After Humanity by Michael Ward is a guide to The Abolition of Man, one of C.S. Lewis's most generally appreciated but least accessible books, which began as a series of ethics lectures he gave during WWII.
These lectures tackle the difficult question of whether moral value is objective or not. When we say something is right or wrong, are we expressing a reality outside of ourselves, or are we simply expressing a subjective feeling? Lewis takes an intellectual approach to the problem, ignoring theological implications. He presents a persuasive case against subjectivism, issuing an intellectual warning that is probably more timely in our "post-truth" twenty-first century than it was when he first issued it.
Lewis characterized The Abolition of Man as “almost my favourite among my books,” and his biographer Walter Hooper has called it “an all but indispensable introduction to the entire corpus of Lewisiana.” Michael Ward's After Humanity throws much-needed light on this important but challenging work, explaining both its broad academic context and the specific circumstances in Lewis's life that influenced it, notably his front-line service in the trenches of World War I.
After Humanity contains a detailed commentary clarifying the many allusions and quotations scattered throughout Lewis’s argument. It shows how this resolutely philosophical thesis fits in with his other, more explicitly Christian works. It also includes a full-color photo gallery, displaying images of people, places, and documents that relate to The Abolition of Man, among them Lewis’s original “blurb” for the book, which has never before been published.