Gen.
9:1 KJV ¶ And God blessed Noah and his
sons, and said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
1
Pet. 3:20 KJV Which sometime were
disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of
Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight
souls were saved by water.
Heb.
11:7 KJV By faith Noah, being warned of
God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to
the saving of his house; by the which
he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is
by faith.
Cultural
Castration
_
C. S. Lewis was more prescient than we realized. When I first read
“The Abolition of Man” a half-century ago I was particularly
struck by the last sentence in the first chapter, “We castrate
and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
_
With the denigration of traditional moralities and the
availability of modern birth control technology cultural castration
is the rule in the world today.
_
It is not only the Europeans who have deplorable birth rates.
American rates are significantly below replacement. Rates in some
Muslim nations have gone from high to deplorable in the last few
decades.
_
It is, of course, worse than Lewis predicted. Our leaders bid
the geldings to be fruitful through the importation of strangers with
their strange cultures.
_
The only groups that demonstrate a trust in the value of their
culture through population growth are evangelical Christians and
orthodox Jews. They remember the command given to the eight who were
saved from universal destruction through faith.
_
There are other valuable lessons in Lewis's work and the article that
brought it to my attention. See below:
The
Abolition of Man
by
C. S. Lewis
[/] http://j.mp/0Castration or
https://archive.org/stream/TheAbolitionOfMan_229/C.s.Lewis-TheAbolitionOfMan_djvu.txt
[Last
three paragraphs of Chapter 1, “Men Without Chests”]
They
probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next
lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently
commended to the pupil on what they would call 'rational' or
'biological' or 'modern' grounds, if it should ever become necessary.
In the meantime, they leave the matter alone and get on with the
business of debunking. But this course, though less inhuman, is not
less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda.
Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be
theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It
still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man
to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is
powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play
cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to
believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an
irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among
sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the
reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the
bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius
would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of
more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king
governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere
appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. ^o The head rules the
belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of
Magnanimity,^! of emotions organized by trained habit into stable
sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the
indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.
It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is
man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere
animal.
The
operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be
called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be
commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to
say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They
are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding
truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be
strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense
of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of
a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any
other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and
generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than
the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them
seem so. [N.B. These last sentences seems to explain the pseudo-intellectual aura of our undocumented president.]
And
all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we
continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering
impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming
across the statement that what our civilization needs is more
'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a
sort of ghastly simpUcity we remove the organ and demand the
function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and
enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be
fruitful. [My emphasisi.]
How
C. S. Lewis Predicted Today’s College Campus Craziness—in 1944
pjmedia.com
[/] By
Tyler O'Neil December 1, 2015 [/] Article printed from Faith:
http://pjmedia.com/faith [/]
URL to article: [ http://j.mp/0NoChests
or ]
http://pjmedia.com/faith/2015/12/1/how-c-s-lewis-predicted-todays-college-campus-craziness-in-1944
When
events at Yale University and the University of Missouri propelled
college politics to national news, many conservatives were caught off
guard by the power of “political correctness.” To those familiar
with the works of C.S. Lewis, however, these events were of little
surprise. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man explains both the confusion
and the radical ideology on campuses today, and how Americans should
respond to these dire threats.
What’s
Happening on College Campuses?
In
the September issue of The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan
Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, described a peculiar movement on
college campuses, which they named “vindictive protectiveness.”
Haidt
and Lukianoff cite Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk, who wrote in
The New Yorker about law students demanding their professors
not even teach rape law -- and in one weird case even to avoid using
the word “violate” (as in “that violates the law”) -- because
it may cause students distress. This culture of overreaction
is being institutionalized, as demonstrated by demands for the
resignation of Yale’s Silliman College masters Erika and Nicholas
Christakis for an allegedly insensitive email about Halloween
costumes.
As
Haidt and Lukianoff explain, “a claim that someone’s words are
‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective
feelings of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the
speaker has done something objectively wrong.”
The
idea of “microaggressions” -- small actions or word choices that
seem to have no malicious intent but are thought of as a kind of
violence nonetheless -- twists the objective idea of being
“offensive” into a subjective charge on behalf of someone
claiming to be offended. Some campus guides denounce as
a microaggression the very act of asking an Asian American or Latino
American “Where were you born?” because this implies that that
person is not a real American.
The
craziness of this new morality may seem unprecedented, but C.S. Lewis
warned of something similar in his 1944 book The Abolition of Man.
The
Abolition of Man
Lewis
wrote The Abolition of Man to warn people about the corrosive effects
of subjective morality. He starts out by attacking a children’s
book which teaches that judgments of value are not objective, but
only statements about the speaker’s feelings.
By
contrast, Lewis argues that morality is fundamental to humanity. He
traces the principles of conscience, the reasoning behind calling
something “right” or “wrong,” throughout different cultures
and religions, from ancient Rome to Christianity, to Hinduism, and
Buddhism. While many attack this “traditional morality,” it
is the building block for all moral values, and such principles as
the Golden Rule -- “do as you would be done by” -- are nearly
universal among men.
Lewis
admits that this universal moral law has many aspects and can be
improved -- as with the discovery that slavery is wrong and the
movement to abolish it -- but says that any attempt to build morality
on a separate basis will fail.
Nevertheless,
teachers -- and especially university professors and students -- try
to present new moralities, more “in fashion with the times.” To
this, Lewis responds, “There has never been, and never will be, a
radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.”
While
some people may argue (for instance) that a man may steal from his
neighbor if he will otherwise starve to death, they are not really
ignoring conscience but focusing on one aspect of universal morality
while minimizing another. “What purport to be new systems [of
morality] all consist of fragments from [conscience] itself,
arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen
to madness in their isolation,” Lewis explains.
Nevertheless,
even these “alternate moralities” rely on conscience to give them
validity. The "vindictive protectiveness" on college
campuses may trample on free speech or the pursuit of truth, but it
does so in the name of conscience, which warns people not to harm
others. This morality is not, strictly speaking, a new morality, but
a twisted form of the original. It is not amoral or evil, but warped
and mistaken.
“Vindictive
protectiveness” minimizes the value which traditional morality (and
arguably conscience itself) places on the pursuit of truth. To
nearly all scholars who have gone before, the pursuit of truth is
worth being offended or having your feelings hurt. Students today
seem to disagree.
Views
of justice provide further evidence that “vindictive
protectiveness” is a warped morality. In the name of equality,
campus culture elevates the importance of some groups over others,
and silences dissenting opinions in favor of groups that are seen as
“underprivileged.”
How
Did We Get Here?
In
addition to helping conservatives understand campus morality, Lewis’s
book also explains how an education in subjective values can create
this lopsided system. The Abolition of Man discusses two very
different kinds of education -- one closely connected to objective
morality and one which considers itself superior to a morality which
it considers subjective.
“In
the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce
and their motives for producing him were prescribed by [conscience]
-- a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from
which they claimed no liberty to depart,” Lewis explains. “They
did not cut men to some pattern they have chosen,” but rather “they
initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which
over-arched him and them alike.” It was merely “old birds
teaching young birds to fly.”
The
newer system, by contrast, regards morality as flexible and
unnatural. According to this understanding, “judgements of value
are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning.” The
new teachers -- whom Lewis calls the Conditioners -- “know how to
produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will
produce.”
The
recent history of higher education follows a similar trajectory. As
Ross Douthat explained in the New York Times, collegiate education
rejected traditional morality to embrace scientific efficiency, and
then fell prey to a new, more destructive, form of morality.
“Between
the 19th century and the 1950s, the American university was gradually
transformed from an institution intended to transmit knowledge into
an institution designed to serve technocracy,” Douthat explained.
Religious foundations were stripped away, classical curriculums
replaced by specialized majors, and professors transitioned from
instruction to research. As a result, the university lost “the
traditional sense of community, mission, and moral purpose.”
The
student radicalism of the 1960s aimed to destroy the traditional
moral footing of the university, but it also sought a “kind of
remoralization.” The new morality focused on the anti-war and civil
rights movements, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ activism, and a
laundry list of “social justice” causes.
When
“political correctness” emerged in the 1990s, “left-wing
pieties dominated official discourse, but the university’s deeper
spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral.”
Today, however, students are revolting against the imbalance --
demanding full institutionalization of liberal values at the expense
of the university’s technical and scientific expertise.
In
response to what Douthat calls “a strange blend of [being] pampered
and exploited,” college students present the twisted morality of
“vindictive protectiveness” as a way to fill the moral gap in the
university. They lash out against perceived injustices, but with a
morality that perpetuates injustice and destroys freedom of inquiry.
As
David French explained in National Review, “the same
secular-progressive movement that fought for free speech in the
Sixties wrote the first speech codes in the late Eighties and then
raise the Millennial social-justice warriors who are now turning on
their parents’ generation as insufficiently faithful to the cause.”
Lewis
warned that, for the Conditioners, “their skepticism about values
is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values; about
the values current in their own set they are not nearly skeptical
enough.” This double standard has come to college campuses. As
French explains, “freedom is useful to put the right people in
power -- after that, it’s a threat.”
Persons
Without Chests
Modern
education, Lewis warns, aims to produce “Men without Chests,” by
which he means men and women with a deformed understanding of
morality. Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine argued that the goal of
education was to grow a young person’s conscience, so his moral
understanding conformed to reality.
“The
little human animal will not at first have the right responses,”
Lewis explains. “It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking,
disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant,
likeable, disgusting and hateful.” The desires and passions of the
gut must be mastered by the reason and knowledge of the head.
Classical education sought to improve the heart -- the sentiments and
passions which bring appetite into conformity with right reason.
“The
Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment -- these are the indispensable liaison
officers between cerebral man and visceral man.” Lewis even claims
this spirited element may be what makes us truly human -- “for by
his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
Modern
education, by contrast, teaches the young to debunk morality and
follow their own course. It produces what may be called “Men
without Chests,” men and women without the grounding in right
response to the reality which makes it possible to live a good life.
Instead,
they elevate their feelings of being victimized and offended into
claims for illegitimate power. Rather than controlling their feelings
and using their minds to understand what others are saying, they
claim these words are aggressions and demand apologies. Morality
abhors a vacuum, and if children are not taught to discover objective
right and wrong they will create their own values -- and more often
than not, use those values to grasp for power.
These
Men -- or “Persons” as they would correct Lewis -- without Chests
now haunt the halls of the university. They demonstrate our country’s
urgent need to return to a traditional understanding of morality, and
seek to educate our students rather than coddle them.
[My emphasis.]
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