The Man Without a Chest

In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, an Oxford don named C.S. Lewis published a small book called The Abolition of Man. It is barely a hundred pages long. It is also one of the most accurate predictions of the modern West ever written.

Lewis was not writing about politics. He was writing about education. Specifically, he was writing about a textbook he had recently read — a book used in British schools that claimed to teach literature but was quietly teaching something else. The book, Lewis argued, was training children to believe that all moral judgments are merely personal feelings — that when a man says "this is good" or "this is evil," he is only reporting his own emotional state.

The book, Lewis said, meant well. Its authors would have described themselves as open-minded and modern. But Lewis saw what they could not see: that their supposedly neutral education was not neutral at all. It was the most aggressive moral instruction imaginable. It was teaching children that there is no real good and no real evil — only preferences — and it was doing so under the guise of teaching them to read.

And then Lewis made his prediction. If you train a generation to believe that all values are subjective, you will not produce a generation of tolerant, open-minded men. You will produce something else entirely. You will produce men without chests.

The image is ancient, and Lewis borrowed it from the older tradition. In the classical understanding of the human person, a man has three parts:

• The head — the seat of reason. The intellect. The part that knows and calculates.
• The belly — the seat of appetite. The part that wants and hungers. Hunger, thirst, lust, greed, the craving for comfort.
• The chest — the seat of virtue. The part that trains the appetite and informs the reason. Courage, honor, loyalty, self-sacrifice. The part where a man is actually a man and not merely an animal with language.

In the classical view, a man without a chest is not a whole man. His head may be sharp. His belly may be full. But there is nothing between them. He knows what is right and he wants what he wants, and he has no third thing inside him to reconcile the two. When his appetite says take it and his reason says it is wrong, there is nothing in him strong enough to make him walk away.

This is not a man who has decided to be evil. He is a man who has been hollowed out. He cannot hold a line because he has nothing in him to hold it with. He cannot be trusted with anything that requires courage, because courage is a chest virtue. He cannot be trusted with a marriage, because faithfulness is a chest virtue. He cannot be trusted with children, because sacrifice is a chest virtue. All he has is intellect and appetite, and neither of those has ever been enough.

He was not made by accident. He was made on purpose, by a century of institutions that thought they were being progressive. Five things were done to him, one after another, over the course of his entire childhood.

One: He was taught that moral judgments are feelings.

From grade school onward, he was told that calling something "good" or "evil" is a matter of personal opinion. That values cannot be proven. That no one has a right to impose their morality on anyone else. He learned this lesson so well that he now believes it is the only polite thing to believe.

Two: He was taught that men and women are interchangeable.

He was told that any differences between the sexes are artificial. That boys and girls want the same things, feel the same things, and should be trained the same way. The distinct duties of a man — protecting, providing, leading, sacrificing — were presented as old superstitions. He was never told what a man is for.

Three: He was separated from older men.

His father was at work. His grandfather was in a retirement community. His uncles were somewhere else. His teachers were mostly women. His coaches were prohibited from speaking about anything but the sport. By the time he was eighteen, he had spent almost no time in the presence of men who could show him what manhood looks like when it is done well.

Four: He was taught that appetite is identity.

He was told that his desires are not urges to be governed but truths to be discovered. That what he wants is what he is. That denying himself is repression, and repression is harmful. By the time he was old enough to face a real temptation, he had no framework left for resisting it, because he had been taught that resistance itself was the problem.

Five: He was handed a screen.

He was given, at age twelve, an infinite stream of images and voices and arguments designed by men who had studied exactly how to keep his attention. He was not given a father who would take the screen away. He was not given a church that would name what the screen was doing. He was not given a school that would teach him to read the screen critically. He was given the screen, and left alone with it.

This is how a man without a chest is made. Not by an enemy who hates him. By a culture that does not know what it is doing.

Look closely at the man without a chest and you will recognize him. He is not a monster. He is not even, most of the time, a bad man. He is a hollow man. And the hollowness produces specific, predictable failures.

He cannot commit.

Commitment requires the chest. To promise a woman that he will stay with her until death requires a part of him that values faithfulness more than he values his own comfort. He does not have that part. So he drifts from relationship to relationship, always meaning well, always leaving.

He cannot sacrifice.

Sacrifice requires the chest. To give up his time, his money, his sleep, his body for a child or a wife or a country requires a part of him that values something more than his own survival. He does not have that part. So when the cost rises, he leaves.

He cannot lead.

Leadership requires the chest. To stand in front of other men and say this is where we are going requires a conviction that the destination is worth reaching. He does not have that conviction. So he does not lead. He manages. He administers. He defers. He tells everyone what they want to hear and calls it wisdom.

He cannot protect.

Protection requires the chest. To put his body between danger and the people he loves requires a part of him that loves them more than he loves his own life. He does not have that part. So when danger comes — and it always comes — he is not there.

He cannot repent.

Repentance requires the chest. To see that he has done wrong and to turn from it requires a part of him that knows the difference and cares enough to change. He does not have that part. So he explains. He excuses. He reframes. He tells himself that his failures were products of his upbringing, his circumstances, his chemistry, his generation. He never says the two words that would cost him everything: I sinned.

This is the man the modern West has spent a century producing. He is not dangerous in the way a tyrant is dangerous. He is dangerous in the way that an empty house is dangerous: because anything can walk in and take what it wants.

Lewis drew a distinction that most men have never heard and every man needs. He said there are two ways to fail as a man, and they look like opposites, but both are failures of the chest.

The first failure: the man who is all stern.

This is the man who can deal with blood and iron but cannot be gentle. He is hard without being good. He is the father who provides but never speaks kindly. He is the soldier who fights but never asks why. He is the man who will defend his family against a threat but will crush his own son with a single look. He has the sternness of a man and none of the mercy. The chest is there, but it is full of the wrong things.

The second failure: the man who is all meek.

This is the man who is gentle but useless in battle. He is soft without being strong. He is the modern man in full: the man who has been trained to be nice, to avoid offense, to never raise his voice. He is pleasant. He is agreeable. He is also the man who will not stand between his family and a threat, because he has never developed the capacity to stand against anyone about anything. He has the meekness of a man and none of the strength. The chest is not full. It is not even empty. It is not there at all.

The healthy man is neither of these. He is what Lewis called the stern and the meek together in one person. He can be gentle with his children and fierce with an intruder. He can speak kindly to his wife and coldly to a liar. He can weep at a funeral and hold a line at a riot. He is one man with one chest that contains both capacities, held under the control of a reason that has been trained by a moral tradition older than he is.

The modern West has trained men to be the second failure almost exclusively. It has called the first failure "toxic" and the second "healthy." The result is a generation of men who cannot protect anyone, including themselves.

This is the part that matters most, and it is the part the modern man is least often told. The chest is not restored by information. It is not restored by therapy. It is not restored by a weekend retreat or a book or a podcast or a YouTube series. It is restored by a set of practices, done over years, by a man who has decided that he wants to be whole more than he wants to be comfortable.

One: A man must be honest about what he lacks.

The first step is always the same. A man must stop pretending he is fine. He must admit that something in him is missing — that he does not have the courage his grandfather had, that he does not have the conviction his father had, that he does not have the peace that his faith is supposed to produce. Until he admits the hole, he will keep covering it with noise.

Two: A man must put himself under older men.

The chest is not transmitted through information. It is transmitted through presence. A young man becomes a man by spending time with men who already are. Not in a mentorship program. Not in a formal relationship. In the ordinary, unglamorous, day-to-day presence of older men who have walked with God for decades and who will not lie to him. This is why the church matters, and this is why a man who has no older men in his life is in danger.

Three: A man must take on real burdens.

The chest is built by carrying weight. Not metaphorical weight. Real weight. Responsibilities that cost him something. A wife. Children. A trade. A church. A neighborhood. A duty. These things put pressure on a man, and pressure, over time, produces strength. A man who refuses every burden because he does not want to be tied down is a man who has decided never to grow up.

Four: A man must train his appetites.

The chest governs the belly. The belly does not govern the chest. This means a man must discipline his body. He must eat and drink and sleep under rule. He must control his eyes. He must not be mastered by the screen or the bottle or the appetite of the moment. He must fast, in some way, from something, on some schedule, because fasting is the exercise of the chest against the belly.

Five: A man must submit his reason to a moral tradition.

The reason is not autonomous. It does not create good and evil for itself. It receives them from a source older and higher than itself. For the Christian, that source is scripture — not as a set of proof texts, but as the living word of God, mediated through a church that has been reading it for two thousand years. A man who makes his own reason the final authority on morality has already begun to lose his chest. He is on the road to becoming the very man he fears.

Six: A man must be willing to suffer for what is right.

The chest is not proved by comfort. It is proved by cost. A man discovers whether he has a chest when he is asked to give up something he values for something he values more. The chest is the part of him that says yes when reason says yes and appetite says no. And that part is only built by being exercised, over and over, in small choices and large.

A man reading this is standing between two futures, and he will spend the rest of his life in one of them.

The first future is the future of the man without a chest. He is comfortable. He is entertained. He is never bored, because the screen is always there. He is also alone. His wife leaves or stays in name only. His children do not call. His friends are acquaintances. He does not know what he believes about anything, and he suspects that most of the people around him do not either. He dies, and within a generation, almost no one remembers that he was here.

The second future is the future of the man who rebuilt his chest. He is not comfortable. He is often tired. He carries burdens that would break a lesser man. He suffers for things that other men do not even see. And yet, on the day he dies, he is surrounded. His wife holds his hand. His children weep. His grandchildren ask about him. His church remembers him for fifty years. He is the kind of man whose grandchildren will be told about, by name, for generations, by people who never met him but who know exactly what he stood for.

The two futures are not determined by circumstances. They are determined by choices. The man who chooses to rebuild his chest will do it slowly, imperfectly, with many failures. But he will do it. And the world will be different because he did.

• Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man (1943).
• Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity (1952).
• Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters (1942).
• Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory (1949).
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC).
• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae (1265–1274), on the cardinal virtues.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (1981).
• Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
• Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life (2018).
• Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.