Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

If Nobody Can Claim Authority

If Nobody Can Claim Authority

If nobody can claim authority, then on what basis can anyone claim the “truth” about anything?

On what standard is your authority based?

Science? Your strength, political clout, or education?

Exploding stars – by themselves – have no ethical opinion in how or why we act a certain way.

Does that make sense?

If you think about it, this is the same for The 10 Commandments or any other reported scripture.

If it came from man – why should it be any more valid than what any other man has said?

If it came from something higher – it should have infinite value and truth.

But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. If he had really started from scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value, no jugglery could have advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man should die for the community or work for posterity. If the Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. Not one of them can claim any authority other than that of the Tao. Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

The Task Of The Modern Educator

The Task Of The Modern Educator

C.S. Lewis believed that the task of the modern educator was simple.

It is to lay the ethical foundation for rigorous analysis and opinion.

Of course, many would disagree, but the older I get I am not sure you can (long-term) do it any other way.

Is (properly) teaching one how to think close – by its very nature – to teaching one what to think?

For like we just said: Can the sentiments we promote really be based on nothing?

Ugh. Deep stuff.

I like what Alan Jacobs had to say on all this in his book How To Think.

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. 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 famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell