To esteem or to sin

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man comments that:

"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt."

Lewis here is fighting the tendency to regard all emotions as subjective by modern thinkers. If I see a waterfall as big as Niagara cascading down a cliff with a thundrous roar that makes my own thoughts seem unable to voice their praise to its majesty, any thing I say about the cataract by modern esteem is labeled as subjective. There is no objective reaction to a merely "materialistic" waterfall. It is merely the process of gravity working on water, albeit on a larger scale. The "thing in itself", i.e. the naked physics of waterfalls, do not have anything to do with emotional responses in the creatures, those are provided only by the creature.

Lewis' view is that a waterfall that impressive "merits" our esteem. To not be moved by the roaring conduit of water is to sin against being human. It is a mark of sanity to be moved by what is moving, to love what is lovely, and to hate what is abhorrent. The "thing in itself" is not naked physics, but a panorama of God's creative glory on display. It has a being bigger than mere physics can expound, and for a person to not see the glory of God dancing on the water as it cascades over the spillway is to blind our eyes to what is our rightful response: worship not of waterfalls, but of God.

I think, though Lewis would disagree with many of their implications, this view is in complete accordance with the Puritans. They believed certain things merited the utmost love just by their own "being-ness". They believed Christianity was a religion of heightened affections over the glory of God revealed in nature and in Scripture, and to fail to let one's affections be raised by it would be tantamount to blasphemy, or profaning the glory of God by holding it as trifling and flimsy.

"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived...For although they [men] knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened."

To not properly love what is lovely ruins mankind on many levels. Henry Scougal says, "love must needs be miserable, and full of trouble and disquietude, when there is not worth and excellency enough in the object to answer the vastness of its capacity."

To illustrate, if I refuse to pin my awe on that massive waterfall, and instead try to be fascinated by a mud puddle, I make for myself a level of misery as great as the waterfall is above the mud puddle. For whatever lesser object I set my approval on, I transgress against my created nature to behold that which is great. I don't choose whether or not to "esteem" the waterfall, I respond to its being by either praising or sinning. I do not grant God a measure of worship, I either worship with all my heart or sin with the level of my heart that does not rise up in praise.

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Francis Thompson "The Kingdom of God"

The dead lay still in the cold earth

I am reading C.S. Lewis' "Ransom Trilogy", which are stories that encapsulate the writings in his book The Abolition of Man. He deals here with the de-humanization of Western culture by modernization.
We have become even more dehumanized since he was alive, having continued this trend. And we see it everywhere. Abortion is a procedure that doesn't even take into account in its description its implication for human life. We talk about disasters and famines in respect to their geo-political ramifications and in numbers. We don't believe anything unless there is a statistic behind it. We have become moral adding machines...and moral is about to fall off the title.
Lewis believes the problem with this tendency to dehumanize and scientifically explain or justify all of our experiences is the abolition of what makes us human. He believes emotion and sympathy are too vital to the human soul to always be validated by our rational side. This is not how we learn or live, merely calculating and weighing all things objectively as they fit towards everything else.
He gives an example of military units. Many units have a flag, or a standard, or an emblem that they use to promote a sense of identity and pride. During the heat of battle, Lewis knew that all the rational information in the world would not keep a soldier in the trenches during hours of bombing. (He fought in WWI). What kept soldiers there, fighting, was not rational; it was something far deeper and more simple. "Don't let the flag fall boys, forward! forward!" No scientist can explain why an emblem could stir such fortitude and emotion in the human soul to endure the savage nature of war for a mere flag, but it worked.
No equation can explain how emotion and inanimate objects bleed together and we feel love for a simple spot of ground just because our dead loved ones lay there for a while. But it is utterly human to experience these illogical draining of ration and intellect and emotion and passion into one another's tanks. Pure, cold, hard logic; humanity cannot stomach it. It has produced the vile dictatorships of the 20th century, it has neutered our poetry into a study of semantic domains and linguistic influences rather than just experience the image for what it is worth.
I'm afraid our culture does not even know how to live without someone pounding us over the head with our own soulish nakedness. We deconstruct our literature, we shackle our businesses with rate of returns, and we sacrifice our marriages for efficiency. Morality is the chief victim of this exchange. We no longer even know why good is better, we go by pragmatism.
Despite all of my criticism, I am all slice and no stitch tonight. I will have to think on this more until I even can think of how we could possibly change it on a societal level. We are too entertainment sodden. It starves a boys soul to be brought up on a Wii rather than on Lord of the Rings. A boy needs dragons to kill in his imagination, not a button to press to defeat pixels. I am unsure our music can even carry themes strong enough to change culture anymore, it is produced to maximize profit rather than to be prophetic. I think we are done for. We've burned the very lifeboats culture had built in to save us.