Tag Archives: Abolition of Man

Becoming Men with Chests

Anthropology, Virtue, , , , , , ,

CS Lewis once described modernity as being inhabited by “men without chests.”  His pithy characterization highlights the fact that men no longer are educated to have a healthy emotional life.  Lewis describes how in reviewing an elementary textbook, he came across a description of a waterfall as “sublime”.  The authors insist that the speaker is “not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Lewis is concerned that such language, even in what appears to be a mere throwaway remark, betray a certain universal prejudice towards sentiments as nothing more than private feelings that have no objective basis in reality.  Devoid of any real meaning attached to emotions, modern man suffers from a shrinking of his heart.

Lewis gives a sketch of man as having three parts: head, belly, and chest.  By head he is referring to our spiritual faculties and by belly our bodily sensations.  For most of us, that would be a sufficient description.  But in order to be more than mere parts, they must be an integrated whole—they must be connected in the middle by the chest.  To ignore the chest is literally disintegrating, you might even say dehumanizing.  “It is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite a mere animal.”  It is the heart that makes humanity unique and it is through its proper integration that we become fully human.

The heart is the “place” where man’s hybrid nature meets and where man is most properly himself.  But most of us have learned to be suspicious of our own hearts—and rightly so.  But we cannot remain masters of suspicion without doing great harm to ourselves.  We must confront this suspicion head on if we are to be authentically happy.  After all happiness is not just a feeling, but a happiness that isn’t felt isn’t true happiness either.

Lewis thought part of the problem was in education.  Although he doesn’t go into details about a proper pedagogy, it most certainly would begin by defining what we mean are talking about when we speak of the Heart.  For modern man, the heart is really the place where our feelings reside.  But this is far vaguer and narrower than the classical and Biblical notion of the heart.  There are different kinds of feelings that we experience and these feelings are on different levels according to the unique powers of the human soul.  There are the mere vegetative feelings like hunger and thirst.  There are the animal feelings like contentment and anger.  Finally, there are the spiritual feelings like peace and joy.  When we speak of a heart that is fully alive, then we are speaking about a heart that has the capacity for the animal feelings (under the control of reason and will) and the spiritual feelings.

Men without Chests

At the end of his first chapter in The Abolition of Man, Lewis sums up the modern dilemma as follows: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”  His point is that without a healthy emotional life, we will never be able to be virtuous—it is like asking a castrated horse to reproduce.  Notice what he is saying—neither the Stoic nor the Sentimentalist can be truly virtuous.  To see why this is we need to reflect briefly upon the nature of virtue and its relationship with the emotions.

Temperance and fortitude and all their sub-virtues are ordered to the proper use of our emotions, or to use a more Thomistic term, the concupiscible and irascible passions.  Notice the italics are use.  Our emotions are not something that are to be killed or to be allowed to run free, but something that, when properly put to use, enable us to enjoy the good. 

An example will help.  All too often we hear “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.”  This is not the virtue of courage.  The truly courageous person does not feel fear, but daring.  Daring, when moderated by courage, gives him a motor by which he can energetically fight against the evil he must not avoid.  Without it, he will succumb to fear or only fight back only weakly.

Virtue conditions the passions to act in accord with reason.  When the courageous man is faced with evil, he does not need to deliberate or wait to stir up daring, it is automatically conditioned to arise in the face of some threat.  In fact it may arise before he is even conscious of a threat and act as an alarm for the person. 

Passions not only make the act easier then, but also make it better. St. Thomas says that when the passions are involved in a morally good act then it makes the act more meritorious.  This is because the entire person—head, heart and hands—is involved in the act as opposed to simply white knuckling it.  White knuckling is still good but doing so fervently is better.  The less interior resistance we have to doing the good, the better the action is.  So, despite popular misconceptions, there are moral reasons why we should be emotionally healthy as well.

Feeding Our Nature

Returning to Lewis’ point, education in the emotions is important because it is the thing that makes virtue easier.  But this education must be aimed not so much on the feeling, but on the object that invokes the feeling.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  As long as the student is focused on the waterfall and not on the pleasure of the feeling of awe or wonder that can only be described as “sublime” he is focused on the good before him.  The minute he turns to the pleasure as his focus, the pleasure is gone and the object is deemed boring.  But if he remains focused on the object, he can learn to contemplate it to find out why it evokes such a response and if the response is, in fact, the appropriate one.  This is one of the reasons why we must always protect and promote children’s capacity to wonder. 

It is by taking in reality that they begin to grow in self-knowledge as well.  Combined with education from parents especially, the child learns that there are right and wrong emotions.  The right and wrongness depends upon the object that causes it.  A young girl touching a cobra because she is charmed by it, needs to be shouted at so that she associates fear with it instead.  All too often parents attempt to diffuse children’s emotions rather than guide them.  This only causes moral problems later on down the road as Lewis points out “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.”    

Then or Now?

Virtue,

It is always the questions with the obvious answers that cause the most problems.  Case in point, what if I were to ask whether you would rather live now or 200 years ago?  Allowing for the exception of a troglodyte or two, every one of them would, without hesitation, say “now.”  The reason seems obvious—the quality of life today is far beyond anything that could have been imagined two centuries ago.  Not only do we live longer today, but we are healthier and more people have access to more wealth.  Even the poor enjoy access to luxuries that only the very richest had in the past (if at all).  Think for example of our access to entertainment, entertainment filled with enough depravity that only the likes of Nero could enjoy in his day.  With that we realize that we may have answered the question too quickly and perhaps even looked at it the wrong way.  Sure we are enjoying an unprecedented material prosperity, but man does not live on bread alone.  Can we say that we are also enjoying an unprecedented spiritual prosperity?  Before throwing away the key to our time machines, we should reframe the question and ask “in which time period would being virtuous easier?”  Suddenly the answer does not seem so cut and dry.

The Question of Technology

We might be tempted to put the question down completely at this point.  We are when we are and there is no going back.  That is certainly true and the answer is only valuable insofar as it helps us in the here and now.  But rather than killing investigation, it ought to motivate it.  Volumes could be written on the differences in the time periods, but they could be summarized neatly in one word—technology.  At least that is the main difference according to CS Lewis who wrote:

“[F]or the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.  For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”

Summarizing Lewis’ point we can say that there are two kinds of men—those who subdue themselves to reality and those who will have reality subdued to themselves.  We call those in the first group virtuous and the second vicious.  This is a “problem” that is at the heart of man’s fallen existence.  Adam’s reality was that he had a single limitation—not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Rather than subjecting himself to this reality, Adam chose to subject reality to himself.  In this regard he is no different than any one of us—sin is, at its core, an unwillingness for each of us to submit himself to reality.  We are like God in many ways, but not in the way that we can define for ourselves what is good and what is evil.

This is not a new problem for sure, but what is new is that in the past the average person lacked access to the power necessary to subdue reality to his wishes.  Now with so many technological solutions (techniques to use Lewis’ term) that give us power over reality, the temptation to subdue reality is much greater.

Technology and Power

Technology and power go hand in hand.  This may not be as obvious as it seems when more people have access to instruments of power, but it is true nonetheless.  Power in the hands of a few tends to corrupt only a few, power in the hands of many corrupts many.  With technological power comes the capacity to destroy ourselves.

We may have fallen victim to the belief that an increase of power mean “progress” but that is only true when the strength of character for using that power has kept pace.  We are now all like the superhero who wakes up one morning discovering he has superpowers and is confronted with whether we will use our powers for good or evil.  With greater command over the world, we need greater command over the self.

Progress in technology then is only truly progress when it makes us more human.  And this ought to be how we evaluate any advances in technology or our use of existing technologies.  Technology may be morally neutral, but how we use it is not.  Our guide as to its use is whether it leads to a more virtuous life or less, whether I am more human because of its help or less because of its substitution.

Efficiency

What often blinds us to seeing our use of technology more clearly is an obsession with efficiency.  Modern technology, the argument goes, increases efficiency making work easier and freeing us up for higher things.  But it seems that in the majority of cases the exact opposite has happened.   Labor saving devices may have replaced the slave labor of the past, but these devices often have enslaved otherwise free men.

The men of 200 years ago were freer than we are today.  Of that, there is no question.  The average man was more capable of taking care of himself and his family without significant outside help.  They could farm and hunt, they could build their homes and repair them, they knew how to navigate when lost in the woods, etc.  We, on the other hand, have specialists (farmers and homebuilders) or special machines (GPS) to do that for us now.  The average man 200 years ago would be far from average today.

The point is not that efficiency is bad, only that we should not treat it as an absolute value.  There is value in work done with our hands and simple tools.  It helps us to grow in the virtues of prudence, patience and perseverance.  In other words, we are better men for having done the work, no matter how menial it seems.  Labor saving technologies are only good and should only be used insofar as they help make us better men.

Another example might help to illustrate the point further.  Take a simple technology that is near and dear to my heart, the calculator.  Having a calculator has freed me up from doing the time consuming work of crunching numbers and enabled me to do the higher and more theoretical work in statistics.  However, when doing simple mathematical calculations, I will never use a calculator because it will reduce my distinctly human ability to do this.  I am somehow less human when I cannot do percentages in my head and have to rely on a calculator for a tip.  The point is that when the technology actually frees us up for higher things then it is a good, but this can never be at the expense of the loss of the ability to do the lower things.

Paradigm shifts always come abruptly.  We may pine for simpler times.  Frankenstein is already out of the cage and is not going back in.  While we may prefer to have lived in a previous age of morally better men, the reality is that we live in a technological age and we must find ways to use that power to make us better men.  Virtue itself may be harder, but this also means they will be stronger.