Single Issues, it could be said, ranks among the least known yet most conceptually elegant and rhetorically concise apologias for what we have come to call the “culture of life” in America. It’s author, Joe Sobran, was a longtime senior editor at National Review. Sobran, now dead, was remembered in the magazine after his passing in October.
Single Issues, sadly out of print, consists of selected essays from Sobran’s contributions to the Human Life Review. In the final chapter, “Happy at Home,” Sobran takes the reader on a survey of C. S. Lewis. It is the least explicitly “pro-life” essay, but, of course, is a treasure for lovers of Lewis.
As Lewis’s scope was vast, so too is Sobran’s, and in this chapter there’s a short section which I’ll excerpt here, dealing with Lewis’s devil-teacher Screwtape and Lewis’s fear about the core intent — or at least, inevitable result — of a ruthlessly egalitarian public education system:
Screwtape in his final appearance gloats that “penal taxes” are destroying private education. Soon only state education will remain, and the total collectivization of England will be within sight. For the object of state education will be to make all its products uniform. The educators will be, in reality, the poultry-keepers, fattening up the young birds to be devoured.
As a teacher Lewis naturally took a special interest in the fate of education. He emphatically thought it was a realm that should be private, hierarchical, aristocratic in the sense of being devoted to excellence. But he saw state education as devoted to equality in a debased sense, equality as uniform servility.
[Lewis:] I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has “the free-born mind.” But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?
At least two perennially daring thoughts here.
First, from Sobran: “The educators will be, in reality, poultry-keepers.” In a culture that has embraced the commodification of free men and women, treating graduates as “products” of a system, as “inputs” and “labor” for “industry,” can there be any doubt about educators as “poultry-keepers?”
Quaint as it may seem, I think there’s real danger — both for the health of our culture and for, truly, the salvation of our souls — to speak of man as anything other than man. We become what we believe. When our language, and the thinking that delivers its spirit, speaks of man in the same way it speaks of oil production or defense manufacture, we then have a basis for also treating man in that antiseptic spirit.
Then, from Lewis: Only “the free-born mind” allows one the perspicacity to “snaps his fingers” at ideology, and at the tyrannies that seduce and pervert depth of thinking.
In other words, working in tandem, Sobran and Lewis remind us that ideology poisons free thinking, the principal thing with which an education is designed to equip young people. Our age brims with ideologues and lacks Montaignes.
Planners everywhere, it seems, are devising absolutist paradigms by which ever greater masses will allegedly be both produced (like circuit boards) for the needs of tomorrow. And our central planners, especially within the $80 billion federal education leviathan, continue undaunted by their existential contradiction, which is this: “planners” necessarily run up against, and must ultimately come to a form of violence with, those of “free-born mind,” who by definition live by a sort of un-plannable code, lives rich with spontaneity and unpredictability, where great moments of decision, discovery, risk, or adventure turn on subtle moments of retrospectively monumental importance.
The cultures that produced the great men and women of history regarded sameness as an evitable baseline, not as a desired standard. One great man only recently died. We’ve taken to calling him John Paul “the Great.” We do so because billions knew him, and millions recognized his spirit as supreme self-possession (to borrow a phrase), and have been excited to embrace an elevated standard.
Free-born man remains the historical exception, and so requires a protection as a still relatively tender and delicate specimen in our history.
Young parents, I think, are in a special place to decide the fate of our culture by answering amongst themselves their preference: poultry-keeper planner, or toward Montaigne and the free-born mind? We can become great, in our own way, by educating for greatness, remembering the truism that rising tides life all ships.
What glory, or fun, really, is educating toward the baseline, toward sameness?
These first principles can spur recovery of form in education.
To put this another way, the greatest poultry keepers are none other than the free-born minds.
And as for one who eats "the mutton and turnips raised on his own land," let us keep in mind that his own land is nothing he created, but is something he took by force, or inherited or purchased from someone who did, and that use of force requires social support. It is not the voice of one free of government, but the voice of one who got the social payout first, then declines to pay the taxes.
Finally, I note that intellectual freedom, or social freedom, is not for everyone. Perhaps it is poorly suited to most of us.
Anecdote: Earlier this evening, I attended a performance of the Vienna Boys Choir at Grace Cathedral, on Nob Hill in San Francisco. This is a rich part of town. I arrived early and waited at a nearby park, where some locals were walking their dogs. Most of the locals were women about 30. All of the dogs appeared to be variations on the theme of Bichon. (I'm not familiar enough to discriminate one gourmet breed from another.) Several of the women sat on benches (apart from each other) while their dogs played. About half of them pulled out a hand-held device and text-messaged, or whatever.
I relate this anecdote because it is difficult to relate it to any imaginary world of free-born minds, independence, or the like.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs I read this it reminded me of Hillsdale College. Their decision to forgo both direct and indirect federal/state funding gives them a unique position in the higher education portion of the $80 billion federal education leviathan. They are free to choose.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm not sure why observing a number of people playing with e-toys and having expensive dogs demonstrates a society lacking "free-born minds." (As a statistical aside, for reasons of sample-selection bias I might expect many of the people in a particular park in a particular part of San Francisco to make similar life choices.)
One of the traits of the free-born mind, it seems to me, is a willingness to acknowledge what we don't know, to be uncomfortable with certainty. In science and in some branches of economics the importance of the assumption of ignorance is known and indeed foundational, but I think we can extend it to thinking about the life choices of other people. I wouldn't choose to own an expensive dog, but it may have some use for other people that I can't understand; indeed, the greater such a hidden use, the more people are likely to choose it. As for the new tech gadgets, they allow us to spontaneously create and alter our own social networks, our own music, our own image of ourselves. To see it as merely aimless time-wasting, although it undoubtedly has some aspects of that, is to miss this power.
As for "modern employers," they rise and fall all the time, their staff from top to bottom are in constant flux. You don't like your job, you quit it. In extremis, you start your own business. From the broader perspective, if we take for granted that large organizations are here to stay because of their (again perhaps hard to discern from the outside) benefits, I could think of worse ones to use as a vehicle for social organization than the profit-making corporation.
How do we know an environment conducive to free-thinking people when we see it? Not, surely, merely by pointing to the prevalence of certain life choices, especially to those that we might personally find distasteful. The important consideration is not what is chosen, but whether the society enables the freedom to think for oneself and to act on one's choices. But I would also add that, perhaps paradoxically, humility born of respect has its place as well.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseC.S. Lewis changed his mind more than once too, that of a devout Christian and something less before. The reality of a "free mind" is that it benefits the individual before the whole. And as in education the individual is suplanted for the benefit of the entire scheme of higher learning, and that is the crux of the problem, if the individual does not bow to the higher authority then his journey is finished. And the education process is ended. In the final analysis the individual struggles to maintain independence but the analogous "poultry teaecher" becomes the indigeouness fowl and the students the flock that indiscriminately follows .
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