Men without "chests": created by modern society, yet abandoned by it.

“Have you ever seen such words?

“I have, even without a background” — it is taken from Lewis's dense first chapter of "The Abolition of Man" — I understand what it means.

Modern society has created many men without "chests," and then complains that the world has always lacked integrity, men with "chests."

However, recently I have spent a lot of time studying the content of the quote, and I learned that Lewis was actually looking for something different; or more precisely, he was not describing the loss of masculinity itself, but rather the mechanism it produces in relation to all other types of virtue.

In fact, by "chest," he was not referring to some textual or metaphorical masculine physique, but rather — emotion.

His lament is that modern society has caused all men to lose their inner selves.

The Way of Emotion

Lewis also observed that almost all religions and philosophical schools, whether Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Aristotelianism, Stoicism, or Platonism, believe that there is a potential natural order to the world, and that "truth" is the thing that most clearly reflects and explains this reality.

To adhere to "objective value theory" is to believe that "certain attitudes are true, while others are false; what the universe creates is what we are."

Lewis felt that this viewpoint could be best described using the Chinese concept of "Dao":

“It is the reality beyond all prophecies... It is nature, it is method, it is the way. It is the law by which the universe operates, the way in which matter eternally and peacefully flows into space and time. It is also the method by which everyone should imitate the universe and the advancement of super science. All activities conform to this great law.”

In the objective reality of nature, there exist people, places, and things with objective value, and therefore they should be respected to varying degrees:

“Until modern times, all teachers and even everyone believed that the universe was such that our certain emotional responses could be consistent or discordant with it — in fact, these objects were not only recognized but should also receive our approval or disapproval, respect or contempt.”

Given that the value of things is objective, they should elicit certain responses from us.

The night sky should evoke a sense of humility;

The story of a brave warrior should evoke a sense of admiration;

A child should evoke a sense of joy;

The death of a friend's father should evoke a sense of sympathy;

Acts of kindness should evoke a sense of gratitude.

Although the nature of emotional responses is intrinsic and automatic, a man's emotions must be consciously educated to become consistent.

This training teaches a person to discern things as more or less just, true, beautiful, and good, and to allocate his feelings more evenly. As Lewis pointed out, this training was considered the core of the entire development of antiquity:

“Saint Augustine defined virtue as ordo amoris (the order of love), which is the vertical coordinate of emotion; in which each object is assigned the degree of love suitable for it. Aristotle said that the purpose of education is to make students like and dislike what they should do. Plato also said the same thing before him. Young animals do not initially have the correct responses. They must be trained to feel pleasure, love, disgust, and hatred towards those things that are truly pleasant, lovable, nauseating, and detestable.”

If a person believes in an objective order and value, then when he fails to make the correct emotional response in the face of specific stimuli, he cannot justify it based on personal preference; it only indicates that he is categorizing things arbitrarily under the title of "for everyone themselves."

On the contrary, it must candidly support the defects of a person's makeup. As Lewis acknowledged, “I myself do not like the society of children: according to the principles in the 'Dao,' I consider this my own defect — just as a person might have to recognize that he is deaf or colorblind.”

In this sense, following the "Dao" is to view things as having "quality, regardless of whether we succeed, requires us to make some response."

From this perspective, emotions themselves are neither rational nor irrational, but they do play a central role in following the dictates of reason:

“Because our approval and disapproval are acknowledgments of objective value or responses to objective order, emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel that what should be approved is indeed approved) or discordant with reason (when we perceive that what should be liked is indeed liked, but we do not feel it).

The absence of emotion itself is a judgment; in this sense, all emotions are illogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable, as they conform to or do not conform to reason. The heart will never replace the head: but it can and should obey it.”

The Anatomy of Danger

The "Dao" as described above existed in ancient times and has been present in many religions and philosophical schools for thousands of years. However, in postmodernity, it began to be abolished. Lewis attempted to refute this disintegration in "The Abolition of Man."

In the 20th century, the world began to be assumed as lacking a natural order, and things did not need to possess some objective value; on the contrary, people simply projected their feelings onto objects, and these feelings were what endowed items with value.

These feelings are culturally conditioned and are completely subjective relative to specific societies and individuals. Lewis also observed that certain inferences drawn from this conclusion, mainly “value judgments are unimportant,” “all values are subjective and trivial,” “emotion is opposed to reason.”

The commitment to improving the education of young people hopes that students will begin to rely on facts as guidance, rather than by increasing their stock of facts and honing their emotional sensitivity.

This shift is seen as beneficial for young people, protecting them from the emotional influence of propaganda. But Lewis believes that this not only abandons education but also emphasizes that subjective emotions cannot provide a certain protective function (in fact making students more susceptible to hype and misinformation), it destroys their virtues and their capacity for human excellence.

Lewis sees those who propagate the first error as “misunderstanding the urgent educational needs of the moment”:

“They see the world around them influenced by emotional agitation — they learn from tradition that young people are prone to sentimentality — and thus conclude that the best thing they can do is to strengthen young people's minds to resist emotional agitation.
My experience as a teacher tells a different story. For every student who needs to prevent excessive vulnerability to emotions, there are three who need to wake up from a cold, vulgar slumber. The task of modern educators is not to chop down the jungle, but to irrigate the desert.
The correct prevention of false emotions is to instill just emotions. By lowering our students' sensitivity, we only make them more susceptible to becoming victims when the propagandists come. Because the nature of thirst will take revenge, a hard heart will not be the most impeccable protection against a soft head.”

What Lewis is saying is that young people in modern society tend to be indifferent, sarcastic, or have a boring complacency; if you merely amplify this cynicism by telling them that all values and emotions are subjective, and that absolute truth does not exist, then you create a vacuum that is more easily manipulated by advertising and propaganda.

Faced with the endless exposure of "ideals," young people have a self-satisfied "joy in their own knowledge." This masks a kind of ignorance that makes them susceptible to the allure of misinformation.

To truly protect a mind from being indoctrinated with predetermined truths, it must be both rational and passionate.

A person with well-trained emotions regarding ideals, a true love for something, transcends cheap propaganda;

A person who loves democracy will deviate from rhetoric that contains falsehoods;

A man filled with emotional values of simplicity will jump out of the temptation of propaganda;

A man with noble feelings towards intimacy and romance will not see the siren songs of pornography.

Emotions not only serve to defend against negative propaganda but are also catalysts for "aggressive" activities. As Lewis said, only dry reason can serve as a sufficient stimulus for positive action:

“No legitimate virtue will make a person good. Without trained emotions, intellect is powerless against animals when attacked.

I quickly played a card against a man who was skeptical of morality but believed that “a gentleman does not cheat,” rather than opposing an irreproachable moral philosopher. In battle, during the third hour of bombardment, it is not [logic] syllogism that will keep reluctant nerves and muscles in their places. The coarsest sentimentality. Regarding flags, nations, or legions will be more useful.”

Lewis compared his view of the importance of emotions to Plato's allegory of the chariot, in which the philosopher compares the soul to a chariot (representing reason), tasked with guiding a winged vehicle drawn by two horses: the black horse (desire) and the white horse (praise and admiration). To truly soar, the chariot needs to harness the energy of both horses and synchronize the black horse of desire with the white horse of praise; when you are driven by heroic, noble feelings, it is much easier to choose the right thing.

Lewis said:

“The head controls the abdomen through the chest -the hips. Organized intostable emotions by trained habits. These are the indispensable liaison officers between the human brain and the viscera. It can even be said that it is this intermediate factor that makes a person human: for with his intellect, he is merely spirit, and his appetite is merely animal.”

Therefore, when society stops emphasizing and educating subjective emotions, it produces a so-called man without a "chest" — without true feelings, without spirit, without pain, without an inner self.

For those who do not mourn what has been lost, they will be skeptical of the universe having an objective order and believe in the subjectivity of emotions. It seems that men without "chests" are the hallmark of progress in the era — they are more advanced, more logical, and more knowledgeable.

But Lewis said that this comforting affirmation is an illusion and "anger." For those among us without "chests," do not pursue truth with greater fervor. On the contrary, because the zeal for seeking knowledge “cannot be sustained for long without the help of emotion” — without a bit of passion.

In fact, “it is not an excess of thought, but a defect of fertile and generous emotions that marks [the lack of a chest]; their minds are not larger than those of ordinary people, but the atrophy of the chest below makes them appear so.”

Ironically, those who lament the loss of everything, who mourn the disappearance of people, through the emotions of their chests produce seats that exhibit the virtues of manliness, the same ambition and courage, as well as all other traits of good character, have no idea what has killed this kind of person, and their own role in accelerating the death:

“And all the time — this is the tragicomedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those qualities that we cannot realize.

Without saying that what our civilization needs more is “drive,” “energy,” “self-sacrifice,” or “creativity,” it is hard to open a journal.

In a terrifying simplicity, we remove organs and demand function.

We leave men without chests and expect them to have virtue and enterprise. We mock honor and are shocked to find traitors among us. We castrate and hope he will propagate.”