Book Club: Abolition of Man | Irrigating with Our Assumptions
Cindy is hosting another book club, this time going through the thin but meaty Abolition of Man, the text of which is available free online. Free text online sure does make quoting a lot easier, let me tell you. :D
Please do join in! Abolition is short and accessible, but with many avenues to discuss.
Assumptions
In the first essay, Lewis considers a particular but unspecified textbook, and how the assumptions of the authors will create unconscious assumptions in the students:
It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.
Giving students assumptions is not necessarily a bad thing, I think; Lewis is condemning the assumptions that the textbook is offering, not the fact that it is giving assumptions. How we perceive the world, the assumptions and filters we function under, will determine the assumptions we pass on to our children. Before theory is simple perception. What Lewis says a few paragraphs later about ordo amoris returns to this thought:
Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’
So, our own assumptions about the world and life, our home’s atmosphere, our manner of living and acting, or reacting, is giving our children entrenched filters and affections that they (and, usually, we) are not even aware of.
The way Lewis speaks here of Reason reminds me of the way Wisdom is personified and spoken of in Proverbs. She calls, and the well-trained son hears and responds; however, the foolish son cannot hear, or, hearing, rejects it.
I know all too often the atmosphere I create is one of harsh tones, hammering the gavel down on silliness, and, generally, keeping a piercing hawk eye for offenses — and what you look for, you can usually see. My own attitude and what I see and how I respond shapes what my children also see and how they respond. This is evidenced clearly by how well they can mimic my harsh frustration among themselves. This isn’t the atmosphere I want, but it is often the atmosphere I choose, because I stubbornly insist on my own way in my heart. In this, even, though, there is room for rejoicing, because there is room for repentance. If through my faults and failings, I can yet model repentance, suddenly the bad turns for good and the crooked is made straight. A sin becomes not something that condemns, but an opportunity to create an atmosphere of repentance and forgiveness and grace.
What we dish out is what will be dished back to us. What we sow, we will reap. Harshness or grace. Glares or smiles. Gavel-hammering or rejoicing. It is sown in our homes and multiplied in our children, shaping their perception of the world much more than any theory or lecture. How scary. How much we need God!
Cutting Down or Building Up
My very favoritest quote is right here near the beginning of the book. It is one of my top most education quotes of all:
[T]hey conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
I have always loved this quote and identified myself as a desert in need of irrigation, just like my own backyard. My own heart does tend toward hardness and cold vulgarity rather than weak excess. I have always looked down upon Maryanne Dashwood. Give me Eleanor, yes, and we shall feel mightily superior to the silly romantics. Give me cold logic and reason and I shall debate in my mind. And then I wonder why, after all this reading and thinking, my life remains untouched. I cringe and groan and protest when Piper emphasizes emotion, and I can only take the excessively poetic in small doses. But then my pride and my reason cannot deny that God commands certain emotions to characterize the lives of His people: joy, thanksgiving, abundance, rejoicing, gladness, contentment. And how come I don’t have them when I have affirmed that it is so? It is because I am a desert repulsed by jungles. Yet, I am called to fruitfulness, to growth, to being an ordered and lively jungle, and God promises to water — with living water — especially those who water others.
After all, it is only by being irrigated myself that I can in turn irrigate the children. “Get cheerful!” Mother snapped and Mother growled, “If you don’t change your attitude, you know what will happen.” Oh, wait. Is this what you meant by hypocrisy? Right. Oops. And again and again we repeat. Inculcating just sentiments comes not by the telling and the commanding, but by the living and the breathing. Easy to say and so, so painful and difficult to live. But if, with my manner of life and my own true affections evidencing themselves, I pull the rug from underneath my children and leave them believing this life is a fraud, then the famished nature and hard heart and soft head will seek a different story and leave them open to lies.
Conclusion
So, I’m here typing convicting things to myself, and my 3-year-old comes with her alphabet flashcards and says, “I want to play with these….for my own glory.” Um. That’s HIS own glory, child. But, yes, perhaps the atmosphere is too often MY own glory. It’s not what one says that matters so much as how one is actually living, what one is actually doing, and the assumptions that are actually governing rather than the theories and philosophies affirmed.
A child’s character is forming under a principle, not of choice, but of nurture. The spirit of the house is breathed into his nature, day by day. The anger and gentleness, the fretfulness and patience — the appetites, passions, and manners — all the variant moods of feeling exhibited round him, pass into him as impressions, and become seeds of character in him; not because the parents will it, but because it must be so, whether they will or not. — Horace Bushnell
Great post, Mystie. I like your application, the atmosphere we set at home, I identify with what you say about this starting with us, gulp.
Oh, my, yes. I strongly prefer Eleanor over Marianne. But I don’t think she is unfeeling, she just works toward control and self-mastery. She doesn’t air her emotions for all to see, but she doesn’t lock them down as though she doesn’t feel either. I think this is what Lewis was talking about where the head rules the heart rather than vice versa.
Like the Bushnell quote a lot.
No, you’re quite right, Eleanor is not emotionless, but self-governed and appropriate. I meant to tie in a sentence there about being the Eleanor that Maryanne perceived, but I couldn’t make the sentence work. :)
And what it really needs to bring home is that we can’t do this at all. It’s God who gives grace and “draws straight with crooked lines” (one of my favorite Wilson quotes).
Reading through this post reminds me of why I enjoy these book clubs so much especially when reading something simple yet complex like Abolition. Instead of plowing through a reading with each post I am taken back into the chapter to gain new insights through the eyes of others. Wow, totally awkward sentence but I am on a foreign (to me) and far from home and weary.
I apologize that I am just now reading this post. Two weeks late, I know, I know. But I wanted to tell you that I thought it was wonderful and it left me pondering the atmosphere of my own home.