“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 a famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man,” Simon & Schuster, 1996, p 27.

I recently saw the movie “The Visitor”. At the end, when I realized the emotional attachment I had formed to the characters, it struck me that the entire movie was advertised and played out, until almost the end, as a movie about how one person can bring renewed life into the life of another. It also was about the power of music. But when the movie ended, I felt cheated. The whole time, the movie had really been about illegal immigration, and not from an objective perspective. It was about the pain caused by deportation laws, their injustice, and the undignified (perhaps even inhumane?) treatment of immigrants in detainment centers. The reason I felt cheated was because I was lied to, though not explicitly, and because I didn’t know what I thought about the deportation of illegal immigrants, but now all of a sudden I had very negative feelings about it that had been evoked in me by a fictional work, not stirred up by rational argumentation.

So then, today, I am reading C.S. Lewis. “The Abolition of Man” can be a difficult read. His main subject is education. What is the purpose of education? My college education has been largely in the liberal arts (that is, English, history, philosophy, and other non-science and non-fine-arts disciplines), and I have gotten the impression that my professors succeed in educating their students if they teach us how to “think for ourselves” and not get hoodwinked by anyone. That is, there is an assumed goodness in training students to harden themselves to emotional manipulation.

What the Lewis quote (and, actually, the larger context of the quote as well) is saying is that students are too easily hardened. And hardening, though the easier route, really does students no good. It makes it more difficult for them to respond to the truth in proper ways because their hardening results in resistance (and, ultimately, indifference) to both the false/ugly/wrong and the true/beautiful/right. In Lewis’s mind, the goal of education is to stir up just (i.e. noble, upright, and good) sentiments, which will then result in the students’ ability to grasp the just while rejecting the unjust.

While I do not know what to do about illegal immigration, I can watch “The Visitor” and agree with the film’s creators that there were many injustices performed in the name of “what’s best for America”. That ought not be so. Those are proper emotions, and the filmmakers are right in arousing them. They do not offer any suggestions as to how to go about fixing the problem, righting the wrongs, but that’s a different critique.

My two main considerations are 1) whether the film stirred up proper sentiments or improper ones and 2) how we are to distinguish between the two. I believe the film stirred up proper sentiments, insofar as they were longings that people be treated with fairness, kindness and dignity even in situations such as detainment and deportation. That I felt outrage at “the system” may not be immediately productive, but it is proper. I also was angered by the ho-hum attitude of the man at the detainment center front desk. There were not only negative sentiments, but positive ones as well, such as enjoyment and pleasure toward the way music was used to reinvigorate a man who was lifeless inside.

I wonder if it would be crediting this particular movie too greatly to liken it in some important respects to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Perhaps so.

One last note… on how we distinguish between proper sentiments and improper ones, or between just sentiments and unjust ones, etc. It is likely that the reason public school education (even up through college) is inclined to harden hearts to emotional pleas rather then cultivating proper responses depending on the plea, is this: to teach which responses are proper and which are improper requires the teacher to take a moral stance, to help students discern between good and evil, right and wrong. As this is frowned upon, even punished in the modern educational system, teachers are left with the easier and more destructive path: that of hardening students from being “moved” in any direction whatsoever.

Links related to the movie:
http://www.thevisitorfilm.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0857191/

(Apologies that this post is not well organized. I was more interested in getting my initial thoughts out than in writing a well-formed essay.)

Written at 1:23 pm         ||         Filed under: General
Add a Comment

Leave a Reply