we expect from other people.
19:02
We know what it means to be perfectly patient, but we get
19:04
annoyed in traffic. We know what perfect honesty is,
19:08
but we tell a little white lie to avoid an awkward
19:10
conversation. And Lewis says the reason we
19:12
have trouble seeing this clearly in ourselves is because our
19:15
conscience is a funny thing. It remembers the wrongs done to
19:19
us with crystal clarity. Oh yeah, for years.
19:22
But our own failures, our own moments of selfishness or
19:25
impatience, they get fuzzy. We forget them almost
19:28
immediately. So he drags it out of the
19:30
abstract. He uses these very small, very
19:34
mundane, very relatable examples.
19:36
This isn't about grand cinematic acts of evil.
19:39
It's about the little stuff. Right.
19:41
Think about being unfair to your kids, or your spouse, or someone
19:44
who works for you. You know you are sharp, You know
19:46
you are impatient. But what's the first thought
19:48
that pops into your head? It's not.
19:50
I am a bad person who failed morally.
19:52
No, it's well, I was very tired. The excuse is immediate.
19:57
The tiredness and external physical state becomes the
20:00
reason. Not my own lack of virtue.
20:02
Or his example of the slightly shady business about the money.
20:07
I love that phrase, it's so perfectly British and
20:09
understated. It's the little corner you cut
20:12
on your taxes or the expense you fudge on a report and we tell
20:16
ourselves we only did it because we were very hard up at that
20:19
moment. Again, the external
20:21
circumstance, the financial pressure gets the blame.
20:24
It wasn't a failure of my character, it was a necessity
20:27
forced on me by my situation. And breaking a promise.
20:30
We all do it. We agree to help a friend move
20:33
or volunteer for something at church and then we don't.
20:36
Why? Because we got frightfully busy
20:38
and we convince ourselves that if we'd known how busy we were
20:41
going to be, we never would have made the promise in the first
20:43
place. He also talks about how we
20:45
behave with our own families. We excuse our bad moods by
20:48
saying how irritating they were being.
20:50
We shift the blame directly onto the person we wronged.
20:53
Their behavior caused my bad reaction, so it's not really my
20:56
fault. When you put it all together
20:57
like that, it paints a pretty stark picture of the human
21:00
predicament. It does.
21:02
We have this internal compass that points towards goodness,
21:05
towards honesty, fairness, selflessness.
21:08
We know which way N is. And yet we are fundamentally,
21:11
consistently unable to walk in that direction for very long.
21:14
And that gap, that constant universal gap between the law we
21:18
know and the life we live, that is Lewis's second inescapable
21:22
fact. If you accept his premises, and
21:25
they are pretty hard to argue with based on our own
21:28
experience, it leaves us all in a state of of moral debt.
21:32
We're creatures who live by a rule book that we both affirm
21:35
and violate every single day. Which leads to the next logical.
21:38
Question, right. So we've established that we
21:40
know the law and we break the law.
21:42
So why the excuses? Why are we so compelled to
21:45
justify ourselves? If the law was just an optional
21:48
guideline, you could just shrug and say, yeah, I broke it, So
21:50
what? I did what I wanted to do, but
21:52
we don't do that. No, we feel this immediate need
21:55
to rationalize. And Lewis says that need for an
21:58
excuse comes directly from the pressure of the law itself.
22:02
He says the law is pressing on us so strongly that we cannot
22:06
bear to face the fact that we are breaking it.
22:08
Our conscience is like this internal prosecutor, and the
22:11
moment it brings a charge against us, our mind scrambles
22:15
to mount a defense. The excuse is the defense.
22:18
Its whole job is to perform a kind of psychological damage
22:21
control. To shift the responsibility away
22:24
from me, the person who made a choice.
22:26
Exactly. When you say you were tired or
22:28
worried or hungry, you're trying to turn a moral failure, which
22:32
is a failure of will, into a mechanical failure, a failure of
22:36
the body if. I snap at you because I chose to
22:38
be unkind. I'm guilty.
22:39
But if I snap at you because my blood sugar was low and I was
22:42
physically tired. And the blame shifts.
22:44
I wasn't being bad. I was just a malfunctioning
22:46
Organism. It was involuntary.
22:48
It's. A kind of self deception really,
22:50
and we are very, very good at. It we're much better at
22:52
accepting our own excuses than we are at accepting them from
22:55
other people. Oh for sure, when my Co worker
22:58
breaks a promise because he was too busy I think that's a pretty
23:02
lame excuse, but when I do it my busyness feels like a completely
23:07
valid reason. And this brings us back to the
23:09
great paradox that Lewis points out.
23:11
The very act of making an excuse is one more proof of how deeply
23:17
we believe in the law of nature. It's so ironic.
23:20
It is if you were a true nihilist, If you really believed
23:23
decent behavior was just an arbitrary rule, you would feel 0
23:27
need to explain away your indecent behavior.
23:30
You just own it. Because in a universe with no
23:32
moral law, there's no such thing as indecent behavior.
23:35
There's just behavior. The moment you start trying to
23:38
explain why that lie wasn't really a lie, or why that
23:41
selfish act was actually unavoidable because of stress.
23:44
You're confessing. You're admitting that you
23:45
believe in the rule, and you know you're accountable to it.
23:48
The first impulse we have is to deny that accountability.
23:51
And Lewis has one final brilliant observation about
23:54
this. It's about how we assign credit
23:56
versus how we assign blame. The selective accounting we do.
23:59
That's a good way to put it. We only ever look for these
24:02
external excuses and mitigating circumstances for our bad
24:05
behavior. It's only my bad temper that I
24:07
blame on being tired or hungry, right?
24:10
But what about your good behavior?
24:12
We never explain that away with external factors.
24:14
Never. You don't wake up and say wow I
24:16
was really kind to my neighbor this morning.
24:18
It must have been because I got a solid 8 hours of sleep and the
24:20
traffic was light. No, absolutely not.
24:22
We take full credit for that. Our patience, our kindness, our
24:26
honesty. That was us.
24:28
That came from our good character.
24:29
We credit ourselves for obeying the law, but we blame the
24:32
circumstances for breaking it. And that double standard just
24:35
confirms everything this has been saying.
24:37
It forces you to admit both facts.
24:40
The standard is real because we feel the need to justify
24:43
ourselves when we violate it, and our failure is universal
24:46
because we are constantly needing to come up with those
24:49
justifications. The law is real, we know it's
24:51
real, and it's always there, pressing on our conscience.
24:55
And our endless automatic effort to dodge responsibility for
24:59
breaking it proves both its existence and our complete
25:03
inability to keep it. So we've walked through Lewis's
25:06
entire foundational argument. He's laid out what he considers
25:10
to be two self-evident observations about reality.
25:13
It makes sense to just restate them clearly as we wrap up.
25:16
OK, fact one. All human beings have this
25:20
innate, inescapable idea of how they ought to behave, the law of
25:24
human nature, and we see the proof in our quarrels, in the
25:27
universal themes of morality across cultures, and in the way
25:31
even moral skeptics can't live out their skepticism.
25:33
In fact, too, we don't do it. Despite knowing this law, we all
25:37
consistently and universally fail to live that way.
25:39
We know the standard and we break it, which is why we spend
25:42
so much of our mental energy making excuses.
25:44
And Lewis is adamant that these two facts are the necessary
25:47
starting point for all clear thinking about ourselves and the
25:51
universe we live in. You can't just skip ahead.
25:53
If you try to build any kind of worldview without first
25:56
acknowledging these two realities, you're building on
25:58
wishful thinking, not on solid ground.
26:00
Right, and for you, the listener, the point of this
26:03
whole analysis isn't to keep on guilt.
26:06
Lewis's goal is to foster a clear eyed self-assessment.
26:09
We have to correctly diagnose the problem before we can even
26:12
begin to talk about a solution and the problem.
26:16
The basic definition of the human condition is this conflict
26:19
between the law we know and the life we live.
26:22
It is, and if Lewis's argument holds up, that this moral law
26:26
isn't just a description of behavior, but a real command we
26:29
feel we ought to follow. And if you all fail to follow
26:31
it. Then the source of that command
26:33
must be something really, really unique.
26:35
So we'll leave you with this to think about.
26:38
This moral law is the only law in the universe we are free to
26:42
disobey, yet it holds us accountable.
26:45
It gives us commands. What does that suggest about
26:48
where it comes from? Does it make sense for a law
26:50
like that to come from inside the physical universe, where all
26:53
the other laws are just descriptions that can't be
26:55
broken? Or must its source be something
26:57
beyond the physical universe, a conscious source, a will,
27:02
something capable of giving commands to creatures who have a
27:04
will of their own? That tension right there between
27:08
the universal command and the universal disobedience, that's
27:11
the doorway Lewis opens to everything that comes next.
27:15
Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the law of
27:17
human nature. We look forward to exploring the
27:20
implications with you next time.