YMB #59 The Abolition of Man and Education: A Conversation with Dr. Jason Jewell

This is your morning basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your home. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 59 of the, your morning basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I am so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, it is no secret that CS Lewis says the abolition of man is one of my very favorite books.

I make It a point to read it over every Year or so, but that’s only because it’s so deep, it’s such a deep, well that I’m trying to understand. So I’m on my third go through right now. And I feel like I’m starting to grasp a little bit of what it’s about, but the fascinating thing about abolition is what all it has to say about our education of our children in the book.

And it’s a really interesting read. So today on the podcast we have dr. Jason Juul and he is helping me dig deeper into abolition. This is more of a philosophical discussion, but I think it’s one that’s important for us to have as homeschooling parents. What is truth, goodness, and beauty. And why are we trying to teach these things to our children?

Is it even possible for us to do so? It’s a fascinating conversation and I think you’ll enjoy it. We’ll get on with it right after this word From our sponsor.<inaudible> This episode of the, your morning basket podcast is brought to you by my stroke classics, give the timeless gift of classical music. This Christmas with Maestro classic CDs and MP3s visit Maestro classics.com.

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That’s maestro@maestroclassics.com. And now on with the podcast, dr. Jason Juul is a father of seven homeschooled kids and the chairman of the department of humanities at Faulkner university. He has advanced degrees in humanities and history and teaches courses both in European history and in great books. Jason is the associate editor of the journal of faith in the Academy and has a special interest in the intersection of Christianity and culture.

He is joining us on this episode of the podcast to discuss CS Lewis’s work the abolition of man and how it relates to education and to the practice of morning time, dr. Juul, Jason, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Pam. It’s great to be with you. Oh, we’re so happy to have you here. Well, we’re going to dive off into a meaty subject today.

So before we get into the actual content of the book, let’s talk a little bit about the context. Can you tell me about the background of the abolition of man? It was originally a series of lectures, correct? That’s right. And these were lectures that were delivered at a, I believe Cambridge university Louis a few years after the publication of this book became a full professor at Cambridge.

And these lectures were then later compiled into the published format that you can access today. And so he was doing them at Cambridge, but what was kind of the historical period of the time that abolition was when he was giving these lectures, what was influencing him? Okay, well, the lectures were delivered during world war two. And of course at that time,

there’s a lot of discussion about the nature of the conflict between the Western countries, including the United Kingdom and the totalitarian States that we were fighting first and foremost, Nazi Germany, of course, and Louis was concerned that some of the same kinds of ideas that animated the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s were also influencing intellectuals in his own country and in the West more generally.

So part of what’s motivating these lectures is Lewis’s desire to sort of sound a warning saying, look, I’m, I’m noticing some disturbing trends here in the way we talk about education and the way we talk about values in our own society. And if we’re not careful, these trends might lead us down the same path that these totalitarians that we all say, we don’t like down the same path that they went.

So he’s hoping to get some people the United Kingdom and in the English speaking world to sort of wake up and recognize the danger. That’s implicit in some of the things that intellectuals were starting to take for granted and the first half of the 20th century. Oh, fascinating. You know, it’s a, it’s an interesting read, no matter what, but then when you take it and put it in that historical context,

it just opens up a whole new kind of so many more things that you could dig into and explore with the book and what he’s saying in there. So why do you think it’s still relevant today? Why is it considered such an important work that we’re reading it 60 years later? Well, you make a good point in that the abolition of man is one of a relative handful of louis’ works that people do keep coming back to and keep finding fresh relevance in the ideas that he’s explaining there.

And I think the primary reason for that is that a lot of these intellectual currents, we’re still struggling against some of those same tendencies. I think that today in the 21st century, we talk a lot about the problems that are presented to us by post-modernism. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot and Lewis isn’t dealing with postmodernism. Exactly. That’s something that sort of comes up after his death,

but some of the same kinds of questioning of what Louis identifies as the traditional values of world civilization, those, those challenges to those traditional values are still very much in circulation today. And so some of the same criticisms that Lewis has, even though he might be talking about a different group of people who are what he would call naturalists and just are taking the position that everything is matter,

moving in motion and denying all kinds of ideas about the supernatural or the spirit or the soul Lewis is targeting those people with his criticism. But some of these postmodernists that are sort of driving the bus today in our educational institutions and in the broader cultural conversation are making what Lewis would consider some of the same mistakes in their attacks on the traditional values of world civilization.

So I think that a lot of people who read the abolition of man today is considered to be very timely and some of the same criticisms that he makes against his contemporaries could equally be made against the people that are in charge of educational curricula and highly placed in, in politics and culture today. So it’s almost like we’re fighting a slightly different enemy, but we’re still fighting the same battle In some ways,

yes, the battle lines are drawn in, in some of the same places. And Louis is a great resource for those of us who do take that position that, you know, Western civilization has produced a lot of great things that are worthy of being defended, particularly with our cultural and religious and ethical heritage, that he is fighting on the same side as us,

so to speak. And so he provides us with a lot of intellect, intellectual ammunition, for lack of a better phrase that we could deploy against the people who are attacking our own Western tradition. Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit, let’s dig into some of the bigger ideas that are in the book. And I know we could probably sit here until Christmas talking about the big ideas in the book,

but can you give me kind of an overview of a couple of the big things that Lewis really puts forth and you’ve touched on it already, but this is a chance to get a little more specific. Okay, well, the book is divided into three chapters, which correspond to the three lectures that he originally delivered and the titles of those chapters are number one,

men without chests, which is an interesting phrase. I’ll come back to in a moment. Number two, right? Number two is titled the way. And that’s a phrase that he uses in different forms quite a bit throughout the book. And then the third chapter is titled the abolition of man. So these lectures sort of build on one another and as you can probably infer from the title of that third chapter,

which is also the title of the book. He considers there to be a real danger in some of the trends that he’s observing that eventually humanity, as we know, it could be destroyed and he’s not talking they’re primarily about something like nuclear war, which of course was a, a big concern in the middle of the 20th century. But of course, when Lewis first delivered these lectures,

the atomic bomb had not been invented. So he clearly is not talking about that, but he’s concerned that the people who are trying to, as he says, conquer nature, could end up really taking away from us. Everything that we consider to be most important in being a human being. So we’ll back up a minute. We’ll, we’ll get back to that point here in a moment,

but this first chapter men, without chests, it begins in a kind of a curious way. He actually starts off by analyzing some passages out of an elementary school textbook and saying that even at a very young age, English children are sort of being indoctrinated in a way into assuming certain things about human nature and about the world around them, that Lewis things are not true.

So he begins with this passage in a book in which the authors are criticizing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of course, coerce is the great 19th century English romantic poet. And Coleridge had told this story about people who were looking at a waterfall to people looking at a waterfall. The first one says the waterfall is sublime. And the second one says the waterfall is pretty.

And Coleridge says the first person, the one who said it was sublime, that person gets it. The person who just says the waterfall is pretty doesn’t really understand what the waterfall is all about. And sublime is not a word we use very often today, everyday conversation, but it has something to do with something that is very impressive, perhaps amazing, but also sort of creates a feeling of fear and trembling in the people who are viewing it.

And so it’s something that is very impressive, but also fear inspiring. And these authors of the elementary school textbook that Lewis is discussing, take that story and say, well, Coleridge really didn’t understand things correctly. When someone looks at something like a waterfall and says that sublime, these authors say, they’re not really saying anything about the waterfall itself. They’re only describing the feelings that they have internally,

subjectively and Lewis thinks this is a very incorrect and potentially dangerous way of describing things. Basically what these textbook authors are saying is they’re, they’re advancing a philosophy that’s been called subjectivism where all judgments of value are simply internal and completely subjective things. And they don’t really correspond to anything real in the world, external to ourselves. And Lewis says this, this idea that all judgments of value,

all values really are purely subjective, is completely at odds with the entire tradition of philosophy and religion and ethics in world civilization, not just the Western tradition where you have the Judeo-Christian values, but really all of world’s civilization, the East Asian tradition of Confucius and the Buddhists. And you go all around the world and there’s always been a recognition on the part of these great world.

Civilizations that values have an objective quality to them. Our rules of morality and ethics correspond to something real in the world. In the external world. It’s not just something that we come up with out of our own heads. It’s something that the, the, the external world demands this response from us and these textbook authors are sort of throwing all of that out.

The window. Lewis says, this is something that is happening a lot in Britain, in the 20th century and in America and in Western civilization more generally. And he thinks this is a very dangerous thing. And already young children are being subtly encouraged through textbooks like this, to abandon the tradition of ethics and morality that has defined our civilization for thousands of years.

So I’ve been talking for a while. I’ll stop there and ask if you, if you have any thing to point out here or any particular thing you’d like me to elaborate on. No, I mean, I think you’ve, you’ve pretty much covered kind of the basic idea of it. And I know we’re going to get into more of that objective truth that he talks about in a few minutes as we start talking about the next chapter.

But yeah, it’s the idea that the waterfall is what the waterfall is. No matter how we feel about the waterfall is basically the idea is, is, is something, is what it is. And it’s, it’s not merely based on our feelings about it, you know, just because somebody were to walk up, let’s say an 11 year old boy,

he might have one of those and go, yeah, it’s not that gradable waterfall. It doesn’t diminish. It doesn’t diminish the value of the waterfall because that’s how he feels about it. That there is this kind of absolute objective truth out there, or beauty out there, or goodness out there. Yeah. So another way of thinking about this is that we,

we have a saying that’s fairly common in the 21st century, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I think that a lot of people in the 21st century, because they’ve been influenced by the same ideas that Lewis is criticizing in his book would probably agree with that statement without hesitation. But that idea that beauty is a purely subjective thing. W what I find beautiful,

you might not find beautiful in a third person might, you know, split the difference between us and we’re all right. Okay. That’s the, that’s the idea that, because we each have one of us, you know, you can’t challenge another person’s feelings. You can’t challenge another person’s judgment on aesthetics or something like that. And yet we still have the idea that it is possible for a person to have good taste,

right? In aesthetic judgment. We, we have idea that someone who has learned the vocabulary of let’s say painting someone who has studied the history of art and know something about the technique of art can make a more informed judgment and a better judgment about a work of art than somebody who had never really done any of that study. So we still have this tension in our culture today that on the one hand,

we say that everybody can make their own perfectly valid judgment about something like beauty. And on the other hand say that, well, people who have studied this and have sort of shaped their own understanding through experience or other kinds of things that their judgment is somehow superior. So that’s that that could be a contradiction in the way most people think about this, but if you go back to the early 19th century,

the same time period, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing, there’s another famous British poet Keats who had that famous line in one of his poems, beauty is truth and truth beauty. And that’s really more in line with the tradition in our civilization about recognizing that beauty has an objective character to it. And that if, if a thing is really beautiful in and of itself,

and two people are sitting there looking at it, this could be the waterfall. This could be a work of art, it could be anything. And one person recognizes the beauty in it and says, that’s a beautiful thing. And the other person looks at it the 11 year old boy perhaps, and says, well, I don’t see anything special about that.

That’s not beautiful. Then Lewis would say, what we need to recognize there is that the first person correctly understands something about that waterfall or that painting or whatever it might be. And the second person misunderstands it, there is something wrong about the way that the second person is approaching this object because of some quality that’s inherent to the object. And that is something that these textbook authors that he’s criticized and are wanting to get rid of.

And then a lot of philosophy in the 20th century was trying to get rid of, but, but Louis is very insistent on this idea that he standing with the great tradition of Western civilization and world civilization saying that our judgements about these kinds of things should or are, do, or ought to accurately reflect something that’s inherent to those things we’re talking about is not just something that things that we’re making up in our own heads.

There’s a real correspondence between our judgment and the actual quality of the thing that we’re discussing. So we’re getting a little, a little technical here with the philosophy. I’m trying to think. It’s, it’s kind of Fun though, because I think that most, and this is such a hard concept to, to grapple with the idea that, you know, we’ve always thought we’ve always grown up with the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I mean, it’s just so ingrained into who we are as a modern culture. And, you know, some of the things that are bandied about today in the name of art, you know, when you think about those kinds of things, don’t get my husband started, but you know, it it’s, we’re so accustomed to that. We’ve kind of fallen prey to these textbooks and educational ideas that Lewis was speaking about in the forties.

So, I mean, you’re saying this is a relatively new, the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is, is a relatively new idea in the history of Western thought. Yes, that’s right. I would say that it originated perhaps in the late 19th century and then came really into its own in the 20th century. And it’s funny,

you mentioned modern art. Well, if you ask any art historian, you know, what, what were the greatest periods in the history of art? Nobody is going to say the 20th century and the 21st century, nobody. And the thing, the periods that they will always point to would be things like the Italian Renaissance, perhaps the Baroque period, or the,

the neoclassical period of the 18th century and these periods in which that everybody agrees are the great periods in the history of art. These are periods in which the artists and the people who wrote about art were in agreement with CS Lewis, that they took the same approach to the idea of recognizing what beauty is. And they might’ve disagreed with one another in certain respects on what the best way is to portray that beauty,

but they would all agree that beauty is something that is inherent in the thing itself, not something that is just a subjective reaction in our own minds. When we look at, when we look at a work of art, so it’s, it’s not surprising then that when the philosophers and others begin to turn away from this idea of beauty, being an objective thing that we can recognize by exercising our rational minds and seeing what’s out there in the world and,

and identifying certain things as beautiful and other things it’s ugly when they turn away from that, it’s not surprising that a lot of the art that gets produced starts getting ugly and starts getting what a lot of people would consider nonsensical that that’s not an accident. So this is something that, you know, and Louis is living in the middle of all this. When you have movements art like abstract expressionism and other things that have really abandoned these,

I don’t know whether rules is the right word, but, but guidelines and understanding truths about perspective and beauty and so on. He seen that all around him. And he’s kind of sounding the alarm here that we’re going in the wrong direction when we, and this, this is not just about the concept of beauty of about anything having to do with our own judgments of value corresponding to something that is real in the things that we are talking about,

rather than some something that’s simply our own subjective response to those things. Okay. So we’ve, we’ve barely touched on like a third of the book before we move on to the way which I do want to talk about because Lewis does an interesting thing there let’s talk just briefly. What does Lewis mean by men without chess? Okay. Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that.

I didn’t want us to get away from this chapter without actually coming back to it. One of the things that the people that, who he is criticizing are often trying to do is Lewis thinks they’re trying to stamp out what they would call mere sentiment our feelings about the stories and places and people of the past that we learn about in school. And in our own reading,

these authors that Lewis is critical of is on what they are doing in part is attempting to sort of rip out in, in louis’ term, the, the chests of these people that Lewis thinks it’s perfectly appropriate and perfectly fine and suitable and healthy for us to let’s say, for example, when we stand in a geographical location where something very significant happened, let’s say for Americans,

like if you go to independence hall in Philadelphia, and you are standing in the place in the building where the founding fathers were and where they declared independence from great Britain in 1776, Lewis would say, it’s perfectly appropriate for Americans to stand there and feel a sense of awe that you are standing in the place where this really significant and momentous event occurred. And the people he’s criticizing are saying,

no, there’s nothing significant at all about standing in a place where something important happened. That’s one example that Lewis uses when we have a sense of awe or reverence or veneration that corresponds to a place or reading about inspiring characters in great literature. For example, Lewis thinks that that is part of our humanity. That’s something that though that emotional sense that we feel is,

is part of what helps to shape us. It helps to form our moral, moral character. And when he sees other authors sort of poo-pooing that and saying that well, you’re getting sentimental and you are losing your ability to look at things. Rationally Lewis is not having any of that argument. He says that whenever we are trying to do the right thing,

we’ve got free parts to us. And he goes back to Plato here. Louis was very fond of Plato, the classical Greek philosopher in certain respects. And he says that we’ve got these three parts of us that play to identify. We’ve got our intellect, which is which corresponds to our brain. We have the appetites, which are kind of the animal,

like part of us that corresponds to our stomach. This would be, you know, the impulse to eat and to drink and to sleep and so on. And then he says, we also have our sentiment, which corresponds to our chest. This is where we get our kind of gut level reaction to things that are right and wrong. Our sense of awe and reverence,

as I mentioned before, and he said, he thinks of these educators of his own time are trying to stamp out the chest and remove things like the sense of honor that people have. And the sense of respect for tradition and for our ancestors and in a very famous passage at the end of that chapter, he says, these guys are coming along and they’re,

they’re trying to stamp out all of these worthy things that are really part of the chest and this three division of three parts of the body that he’s talking about. And so he says that we educate our kids this way to tell them, to use their head and to obey their impulses, their instincts, their stomach, but then they shouldn’t have a chest.

But then we turn around and we hear all these, these, this complaining, and hand-wringing about how our civilization needs more drive. It needs more creativity, it needs more self-sacrifice. And Louis at the end of this chapter says in a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traders in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings, be fruitful. That’s how he ends that lecture. So a very dramatic imagery there, but that’s what he means by men without chest. That the way we’re educating young people is destroying sense. That helps to guide them ethically. Yeah. And then we wonder,

you know, why everything’s turning out the way it is. I’m glad you read that. Cause I had found that quote to read, if you hadn’t read it, It’s probably one of, one of the most quoted passages by Lewis or at least the one that I see people quoting very, very frequently in my own work. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s,

it’s pretty, it’s pretty good. Okay. So let’s move on to the way and talk a little bit about what he establishes and this next lecture. Okay. I think this is the chapter that may be the most difficult of the three for modern readers. It’s the one where he gets the most philosophical really. But the way is a phrase that he had actually introduced in the first chapter men without chest.

And he, he uses this phrase to refer to the inherited body of tradition about ethics and values. That that is really common to all world civilizations. And in fact, the phrase that he uses more than any other to refer to this body of prescriptive knowledge, he calls it the towel, which of course is a Chinese phrase. And I, that was a very clever thing for Lewis to do,

I think because it helps to inoculate himself against accusations that he’s simply trying to privilege the particular Western and Christian body of ethics. But Lewis is saying, no, this is something that’s, it’s not just a Western thing. It’s not just a Christian thing. This is something that’s common to civilizations around the world. Almost every, every great civilization believed these,

this set of ethical guidelines, things such as it’s wrong to murder people, it’s wrong to steal, you know, those kinds of things. He says that everybody believed this up until really about, you know, the last century or so. So he says that in the 20th century, there are people that he calls innovators and he always spells this with a capital.

I, he says, the innovators want to do this. And the innovators want to do that. And his diagnosis is that these innovators are trying to not actually destroy the towel. Sometimes that’s what they say they’re trying to do. But what he says they’re really trying to do is to take little bits and pieces of the towel that they like and make those the absolute standard for everything.

And then get rid of other parts of the towel that they don’t like. And I, one example of this that he uses is that so many people in the 20th century are trying to get rid of the sexual ethic. That’s part of the towel, the, the rules about when it is, and is not appropriate to engage in sexual activity. And he says that,

of course, there are a lot of people in the 20th century who want to go out and say, it’s okay to obey your instincts in this area. And these rules that we have about this particular activity are just getting in the way of us living fulfilling lives. And remember, he’s writing all this, he’s delivering these lectures well before of what we would commonly identify as the sexual revolution,

but he already sees the writing on the wall here. He’s like, there’s this intellectual sort of framework that’s being put in place by these innovators that is trying to do away with this traditional ethic about sexual behavior. And he gives several other examples as well, but he says that these people are trying to do what they say they’re doing is liberating us from these traditions that are antiquated and outmoded.

And they’re just trying to, they say, allow all of us to adopt a, a new ethic that is more humane and more suited to who we are as human beings. And that will allow us to live a better and more fulfilling lives. And Lewis again, has some very critical things to say about this. He says that these intellectuals and others who are advancing these kinds of ideas are really when you get right down to it,

he thinks simply saying that human beings need to obey their instincts whenever they can. And Lewis says there are problems with that. If we all just go out and obey our instincts all the time, that has very serious social consequences. And he’s not even saying this in a particularly religious way. Of course, Louis was a Christian, but he say, again like,

this is not a particularly religious argument that he is making. It’s one, that’s common to civilizations around the world. That we’re part of different religious traditions, of course. And he says that, you know, there, there, there are two ways of trying to change things. The first way is to say, well, I respect the traditions that we’ve inherited.

And I recognize that maybe those traditions are not perfect. And there might be certain situations in which we need to change some of the ways that we do things that make it more humane or more suited to our own situation. But he says that that’s changing things from the inside where you have a respect for the tradition and you are maybe identifying particular problems with that tradition and working in a constructive way to make adjustments along the way he says,

the other way of trying to make changes is what he thinks these innovators are doing. The innovator will look at that entire body of inherited tradition and sort of place themselves outside it, and then claim that they’ve got their own way. They want to do things. And they say that the burden of proof is upon the tradition to defend itself and justify itself.

And that if it can’t justify itself, according to the standards of the innovator lays out, then that tradition should just be discarded, thrown away, you know, put onto the rubbish sheep. And Lewis says, that’s a completely, that second method is a completely illegitimate way of trying to bring about social changes. And he accuses these innovators of really being dishonest.

Because as I said earlier, what they’re really trying to do is preserve certain things from the towel or the way that they like. And then just trying to get rid of things they don’t like, but, but Lewis says it’s a package deal. And there might be certain circumstances in which you do need to make adjustments in how you apply some of these ethical guidelines,

but you can’t just start ripping chunks out of it. And then think you’re going to have something that’s salvageable when you’re, when you’re done with that process. Okay. And so, and I just, my particular version of the abolition of man actually has an appendix with illustrations of the towel in it, which I found really fascinating and helpful. So there were all of these they’ve gone to different cultural backgrounds.

I’ve got a lot of from Hindu, from the ancient Greek and Roman from Jewish scripture and the ancient Chinese. And they’ve given all of these examples of, you know, they divided up into topics like sexual justice and honesty and justice in court. And they give all these examples of, of, and show the similarities, how, you know, this is a universal truth that we’re seeing here.

This is not the Judeo-Christian only, this is like, the truth is he’s presenting it this way. Or towel is something that you can see everywhere across all these cultures. So it was really a fascinating bit to have in the back of the book. Yeah, it’s remarkable. And I’m kind of paging through that appendix as, as you’re talking here and I’m seeing things from ancient Babylonians,

Australian Aborigines, I mean, these are people whose own cultural context is almost completely different from our own. Yet they arrive at many of the same rules about ethics more or less. So there are, there are, you know, there’s multiple ways that you could explain that, you know, someone who is who’s an atheist and is just, you know,

just a science kind of person. And they think that that explains everything. My, someone like Richard Dawkins, for example, some of your listeners may know who that is. He might say, well, that means that there’s a, there’s certain things that are built into our DNA, our genes that lead us to kind of make these ethical judgments. That might be one way of trying to explain that another way,

which, which Lewis would probably prefer is that, well, all human beings are, you know, were created by the same God. And so God placed certain kinds of things, you know, into our souls and into, into our hearts, so to speak so that we are, we feel led through this, through the image of God that’s in us.

And also the use of our reason that no matter where we are in the world, we’re going to land on many of the same kinds of conclusions, many of the same truths. So there are different ways you could explain why you see this commonality among all these cultures, but Lewis, his critique of these innovators is that they somehow think they can step outside all of that and try to Chuck the whole thing.

And he says, no, that you’re going to run into a lot of contradictions when you do that. First of all, and by the time the whole process is done, you really, aren’t going to like where you end up, because in the end, you’re subject to these same kinds of tendencies and, and longings of the human condition and that the people that you disagree with are subject to,

and what he ends up doing in the third chapter is saying, you think you’re on this path of progress and that you’re going to lead humanity to higher and higher achievements and lofty Heights and all that. But in the end, you really will not like where this all ends up. Right. And he even talks, he changes the name from innovators in the end,

and he starts talking about conditioners, right. That’s right. That’s the term that he uses quite frequently in the final lecture, the abolition of man. And so what are they trying to do as he’s talking about them in this last chapter? Yeah. Here you can really, I mean like Lewis is original listeners in the 1940s when he’s delivering these lectures.

Almost certainly what he’s saying here would have called to mind the eugenics policies that were common, not only in Nazi Germany, but also in a lot of places in the English speaking world, where there was a very concerted effort based on certain interpretations of Darwinian biology. And so on in the early 20th century to say, we want to improve the human race.

And the way we need to do that is by trying to make sure that people that we think have desirable characteristics, maybe they’re, they’re tall, they’re good looking, they’re physically strong. They possess certain character traits like ambition and intelligence. We want to make sure that those people are disproportionately reproducing and providing us with the next generation. And on the flip side of that,

the people that we think have less desirable characteristics, maybe people who are ugly, maybe people who have certain disabilities, physical or mental disabilities, we don’t want them reproducing because if those people reproduce, they’re just going to drag the human race. And so you had policies in many Western countries in the early 20th century of things like involuntary sterilization of people so that they could not have children and many things that,

you know, in the early 21st century, almost everybody would, would shrink back from in horror and discussed, but they weren’t very mainstream kind of ideas there in the early twenties century. And these conditioners that Lewis is talking about are the ones who are trying to manage humanity to try to create certain conditions that they think will lead humanity to improvements in the long run.

So this could be things like eugenics. It also could be certain kinds of educational practice, where you try to indirectly<inaudible> people to think in certain ways. And they think that you’re going to change human nature by the way that you educate them and indoctrinate them. This was a very big idea among communists in the 20th century. They believe when, when people told communists your ideas are not compatible with human nature,

a frequent communist response was that, well, we’ll just change human nature. Then you know, this idea that human beings are infinitely changeable, infinitely, malleable. And if we just indoctrinate them correctly, we’ll create this new socialist man. That was a phrase that was used quite often, who would think the correct things about society and be willing to sacrifice for the good of society and so on.

So Louis is looking at these trends, which are very acceptable and very fashionable, among many intellectuals in both the English speaking world. And in other parts of Western civilization and saying, look, what you are actually talking about doing is controlling future generations. You’re not you, you say that you’re liberating humanity from the shackles of the past. In reality, you are trying to control humanity and place new boundaries around human beings.

And he makes this point very dramatically by imagining say, if we keep going on this present course, let’s say that our generation is able to make improvements on quote in humanity by three eugenics or some other process. And then the next generation continues that same process. And we go, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes at some point, there’s going to be a generation that is,

has been influenced by those people, previous generations. But finally, let’s say that they find solve everything and they have conquered nature unquote, and these people then have figured out exactly how to in 21st century, we would say something like control the human genome in louis’ day. They didn’t know they hadn’t sequenced the human genome or anything like that. The DNA was just on the verge of being discovered when Lewis made these delivered these lectures in the 1940s.

But let’s say Louis was already kind of looking down the road and seeing this as a possibility. Let’s say that at some future point, there is a generation of scientists that is able to control completely through genetics or whatever. While the future generation of humanity is going to look like, well, from that point on every later generation is not free. Every later generation is the slave in a sense of the people who came before it.

And so he says that you, you guys who think you’re on this path of progress and you think you’re liberating humanity in a, in a sense you’re, you’re kind of enslaving humanity, or you’re putting us on the road towards that. And let’s say even what what’s imagined that, you know, a hundred generations down the road, those people, maybe they are smarter,

maybe they do live longer. Maybe they have certain qualities, physical strength, whatever that we value. And we think are great. Well, they have those traits because we valued them. Not because they value them. They have those traits because we program them to have them. So are they really free? Well, in a sense, they might be free of certain physical limitations,

but does it, are they any more human as a result of that? And Lewis says, no. In fact, in fact, they may, by the time we get to the end of this road, we might not even recognize those people, a hundred generations away from us as being human beings at all. Or they might be more like robots.

Yeah. Louis was writing about this even before the abolition of man, if you, if you read some of his space trilogy, which he started writing in the 1930s, one of my favorite books by Lewis is the first book of that space trilogy, which is called out of the silent planet. And he has a character in there who sort of represents this kind of conditioner or innovator.

It’s a character named Western and Western is very forthright. He thinks, he thinks that the ultimate value is the survival of humanity as a species in the collective. But he says, well, you know, thousands of years from now, I might not even recognize a human being. They might’ve changed so dramatically because of the changes that we’ve been making along the way,

but that’s fine. Western thinks that’s great. As long as they are, as there are a lot of those things, whatever they are, and they are going out and colonizing other planets and that sort of thing, Louis doesn’t really see any value in that in and of itself. He thinks that what it means to be human is not just that we live a long time and that we’re strong and that we’re smart.

There’s something else that makes us human. And if we sacrifice that in order to gain these other things, well, then we’ve really made it kind of a foolish. Okay. And we could just go on, I mean, there’s so much in here we could dig into, but I want to bring it around to education and what this means about education in our families.

So how has Lewis’s ideas on education influenced your family’s approach to teaching and learning? Hmm, that’s a really good question. I would say that for one thing, our, what we do as a family in our home school is in line with Lewis. I think in the sense that ethical training and character formation is very important to us. And when you contrast that to what Louis portrays in the first chapter of the book,

these authors, that he’s very critical of sort of present themselves as morally neutral guys who are simply teaching the kids a skill. And if we’re honest, you know, and that’s what a lot of parents say they want out of the school system. They say, don’t try to teach my kids values. I’ll do that at home. And then what happens in a lot of cases is that neither of the schools teach values and the parents don’t teach the values either,

unfortunately, but Lewis thinks that the transmission of these ethical values can’t be taken out of education. It’s it’s going to happen one way or the other. And so one of the criticisms he makes of these textbook authors, he says, they’re not really being neutral. They’re smuggling in certain values, values that Lewis things are wrong. He says that when, when you write your textbooks this way,

and you try to set up the thing like you can, like, you can understand all these different areas of life, all these subjects, without any kind of reference to ethics, without any ref reference to values of any kind Lewis says you really are teaching them values. You’re just teaching them bad values. You’re trying to get them to divorce all of these important areas of life from a ethical consideration.

And what that really means is that they’re going to approach those things in an inhumane manner. So I think that part of what we do as, as a homeschool family is at, at every step of the way, I hope we are always trying to make sure that the kids understand what is and is not the morally and ethically right thing to do with respect to their studies and with respect to looking at the world around them.

So these are things that hopefully my children are going to have the kind of chests that Louis says that we need. And I think that if you’ve gotten that, and of course the kinds of things you give them to do is going to have an influence on that. This is part of the argument over, you know, back when ed Hirsch and others were talking about cultural literacy,

does it really matter whether the kids are being, you know, are learning to read with books, like, you know, children’s versions of the Elliot and the Odyssey children’s versions of Dante’s divine comedy. Should they be learning to read what those kinds of books or is it fine just to give them Dick and Jane, you know, from the fifties, you know,

Dick and Jamie, you can, you can learn how to read words and that sort of thing, but the cultural literacy folks. And I think they were right. People like Hirsch were saying that the content of what you’re giving them to read is as important as the technical skill of learning to decipher the symbols on the page that are the letters and making the words out of them.

You can’t just say, well, I’ve got I’ve, I’m teaching them the skill. And therefore I’ve been a success as a teacher. No, the idea here, that’s part of our millennial long tradition in world history. Is that going along with that, you have to be inculcating the values in them as well. And so the choice of, and this is why I think that it’s healthy when parents want to fight over textbooks and things like that,

because somebody’s values are going to be communicated through those textbooks, regardless of what the well, the textbook authors say. And if you are concerned about the values that your children are going to have, surely you are everybody listening to this, who’s a homeschool parent. Then you need to take care with what sort of things you give them to read, because as they learn these skills,

they’re learning other things too. And you want to make sure that they’re learning the things that are in line with, with, with your own orientation and your own ethics and, and faith and so on. So I think that’s one of the main takeaways that I have for education from Lewis’s book. And even in, you know, this kind of movement to strip away all of the story and the fiction from learning for kids,

you know, like we’re going to learn history only through nonfiction. We’re going to learn history only through these texts, you know, such an emphasis these days, especially with like the common core on reading nonfiction pieces and in stripping away, a lot of the hero stories, a lot of the mythology, a lot of the literature and things like that, that really does kind of shape who we are as people going back to that idea of having a chest.

And, you know, I know there are a number of homeschool curriculum that start with these hero stories for very young kids, and that is essentially their history. And it really serves a greater purpose than just, you know, a nice story about some historical figure. It, it really is teaching them things like honor and courage and duty and those kinds of things that Lewis reference.

Yeah. It sometimes seems like when you go into the schools, the curriculum is designed at every point to avoid firing the child’s imagination. Right. And, but, but, but we know that having your imagination fired is the thing that inspires you to learn and makes you want to know more. So I think that it’s perfectly appropriate and yeah, we can argue about the factuality of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and things like that.

But if you can get the child interested in George Washington with that story, and there’s a point at which you say, well, yeah, this may not be entirely factual, but it does communicate the idea that Washington was known for his honesty. And that’s an important character trait that we should all aspire to. And yeah, eventually you’re going to graduate to the things where you say,

yeah, let’s, let’s try to make sure we’ve separated the facts from the fiction and all that. But when it comes to the idea of trying to convince the children of the worth of these areas of study, then I think that’s an extremely valuable thing. And I’ve, I’ve used a variety of different resources with my kids, as I’m sure many parents have.

And you know, when, when I see the kids sitting down with one of those books and reading it outside the time that we’ve designated for, for, for schoolwork or study time or whatever, and they just want to read the story because they’re interested in finding out more about these people, then that’s a victory as far as I’m concerned. And so,

yeah, there’s going to be a point where you say, well, yeah, I mean, when we want to get to sort of a higher order understanding of certain things, you know, what’s, what’s moved to the nonfiction and let’s, let’s make sure we’ve got some of these other things in place, but that’s, that’s really critical. And that,

of course, that ties back in with what Lewis is saying is the, the importance of the character, character formation, as they are learning these skills and competencies and whatever the educational professionals are telling us are important these days. Yeah. But there’s definitely value in both. They each have their own place. So I want to touch on a morning time because that’s what we talk about on this podcast.

You know, it’s a time we like to call it a time in your day when your entire family can come together and immerse yourself and make time, you know, in the midst of the checklist and the history lesson and the learning to read for things that are true. Good and beautiful. Now Lewis seems to be arguing in the book that there is actual truth,

beauty and goodness to be found. And it’s not just a matter of our own feelings or opinions. So how do we hone our own sense of truth, goodness, and beauty, as we try to pass the, these ideas onto our kids. Great question. And I think you’re right, that Lewis is endorsing the truth, that these things are all real,

that they do exist, that we should be pursuing them. And this is probably not going to sound too surprising coming from a professor who teaches the great books. But I would say that outside the, the teachings of one’s religious faith, that the best way to do that and to engage in that pursuit with your children is to get engaged in the great conversation,

through the great books, you know, identify the best. You know, this is the, this is the 19th century politically incorrect phrase, but the best that has been thought and said, who are those great authors who are the ones that have advanced our understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty, and make sure you are engaged in a discussion of those works with your kids.

And there are, of course, a lot of difficult authors out there that are part of this, this cannon for lack of a better word. And certainly there’s no expectation that young children are going to be able to plumb the depths of Aristotle and other great authors like that. But even with some of those difficult authors, there are ways that key ideas from their writings can be presented to young people.

And there are so many great resources out there today for, for homeschool families, from organizations like the great books foundation and other versions of these classic stories and, and other writings that have been condensed and simplified for young readers. I really think that we’re, I mean, I don’t know if the golden age is the right term to use for homeschooling parents,

but there’s certainly so much available now than there has been at any other time in the history of this, of the modern homeschool movement. That if I, I think that if you’re, if you haven’t found a good way to do this with your children, it probably is that you just haven’t looked enough for those resources because they are out there. So that would be my recommendation.

You know, some of the great biographers, for example, of the classical world, Plutarch is a good example know was, was very concerned with the transmission of, of morality and ethics through the writing of the lives of these great Greek and Roman figures that he was writing about. So you can take children’s versions of those Plutarch biographies and, and talk about the life of an important individual and insight.

You know, what, what kind of character traits are, you know, are sort of things that we could admire in this individual, where, what were his flaws, where did he go wrong? Or are there ways that we could try to avoid the same mistakes this person made, or are there ways that we could emulate him him in, you know,

if he did something that was really praiseworthy and, you know, children will, will latch onto those kinds of conversations and, and they can pick up a lot of great insights. So I think there’s a, there’s a wealth of material resources out there, and it’s exciting in a lot of ways to be a homeschooling parent with, with everything that we have access to these days.

Yeah, it is. And we like to think we point people towards a lot of those things here too. So keep listening to the podcast and we’ll hook you up with, with some of those ideas. Well, Jason, I could probably talk to you all day about these big ideas that we’ve been talking about, but could you tell people where they could find out more about you online?

Yeah. I do have a personal website. It’s Western tradition.wordpress.com. And it’s a website that I actually have not updated recently. I’m hoping I’m going to come back to it very soon on that website, I’m practicing my own personal project of reading through the great books of the Western world. The 60 volume series that was edited by Mortimer Adler, about 40,000 pages of many of the great authors of Western of the Western tradition.

And I’m also available through Faulkner university’s website for those parents who have a high school age children, and are wondering about where to send them for college. We have a great undergraduate great books program that is@faulkner.edu Faulkner like the author, William Faulkner, F a U L K N E r.edu. And you can just search for great books on there and you’ll find me and the other professors who work with our great books undergraduate program.

We also have programs online degree programs that are designed in part for homeschool parents who were never able to finish a degree or interested in coming back and discussing great books with other like-minded people. So you can find me there. I would love for folks to reach out if they have any interest at all in studying the great books in a formal capacity at the,

at the college or graduate level, or visit me on my personal website. Thank you for that opportunity. Oh yeah, that sounds wonderful. So we’ll be sure to put links to all of that in the show notes so everybody can come over and check those out. Well, thank you so much for being here with me today. It was such a pleasure.

You’re very welcome, Pam. Thanks for asking me. And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to any of the books or resources that dr. Joel and I spoke about today, you can find them on the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Those are@pambarnhill.com forward slash Y M B 59. Also on the show notes are some instructions on how you can leave a rating or review for the your morning basket podcast on iTunes.

We love it when you leave reviews on iTunes, because it helps us get the word out about the podcast to more listeners, and if you’ve taken the time to do so. Thank you so very much for doing it. Now we’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great morning time interview until then keep seeking truth, goodness and beauty In your homeschool day.