C.S. Lewis examines some common assumptions about culture, science, and ethics that he believes are setting humanity on a path that will destroy both soul and species.

Most people give little thought to how textbooks shape children or society. Take one English textbook intended for high school students, which we will call The Green Book and its two authors, Gaius and Titius, in order to protect the guilty.

In one of the book’s early chapters, the authors include an excerpt from a work by the poet Samuel Coleridge in which two men are gazing at a waterfall. One man calls the waterfall “pretty;” the second man calls it “sublime.” Coleridge balks at the first descriptor and supports the second. The Green Book’s authors write that both men in the passage appear to be commenting about the waterfall, when in fact they are commenting about their own feelings regarding the waterfall. What the man is really saying, the authors argue, is that he has sublime feelings.

They go on to write that, “We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only speaking about our own feelings.” Perhaps without meaning to, the authors have communicated that all statements of value are subjective and unimportant. They might disagree, but, what is the inevitable effect that such phrases would have on youths? We appear to be saying something important, but we’re only saying something about our feelings.  What child can resist words like “appear” and “only,” which so strongly suggest that feelings are naïve.

This lesson is internalized without question because the youth is in English class and thinks he is learning English. Without any tool to prevent him from applying this above-the-fray, propaganda-proof tool indiscriminately, applying it to cheap advertisements and world-class literature alike, he is in more danger than he realizes. The boys in prep school are too young to know what’s being done to them; and so, without a fight, they are predisposed to a certain vision of ethics, politics, and philosophy. They passively ingest it, and maybe ten years later, they have a strong belief about the role of sentiments and values, but don’t know where the idea came from.

Another instance of soul-removal (hopefully inadvertent) in The Green Book is the handling of a mawkish advertisement about a cruise. The advertisement says that passengers will be able “to travel the Western Oceans where Drake of Devon sailed,” to take home treasure of golden hour sunshine, and so on. There is a teachable moment here, an opportunity to critique the shameless cliches and counter them with exemplary literature (as one might expect from an English textbook) where allusions to myth have been masterfully employed to evoke deep sentiments. Instead, the analysis of Gaius and Titius is stale and obvious. They point out the fact that the cruiseliner’s course will differ from Drake’s and that any treasures found there will be symbolic rather than literal.

In their attempts to inoculate children against propaganda, Gaius and Titius have slipped from their declared purpose of teaching English grammar into amateur philosophy that is more destructive than child or author could imagine. The youth is taught that emotions that any kind of writing arouse are irrational and shamefully childish.

The best way to safeguard the next generation against misguided feelings is not by subduing the capacity for feelings, but by exposure to true, just feelings. This is not the main problem for most students, today, though: for every student with an excess of emotion, there are three who need to be shaken from a cold, cynical stupor. The education that Gaius and Titius and many others suggest, whether they realize it or not, is one of anesthetizing rather than awakening. The point of education, however, is not to hack away at jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Until the modern era, people believed that emotion could be aligned or misaligned with ultimate reality. It was taken for granted that some responses are more just or fitting than others. The Hebrew tradition talks of learning to separate the precious from the worthless. St. Augustine describes virtue as ordo amoris, or ordered loves, the wisdom to value things according to their worth. In Hinduism, there’s the concept of Rta or the nature and supernature to which men’s good conduct corresponds. The Chinese talk about the Tao, a reality that is deep and rich beyond words, the greatest thing, preceding even the Creator. It’s been called Nature or the Way or the Road. There are differences between religious and philosophical schools, but what they hold in common is significant: a doctrine of objective values, beliefs that some conduct is aligned with truth and others with falsehood. In this tradition from time immemorial, values and emotion are not at odds with reason, but join it in a glorious harmony. For ease of expression, we will refer to these traditions as the Tao.

Gaius and Titius’ Green Book suggests a very different state of affairs than the Tao: For Gaius and Titius, emotion isn’t even given the dignity of being “wrong” or misaligned. It’s not a category at all connected to Reason. There are facts and then there are emotions. There is no possibility of correspondence—only conflict. For the authors, sentiments do not enhance or confirm Reason, but like a fog, obscure an accurate picture of the world and its objects. The Green Book is a debunking education.

Thus, it matters a great deal whether one is willing to acknowledge and live by the Tao or outside it. It profoundly impacts, among others things, the way one views education.

If you educate outside the Tao, you either seek to dispel the mists of sentimentality or train students to like some sentiments and reject others. In the case of the latter, training sentiments has nothing to do with some sentiments being intrinsically good and true and just and others not. You have to adopt some sentiments for ulterior reasons, like usefulness or efficiency. Educating outside the Tao is a dangerous game because it involves prepackaged suggestions for behaviors and attitudes, rather than encouraging students to discover values that are already present in the human experience throughout history.

The old education is Tao-centered; it’s interested in initiating manhood in a man, showing him what the good is. The new education stands outside the Tao, and is more concerned with conditioning for purposes of society. The former is about propagation, instilling in the next generation what it means to be human; the latter is simply propaganda. The difference between them is similar to the difference between a parent bird teaching a fledgling to fly and a poultry-keeper raising chicks in this or that manner for a grim purpose of which the chicks are unaware.

The Green Book and its kind leave us with a choice between cerebral man and visceral man, the man of reason and the man controlled by appetites. It creates Men without Chests: people incapable of bringing together reason and sentiment. The cerebral man tends to be a coward; the visceral man, imprudent. In between the head and the gut, however, is a chest, and it is here where man brings the two together with a settled, well-trained emotion. It’s not syllogisms and sound logic that sustains a man’s will to fight for what is right in the face of danger. How can we belittle talk of honor, nobility, and virtue, but still be outraged by betrayal and scandal? How can we expect people with drive and sacrifice when we are in the business of debunking values that would lead to such qualities?   

The practical outcomes of The Green Book brand of education is nothing short of the society’s destruction. This will be addressed in another section, but before exploring the practical results, it is helpful to look at the more theoretical problems.

For instance, despite the authors’ belief that statements of value are subjective, they cannot avoid making value judgments and believing their own to be objective, accepted as fact. The very act of writing a book is goal-oriented; it tries to accomplish some end which is good, presumably. They are trying to train the minds of children in a way that they believe to be advantageous, to the children, or to society more generally. Even vague abstractions like “progress” and “efficiency” can’t sidestep value statements. Words like progress and efficiency invite the questions like, “progressing towards what?” or “efficiency to what end?”

Clearly, Gaius and Titius cannot but believe that, minimally, some things are objectively valuable. They reserve their skepticism about values for other people’s values, but toward their own values, they are generously uncritical.

The Innovator, who attempts to debunk traditional Tao values, or “sentimental” values, as Gaius and Titius would call them, looks to create more “basic” or “realistic” values. But how would the Innovator justify such values? In a story of a father telling his son that it is a good and noble thing to die defending your country and the ones you love, this finds deep resonance in the Tao. “Greater love hath no man.” But if the Innovator strips away love, honor, and all that is “sentimental,” what is he left with? How does he ground the decision to die for his country?

The utility of sacrifice? For the “good of the community”? That only works with a few people because the death of everyone in a community is obviously not good for the community. Only a few? Well, then how will you determine who will be sacrificed? And would those expected to sacrifice then be wrong to flee and fight the decision? A statement formulated as, “This will preserve society” conceals value and an ethic: “Society ought to be preserved.”

If the Innovator falls back on Instinct as the grounds for action, why bother writing books like The Green Book at all, which try to shape and influence? If Instinct is what we rely on for action, won’t we inevitably act on what comes naturally, regardless of what we read in a book? Would someone argue that Instinct will bring happiness and satisfaction? Tell that to the one who is expected to sacrifice for his community. How can you compel him? It is likely that he would pursue self-preservation or animal pleasure, and who could hold that against him if he is just listening to Instinct?

This reveals another problem with the Instinct grounding. Obey your instincts is like saying obey people. People say different things. Instincts differ from person to person, and multiple instincts often war within a single person. By what metric would a person judge between his instincts? His judgment between instincts is not in and of itself an instinct, which means there would be something deeper than instinct motivating selection.

Appeals to factual statements and instinct don’t get the Innovator very far in finding a foundation for a new system of values. The principles he is trying to justify, like utility or posterity or preservation of the species, are not found in instinct or mere facts. They are, however, found in the Tao, those universal values that people from differing civilizations and cultures have affirmed over the millennia.

The Innovator is attempting to start from scratch, creating the biological or rational values that he believes should be privileged over traditional values. But all of his critiques of the Tao, all his reasons for adopting the new system, can’t help but borrow from the Tao. As we saw, no amount of maneuvering outside human tradition can compel sacrifice or concern for posterity.

The Innovator’s rejection of the Tao is like a branch attacking the tree to which it’s connected. He ends up keeping scraps of the Tao while rejecting others. This raises the question of how he chooses some bits of the Tao and rejects others. If there’s no authority in the parts he rejects, then there is also no authority in the parts he accepts. Instinct and rationality alone ground his concern for posterity; whether the Innovator admits it or not, his notions about duty to posterity borrow heavily from the Tao.

To reject the Tao is not to reject a set of values, but value itself. To hang on to any kind of values is to hang on to part of the Tao. This rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is the story of branches fighting against the tree to which they are connected. They each take select values from the Tao, and, in isolation from the whole, they become bloated and insane. If the various Innovators actually succeeded, they would discover that they’d destroyed themselves. A new value can no more be innovated than can another primary color.

It is commonly believed that Man’s subjugation of Nature is becoming more complete by the day. Without disparaging some of the remarkable, self-sacrificial work being done in medicine, the darker side of this idea must be exposed.

In what sense does man control Nature? Many people would point to airplanes and contraceptives as signs of Man’s power over Nature, but this power is held by a handful of men, a power which they might or might not permit others to benefit by. Nature is not being subjugated, but is made an instrument by which a few might exert power over the many.

Now this is not a diatribe against technology or its abuses. Its misuses are nothing a revitalization of morality can remedy. The goal is to better understand the essence of Man’s power over Nature. To get a sense of Man’s relationship with Nature requires looking at the human race across time, from its emergence to its extinction.

The dimension of time is often ignored in these conversations, but it matters a great deal because each generation wields power over its successors because of its capacity to influence and adjust the social environment. A generation also limits the power of its predecessors to the extent that it rejects the values handed down.

The narrative of progressive liberation from tradition and increasing control over Nature leading to an ongoing rise in humanity’s power is questionable. If one generation, let’s say in the year 10,000, obtains maximal control over Nature, and fashions the next generation in the manner it pleases through genetic modifications and fine-tuned psychological conditioning, then how much power do the generations after them actually have? They are weaker—not more powerful than the previous generation, no matter how sophisticated the technologies they’ve been trained to use. And once these technologies are in place, future generations will not have the power to remove them.

In this final stage of Man’s conquest of Nature (which may not be too distant), Man will seek to control and manipulate human nature. The human part of nature will be the most difficult to subjugate, but through conditioning that begins in the womb (or the test tube) and a comprehensive social education, the Conditioners and molders will attempt to implant in future generations the motivations they find suitable. The Tao will not be the starting place for motivation and virtue, but the result of carefully-crafted conditioning. Much like efforts of The Green Book, Conditioners will try to develop an artificial Tao, inculcating motivations in people—or human artifacts. But what motivations would those be? What set of motivations will the Conditioners choose? With the Tao, values are the starting point for action, not a result, as Conditioners will treat it.

A species’ progress is never guaranteed; it won’t be endless progress till the moment of extinction. The last generations will be crushed under the weight of the Conditioner’s dead hand, slaves to his methods of organization, with precious little power to direct humanity’s course. What is supposed to be power over Nature is really power by a few hundred people over billions and billions, both predecessors and successors, the dead and those not yet born. Man’s attempts to dominate Nature and human nature will lead to the abolition of Man himself.