The Doctrine of Objective Value

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

There is no natural law ethic without objective value.

Chapter Four….

‘Can you be righteous unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem?  All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.’

From Centuries of Meditations, by Thomas Traherne, and as cited in The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

To render something its due esteem, to prize something according to its value…in order to do so, such things must have a value that is objective.  Otherwise, what amount of esteem is due?  After all, otherwise any amount of esteem will do.  What value is the thing’s accorded value?  Can any amount be just as good as any other?  Not if it has an “accorded value.”

We have seen that it cannot be so with words.  For life to have meaning, words must have meaning.  Objective meaning.  “Sublime” and “pretty” are not the same.  When describing the waterfall, one of these words is more objectively true than the other.  Rendering due esteem to the waterfall, esteem according to its value, requires the use of one of these words over the other.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.

Virtue requires some standard; else any behavior can be deemed virtuous.  Can you envision otherwise?

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

“Ought” requires some standard; else any affection can be afforded any degree of love.  Well, unless we are free to live without “oughts.”  For humans, some would describe this as liberty, but the same people would not be so callous in this attitude if describing a lion living without lion “oughts.”

[The young student] must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.

Students who have thus been taught in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ are able to find the first principles of Ethics when the age of reflective thought is reached.  Otherwise, reason is left free to justify every whim, every instinct.  Citing Plato:

‘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.’

Absent the inculcation of these first principles of Ethics, Reason can justify any cause, any course of action.

In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta…. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence with reality.

Is it possible to have a life of meaning if one does not live in correspondence with reality?  Or, to frame it in accord with the premise behind this series of posts: if one does not live in correspondence with reality (say, for example, “birthing persons”), one will live a meaningless life – hence, a meaning crisis.

Lewis then speaks of the Tao – reality beyond all predicates.  It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.  He has earlier referred to it in its Western form: Natural Law.

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of things the universe is and the kind of things we are.

If this is so, then to live in a manner other than this – other than the kind of thing we really are – must inherently lead to a crisis of meaning.  Is a lion leading a meaningful life if it lives as a house cat – is it living a life of lion-ness?  Better, if it lives in a zoo, with all material comforts met but none of the things that make the life of a lion lion-like?  Can this be described as a meaningful lion-life?  To ask such questions is to answer these.

But it is precisely this toward which we “educate” children today, the “new” education in contrast to the old form:

Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’.  The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds – making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing.  In a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

The student is made for something other than being what he was made to be.  Without objective value (a man can be trapped in a woman’s body), meaning is lost.  These are to become Men without Chests – the Chest, in Lewis’s view, is the liaison officer between the cerebral man and the visceral man.  It brings together the intellect, mere spirit, with the appetite, the mere animal.  The chest makes man man.

But it is precisely this chest that is taken from man.  the idea that words have meaning – objective meaning; the idea that things are to be rendered due esteem in accord with a value that is objectively understood.  It takes proper training for this – proper training to be what man was designed to be – just as it takes proper training for a baby bird to grow to and adult bird, or for a lion cub to become a proper lion.

Conclusion

And all the time – such is the tragi-comedy of our situation – we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.

This may have been true when Lewis first spoke those words; it clearly no longer is true today.  Today society celebrates that which is most opposite of what man was designed to become.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.

We no longer expect even this.  We now tell these men, men leading meaningless lives, that their lives are so meaningless that we don’t expect anything from them.  Is it possible that this would cause such men to believe their lives were meaningless?

We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.