In many cases, the authors of these textbooks on writing validly critiqued truly abysmal pieces of sentimental writing, such as advertisements, in an attempt to teach pupils what bad writing looked like. They sought to debunk shallow thought and shallow feeling. Yet, as Lewis points out, they failed to provide a real antidote to the bad writing and shallow sentimentality.
In debunking shallow writing and leaving it at that, they taught students to look on all expressions of emotion as shallow and beneath them. The antidote to shallow thought and feeling, good writing and deep emotion, was ignored. Even worse, they trained students to look upon the world not with wonder and humility but with scrutiny, condescension, and disillusionment.
These textbooks formed, in Lewis’s words, “men without chests”—people incapable of feeling deeply, of getting outside themselves, and of being overwhelmed by a powerful, genuinely meaningful emotional experience. Lewis says that a student who reads such textbooks will
“…have no notion that ... [sentimental writing] falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water. There are two men to whom we offer in vain a false leading article on patriotism and honour: one is the coward, the other is the honourable and patriotic man.”
Eighty years later, we are gathering the thorns from these corrupted educational seeds. Many people suffer from stunted emotional development and a lack of awareness of the sacred. A good education enlarges the heart by offering students experiences of deep and noble emotions that correspond to deep and noble realities. By contrast, a bad education either shuts down emotional growth entirely (as Lewis pointed out) or it directs emotions toward shallow ideals.
An example of the latter is this. I once asked a group of teenagers what image appeared in their mind when I said the word “justice.” A number of them responded “Superman.” It’s not that Superman is, strictly speaking, an unjust figure, but as an image of the fullness of real justice, he is woefully inadequate. Though they might both agree on the same definition of the word, a person whose imaginative correlative for “justice” is Superman has a fundamentally different and much shallower understanding of the concept than the person who thinks of Tennyson’s King Arthur in “Idylls of the King” or Plato’s detailed discussion of the topic at the beginning of “The Republic.” The reference points are completely different.
Sufficient for the purposes of mass entertainment is a vague, stereotypical slogan on the lips of a paper muscle-man sweeping across the pages of a comic book. Entertaining as it may be, a cardboard idea of justice is not enough to actually bring about that reality—justice—in society. Nor is it enough to inspire a glowing love of such ideals in people’s hearts, especially youth. We need depth. We need King Arthur and we need Plato.
Neither public education nor popular culture provides the imagination of modern students with good, true, and beautiful images to form the foundation of thought, belief, and action. We need the traditional Western heritage for that, transmitted through things like art, literature, and crafts. This tradition can help restore a healthy emotional development. It may even lead to a reverence for things like history, one’s forefathers, high ideals, and God.
1. Understand the Role of Emotions
Plato famously compared the human being to a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. The charioteer is our reason, which must guide the horses, our emotions, to drive us toward good and virtuous goals. When the horses obey the driver, emotions obey reason, and serve as powerful forces for helping us live a good life. C.S. Lewis writes, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it.”2. Guard the Imagination
An artist friend of mine once said that everything that we take in—through our eyes, ears, touch, etc.—becomes a little part of us. From a psychological, emotional, imaginative, and even intellectual point of view, you are what you sense. The sense images we take in are stored in our memory and imagination. They form the bedrock of our future concepts of reality.We need to screen out ugly or shallow sense images—whether that be music, games, film characters, or toys. Popular culture tends to oversimplify concepts, like justice in superhero stories or love in song lyrics. In order to avoid misleading mental and imaginative associations with concepts like justice or love, we have to avoid at least some of the two-dimensional examples of them provided by popular culture. That doesn’t mean a total ban on popular notions of such things, of course, which is unrealistic, but it does mean augmenting and counterbalancing them with richer and truer images like those found in classic literature, music, and art.
3. Foster the Emotions with Classic Art, Music, and Literature
In his Politics, Aristotle says that the purpose of education is to train students to love and hate the right things, not just intellectually, but emotionally too. Aristotle writes, “Virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, [and] there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgements, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble action.” Aristotle goes on to explain that one of way of training the emotions is through the power of music (and art more broadly), which he sees as indispensable to education. He says,“Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities ... Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character.”
So seek out traditional fuel for the imagination and emotions in the form of great books, masterpieces of cinema, classical music, and time-tested artwork, which have the power of “forming character” well, as Aristotle teaches.
Part of what makes a work of art a classic is that its complexity and depth of depiction make it true-to-life, a true reflection of some aspect of human nature or reality, and thus universally appealing and applicable. Such art speaks to people of all times and places, and it gets passed down as an heirloom from generation to generation for that reason. History has shown that these works are capable of forming “men with chests,” as Lewis puts it.
Since classic art generally does a better job reflecting the human experience truthfully, it provides the imagination with better-fitting images for concepts. In addition, the emotional response it elicits is healthier and deeper because it corresponds more fittingly to reality, thus producing young men and women of character, the ultimate goal of emotional formation.
