C. S. Lewis Warned About Men Without Chests in a Book About Schoolbooks

One of the most important books about Western civilization in the twentieth century begins with a complaint about a schoolbook. Not a war, not a revolution, not a manifesto. A textbook for teenagers about English composition, the kind of book a student forgets the week after the exam. C. S. Lewis read it, noticed what it was quietly teaching, and spent three lectures explaining why that lesson would, if it spread, end the human race as a moral species.

That sounds like an overreaction. It is not. The book is The Abolition of Man, published in 1943, and its argument is tighter than its reputation. Let me lay it out the way Lewis did: define the terms, follow the premises, and then take the strongest objection seriously.

The man before the book

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He served in the British Army in the First World War, was wounded in 1918, and went to Oxford, where he became a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College in 1925. He held that post for almost thirty years. In 1954 he moved to Cambridge to take up a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He died on November 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, which is why his death got so little notice at the time.

Two facts about his life matter for this book. First, he was a professional reader of old books. His scholarly work was on medieval allegory and sixteenth-century literature, and he spent his days among authors who took for granted that the world contained real goodness, real beauty and real obligation. Second, he had not always believed that himself. Lewis was an atheist as a young man. He came back to belief in God around 1929 and to Christianity about two years later, and he later became the best-known Christian writer in the English-speaking world, partly through the talks he gave on BBC radio during the Second World War.

But The Abolition of Man is not a religious book. That is its great strategic choice. Lewis deliberately argued from premises that a Confucian, a Stoic, a Jew, a Hindu and a Christian could all share. He wanted to show that the moral inheritance under attack did not belong to one church. It belonged to humanity.

The lectures and the little green book

The book began as three lectures delivered in early 1943 for the University of Durham, under a lecture series called the Riddell Memorial Lectures. Britain was fighting for its life. Lewis chose that moment to talk about a composition textbook. His audience may have wondered whether the professor had misread the news.

He had not. Lewis declined to name the textbook's authors. He called them Gaius and Titius and called their volume "The Green Book," on the gentlemanly theory that you criticise the idea, not the schoolmasters. (Scholars later identified the real book and its two authors, but Lewis's discretion is worth copying, and we will copy it.)

The passage that set him off was small. The textbook retold a story about the poet Coleridge at a waterfall. Two tourists were present. One called the waterfall "sublime." The other called it "pretty." Coleridge, the story goes, approved of the first remark and rejected the second with disgust. The textbook's authors then explained to the pupils that the man who called the waterfall sublime was not really saying anything about the waterfall. He was only describing his own feelings.

Here is why that matters, in Lewis's terms. The textbook was not teaching English. It was teaching philosophy, and a particular philosophy: that every statement of value is really a statement about the speaker's emotions. The pupil does not notice he has been taught it. He thinks he has been taught to write clearly. He has in fact been taught that nothing is actually admirable, only admired.

The argument in five steps

Lewis's first lecture, "Men Without Chests," makes a case that can be put in numbered premises.

1. Some things deserve certain feelings. A waterfall really is the kind of thing that merits awe. A child's courage really merits admiration. Cruelty really merits disgust. To say so is to say something true about the object, not merely to report a mood.
2. Education is the training of feelings to fit their objects. The older tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine, held that a good education teaches the young to like what is likeable and hate what is hateful. Augustine defined virtue as rightly ordered love. Aristotle said the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.
3. Reason alone cannot do this work. A boy facing a bully, a temptation or a battlefield will not be saved by a syllogism. Lewis puts it in a line worth memorising: "The head rules the belly through the chest." The chest is his image for trained sentiment, the settled habits of honour, loyalty and shame that stand between our intellect and our appetites.
4. The new education removes the chest. If you teach children that all value talk is mere feeling, you do not make them more rational. You leave them with an intellect and an appetite and nothing in between. You debunk every sentiment and replace none.
5. Therefore the new education produces the opposite of what its designers want. They want critical, honest, public-spirited citizens. They are removing the organ that makes those things possible.

Lewis condensed the conclusion into the most quoted passage of the book:

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.

That is not a man exaggerating for effect. It is a syllogism with a punchline.

He added a teacher's observation that every parent should tape to the refrigerator: "The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." The authors of the Green Book thought they were protecting children from propaganda and gush. Lewis thought that for every pupil who needed protection from too much feeling, there were three who needed to be woken from too little. A starved heart is not an educated one. It is just easier to fool.

What Lewis meant by the Tao

The second lecture, "The Way," names the thing being abolished. Lewis borrowed a Chinese word, the Tao, for convenience, and he was careful about it. He did not mean Taoism. He meant what he called the doctrine of objective value: the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of thing we are.

His examples show the range. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Hebrew scriptures, Christian teaching, Hindu tradition and Chinese philosophy all agree, in different idioms, that there is a real order to which human feelings and actions ought to conform. You do not invent the duty to keep a promise. You discover it.

Then Lewis made the move that turns the book from a lament into an argument. Suppose the modern educator rejects the Tao and decides to build a better morality from scratch. What does he build it from?

• From instinct? Our instincts conflict. The instinct to preserve the species competes with the instinct to preserve ourselves. To choose between them you need a standard that is not itself an instinct. You are back to the Tao.
• From usefulness to society? Why should I care about society, or about future generations, if all value is feeling? The reformer quietly smuggles in an old duty, care for posterity, while claiming to have abolished duty as such.

Lewis's verdict was that the innovators were never really outside the Tao. They had pulled one branch off the tree, the duty to posterity, or the duty to the poor, and were waving it around as if it had grown in their own garden. The rebellion against traditional morality was a rebellion of a part against the whole. Remove the whole and the part withers too.

This is the point where conservatives should pay close attention. The modern reformer usually is a moralist. He is outraged by injustice. He wants a better world. Lewis's answer is not that the reformer has no values. It is that he has borrowed them from the very inheritance he is teaching children to doubt, and he has no account of why his borrowed values bind anyone else.

The appendix nobody reads and everybody should

The most practical pages in the book are the ones most readers skip. Lewis added an appendix called "Illustrations of the Tao," a collection of moral precepts arranged under eight headings: the law of general beneficence, stated both negatively and positively; the law of special beneficence, which covers duties to kin; duties to parents, elders and ancestors; duties to children and posterity; the law of justice; the law of good faith and veracity; the law of mercy; and the law of magnanimity.

Under each heading he set short passages side by side from ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu, Chinese and Christian sources. The effect is cumulative and a little startling. The duty not to murder, not to lie, not to betray a guest, to honour one's parents, to care for the weak, to deal justly with strangers: the wording changes from culture to culture, and the core does not.

Think about what that does to the most common objection to objective morality. The objection says that moral codes are arbitrary and vary wildly between cultures. Lewis's appendix is a body of evidence that the variation is mostly at the edges and the agreement is at the centre. Cultures differ about whom the duties are owed to and how they are expressed. They do not differ about whether courage beats cowardice or gratitude beats treachery. No civilization on record has built its moral code on the principle that a man should be admired for running away in battle or for double-crossing everyone who had been kind to him.

That is not proof of God, and Lewis did not offer it as such. It is proof that the moral inheritance is not a local superstition that a few textbook authors can safely debunk.

The third lecture and the Conditioners

The final lecture gives the book its title, and it is the most prophetic thing Lewis wrote. He asked what "man's conquest of nature" really means. Every new power over nature, he observed, is in practice a power exercised by some people over other people, with nature as the instrument. The contraceptive, the radio and the airplane were his examples. Each gives some living people power over others, including over generations not yet born.

Now carry that forward. Suppose a future generation acquires the power to shape the minds of its successors through education, conditioning and technique, and suppose that generation has been taught that there are no objective values. What guides the shapers? Lewis called them the Conditioners. Having stepped outside the Tao, they cannot appeal to duty, justice or honour, because they have explained those away. They will be guided only by their own impulses. The rest of humanity becomes raw material for those impulses.

His conclusion was stark. Man's final conquest of nature turns out to be the abolition of man. The last thing to be conquered is human nature itself, and the conquerors are not supermen but men who have cut themselves off from any standard by which to judge what they do.

Lewis turned the same argument into a novel, That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, which features a scientific institute with grand plans for remaking humanity. He said in its preface that the tale had behind it a serious point, the one he had tried to make in The Abolition of Man. It is also very funny about committees, which is a mercy.

The best objection, answered

Fairness requires stating the other side at its strongest. Here it is.

Moral traditions have been wrong, badly wrong. Many cultures that honoured parents and praised courage also held slaves, oppressed women and persecuted heretics. If we teach children to trust inherited sentiments, we teach them to trust prejudice. The textbook authors were not nihilists. They were trying to teach young people to be suspicious of emotional manipulation, especially in an age of mass propaganda. That is a worthy goal, and Lewis caricatured it.

That is a serious argument. It fails on three counts.

1. Reform requires a standard. Every great moral reform in Western history appealed to the Tao, not against it. The abolitionists argued that slavery violated the law of justice and the dignity of every person. The civil rights movement appealed to the Declaration's claim that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Those reformers did not say "our feelings have changed." They said "you are breaking a law you already acknowledge." Debunking all value does not give you a reformer. It gives you nobody with standing to object to anything.
2. Debunking makes propaganda easier, not harder. The young man who has been taught that "sublime" means only "I feel something" has no defense against the advertiser or the demagogue who promises him new feelings. A trained chest is resistance to manipulation. A hollow one is an open door. The 1940s, of all decades, made that plain.
3. Lewis allowed for growth. He said explicitly that the Tao admits development from within. A person who really stands inside the moral tradition can extend and correct it, the way a native speaker refines a language. What he cannot do is step outside it and design a new one from nothing. That is the difference between a reformer and a Conditioner.

Verdict: the objection is right that traditions contain errors and wrong that the cure is to teach children nothing is really good.

Why this book belongs in every school argument

Lewis wrote about a single textbook. His argument applies to every classroom.

Every school teaches morality, whether it admits it or not, as we argue in Every School Teaches Morals, the Only Question Is Which Ones. A curriculum that presents all values as personal preferences is not neutral. It teaches a philosophy, the one Gaius and Titius taught, and it teaches it to children too young to notice. Lewis's warning is that this philosophy does not produce independent thinkers. It produces young adults who know how to deconstruct a poem and have no reason to keep a promise.

The older American approach understood this. The readers that taught generations of children to read were openly moral, as The McGuffey Readers Taught Reading and Virtue to Millions of Americans shows. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that "religion, morality, and knowledge" were necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, and that schools should be encouraged for that reason, a clause we read closely in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause. The Founders did not think a republic could survive on clever people with hollow chests. Self-government, as Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted explains, begins with governing your own appetites.

Lewis also gives conservatives a vocabulary that is better than outrage. When a curriculum teaches that moral claims are only expressions of power or preference, the answer is not to demand that the school teach our side's preferences instead. The answer is to insist that some things really are true, really are good and really are beautiful, and that children are owed an education that trains them to recognise those things. That is the natural law tradition traced in From Cicero to Aquinas to Jefferson, the Long Road of Natural Law, and it is the ground on which the claim of unalienable rights stands, as Rights Are Not Social Constructs, and Here Is the Answer to That Claim argues.

There is a reason the book has outlived the textbook it criticised. Nobody reads the Green Book. Everybody who cares about education eventually reads Lewis.

The case in brief

1. The Abolition of Man (1943) began as three lectures in which C. S. Lewis criticised a school English textbook for teaching that every statement of value is only a statement about the speaker's feelings.
2. Lewis argued that education must train the feelings to fit their objects, because reason rules appetite only through trained sentiment, which he called the chest, and an education that debunks sentiment produces "men without chests."
3. He called the shared moral inheritance of humanity the Tao, showed in his appendix that its core precepts recur across ancient civilizations, and argued that reformers who reject it are still borrowing from it.
4. His third lecture warned that conditioners who reject all objective value would rule others by impulse alone, so that man's conquest of nature would end in the abolition of man.
5. The lesson for schools is that neutrality about value is impossible, and children are owed an education that teaches them some things really are good.

What you can do: ask your child's school for the reading list and textbooks in one English or civics course, read a chapter yourself, and raise any lesson that treats all values as mere feelings at the next school board meeting.