#men without chests

[justjudethoughts]

The older I get, the more I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who just really, really hate joy. And the thing is, I don't think they realize they do. I think our culture has built them to be like that. I think it's part of the "Men Without Chests" thing C.S. Lewis talks about.

All you have to do is make a post about something you care about and watch the responses you get. No matter how innocuous what you said was, somebody is going to be weird and nihilistic about it. Of course, they have a right to respond. But that isn't the point. The point is that you could say something like "the memory of my great grandparents formed me as a person" and someone will respond "yeah, but you didn't know them, so—"

Say that you like Valentine's day and count how many responses like this: "I hate Valentine's day, it's stupid and made up" you get. Or that you like Taylor Swift. Or that you are moved by a certain tradition. Or that you think children's literature is important. Someone is going to pipe up for the express purpose of negating what you just said. They aren't getting anything out of it or contributing an experience of beauty to the world. They're just cutting down a spot someone else found and expressed beauty.

Have we really become so bitter that when someone shares a piece of their heart or their story our first instinct is to shut them down? Do we really hate happiness so much that we wish to dismantle anything we think we "made up"?

Gee, I'm sorry you think holidays are stupid and made up (wait til you learn where cultures come from). I'm sorry you won't listen to any music that's "too popular." I'm sorry that you don't think history is living and breathing and beautiful and matters today. I'm sorry you don't think anything matters. I'm sorry you think we are on a big rock of meaninglessness. But I don't.

And frankly, I think I'm having more fun than you.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I am simply categorically incapable of silently watching the media apparatus unleash this character assassination on Joe Biden

These people were an impenetrable wall of defense for that man going back years, constantly and reliably framing everything he did in the most flattering possible light

And listen, say what you will about Joe Biden the politician, the policies of Joe Biden, and so on, on some level it's like...I mean have you ever met a stubborn man in his 70s and 80s? Obviously he's going to insist he's fine. Obviously he's not going to surrender the reins, especially when he's surrounded by people encouraging him not to.

Granted, there is a scale effect here--refusing to step down from the presidency when you are unfit has far greater potential for catastrophic damage than your grandpa refusing to go into assisted living--but at the end of the day, I find this an utterly unremarkable if not entirely predictable story. The oldest story in the English language is about a powerful man who cannot accept his limits. The oldest recorded story that our species has to offer is about a powerful man who cannot accept his limits. We have I am sure all observed it personally, and many of us will ourselves endure our version of it, which is precisely why the story is so timeless.

The media and the party apparatus are desperately trying to pin this on Biden and like half a dozen people in the hopes they can save their own skins but they are absolutely and utterly to blame in this. Someone should have had the stones to take those car keys away ages ago.

[symphonyoflovenet]

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

C. S. Lewis, Men Without Chests

[de-la-bibliotheque]

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

[martyschoenleber]

Excerpts from Chapter 2 in "The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis

Excerpts from Chapter 2 in “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis

75 years ago, C.S. Lewis saw the philosophical direction of the modern world and delivered three lectures as a buttress against those trends. Over the years the book has sold well but its warnings have not been heeded. And now, the destruction of Western Civilization is imminent. Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King’s College, Newcastle (part of the University of Durham), from…

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[martyschoenleber]

Excerpts from "The Abolition of Man"

Excerpts from “The Abolition of Man”

One of my goals for the New Year is to reread the C.S. Lewis shelf in my library. These gems on paper were formative to my former as a man, as a thinker, and as a Christian. They continue to shadow almost everything I write and I shudder to think how shallow and inconsequential would be the whole of my life without the influence of Lewis in my life. Presently, I am reading my copy of THE…

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[wittyhistorian]

We laugh at chastity and are shocked to find the sexually exploitive in our midst. We are constantly feeding the sexual appetite of young men and bidding them “be faithful.” We demand consequence free sex and are appalled when we see what we deem “consequences” have faces that are being sliced open.

Our Men Without Chests 

[riotouseaterofflesh]

???/365:

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms (logical arguments) that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. … A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

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.

Lewis has long been used by the right to justify all manner of violent macho bullshit, far, far more in common with Weston than Ransom. I wanted to draw something that matches a description that is genuinely dehumanizing not merely playing to an American jock/nerd stereotype (of which there is certainly an element in Lewis but it seems to drown out everything else - note "not excess of thought").

Had to do away with arm and hand bones since they didn't make any sense without shoulders to support them.