For anyone interested, the book can be found here and a video of someone reading the book can be found here.
This isn’t so much a book review as it is an attempt to try to understand what Lewis was writing, and to see how what he wrote may be playing out now.
One thing Lewis tries to establish early on is that there is a universal code of morals and ethics. It is universal because almost all aspects of it are found across all human cultures in all times. “This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’.” (p. 8).
The existence of this code is of primary importance to humanity. “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.” (p. 11).
To take away this code would be to create what Lewis calls “Men Without Chests”. “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.” (p. 12).
Is this something we can see with our own eyes, the effects of this void between our heads and our stomachs, between our minds and our appetites? I can think of the recent outbreak of mass robberies in certain cities, where large crowds of people rush into stores, steal in an almost haphazard manner whatever is at hand, then leave. And when the businesses shut down and leave for better, safer places, they will cry that their neighborhoods are being abandoned by those greedy businesses.
It could even be that the whole of what we called “cancel culture” is an example of this void. For most of those who participate in cancelings, it seems to be less about intellect, about the give-and-take of ideas and only shutting the doors to truly heinous ideas, but about silencing any idea that they find troubling, or that simply disagrees with them. They are simply obeying their own desires, their own emotions, their own appetites., and have given no thought to the idea that the same rules they want to use against others could very well also be used against them.
Or the recent examples of transgender madness, or people intentionally exposes young children to sexually charged drag shows, or the insanity during the time of Covid over things that we now know were useless and even lies,. I’m sure other people can add to the list of things that show how as a whole our minds and our appetites have been separated, how our culture is being pushed around by people who are ruled by their appetites and not ruling their emotions by their minds.
Lewis gives us a possible scenario of how things may finally play out. “At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.” (pp. 31-32).
“Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere ulh, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.” (p. 34).
What we are left with is a vast herd of sheep called humanity who are ruled by some few who through education will not train us in how to think but will tell us what to think. They will not believe in a code themselves, but they will force a code upon all the sheep below them.
Yet since they themselves have no code, what code can these dear leaders force upon us? Only what is convenient for them. They have no code that tells them to care one whit for the sheep, except perhaps insofar as happy sheep make for happy shepherds. But the rules they make for the sheep will not be rules they intend to keep themselves.
Consider the climate fearmongers. In words, they are very ready to make dire predictions, and in actions, they are very ready to make the lives of the sheep very difficult. But in their actions regarding themselves, they are very ready to ignore their own rules. When they gave for their conferences, they come on their private jets with the vast entourages of people and armadas of vehicles. Their homes are examples of energy waste.
If I could offer one counterpoint, it’s not as if such hypocrisy is new. Jesus denounced the religious rulers of His day for putting burdens of the people that the rulers themselves would not touch.
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