The democratic impulses of the Enlightenment that began in the seventeenth century to topple kings and later aristocrats brought with its newly-found economic and political powers certain concerns: can the masses, the many, the demos, the hoi polloi, justly and effectively govern themselves? If the masses become king, what shall the minority do?
The answer to that question for some has been an invisible government of the minority which employs propaganda as its executive arm. Edward Bernays explains that “The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing the majorities. It has been found possible to so mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction” (Bernays, 47).
As far as propaganda goes, it is neither good nor bad. It is merely the propagation of an idea. It lives in the same space as rhetoric, the means of persuasion. And what makes either—or both—good or bad is “the merits of the cause urged” and the motivation of those using the persuasive powers to urge said cause.
Bernays writes, “Propaganda becomes vicious and reprehensible only when its authors consciously and deliberately disseminate what they know to be lies, or when they aim at effects which they know to be prejudicial to the common good” (Bernays, 50).
In our modern world, a good education must prepare the next generation to be aware while living virtuously in such a society as Bernays has identified, and has undoubtedly helped create. To be virtuous and to flourish in such a society it is paramount—as it is in any society—to have rightly ordered loves, just sentiments as it were.
To this end, we often say that for any good road leading in the right direction there is a ditch on either side of which we should take great care to avoid. In a propaganda-governed society, there are two very deep ditches on either side of the road to raising the next generation with properly formed sentiments; and these ditches are sometimes difficult to see.
To lay it out in terms of the Aristotelian Golden Mean, the virtuous center of the road is ordo amoris, just or properly-ordered sentiments. On the right-hand side we have the deficiently developed sentiments, or “cold vulgarity” as C. S. Lewis referred to it; and, on the left-hand side, there are the excessively developed sentiments, what we might call sentimentalism.
For the most part, reasonable people tend to recognize the left-hand ditch of sentimentalism when they get close to it because excessive emotion detached from reason is gullible and silly. But avoiding the ditch on the right-hand side seems to be more difficult.
Our first task to staying in the center of the road is to recognize the nature of the road we are traveling on. And it cannot be denied that we are now trucking down the superhighway of a global society. That means, regardless of one’s political preferences, we must accept that the rise of democratic man was followed by the rise of technological man. And the exponential growth of the internet and social media in the past three decades has brought with it a new globalization of markets, politics, and social engagement. That means today the propaganda is far more pervasive and those pulling the strings are equally elusive.
The second task is to intentionally teach our young how to rightly order their sentiments so they are immune to the modern propaganda machine. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues against the authors of The Green Book who in their attempt to philosophize assert that to the biggest dander is the ditch of sentimentalism; therefore, it is best to cut down or starve our subjective sentiments of all their importance (i.e., it only matters what things are made of because all values are subjective and trivial).
But Lewis explains there are two ways of becoming immune to modern propaganda: “It falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as a thing more than so many million tons of cold salt water” (emphasis mine; Lewis, 9).
For example, there are two kinds of men on which a piece of patriotic propaganda will be offered in vain, explains Lewis: the man of real sensibility and the coward. The sentimentalist might easily be taken up by the propaganda, but the man who has real sensibilities will not be smitten by it; and neither will the coward because such notions to him are contrary to reason and thus, contemptible.
The problem with the coward, however, the “mere trousered ape,” is that, in the long run, it actually leaves him even more susceptible to the conditioning of the propagandists of the invisible government. He might, for example, eventually be persuaded to die for his country, not because it is dulce et decorum, not because there is a noble, or glorious, or virtuous reason to do so, but because it becomes a matter of usefulness for those who have decided they are the ones who are fit to survive.
Therefore, says Lewis, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense 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 not infallible protection against a soft head” (Lewis, 14).
So the million dollar question is how do we irrigate the modern desert? How do we inculcate just sentiments?
We start by recognizing our universe is such a place “that certain emotional reactions on our part are either congruous or incongruous to it…that objects in the universe do not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt” (Lewis, 15). And by recognizing such, we must also strive to find pleasure in those things that merit approval and inspire those we teach to do the same.
I say strive because when we accept that the universe is filled with transcendent values—objective goodness, objective truth, and objective beauty, for example—we may also recognize some deficiency or defect in ourselves; that is, our own tastes are not always in harmony with or approximated to that which deserves our ordinate affections.
References
Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda: With an Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. New York, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teachings of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York, NY: Harper One, 1974.
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