The Assault on the Heart

Politics of the Heart, Part 2 of 5

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a dinosaur.

In 1954, he took up the newly founded chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. The 56-year-old Lewis presented himself as a “dinosaur” to his audience; a representative of what he called “Old Western Culture” (Lewis 1969, 13). Lewis, an Ulster-born Irish Protestant, is best known for his works in Christian apologetics. However, here, we’ll confine ourselves to works he wrote with his ‘literature professor’ and ‘philosopher’ hats on (Lewis initially trained at Oxford in Philosophy, but a position there in Literature opened up first).

In his inaugural lecture, outlining his approach to his scholarly field, Lewis asserts that the main divisions of history (from a literary perspective at least) were the separation between the ‘pagan’ pre-Christian period of the West, then the ‘christening of Europe,’ followed by “the un-christening of Europe” which he situated in the nineteenth century. Hence, he asserts that it makes sense that his chair combines the Medieval and Renaissance periods which together represent the middle period in his three-way division of Western history. Further, he asserts that “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian” (Lewis 1969, 5). In speaking of himself as a representative of “Old Western Culture,” he means he speaks for the first two periods to his audience who are themselves located in the third, post-Christian, period. Hence, he is a living dinosaur.

For Lewis, the essential force that brings about the decisive break between a culture still essentially rooted in the Renaissance and the modern world is science. More specifically, it is when science shows that it is not just a power wielded by human beings but a power which will also reshape human beings that he sees the break occurring. When industrial technology reshaped how humans produced and reproduced the material means of their existence, when Darwin redescribed our species, and when Freud redescribed our souls, humanity went from being the autonomous wielder of power over nature to also being a patient who would be subject to that same power. This change effectively comes “with the birth of the machines” (Lewis 1969, 10). Also, let it be noted, totalitarianism is really not conceivable until you understand human beings as material that can be moulded.

Lewis admonished his audience that they would do well to listen to this dinosaur, because there would not be many more. What he saw was untold danger in the subjection of human beings to scientific and technological control and that any resistance to that, or way of ameliorating its potentially disastrous effects, lay in that old culture of which he was a representative.

The Green Book

In 1944, during the waning days of the Second World War, Lewis had written The Abolition of Man, a book I personally consider to be one of the five or so most important works of the twentieth century, and almost certainly the most ignored of that group. In this book he set out to explain how the very being of humanity was under assault by the totalitarian forces of modernity. To ground his analysis and to point to the possible solution he would set out to provide a very concise statement of what he took to be the universal moral wisdom of pre-modern humanity which he terms The Tao (The Way). Presciently, Lewis did not make the mistake of limiting the totalitarian urge to Communist and Fascist regimes. In the 1945 novel That Hideous Strength, he covers much of the same territory but in a fictional format. It focuses (mostly) on ordinary English men and women of Lewis’ day and how they are seduced to work for the sinister N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). I say ‘mostly’ because malevolent supernatural beings and Merlin (who, like Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, is not tame, or nice, but who is good) also show up in this space fantasy.

From our position of advanced cultural decadence, we might take Lewis’ starting point to be rather quaint. I take it that he was perceptive enough to discern a major threat in a minor manifestation. He opens that work with this observation: “I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books” (Lewis, 1974, 1). I will say that many a contemporary parent has finally awakened to this issue!

The specific textbook in question Lewis only refers to as The Green Book and refers to its authors by the pseudonyms of Gaius and Titius (scholars long ago nailed down that the actual book was The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing by Alec King and Martin Ketley, published in 1939). Had these miscreants gone into the finer details of the sort of sexual practices that have put some textbooks in the headlines in our own day? No, these authors had misattributed ‘sublimity’ to a psychological state instead of as being an objective attribute of some aspects of existence. We have fallen far indeed from the worldview of the dinosaurs.

Lewis charitably grants that Gaius and Titius probably meant well, but were just too dense to understand where their teaching naturally leads. The authors reference a well-known example mentioned by Coleridge of travelers who walk to a waterfall and have a discussion about whether it is ‘pretty’ or ‘sublime.’ The authors of The Green Book tell the student that both positions are mistaken: judgments of value do not tell us anything about the world, but only about our own subjective mental state. Lewis takes this as an example of the modern pedagogy of “debunking,” what we tend to call ‘critical thinking.’ Lewis grants that what they seek to do, which is to provide their young readers with a critical lens with which to see through the obscurations of advertising and propaganda, is good, but their chosen method is disastrous.

“The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book,” Lewis asserts, “will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant” (Lewis 1974, 4). What he is on to here is the whole conscious strategy of post-war liberals to undercut the strong claims of value which such thinkers saw as contributing to the rise of ‘the authoritarian personality’ (see R.R. Reno’s “Return of the Strong Gods” [Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno | Articles | First Things] and his later book of the same title for a fascinating account of this). As Lewis notes, the average modern student is hardly in danger of believing too much about value; the opposite is much more common. Nevertheless, this rather mild form of ‘relativism’ would hardly tend to grab our attention today. However, we are not people of the Old Western (or any) Culture. (I have often mused on teaching a class in ‘credulous thinking’ to counter the ‘critical thinking’ of the dominant curriculum: rather than ‘let’s see how much we can come to disbelieve,’ ‘let’s see how robust a view of the world we can, justifiably, believe.’ I think the latter course would lead to much less alienated, more resilient and attuned students).

The problem that this version of debunking leads to, Lewis states thusly: “On this view, the world of facts without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible” (Lewis 1974, 20).

The chest

To get at the significance of that conclusion, Lewis turns to the traditional doctrine of ‘the heart,’ what he will refer to as ‘the chest,’ elucidated by Plato and others which we examined in the last essay. “St. Augustine,” Lewis teaches, “defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought” (Lewis 1974, 16). Such an education would aim to instill ‘ordinate affections’ and ‘just sentiments.’

Let’s note some of the consequences of this view of this ‘education of the heart,’ as we might call it. First, contrary to the view Lewis ascribes to Gaius and Titius, it assumes that value and values inhere in nature – they are of the order of facts. We should love good things because they deserve to be loved, not because we feel a certain way toward them. I ought to love good people and justice because they are good and just. I ought to love my child, my dog, and the old lady down the street. If I don’t feel love toward them, then my feelings are out of step with reality and I should try to change them so that I do love what is lovable. Further, education should have something to do with helping one learn to love the right things.

Additionally, I should learn to love good things in the right way and to the right degree (ordinately). My reason will be essential here. My heart might prefer my dog to the old lady down the street. In that case, I need my reason to discern and explain to my heart the proper order of values. Further yet, not all loves are the same. Some things are properly objects of erotic love (eros) and others are not. Some things should be loved in a friendly way (philia). Some things will deserve to be loved in a self-sacrificing way (agape).

Lewis deduces that the aims of modern education, under the model of The Green Book, is to produce “Men without Chests” (Lewis 1974, 25): people who do not know what to love, how, and to what degree. Just take a moment to think of the multitude of maladies in our culture that come from people loving what should not be loved, loving things that should be loved but in the wrong way or to the wrong degree.

The Tao

Lewis cites Plato in affirming “The head rules the belly through the chest…” (Lewis 1974, 24). He sees this great goal and great truth as the moral core of all the Old Cultures of the world. Let’s listen in as he articulates this at length:

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which all things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects [of Confucius], ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancients Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’. This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’ (Lewis 1974, 18).

Lewis had made previous mention of Hinduism and will go on to quote sources from Old Norse sagas, ancient Egyptian manuals, Babylonian texts, an indigenous American account of the Battle of Wounded Knee, Australian Aborigines, the Anglo-Saxons, and English seventeenth century natural law theorists, so we should consider them and their wisdom to be included as well.

Ultimately, for Lewis, the Tao comprises the full set of moral truths about the world (though the full set is not written down anywhere and by the nature of the case cannot be). It is by reference to the Tao, or Natural Law, that the head will educate the heart on the proper modes and orders of love, joining fact and value.

If, instead, we separate fact from value, we are left with only the facts of the head and the values of the stomach which have nothing to do with one another. Such would be the modern way, the way of ‘Men without Chests.’

Deconstruction

The modern way of debunking, we might say of ‘deconstruction,’ sunders apart the world into a chaos, not a cosmos. It also breaks the natural link between us and our world: alienation not belonging. Further, it overturns the order of the soul, reducing the human psyche to a hodge podge of conflicting tendencies, some innate and some socially constructed, with no essential center, no real ‘self.’ This is what Lewis saw coming in the teachings of Gaius and Titius in 1944. Further, he saw the roots of this in modern science itself, in industrialism, the ‘coming of the machines,’ and in turning the critical gaze of science on humanity itself.

It seems that these developments were not quite intentional, but for Lewis they should have been foreseeable. The critical gaze turned upon nature, breaking it down into workable bits, would also break the human being down into workable bits. Stripping nature of its meaning and sense of purpose would eventually strip human beings of their meaning and sense of purpose. Human beings had set out to be conquerors and to liberate themselves from nature. By a cruel, but obvious, reflex action, human beings themselves had been conquered and at least potentially enslaved. Illuminating this sort of tragic reflex action, what others would later call ‘the dialectic of enlightenment,’ is one essential characteristic of what Lewis will wish to teach us. The other is the sharp observation that it is not ‘humanity’ which learns to control ‘humanity’ through technique, propaganda, social engineering, eugenics, etc…, ie., all the fruits of a science denuded of value and applied to human beings. It is in fact the power of some specific set of human beings over some other specific set of human beings.

Such is the basis of Lewis’ concerns over modern totalitarianism. It is not an aberration but is an aspect of the modern way of construing the world. It is not past but is, unless something drastic is done, our inexorable future. And it will be done in the name of ‘humanity,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘liberation.’ It operates by first disrupting and disempowering our hearts.

This essay was first published by Winter Oak.