The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.