S9E11: Abolition – Ch. 1, Pt. 2 (“Urban Blockheads and Trousered Apes”)

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We move into the heart of Chapter 1 of The Abolition of Man and see why The Green Book fails to teach English and instead transforms its students in a different way…

Click here to download S9E11: Abolition 1.2 (“Urban Blockheads and Trousered Apes”)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

But there is a third, and a profounder, reason for the procedure which Gaius and Titius adopt. They may be perfectly ready to admit that a good education should build some sentiments while destroying others. They may endeavour to do so. But it is impossible that they should succeed. Do what they will, it is the ‘debunking’ side of their work, and this side alone, which will really tell.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Chapter 1)

Chit Chat

Q. How’s everyone doing?

  • David just got back from a work trip to Chicago. He’s about to start reading a beautifully illustrated Kickstarter copy of “The Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser to his son, Alexander.
  • Andrew hit the Rabbit Room jackpot, with an Advent devotional, “The Anglican Way”, and “Lent With the Desert Fathers” by Thomas Mckenzie. In addition, Andrew recently had a book come out that he helped to edit, called “Rediscovering Lewis”.
  • Matt is back from a trip to Rome. He’d been attending a Catholic conference that focused heavily on the use of AI in the modern world, and listened to priests, theologians, and philosophers hash out the topic.

Q. Today in the episode, we’re going to be talking about advertising. What’s your favorite advert of all time?

  • For Matt, it’s the Apple ads, and for Andrew it’s the “Give Me a Break” Kit Kat commercial.
  • The first one David thought of was the Cadbury’s Gorilla adverts, set to “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.

Toast

Today, we toast our new Patreon supporter, Jack Kirk! May your days be long, filled with joy, good work, and the grace of God. Cheers!

Discussion

Recap

Before we dig into the next section of Chapter 1, a little recap from last week… 

  • “The Abolition of Man” was published in 1943, based on the Riddell Memorial lectures that Lewis had given earlier that year. Well received at the time, it has only gained in esteem since its publication, being quoted both by Popes and on the US Congress floor.
  • It’s a short book. TAOM is just three chapters – one per lecture: “Men Without Chests”, “The Tao”, and “The Abolition of Man”.
  • In this series of essays, Lewis is responding to the arguments of scholars I. A. Richards and A. J. Ayer which are founded on Logical Positivism, a philosophy that claims that sentences must either be tautological (“Bachelors are not married”) or empirically verifiable. Everything else is basically discarded as emotivism and therefore meaningless.
  • Similar content to “Abolition” can be found in the opening chapters of “Mere Christianity”, essays such as “The Poison of Subjectivism”, and even in his fiction, particularly “The Last Battle” and “That Hideous Strength”.
  • In the section we read last week, we learned about “The Green Book” written by “Gaius” and “Titius”. These are pseudonyms Lewis invented to hide the identity of an English school textbook, which we now know to be “The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing” by Alexander (“Alec”) King and Martin Ketley.
    • The book describes two tourists at a waterfall who describe the scene in different ways. One calls it “sublime”, while the other calls it merely “pretty”. The famed English poet Coleridge endorses the former, and is repulsed by the latter. However, the authors of “The Green Book” claim that the descriptors aren’t actually about the waterfall, but what feelings the sight invokes within us.
    • Lewis claims that the book has little to say about English composition, and is instead an underhanded way of teaching children bad philosophy.
  • So, with a little background knowledge, let’s push on… 

01. “The Practical Results”

Q. Jack says he’s going to table the discussion about the philosophy pushed by the Green Book for now. He says he wants to talk about the practical results of it. What are they?

  • First and foremost, the students learn very little about English literature from their English textbook! They don’t know how to write or recognize a good piece of text, but rather how to read through a monotone lens.

02. “Compare and Contrast”

  • Gaius and Titius mock a pleasure cruise advertisement that uses marketing tactics to exploit people’s desires. Lewis actually agrees with them, calling it a “bad bit of writing …exploitation of those emotions of awe and pleasure which men feel in visiting places that have striking associations with history or legend.”
  • However, Lewis says that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Gaius and Titius should have followed up the advert with a piece of good writing that expresses the same sentiment, from a writer such as Samuel Johnson or Wordsworth.

A lesson which had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really discriminated the good from the bad would have been a lesson worth teaching… It would also have had the merit of being a lesson in literature: a subject of which Gaius and Titius, despite their professed purpose, are uncommonly shy.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

03. “What Did We Learn?”

Q. If the students haven’t learned anything about English Literature from Gaius and Titius, what will they have learned?

  • They will know how to be cynical, critical readers, who take everything too literally.

…the luxurious motor-vessel won’t really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not have any adventures, that the treasures they bring home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate might provide ‘all the pleasure and rest’ they required. All this is very true: talents inferior to those of Gaius and Titius would have sufficed to discover it. What they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very similar treatment could be applied to much good literature which treats the same emotion.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)
  • The same way that Gaius and Titius are going after this advert, they could do to “debunk” any piece of good literature that expresses the same emotions.

From this passage the schoolboy will learn about literature precisely nothing. What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

04. “An Attractive Conclusion”

  • All of this criticism will leave students with a smug illusion of austerity and intelligence, when in reality, it instills priggishness and emotional deadness that rips the value out of everything.

…he is encouraged to reject the lure of the ‘Western Ocean’ on the very dangerous ground that in so doing he will prove himself a knowing fellow who can’t be bubbled out of his cash. Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters, have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful…

Psalm 1:1
  • Lewis also talks quite a bit in similar works about “stock responses”, or the typical replies certain statements might receive. He claims that stock responses are being eroded, and that ugliness is being openly embraced for ugliness’s own sake. Walter Hooper’s “C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide” walks through these arguments from Lewis and much more.
  • Especially today, this scornful mentality permeates our age. We usually associate it with adolescents, but lately, many adults have this attitude, especially towards religious things. We talked earlier this season with Terry Lindvall and his SIL and daughter in S9E4: “The Joy of Narnia”, where we discussed using Narnian principles in a classroom setting to help deter cynicism and flippancy in middle school students.
  • Lewis gives examples of scoffing in other works, such as “The Last Battle”, where Susan mocks her siblings for continuing to talk about Narnia as they grow older, acting as though it was something only for children and she was past it. The ironic thing is that the things she’s convinced herself are fiction are far more real than the things she is interested in.

“Whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”

C. S. Lewis, Eustace, The Last Battle (Chapter 12)

05. “The Two Ways of Immunity”

Q. Lewis says that there are two ways in which someone can be immune to the advert. What are they?

  • One can either be above it, by being a “man of real sensibility”, or by being below it, by being a “mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water”. Gaius and Titius are turning students into the latter. This philosophy is evolution in reverse, making us less human.
    • This analogy of a “trousered ape” is Shift from “The Last Battle”! The scheming monkey pretends to be human, but he still remains an ape.
    • It’s also a reminder of the talking beasts in “Prince Caspian” loosing their gift of speech. The students are like these poor animals, who have been conditioned to lose their sensibilities.
  • Lewis gives another example, this time of “a false leading article on patriotism and honour”. Once again, there are two ways to be immune to it. The first is the truly honorable and patriotic man, and the other is the coward, or perhaps at least someone who thinks nothing of patriotism. 
  • In all of this, Lewis is arguing that it is better to have a sentiment that is well-formed, rather than cut out of you.

Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters, have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

06. “Obilius”

Q. Lewis says that the same “soul surgery” found in The Green Book is being done in other books under “the same general anaesthetic”. Who’s he talking about?

  • Lewis calls this author “Orbilius”. This author debunks what he calls “a silly bit of writing on horses” who are “praised as the ‘willing servants’ of the early colonists in Australia”. Lewis says that the author is, once again, reading into things too literally, because horses are not interested in colonial expansion. Orbilius’s readers, like readers of “The Green Book”, won’t learn much more than debunking.

Why the composition before them is bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good, they do not hear… Some pleasure in their own ponies and dogs they will have lost: some incentive to cruelty or neglect they will have received: some pleasure in their own knowingness will have entered their minds… That is their day’s lesson in English, though of English they have learned nothing. Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)
  • Lewis talks again about those who remain untouched by good writing, because they are either above or below it.

07. “Counter Examples?”

Q. As with Giaus and Titius, Lewis says that the pupils aren’t given counter examples (or is that “canter” examples?) of writing about horses that’s good. This section is a little dense, so I just wanted to run through them. What are some of the ones he mentions?

  • Here’s a list of the literary examples Jack offers:
    • Ruksh: Persian national epic Shahnameh 
    • Sleipnir: Odin’s eight-legged horse
    • The weeping horses of Achilles: Balius and Xanthus, immortal steeds who wept in sorrow over the death of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad
    • The charger in the Book of Job: Job 39:19-25 
    • Brer Rabbit: A character in African-American folktales
    • Peter Rabbit: Beatrix Potter
  • Lewis also points out that Orbilius has nothing to say about what he calls “man’s prehistoric piety to ‘our brother the ox’—of all that this semi-anthropomorphic treatment of beasts has meant in human history and of the literature where it finds noble or piquant expression”.

Q. Once again Lewis speaks about the two kinds of people who are not in danger from bad writing about horses. Who are they?

  • Once again, those above it, those with ordinate (rightly-ordered) love for horses, and who he calls “the irredeemable urban blockhead to whom a horse is merely an old-fashioned means of transport”.

08. “Talking About Bicycles”

  • On the subject of being disenchanted, Lewis discusses this in further detail in an essay called “Talking About Bicycles”. In it, he describes the four ages of a person, and what a bicycle means to a person at each stage.
    • Unenchanted: a person is ignorant of what a bicycle is.
    • Enchanted: they have ridden a bike, and it gives then joy and freedom.
    • Disenchanted: the man experiences the daily grind of riding to work and appointments, and having to go up hills that make riding unpleasant.
    • Reenchanted: the man retires, and begins to ride for pleasure again.

09. “Iniusta Sunt”

Q. Up until now, Lewis has assumed that Gaius and Titius are not intentionally teaching philosophy… but now he considers the possibility that they are doing this on purpose. They want to turn their students into trousered apes and urban blockheads: “They may really hold that the ordinary human feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradicated.” It’s horrible in and of itself, but what cardinal virtue are they destroying?

  • The virtue they eradicate is justice.

In filling their book with it they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist’s obiter dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

Q. But at the end of the section we discuss today, Lewis suggests that the authors are not really planning to teach philosophy. It’s accidental… but why does Lewis think they’ve fallen into doing this?

  • Literary criticism is hard – this is easier!

…literary criticism is difficult… To ‘debunk’ the emotion, on the basis of a commonplace rationalism, is within almost anyone’s capacity.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)
  • I. A. Richards himself, as Lewis points out, failed to tackle the problem of “badness” in literature.
  • Additionally, Gaius and Titius have misread the educational needs of society – they think society is too emotional/sentimental – but Lewis thinks the opposite is true.

They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they 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 or 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.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Men Without Chests)

10. “Lewis the Hypocrite?”

Q. Is Lewis guilty of this as well, sneaking past “watchful dragons”, or “smuggling in any amount of theology under the cover of romance”?

  • No. Lewis set out to write good works of fiction, and as with any great stories, morality becomes a part of the air of the fictional world rather than something that is shoehorned in. Lewis wasn’t trying to deceive his audience by using a completely unrelated topic as a pretense for shoehorning in an ideology. He uses story as a medium for teaching virtue and goodness.

11. “Why Has This Happened?”

Q. What is the last reason Lewis gives for why Gaius and Titius are doing this?

  • They may think education involves some sentiments being encouraged and others discouraged. However, Lewis claims that they’ll only succeed in debunking… but in order to explain why Lewis says he’ll have to take a detour… which we’ll pick up next time!

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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Posted in Andrew, Audio Discussion, David, Matt, Podcast Episode, Season 9, The Abolition of Man and tagged , .

David

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After working as a Software Engineer in England for several years, David moved to the United States in 2008, where he settled in San Diego. Then, in 2020 he married his wife, Marie, and moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Together they have a son, Alexander, who is adamant that Narnia should be read publication order.