In a world of sensationalistic news, propaganda, and emotions running in overdrive, our students need specialized training in how to navigate life’s challenges with wisdom. Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis, two favorites in the classical education renewal movement, offered different, but related, educational solutions to respond to emotive and misleading propaganda.
Dorothy Sayers, known for her essay The Lost Tools of Learning (1947), advocated for a return to liberal arts education. With a special emphasis on the language arts of the Trivium, Sayers believed that the best remedy against sensationalistic news headlines was to equip the intellect with the right tools. Sayers writes,
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
It took a few decades, but her essay struck a nerve. Today there are hundreds of classical liberal arts schools across the United States, and indeed, the world, who look to this essay as their source of inspiration. Through equipping students with the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, students are trained how to learn independently, master words, and discern truth from falsehood for themselves.
C.S. Lewis, a friend of Sayers, offered different, but related, advice. In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argues that the best defense against propaganda that preys upon our unguarded emotions is a good offense: trained affections (what we desire). Emotions and affections themselves are alogical (not illogical) and not the issue. The problem occurs when our desires, and emotions that accompany them, are untrained and left unprepared to respond to bad ideas. The solution for Lewis, therefore, is not to suppress our subjective responses, but to shape them properly. Lewis writes, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts” (14).
In this blog article, I will explore how Christian educators can preserve a holistic view of the human person, including emotions, while not falling prey to emotionalism. To do so, we need to avoid subjectivism on the one hand and disembodied rationalism on the other. The way forward is to train students’ affections and emotions to be in accordance with objective values embedded in reality.
An “Innocent” Grammar Textbook
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ thesis is that the key to saving the humanity of human beings in the modern world is to preserve the idea that a connection exists between subjective responses and objective values. That is, existence is not a moral free-for-all regarding what to believe and love, or how to live. Rather, there is an underlying moral fabric of the universe that humans must learn how to properly live within.
To make his case, Lewis shows how subjectivism, the idea that there are no objective moral values, is already creeping into the broader western intellectual mainstream. Using The Green Book, a pseudonym for The Control of Language (1939), as an example, Lewis points out that the authors smuggle in language of subjectivity in their supposedly innocent treatment of adjectives. How so?
In this now-famous passage for Lewisian readers, the authors, whom Lewis pseudo-names Gaius and Titius, recall an episode from the life of Coleridge in which he and a fellow tourist visit a waterfall. As they behold the majesty of the falls, they are struck with awe. Coleridge deems the falls “sublime,” while his fellow tourist calls them “pretty,” to Coleridge’s chagrin.
Gaius and Titius take this opportunity to correct Coleridge for his judgment of the fellow tourist. Coleridge, they write, has no reason to look down upon the poor word choice, because both descriptions are mere projections of subjective emotion. These value statements have no purchase on reality. It is not as if the waterfall actually contains a quality that merits a particular response. To be sure, if the tourist described the water as purple or if Coleridge claimed the falls were composed of salt water, this would be a problem. But for Gaius and Titius, the value statements such as “sublime,” “pretty,” or even “ugly,” cannot be aesthetically evaluated objectively because there is nothing aesthetically objective about the waterfall, or anything for that matter, to evaluate.
Attack on Metaphysics
The authors of The Green Book, it could be said, were merely drinking from the subjective water fountain of the academic waterline in 20th century Europe. In After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (2021), Michael Ward identifies two key figures who were influencing this subjectivism.
The first figure is philosopher A.J. Ayer, a leading figure for logical positivism. Logical positivism is the idea that meaningful propositions are only those that are either tautological (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried”) or empirically verifiable. In this view, moral and aesthetic judgments are mere expressions of emotion (6). There are no inherent qualities such as “good” or “beautiful” in objects of the universe. All that exists is the world of our five senses. Language is meaningful insofar as it describes the natural world or communicates incorrigible logical truths. The conclusion is that value statements are mere projections of individuals and therefore are data for the social sciences. Ayer writes, “It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychology and sociology” (“A Critique of Ethics” (1952) in Ethical Theory: An Anthology (2007), edited by Russ Shafer-Landau).
The second figure is I.A. Richards, an interdisciplinary scholar well-known for his work on subjectivism. Subjectivism, like logical positivism, holds that there are no objective moral or aesthetic values. Value statements merely reflect the internal feelings of the subject. They cannot and do not correlate to objective qualities in external objects (7). Ward writes, “He (Richards) makes the same subjectivist moves in the field of aesthetics as Ayer does in the realm of ethics. The beauty of art, just like the wrongness of theft, is an interior feeling only, a personal experience in the mind of an onlooker, not the external reality that merits a certain response” (8).
With these philosophical ideas in circulation, you can see why Lewis is concerned. It is one thing for these ideas to gain traction in the ivory towers of academia. It is another thing for these ideas to be smuggled into grammar textbooks for the general public. Through the innocent teaching of grammar, a whole generation could grow up indoctrinated to believe in the nonexistence of objective values.
With World War II raging on around Lewis, Ward captures the Oxford professor’s fear well:
Had human civilization run its course? With entire sections of the population in mainland Europe being systematically exterminated, with food scarce and death falling out of the sky, no one could avoid wondering what had led humanity to such a pass or whether it would ever regain its equilibrium. And did it even deserve to? Did the word deserve itself still mean anything? The status of desert, of objective realities meriting certain responses, had become an inescapably pressing matter of concern politically no less than ethically and aesthetically. Modernity was producing barbarism, but did it really matter? (9)
To deny a world of objective value is to deny any possibility of proper action in the world, including our emotional responses. It is to release humans to the whims of instinct, the spontaneous urges of desire, and ultimately, slavery to our base appetites. In this world, there is no moral ecology, no basis for distinguishing virtue from vice and good from evil. All that is left is a Nietzschean battle for the will to power. Lewis dedicates the remainder of The Abolition of Man to further diagnose this grave issue and issue humanity’s final prognosis. Spoiler: It is not “pretty.”
A Good Offense is the Best Defense
The solution Lewis prescribes is not to excise emotion from the human experience, but to shape our affections, and the emotions that accompany them, properly. This is the antidote to both bad philosophical ideas, like subjectivism, and practical everyday challenges like sensationalistic news media or propaganda. Interestingly, the The Green Book authors offered their own solution to propaganda in their day: use exclusively empirical arguments to critique faulty, sensationalistic arguments, thereby leading to the deflation of the emotional force.
Lewis, however, proposes a different way that takes into consideration the emotive and affective aspects of what it means to be human. He writes,
They (Gaius and Titius) see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda–they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental–and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. (14).
In other words, the best defense is a good offense. To train against sensationalistic propaganda, full of goodness and beauty fakes, expose children to examples of real beauty and goodness, through rich literature (6). The solution, therefore, is not to dispel with emotion or desire altogether, but to train it according to moral and aesthetic values, holding logic, emotion, and beauty together. An empirical solution alone produces “trousered apes,” as Lewis puts it, not full-orbed humans.
The call to shape our affections and train our emotions, of course, assumes there is objective value in the world to which we must respond. Going back to the waterfall example, the reason Coleridge was disgusted by the word “pretty” was because he believed the waterfall merited more than the meaning that word could conjure (15). In other words, the term did not align with the objective beauty of the waterfall. Later Lewis writes that emotions are alogical (not logical or illogical) in and of themselves… “But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (19). Students need to be exposed to numerous examples of honor, courage, self-sacrifice, and beauty. As they do, their emotions and affections will overtime align with reason.
The Important of Musical Education
In The Liberal Arts Tradition (3rd edition 2021), authors Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain sketch out what this training might look like. In their paradigm for understanding classical education, they point out that the liberal arts tradition of education is more than a program for the mind. Indeed, the tradition reflects a holistic understanding of what it means to be human as a complex unity of mind, heart, body, and soul.
One key insight from the book is that before the liberal arts can be properly studied, students should be trained in a precritical fashion, called musical education. The authors write, ” The musical and gymnastic education fitted the students’ hearts and bodies to reality. The training of the body and the tuning of the heart to love what is lovely helped nurture the virtues of courage and temperance (bodily restraint)” (6). In other words, through telling stories, reciting poetry, and beholding beauty in nature and art, students are oriented toward objective values even before they can analyze these subjects critically with the liberal arts.
Conclusion: Read and Practice
If you are a regular follower of Educational Renaissance, you will not be surprised that I am going to close by emphasizing the importance of reading the classics and cultivating good habits. Lewis writes, “Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (24). How do we train affections and emotions in accordance with what is true, good, and beautiful? Let me suggest two general ways:
First, we can shape the moral imagination of students through reading, listening, narrating, and delighting in all that is good, true, and beautiful. As children hear stories of heroism, compassion, courage, perseverance, and honesty, they will begin to recognize these virtues as good and worthy of imitation. As they delight in God’s beautiful creation, behold a dazzling seascape, or enjoy an inspiring musical score, they will begin to develop a desire and appreciation for the beauty around them.
Second, we can help students gain experience in a life of virtue through practicing good habits. The repetition of acts of service, kindness, honesty, and other habits will shape their hearts and minds in a truly formative way. As teachers cast vision for students of a life led by the Holy Spirit, and support them encouragingly on a daily basis, students undergo the sort of moral formation that will lead them to be well-rounded humans, trained with affections and emotions informed by reason, and prepared to thrive in God’s created moral order.
