Subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools", it uses a contemporary text about poetry as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law.

Even the authors of The Green Book clearly believe that some things, such as improved student learning, are truly good and desirable.

He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...".

An appendix to The Abolition of Man lists a number of basic values seen by Lewis as parts of the Tao, supported by quotations from different cultures.

"[10] Carl Trueman has argued that the collection of essays is strongly relevant to today as "the turmoil in our contemporary Western world is a function of the collapse of consensus concerning what it means to be human... a time marked by a crisis of anthropology.

"[11] Commenting on the book's more political elements, Michael Ward argues that Lewis's essay is an early warning that democracies are vulnerable to "the dangers of subjectivism.

In time, however, similar observations were shared and developed by both equivalent and later thinkers such as Wilhelm Röpke, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

[13][14] As such, his essay is now regarded as both key to the revival of this idea of natural law, and a strong counterpoint to ethics of Karl Barth, where morality depends on Special revelation.

[24] In 2022 artist Carson Grubaugh created a comic book adaptation, “Abolition of Man,” using illustrations generated by artificial intelligence.