Has America Run Its Course?

In this four-minute video below, American young people were asked questions about American history. Listen to their answers and you’ll know how our nation was lost. Even if you only have 30-seconds, start at the 3:54 mark and hear a teacher admit how she preaches the ills of racism in lieu of teaching her students history.

Perhaps, this, above all, describes America’s descent into a third-world country: The failure of education. Or, rather, more specifically, the transmogrification of education into indoctrination.

Because education requires proper discernment of ethics, values.

The first chapter of the book “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, is entitled “Men Without Chests”. Therein, Lewis described “chests” as “the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man”. He added: “it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal”.

Lewis then forewarned of our dystopian future:

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.

….We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

So… the kids. Many, if not most of them are NOT alright. This, in fact, explains why America is not alright.

Many people may not realize that C.S. Lewis wrote “The Space Trilogy” as a fictional account of how the educational misconceptions as described in “The Abolition of Man”, would transition western civilization into a dystopian society.  Paradoxically, while working for the Manchester Evening News, George Orwell reviewed the third book of “The Space Trilogy” by Lewis. It was entitled “The Hideous Strength” and Orwell claimed that Lewis’ book “would have been stronger without the supernatural elements”.

It’s also true that C.S. Lewis once compared Orwell’s “1984” with “Animal Farm”, and, ironically, Lewis wrote the following in publications several years before Orwell wrote 1984:

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.

Now those words were included in Lewis’ 1952 book “Mere Christianity” and “1984” was published in 1949, but the former book was a compilation of publications written by Lewis from 1943 – 1945 (that were derived from even earlier speeches & radio broadcasts).

So, I’m thinking Orwell’s 1984 (2+2=5) might have been written in response to Lewis – about a world devoid of logic and morality, except without the “supernatural elements”.

If anything, perhaps the writings of these mid-twentieth-century intellectuals demonstrate how a nation’s spirit might be addressed by the application of principles (laws?) like truth, honesty, courage, discernment, temperance, and discipline – as opposed to deception, deceit, cowardice, moral relativism, lust, and greed.

Yet still today, in America, many people in both business and government conduct themselves with honesty, courage, and integrity.

It’s how I roll and I believe most of you now reading this do as well.

Nevertheless, here we are.

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