"We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
~ C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man" (1943)
A friend used the phrase "men without chests" in a comment on a post of mine - and it reminded me that this is the title of the first chapter of C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man", written in 1943.
Written as a critique of the state of education in the UK, it is a scathing indictment of postmodernism, its inherent moral relativism and a defense of objective values and natural law. It also sounds an alarm bell about the consequences of doing away with them.
Lewis' book was published 78 years ago.
Nobody can say we weren't warned.
Chapter One - Men Without Chests - ends this way:
"And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
Another friend shared with me an article about Jean-Jacques Rousseau's collectivism and after thinking about it (albeit briefly and superficially), I noted that in the thinking of many of the Enlightenment era philosophers there is something we are seeing with increasing frequency today - a theme of what the individual owes to the collective, that is how much liberty and morality is demanded be surrendered to preserve a civil society.
It is a concept that leftist progressives have weaponized to satisfy their lust for power.
Most often it is presented as being in or out of compliance with some sort of "social contract", one that demands payment of not only productivity, but slices of individual liberty as the cost of unity. I've long noted in the contemporary conversations we have about this subject, there is damn little discussion about what the collective owes the individual.
I have no problem with the idea the individual should be expected to sacrifice some liberty to preserve peace and for the good of all, but where I disagree with the left is in three aspects: 1) their constant redefinition of the social contract, 2) the degree of liberty that must be surrendered to satisfy that contract, and 3) the idea that anything at all must be surrendered to a clearly corrupt collective.
C.S. Lewis was blessed (or cursed) with clarity of thought and the foresight to see where the madness of postmodernism and the rejection of values would lead.
There is a legal term for what we face today - it is "fraudulent inducement". That is when a person is tricked into signing an agreement to one’s disadvantage by the other party using fraudulent statements and representations. When fraudulent inducement is proven, the contract is considered "voidable", meaning the harmed party decides whether to continue (often with modifications) or to terminate.
We must produce men and women with chests (no pun intended). Society needs people with heart, courage and conviction to terminate our social contract - or significantly modify them - or as a society and culture, we are lost.