Teaching objective values in an age of gurus

My latest for Discourse Magazine

“The head rules the belly through the chest,” declared C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. Our head represents our rational intellect. Our belly is the seat of our appetites. And our chest houses our heart, our sentimentality. Our chest, our capacity for emotions is what makes humans human. It is the “indispensable liaison officer between cerebral man and visceral man,” as Lewis put it. Without emotions, or more specifically, properly trained emotions—a commitment to a set of objective values that inform how we respond to inputs—we fall prey to propagandists who wish to influence how we view the world and each other.

Lewis thought that the role of a good education, no matter who is providing it, is to root the young in a tradition, a doctrine of objective values. For him, this doctrine would permeate society, so that teachers and students alike were swimming in it. Therefore, teachers would not have to teach values, rather they could focus their efforts on transmitting human heritage.

This is not the sort of society we live in. Nonetheless, how to transmit humanity through a doctrine of objective values, or simply acknowledge that there is such a thing as objective values, is worth considering. This is the argument I put forth in my most recent article for Discourse Magazine.

Enjoy! And feel free to share your thoughts.