Men Without Chests - Time to Prepare

Men Without Chests is a multiplayer survival game being developed by the studio Three Lives Left. In this game, you wake up naked and must find clothes to clothe yourself before someone finds you in your vulnerable state. Evolving over time into something more complex than just wandering around looking for clothing, Men Without Chests is poised to become one of the most innovative games on the market today.

The “abolition of man pdf” is a book that discusses the abolition of men. It is a very interesting read and it has been written by an author who was against the idea of women having to be saved.

“We create guys without chests and demand virtue and initiative from them.” We make fun of honor and are surprised to discover traitors among us. We castrate the geldings and wish them good luck.” C.S. Lewis said it best:

Have you ever heard the quote above? I had, and even without the context — it’s from the pretty lengthy opening chapter of Lewis’ The Abolition of Man — I assumed I knew what it meant: contemporary society produces men who lack a chest-swelling virility, and then complains about the dearth of upright, strong men.

However, after spending some time lately studying the whole context of the phrase, I discovered that Lewis was really aiming at something else; or, to put it another way, he was outlining the process by which masculine virtue, like all other forms of virtue, is formed. He doesn’t mean any type of tangible or metaphorical structure of masculinity when he says “chest,” but rather feeling.

He bemoans the fact that contemporary civilization has rendered men heartless.

The Tao of Feelings

Lewis notes that almost all faiths and philosophical traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Platonism, believe in an underlying natural order to the universe, and that Truth is that which best represents and explains this reality. To believe in this “doctrine of objective worth,” one must think that “some attitudes are really true, and others truly untrue, to the nature of the cosmos and the nature of ourselves.”

This viewpoint, according to Lewis, is best expressed by the Chinese notion of Tao:

“It is the reality that transcends all predicates… It’s the Way, the Road, and it’s Nature. It is the Way in which the cosmos continues to exist, the Way in which things eternally emerge into space and time, calmly and tranquilly. It is also the Path that every man should follow in order to imitate that cosmic and supercosmic evolution, fitting all of his actions to that great example.”

People, places, and objects with objective worth exist within the objective reality of Nature, and are hence deserving of varied degrees of regard and respect:

“Until modern times, all teachers and even all men believed that the universe was such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruent or incongruent to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, reverence or contempt.”

Given that objects have objective worth, we should have particular reactions to them. The night sky should elicit a sense of awe; a brave warrior’s narrative should elicit a sense of awe; little children should elicit a sense of joy; a friend’s father’s death should elicit a sense of empathy; and a good gesture should elicit a sense of thankfulness.

While emotional reactions are partially visceral and instinctive, a man’s feelings must also be deliberately schooled in order to be congruent — to be more in tune with Nature. This kind of education enables a man to judge things as more or less Just, True, Beautiful, and Good, and to balance his feelings accordingly. This training was regarded crucial to one’s growth throughout antiquity, as Lewis points out:

“St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate state of the emotions in which every object receives the right degree of love.” According to Aristotle, the goal of education is to teach a student to enjoy and despise what he should. Plato had expressed the same thing before him. The small human animal will not have the appropriate answers at first. It must be taught to experience pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred in response to things that are really pleasant, agreeable, repulsive, and hateful.”

The individual who gives a national park a one-star Yelp rating, mocks a soldier’s bravery, thinks that attending his friend’s father’s funeral would be too much trouble, or fails to say thank you for a gift demonstrates a lack of this sort of sentimental education.

If one believes in objective order and value, then failing to feel the appropriate emotion in response to a given stimulus cannot be justified on the basis of mere personal preference, which is casually categorized under the rubric of “to each their own”; rather, it must be openly acknowledged as a flaw in one’s human make-up. “I personally do not love the company of tiny children,” Lewis admits, “and since I speak from inside the Tao, I acknowledge this as a flaw in myself, just as a guy may have to realize that he is tone deaf or color blind.”

In this meaning, following the Tao means seeing things as having a “quality that requires a specific reaction from us whether we create it or not.”

Emotions are neither rational nor irrational in this context, but they do play a crucial role in fulfilling Reason’s dictates:

“Because our approvals and disapprovals are therefore recognitions of objective worth or reactions to an objective order, emotional states may be in accordance with reason (when we like what should be accepted) or out of harmony with reason (when we don’t like what should be approved)” (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is a judgment in and of itself; all emotions and sentiments are alogical in this sense. They may, however, be reasonable or unreasonable depending on whether or not they comply to Reason. The heart will never be able to replace the brain, but it may and should follow it.”

An Experiment in Perilous Dissection

For thousands of years, the “Taoist” system as stated above has existed in various faiths and intellectual systems. However, in the postmodern era, it started to fall apart. And it is against this disintegration that Lewis writes The Abolition of Man.

Individuals came to believe in the twentieth century that there was no inherent order to the universe, that things did not have an objective worth that needed a reaction, and that people merely brought their own sentiments to items, and that these feelings were what gave the objects their value. Feelings like this were culturally conditioned and specific to certain communities and people, making them fully subjective. Lewis notes that this result has many corollaries, including “value judgments are irrelevant,” “all values are subjective and inconsequential,” and “passion is antithetical to reason.”

Rather of attempting to better young people by improving their knowledge of facts as well as sharpening their emotional sensitivity, children started to be instructed just in facts. This move was considered to help adolescents by shielding them from propaganda’s emotional pull. But, according to Lewis, not only did focusing education on feeling fail to produce this protective effect (in fact, it made pupils more vulnerable to hype and deception), but it also weakened their ability for morality and human perfection.

Those who spread the first misconception, according to Lewis, “misunderstood the severe educational need of the time”:

“They observe the world around them being affected by emotional propaganda — they’ve learnt from tradition that kids are sentimental — and they come to the conclusion that the greatest thing they can do is arm young people’s brains against emotion.” My personal teaching experience offers a different story. Three pupils must be awakened from the sleep of frigid ugliness for every one who has to be protected from a weak excess of sensitivity. The contemporary educator’s job is to irrigate deserts rather than tear down jungles. Inculcating just feelings is the best defense against false sentiments. By starving our students’ sensibilities, we are merely making them easier victims for the propagandist when he arrives. For a hungry nature will revenge itself, and a hard heart is no guarantee against a delicate mind.”

What Lewis is saying is that young people are prone to apathy, cynicism, and sterile complacency in the first place, and if you only magnify this cynicism by telling them that all value and emotion is subjective and that absolute truths do not exist, you create a thirsty vacuum that is more vulnerable to advertising and propaganda filling. The constant debunking of principles instills in young people a smug “delight in their own knowingness” that might mask an ignorance that makes them vulnerable to disinformation’s enticements. Filling one’s head with positive facts that are both well-reasoned and inspired by feeling is the only way to really shield one’s mind against brainwashing. A guy who has a well-honed emotion for an ideal, a genuine love for something, rises beyond propaganda’s cheap tricks: A guy who values democracy deflects speech that just contains a phony version of it; a man who values the philosophical worth of simplicity tunes out advertising’s enticements; a man who values intimacy and romance sees through porn’s seductive call.

Emotional feeling operates as a motivator for “offensive” conduct as well as a protection against negative messaging. Dry reason alone, as Lewis contends, will never be enough to motivate constructive action:

“There is no virtue justification that will allow a man to be virtuous.” The mind is weak against the animal organism without the help of educated emotions. I’d rather play cards against a guy who was skeptical of ethics but raised to think that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’ than against an incorruptible moral philosopher raised among sharpers. In the third hour of the bombardment, it will not be [logical] syllogisms that will hold the hesitant nerves and muscles to their post. The most primitive sentimentalism about a flag, a nation, or a regiment will be more useful.”

Lewis relates his attitude toward feeling to Plato’s Allegory of the Chariot, in which the philosopher compared the soul to a charioteer (representing Reason) entrusted with steering a winged vehicle drawn by two horses: a black horse (appetites) and a white horse (desire) (honorable spiritedness or thumos). To fully fly, the charioteer needed to harness both horses’ energies and utilize the white horse of thumos to draw the black horse of appetites into line; it’s much simpler to do the right thing when you’re propelled by a heroic, noble emotion.

This is how Lewis says it:

“The mind governs the belly via the chest — the seat… of emotions structured into stable feelings by taught habit… they are the important liaison officers between cerebral and visceral man.” Man is man, after all, because of this intermediate element, because his mind is simply spirit, and his desire is simple animal.”

As a result, when society ceases stressing and teaching feelings, “what may be dubbed Men without Chests” emerges. Men devoid of emotion. Men who are devoid of vigour, thumos, and heart.

To those who do not mourn what has been lost, who doubt that the world has an objective order, and who believe in the subjectivity of emotion, men without chests may seem to be a sign of development – that they are more developed, sophisticated, rational, and intelligent. But, as Lewis points out, this reassuring reinforcement is an illusion and a “outrage.” Because the intense pursuit for knowledge “cannot be long sustained without the help of feeling” — without a smidgeon of passion — the chest-less among us do not seek truth with more zeal, but rather the contrary. In actuality, “it is not excess of cognition that distinguishes [the chest-less], but a deficiency of fruitful and compassionate feeling.” Their heads aren’t particularly large; it’s the atrophy of the thorax underneath that gives them that appearance.”

The irony is that people who regret what has been lost, who bemoan the departure of men who show male attributes like ambition and bravery, as well as all other aspects of good character, have no understanding what has died off this species of man, or their own participation in hastening his demise:

“And all the while — such is the tragi-comedy of our predicament — we continue to clamor for the precise characteristics we’re making unattainable.” You can’t open a magazine without reading something about how our culture needs more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity.’ We remove the organ and demand the function in a hideous simplicity. We create men without chests and demand virtue and initiative from them. We make fun of honor and are surprised to discover traitors among us. We castrate the geldings and wish them good luck.”

Listen to my podcast on C.S.E. with Dr. Michael Ward. “Men without chests” is a concept proposed by Lewis.

The “abolition of man chapter 1 summary” is a book that discusses the history of the idea that men have chests. The author, Michael Chabon, discusses how this idea has been used to justify violence against women and people of color.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a man without a chest mean?

A: A man without a chest means that he has no nipples.

What does Lewis mean when he speaks about the abolition of man?

A: This is a quote from the book The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, which talks about man becoming obsolete as technology progresses and how this will result in our extinction. He says that we are now living in an era where humans no longer need to exist on earth because there are machines able to do everything for us automatically without having any emotion or feeling involved.