CsLewis Borrowing the term from Daoism, what C.S. Lewis calls “the Tao” is the set of basic-level ethics and values more or less universal to all Mankind from past to present regardless of religion or ethnicity, inspired by both C.S. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man and the Christian theological idea of “general revelation” (i.e., what can be deduced about the character of God from nature both exterior to mankind and within mankind’s own conscience). Lewis believes (as shown in the appendix of The Abolition of Man) that once you dismiss the differences of custom, habit, and fashion, all of the cultures on earth that lasted for longer than a few generations all settled on pretty much the same adherence to honesty, justice, duty, charity, and so on, the only non-superficial disagreements being on who is to be the recipients of moral obligation; furthermore, Lewis also argues that any modern ideology is not inventing anything new or even revolutionary, but cutting out a smaller subset from the Tao and holding those truncated values up as the ones to be obeyed, often by any means and at all costs (at which point tyranny ensues).