Allan Bloom in his devastating commentary on modern rock music made this observation: “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Rather than using this intriguing idea to critique Bad Bunny’s repulsive Super Bowl performance (an act that resonated with FOX’s King of Late Night, Greg Gutfeld) I wish to move beyond rotten trees to the more expansive infected forest in which we currently wander.
A short but
penetrating book often employed in my philosophy classes was C. S. Lewis’s The
Abolition of Man in which he said, “Without the aid of
trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” I was immediately convinced that those two
words, “trained emotions,” would seem absurd to most students since that verbal
combination goes counter to almost every relevant message they’ve received in
their lives.
As if to confirm the
accuracy of Bloom’s madness-normalcy statement, Google highlights this
incorrect “Christian” interpretation of Lewis:
“Training emotions?” That's ridiculous, you
can't train your emotions! It's just how
you feel, nothing can change that. Lewis doesn't deny that, but his point is
that not all emotions are right.
In fairness, the
author of the above sentences in her further analysis does attempt,
unsuccessfully, to rescue the faulty assertion that Lewis believes “you can’t
train your emotions.” In truth, Lewis means
exactly what he and other philosophers have believed for millennia, namely,
that emotions can be trained by the human capacity termed the spirit in Plato and “the chest” in Lewis’s treatise. Indeed, Lewis decries a modern approach to
education that has produced “men without chests” by failing to develop the
human faculty that’s the source of courage, self-control, and the proper
appreciation of things. As Lewis says,
echoing Plato, “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.”
Instead of embracing
Lewis’s and Plato’s doctrine of objective value (the idea that things merit corresponding
emotional responses) we now unthinkingly embrace the idea that emotions are uncontrollable
responses to stimuli and that beauty is solely in the eye (or spleen) of the
beholder. Unfortunately, it’s a short
hop from this aesthetic assumption to the philosophical assertion that good and
bad, morally speaking, are no more than our personal emotional responses to
things. Indeed, this belief was perhaps
the most common assumption held by my students who insisted that the slaughter of
innocent humans (as in the Holocaust) was only “wrong in my own opinion” rather
than objectively wrong.
A virtue directly
connected to the “spirit” (Lewis’s “chest”) and almost never touted nowadays is
temperance. Today that term is largely associated
only with abstinence from alcohol, but historically the virtue concerned
controlling and properly directing appetites and emotions. Aristotle emphasized habit as the primary means of developing temperance -- of
feeling pleasure at doing good things and displeasure at doing bad things. But today habits are disparaged as much as
temperance is ignored, while emotional impact is the premier currency employed in
commercials, Hollywood productions, pop music, internet posts, and many graduation
addresses. Institutionally, only in military
boot camp is Aristotle’s insight taken seriously so recruits will be able to
control their emotions under fire.
A half century ago Marshall
McLuhan distinguished the dying culture of print from the new electronic
culture. The former, he noted, was
formed largely by the abstract communication of printed words which facilitated
unified linguistic standards, rational discourse, and the ability to act without reacting -- a quality preeminently exemplified
by jet pilots and astronauts who keep
cool under pressure. By contrast, the new
electronic culture of the sixties featured emotional immediacy conveyed by
music and visual images, all now exponentially increased by instantaneously
composed, conveyed, and received computer messages. McLuhan likened this new informational world
to the “tribal drum.”
If one assumes that
emotions can’t be trained, then people are, as Lewis asserted, “powerless
against the animal organism” -- that is, against our instincts and raw emotions
which are being constantly manipulated and stimulated by the “tribal drums” of electronic
images. Consider the internet wasteland that provided the violent propaganda
motivating that Canadian transgender youth who recently killed his mother, stepbrother,
and several others at school in a small British Columbia town. This young mass murderer not only put immense stock
in his own emotions, those feelings were also given inordinate weight by
“professionals” who couldn’t summon the wit or courage to provide a diagnosis that
opposed the wrong-sex prescription repeated endlessly by media to a mentally
disturbed teenager.
Far from “training”
emotions, our culture regularly praises “groundbreaking” actions that destroy
limits on expression and belief.
Implicitly and often explicitly, obscenity is taken as a sign of
cultural sophistication as are activities that contain egregious displays of sexual
perversion to which the label “mature” are absurdly attached. In short, sensationalism and sheer novelty are
often associated with progress, whereas self-control is disparaged as
“self-censorship,” the assumption being that whatever one feels ought to be
expressed, and likely expressed in public. No joke is too crude for the King of Late
Night, and no expression of political venom is too over the top for his
competitors.
It is possible, as
Plato and Lewis assert, to train one’s emotions, but our “tribal drum” culture
militates against and actively discourages it with almost every image and
message that emanates from its corrupt media.
Temperance in our time need not uncritically reflect Victorian or 1950s
mores, but absent development of the human capacity to train emotions, a
culture drowning in moral and emotional chaos is inevitable.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in
Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is
also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry
with a Moral Edge
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