C.S. Lewis on the Soft Dictatorship of Objective Values

From near the end of The Abolition of Man (read it free online here). Emphasis mine.

But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements 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 this 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 be: 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 de-humanized Conditioners.

We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

That Lewis says we have the ability to surrender ourselves as raw material to Conditioners says he might concur with an instance of the absolute value of private property, that instance being our own bodies. If all of us are able to surrender them don’t we need to own them imprimus?

I’ve been lazily casually wondering what other objective values can be derived, sans religious origins, from the absolute right of private property^*, regardless of political beliefs. Lewis seems to come very close to that kind of inference here. Someone somewhere has most likely already done that, I’m just not well-read or perceptive enough to know who it is.

^*I might be jumping the gun on calling this absolute. I don’t think I am but that is a whole other series of posts. Most of us can argue very well for some circumstances in which the self-ownership of bodies can be overridden. A lot of it is institutionalized: governments act or allow acts (conscription, abortion, capital punishment, and some would argue imprisonment) that violate it often, so its nature as an obvious categorical right doesn’t seem so obvious anymore.