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Andrew Klavan’s recent call to “follow the words of this author” is not a mere literary sermon — it’s a clarion warning to a nation drifting toward moral bankruptcy. He points Americans back to what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the doctrine of objective value, because without a shared standard of right and wrong a free society cannot stand. This isn’t academic hair-splitting; it is the philosophical foundation of civilization itself.
C.S. Lewis coined the phrase “the Tao” to describe the perennial moral law that undergirds all decent societies, the set of objective values that make justice, courage, and mercy intelligible. Lewis’s argument in The Abolition of Man was that when we reject the Tao we do not gain freedom — we surrender our humanity to technicians and conditioners who decide what we are allowed to feel. That diagnosis fits our moment perfectly: a culture that divorces truth from virtue is a culture that manufactures consent for tyranny.
Klavan has long been one of the rare public intellectuals willing to name the rot and tie it to the loss of objective standards, and his recent commentary leans on literature and faith to make the case. In his new work he traces how poets and theologians preserved the idea of objective value even as materialistic philosophy tried to erase it, and he urges conservatives to reclaim that inheritance. This is not nostalgia; it is a strategic argument for how to win the battle for hearts and minds.
Americans who still believe in the dignity of the individual should be alarmed at what happens when schools, courts, and corporations embrace moral relativism. Klavan and Lewis both warned that “conditioning” — the soft science of shaping desires and language — succeeds only where the Tao has been surrendered, and the results are predictable: atomized citizens, corrupted education, and bureaucracies that treat people as means to policy ends. Conservatives must call this out plainly and refuse to be cowed by the moral authorities of the managerial class.
If we are serious about restoring a free and flourishing republic, the work begins in families, churches, and local schools where the habits of virtue are taught and practiced. Klavan’s message is practical: revive the story, teach what is true and good, and refuse the fashionable reduction of value to preference. This is how ordinary Americans can inoculate their children and their communities against the soft totalitarianism of the progressive academy.
Politically, the implication is clear: conservatism without a moral backbone is merely administrative; it cannot hold a nation together. We need leaders who will defend objective standards in law and policy, and we need a movement that understands the cultural long game rather than chasing temporary electoral fads. Ignore the Tao at our peril — the left’s project depends on a citizenry that no longer believes in objective right and wrong.
Now is the time for hardworking Americans to stand up and insist on truth, not to apologize for believing there are real goods and real evils. Follow the words of Lewis and the clarion voice of Klavan: teach virtue, demand honesty from our elites, and refuse to let the moral language be stolen from us. Do that, and we will not only save our country’s institutions but restore the character that made this nation great.
