C. S. Lewis on Unruly Appetites
One movement that continues to gain popularity in our culture today is Relativism. As we stray away from religion and its idea of absolute truth, we inch closer and closer to a completely relativistic society where really anything goes. Everyone gets to make their own truth and live by their own rules, which usually means they live by their feelings. This is a mistake.
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes an argument for Objectivism (the opposite of Relativism). The argument Lewis makes is in direct response to the English education system at the time, attacking the problematic ideas he saw being taught in the classroom.
Should We Train Our Emotions?
The gaping hole that Lewis sees in the way his society was educating children was that they weren’t training their emotions. To our minds today, that immediately strikes us as odd. “Training emotions?” That’s ridiculous, you can’t train your emotions! It’s just how you feel, nothing can change that. Lewis doesn’t deny that, but his point is that not all emotions are right. “No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.” Just because you feel something, that doesn’t make it right or legitimate. He uses the example of liking children – he himself does not like children, but recognizes that he is wrong. He ought to like children, but he does not, and this is a wrong emotion.
He introduces with this the idea that all men (and women) are made up of three parts: the head, which is the intellect, the stomach, which is the appetite, and the chest, which is the trained emotion. Throughout the book, he calls this chest the Tao. It is the Tao that keeps the whole operation working as it should. Your intellect alone is not strong enough to control your appetite. You may believe strongly in ethics and know that something is wrong, but when your body desperately wants something, head knowledge is not enough to keep you from doing what you know is wrong. For example, a fresh warm batch of chocolate chip cookies is placed in front of you. Your head knows that it would be responsible to eat one, maybe two, and leave the rest for another time. However, after eating your one cookie, your stomach is ravenous for more. Even though you know that eating an entire batch of cookies is not the best for your health and even that you will likely make yourself sick, without the “chest,” the crucial piece of self-control, your stomach will win every time, resulting in a massive stomach ache and a whole lot of regret.
The Importance of a "Chest"
It takes trained emotions, a chest to govern a stomach. In our society today and in Lewis’s back then, he claimed we are raising “men without chests,” men ruled only by their appetite. Men who follow their appetites and whatever their untrained, wrong emotions tell them are not right for our society. Lewis tells us that “the right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” Unless we start to teach children what the right and wrong emotions are, our society is headed in an unknown, but certainly bad, direction. We see this today already among college students and twenty somethings, who prefer to spend their time going to bars or parties, getting wasted and hooking up, when their “chests” should be telling them that they ought to be spending their time making good decisions, working hard in their school or work and trying to build lasting relationships. We see this in married couples who fight constantly, and while their “chest” would tell them to do their best to stay together and work it out, they decide to follow what their appetite tells them, and so they split up or cheat on each other. All around us, people live hedonistic lifestyles, doing whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for themselves or for our society as a whole.
Lewis closes his argument by pointing out that despite our relativistic society, we still have a deep, ingrained desire for virtue. Deep down, we know that we need self sacrifice, altruism, and all kinds of good qualities that Relativism seeks to destroy. “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.” There is no virtue and enterprise in our human nature unless our chest controls our powerful appetites, so if we desire to avoid a hedonistic, shallow society, we must begin to train our emotions again.