[American Greatness] 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 honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."Those were the famous words of C. S. Lewis in his celebrated essay, The Abolition of Man. His target was modern education and its failure to teach men what to value and how to value it, in a decisive break with the entire Western tradition of pedagogy dating back to Plato and Aristotle.
The spread of subjectivism—the belief that all statements of value are nothing more than expressions of the speaker’s inner feelings—was hollowing men out, Lewis argued. Without the necessary "chest," by which Lewis really meant something like "courage," man is little more than an animal, incapable of reflecting and acting in a fully human manner.
"Organ," "chests," "castrate," "geldings"—the language was biological but also clearly a metaphor. And yet, Lewis knew that biology and the physical reality of the body were a necessary part of masculinity and the virtues associated with it. Lewis made Aslan, the Christ-figure in the Narnia series, a magnificent lion, the most fearsome and powerful creature in the animal kingdom, for a reason.
Lewis’s metaphor of "men without chests" is one of the organizing images of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. But unlike in Lewis’s famous essay, I use that unforgettable phrase in a very literal sense. In 2026, legions of men don’t have chests at all—they’re as wide across the underarms as they are at the waist, maybe wider at the hips—and it’s making it even harder for them to be men and do what they should.