With the current wave of decadence in Western society, we are witnessing an “abolition of man” more literal than C.S. Lewis ever could have imagined. The “transgender woman” is a man who has had his manhood literally abolished. Is this the much-hyped “transhumanism” that is being forecast? Are we destined to become a race of “non-binary” human beings?
In The Abolition of Man, C.S.Lewis famously wrote of “men without chests”. He used “chest” as a shorthand for the seat of emotions governed by self discipline and reason—and it is this quality of man that enables him to not just think about goodness, nor be given over to his baser instincts, but to be empowered to rise to true virtue. So Lewis observes,
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.
With the current wave of decadence in Western society, we are witnessing an “abolition of man” more literal than Lewis ever could have imagined. The “transgender woman” is a man who has been castrated—his manhood literally abolished. Ironically, the Doctor Frankensteins and Doctor Mengeles of our day are not creating men without chests, but men with chests—artificial ones: silicone balloons inserted into their chests to give them breasts as perky and plastic as a Barbie doll’s.
What can correct this madness that everyone is supposed to accept as the new normal? Lewis’ assessment of the problem contains the solution to the problem: Not pretend breasts, but real chests.
To reiterate, Lewis says the chest (or traditionally the heart) is the engine for virtuous action. In other words, emotion motivates—remembering that “emotion” and “motivation” flower from the same root word emovere, to move. As an old Russian proverb affirms, “The heart moves the feet.”
However, this is not pure, reflexive, or instinctive emotion. Reflexive emotion is a reaction to an external stimulus of some kind. Instinctive emotion is rooted in our animal instincts. So, for example, If I suffer an injustice, I experience the reflexive emotion of anger. If I perceive an attractive woman, I may experience the instinctive emotion of sexual desire.
The sort of emotion Lewis calls for is an enlightened desire for truth, goodness, and beauty, and that sort of longing does not occur accidentally or instinctively. While we have an inborn desire for truth, beauty and goodness, that desire needs to be cultivated. The longing for truth, beauty, and goodness that is intrinsic to human nature is distorted by original sin and needs to be regenerated by grace, educated by catechesis and trained through discipline.
Without regeneration, education, and discipline the untrained heart lapses into uncontrolled sentimentalism, and uncontrolled sentimentalism leads to chaos and conflict. The current chaos and conflict in sexual identity is the result of such uncontrolled sentimentality.
It is easy to see the sexual free-for-all in the fading West as merely the result of several congruent social and technological factors: the social upheavals of the 1960s, feminism, homosexualism, and the invention of artificial contraception and abortion. But these are merely the social manifestations and technological symptoms of a deeper malaise.
The roots of the rot lie in the sentimental romanticism of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who revered not primarily the rational capabilities of man, but the surgings and the urgings of the heart (and groin). The Age of Reason trusted the human head independent of divine revelation. It was followed by The Age of Romanticism that trusted the human heart independent of divine law. Rationalism and Romanticism were logically superseded by the Decadents and Eroticism, which trusted not the head or the heart, but the heat—the heat of unrestrained sexual desire.
We are reaping the results in a culture confused about our sexual identity and thus confused about our human identity. Without a renewal of revelation, education, and discipline, humanity is truly in danger of being abolished by a kind of inevitable corporate suicide.
Is this the much-hyped “transhumanism” that is being forecast? Are we destined to become a race of “non-binary” human beings? Men not only without chests, but also without genitals. Not men without chests, but rather men whose chests have been replaced with… silicone balloons: fake breasts that abolish masculinity, mock the women they imitate, and symbolize the insane, clownish, and tragically vapid future to which we seem to be destined.
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The featured image is “Germanic soldier holding a Roman helm” (1902) by Osmar Schindler, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I can assure you that we are NOT destined to become a race of “non-binary” human beings. The temples that are our bodies will fall like the Towers of Babylon, and it will be a horrific sight to watch happen. All this is just a Fourth Turning with steroids, another Fall of an Empire. It never turns out well for those who fancied themselves as thought leaders of the next thought revolution.
Pride goes before the fall, and this time they are waving banners proclaiming such “pride”.
God is not mocked.
The revolution indeed eats its own. There is a straight line from feminism to transgenderism. The latter is the former’s undoing. It’s still a man’s world, even if the “men” now call themselves women. The psalmist understood this.