I was lying in bed last night trying to figure out what to read next, and I ultimately settled on a new (to me) book by CS Lewis: The Abolition of Man. I’ve long admired Lewis for his ability to put difficult concepts into words that are accessible, so even though I didn’t really know what to expect in the book, I started it right away. It begins with an essay titled “Men Without Chests,” and suddenly what I was reading connected with something else that’s been on my mind non-stop for the last several days: the shooting of Renee Good by ICE in Minneapolis. I’ve since gone down a rabbit hole of thoughts, and I’m going to try to capture that for you now. It might take a bit, so bear with me.
Lewis wrote his essay during World War II, arguing that the modern education system was removing values from education. He talked about humans as having a head, a belly, and a chest. The head is reason, the belly is appetite and impulse, and the chest is what he called the seat of sentiment: the part of us that learns over time what to admire and what to abhor, that feels in harmony with what our reason tells us is good and our impulses tell us to want. Lewis’s point was that if you educate people to analyze values without actually training them to feel values — to admire courage, to feel shame at cruelty, to be moved by beauty and justice — then you wind up with clever people and people with desires, but not people whose moral compass has ever been formed. You get “men without chests”: people who can talk about morality but have never been carried along by it.
Which brings me back to Minneapolis in 2026. Good’s shooting has become a national flashpoint. Federal authorities insist the officer acted in self-defense, local officials and eyewitnesses have raised questions about that claim, and the responses have split sharply along political lines. Some people see this as systemic violence and a failure of moral imagination on the part of authorities; others see it as a tragic but legally justified use of force by someone charged with enforcing the law. What strikes me isn’t that people disagree about what happened (disagreements about facts and policy aren’t new) but that they often seem to be coming from completely different moral frameworks. One side looks for empathy and understanding; the other looks for order and the rule of law as primary moral goods. And it’s not just that they disagree about this particular event. This isn’t the only thing people are at odds about these days in America. As I thought about it through the lens of Lewis’s essay, it seemed to me that the root problem is that people disagree about how to interpret moral claims at all. The conversation quickly stops being about the specifics of what happened and becomes about which moral vocabulary gets to count as valid. This isn’t just a political dispute; it’s a moral language problem. (Note: I am specifically avoiding making comments on the shooting. I just . . . can’t right now. I’m not up to it, but I also don’t want to pretend it’s not affecting me at all. This essay is part of me trying to come to terms not just with what happened, but with the response to what happened, which is in many ways more important to me personally.)
When I first made that connection, I wondered if the potential breakdown in moral formation that Lewis predicted is the reason we ended up here. I wondered if the political and cultural fractures of our time were the fruit of the educational and cultural shifts Lewis warned about. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that didn’t capture the whole picture for me. It wasn’t just that people abandoned the humanities or grimly marched toward purely “marketable skills” at the expense of moral education. It was that the humanities also changed, ceding its goal of teaching moral education (helping people to understand what was admirable or abhorrent) to instead simply study and analyze what was “good literature.” And there’s a big divide between “good” and “moral.”
There were always legitimate critiques to be made of the traditional humanities. A great deal of the old “shared canon” that once served as the foundation of American education was built on blind spots and exclusions. Women were marginalized, minorities barely represented, and too many of the stories we passed around as embodying virtue were, in practice, embedded in unjust social orders. Calling out those blind spots was necessary. But as we made those calls, something subtle but important got lost. In the rush to be more inclusive, we sometimes treated the old narratives as the problem, and not just their exclusions. Instead of expanding our moral vocabulary by bringing in new voices and integrating them into a larger framework of shared moral questions, we often turned the humanities into a series of separate, competing narratives with no center. The emphasis shifted from learning a shared moral language — learning why certain things matter — to debating which narrative gets to define what matters. The result is that we ended up with more moral vocabularies, but fewer shared moral standards. In other words, even among the people who might have been best equipped to navigate these moral quagmires, we had no shared footing to start from. That makes it hard to talk to one another in anything but oppositional terms.
Education has increasingly become about measurable outcomes and tangible skills that can be marketed, quantified, and justified in economic terms. That’s not inherently wrong (people need jobs and need to be able to provide for themselves and their families) but when the purpose of education becomes primarily about what you can produce, it shoves why you should care about anything into the background. If education focuses on building skills without also building moral imagination, then it becomes excellent at teaching analysis and optimization but not very good at teaching moral solidarity or shared moral reasoning. As I understand it, Lewis’s concern was never about preserving a particular curriculum for its own sake; it was that if a society stops forming the moral emotions that connect reason to action, nothing replaces those emotions except the force of ideology or power. And that pattern is visible behind so many of the headlines these days. We aren’t just talking past each other about one event; we’re often operating with different assumptions about what it means for something to be truly good or bad, just or unjust, worth preserving or worth lamenting.
This isn’t to say that the traditional canon was perfect, or that all criticism of it was misplaced, or that the humanities should never have evolved. It’s to say that the purpose of studying literature, history, and philosophy was always more than critique. It was to cultivate shared moral instincts, to help people not just think but feel, and to give them a framework for care. If you only ever practice dismantling narratives, then you get good at unmasking hidden assumptions but not at articulating why some things are genuinely worth defending. And that leaves people with powerful intellects and powerful emotions, but not much of a chest to mediate between them.
So when I look at how Americans are responding to the death of Renee Good and see so much heat and so little shared language about the moral questions at its root, I don’t think it’s because people lack opinions. I think it’s because the deeper moral grammar that once let us at least speak the same language about what matters and why has become fragmented. Some of that fragmentation came from legitimate efforts to correct exclusion and bring in voices that had too long been ignored. Some of it came from diminishing the role of moral formation in favor of technical or economic utility. Those two trends together produced something that looks a lot like what Lewis feared: a culture full of intellect and impulse, but with fewer shared moral instincts to carry the judgments those faculties make. I’m not saying both sides are equally at fault or anything like that. I’m identifying part of the core of the problem. Until we as a society can start building that shared moral framework again, we’re going to find ourselves stuck in exactly these sort of situations. Or worse.
That’s not just an academic concern. When moral disagreements become disagreements about which moral framework gets to count as reality, we lose the ability to persuade one another, and we lose the possibility of genuine common ground. We’re left with tribes who use moral language, but who aren’t formed by shared moral habits; who defend different bulwarks instead of working from the same foundation. And that, Lewis would say, is exactly what a society without chests looks like.
So where does that leave us? If Lewis is right, and if any of this diagnosis holds, then the answer probably isn’t something neat or fast or easily scalable. Rebuilding a shared moral framework isn’t something you fix with a new law, or even a new curriculum, at least not in the short term. It’s something that happens much more slowly, and much closer to home.
Lewis’s whole point about the “chest” was that it isn’t built through argument alone. It’s built through formation. Through what we praise and what we excuse. Through what we repeatedly expose ourselves to. Through the stories we tell, the language we use, and the habits we cultivate over time. In other words, this isn’t just some existential societal problem hanging out in the ether. It’s a personal one. It’s about how each of us is being shaped, day by day, whether we’re paying attention or not.
If we want a society that can reason together morally, then we need people whose instincts have been trained to care about the same kinds of things in roughly the same ways. That doesn’t mean uniformity of opinion, and it doesn’t mean pretending differences don’t exist. It means cultivating the ability to feel moral weight together: to recognize cruelty as cruelty, dignity as dignity, justice as justice, even when we disagree about what to do next. That kind of shared instinct doesn’t come from winning arguments online. It comes from formation, repetition, and attention.
Which means, uncomfortably, that the work starts with us. With what we choose to consume, what we choose to amplify, what we choose to excuse because it benefits our “side,” and what we choose to condemn even when it costs us something. It starts with whether we’re more interested in being right or in being shaped well.
Lewis warned about a world full of people with sharp minds and strong impulses but no chest to mediate between them. If that description feels uncomfortably familiar, then the response can’t just be structural or abstract. It has to be formative. It has to be about rebuilding, in small and imperfect ways, the moral muscles that let us live together without tearing one another apart.
That doesn’t guarantee agreement. But it might make disagreement survivable. And right now, that feels like a place worth starting.