Very good piece, Linker. I would also advise men (women also) to turn away from popular religion (especially fundamentalist Protestantism, mistakenly called "evangelical," which is largely responsible for fueling this whole moral panic) and seek instead a life of serious reflection on what it means to be human instead of a beast or a god. I know you personally are Jewish and have rejected Christianity for the time being, but mid-20th century Protestant thinking along the lines of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr (whatever one's opinions are about his politics--he was very sound on matters of the Christian faith) would be a great resource for people, believer or non-believer alike, to gain some perspective and a sense of proportion on the cultural hatreds that are engulfing our civilization--few if any are actually totally new. If their works seem daunting, and they will be, especially if one has no prior education in basic theology or an extensive exposure to disciplines like history, first visit the articles on them in Wikipedia and start from there using search sites--those theologians' own works and those that introduce their thought are found aplenty on used book websites and quite a few are still in print (ebooks even). One should have no illusions about easiness of comprehension--they admittedly wrote for an audience still steeped in the folkways of Christendom unlike us moderns (by the way, spare me the lectures about this being a supposedly "post-modern age"--I am not buying it anymore), make no mistake. Those who are dogmatic fundamentalists, "orthodox," full-fledged "woke," or atheists will not find their viewpoints convincing, of course, and probably should not waste their time. But for those who are screaming for sanity, especially at this time of year when people suspect that the Christmas season had something behind it originally before the onset of consumerism some 80-odd years ago, they might well find some relief. They might also be led to a reconsideration of the Christian faith as liberating instead of enslaving; very likely there are churches nearby their residences that will proclaim that truth instead of the sorry syncretism that is now called "Christian nationalism." That is for them to decide, of course, but it is where I take my stand as I write on the day before the annual commemoration of God coming into human flesh as the ultimate "beta male"--a helpless baby boy.
I find it interesting, amuzing a sad when I see the likes of Carlson talk about masculinity and then mock possibly the bravest man in the world. Zelensky's bravery comes not from aloofness but from a genuine love of country and the Ukranian people. Carlson and his ilk worship a terrified thug and denigrate a truly brave man. The I r sense of masculinity is warped beyond belief. It is
also very disturbing to see the intersection of this warped masculinity and the christian right. The book "Jesus and John Wayne" explores this in detail.
'Masculinity', or at least its potential, is a racially-delimited birth-right, in much the same way as members of bad groups are never stoïc, they just don't feel pain the way we do.
Zelensky's a Jew, and not an Israeli, and more generally is not on the side of the Dearest Leader, therefore to much of the Right he _situationally_ can not be truly masculine. To at least some of them, 'Jews' like words and reading and learning in general, 'Jewesses' are willing to argue and sometimes ran the family business if their husband were too busy (gasp!) studying, and so we are all gender-traitors or continually suspect on that score.
I have a different view of the Trumpist right's view of Zelensky. In their view, Israeli's fight Muslims so that's ok. Plus Israel is needed for Christian end-times. But Zelensky is an uppity European Jew who fights against Christian Russia, and that's not permissible. European Jews should be helpless against their Christian 'betters'. So the Trumpist will trash Zelensky with any and all mutually contradictory/incompatible insults and stereotypes.
Your reference to Aristotle, from which you get your title, takes us back to the culture of ancient Greece, which provides the foundation of half of Western Civilization (the other half being the culture of ancient Israel). One of the four virtues Aristotle (via Plato) identifies is ANDREIA, which we normally translate as “courage” or “fortitude,” but its root meaning is “manliness” (from ANDROS, of man). The archetype of manhood for Plato and Aristotle, as for ancient Greek civilization generally, was, and remains for us Westerners today, the hero of Homer’s second epic: Odysseus.
In addition to possessing all four virtues — PHRONESIS, SOPHROSYNE, DIKAIONSYNE, and ANDREIA (prudence, temperance, justice, courage) — Odysseus as a model for manhood presents a striking image of uxoriousness: all he wants after the Trojan War is to get home to be with his wife, Penelope. We first see him weeping on the beach of Calypso’s island. Alas, the beautiful goddess forces him to make love to her every day, a task most men would die for. But he wants his Penelope
In one of poetry’s great metaphor-symbols of all time, when Odysseus finally does get home and slays (with his son Telemachus) the “suitors” who have defiled his home, he gets to enjoy his heart’s desire: a night of lovemaking with his beloved Penelope. The goddess Athena (after whom Greece’s greatest city is named) gracefully blesses her champion’s homecoming by extending the night hours, thus extending the domestic lovemaking that had been suspended for twenty years, ten at war and ten more getting home. He spends that joyous night, the end of his longing, in the marriage bed he had made himself out of a living tree, around which he built his home with Penelope. His marriage bed is rooted in the soil of Ithaka, his kingdom. His private, domestic life, and the happy duties of that life, balance the public, civic duties he exercises as king (or, the duties of all men in democratic Athens of Plato and Aristotle).
Odysseus, then, as James Joyce implies in his modern masterpiece ULYSSES, is the model of manhood for ancient Greece, and for us today. .
Thanks. — Lots of good stuff on ULYSSES on Internet. I recommend <www.ulyssesguide.com> as a helpful source of authoritative commentary addressed to ‘the common reader.’
Mr. Holt, that is excellent advice for those immersed as you are in classical thought. But what about the 99.7% of our fellow Americans who are not? You might as well tell them a children's bedtime story, as it would make more sense to them than your recollection of Homer, the whole account of Odysseus wanting a normal life of domesticity after years of fighting notwithstanding. I respect and to some extent agree with your interpretation, but the fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans have no familiarity with the "foundation of half of Western civilization," as you put it. I confess that I only got a cursory exposure to it during my days on campus--in my defense, I was too damn busy at the time trying to get a foothold in a middle-class profession (and, of course, I was an 18-to-21-year-old, not exactly a time of life when you show much enthusiasm about anything but popular culture, regardless of the quality of your education). And there is not a great deal you or I can do about it, so I am afraid we have no choice but to use narratives our contemporaries are more cognizant of to make the case that Odysseus and Penelope's monogamy, for instance, is preferable to one-night stands, prostitution, hard-core pornography, or what have you. It seems that the cultural far right has us centrists beat on that score, as its loudest voices use as a weapon the other half of Western civilization: the Old Testament. It might be understandable if Jews were the main drivers behind the Puritan reaction to sexual libertinism, but they are not, at least not in the United States. So-called "Christians" who refuse to confess that the New Testament and its message of peace and love among God's estranged yet reconciled children are at least in tension with if not in opposition to the Levitical codes found in the Old are the people raising the whole flapdoodle about sissified men and butch women--with drag queens thrown in for good measure. In other words, if you set out on a crusade to convince voters that a dose of Homer would help set them straight about sexual anxieties, I wish you luck. You are going to need it.
The story of Odysseus that I relate may reflect my learning, but I tell it for its simple narrative and symbolic power. Others may not be familiar with the Homeric text, but it seems to me that anyone with a pulse can relate to it.
Samuel Butler, the author of the utopian novel EREWHON (“nowhere”), in addition to writing a fine prose translation of the ODYSSEY, wrote a book titled THE AUTHORESS OF THE ODYSSEY, in which he opines that the “Homer” of the ODYSSEY must have been a woman, so contrary it is to the patriarchal values of the ancient world (and most of of the world then and since!). Be that as it may, it seems obvious to me that the evolution of consciousness in the modern world has been trending towards the mental and spiritual equality of men and women. The sexes are decidedly different — and vive la differance! — but equal. As in Genesis 1: “And God created man in his own image — MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM.” The image of God is, in a word, androgynous. (Gen. 1 thus contradicts the more poetic version of the creation of humans in Gen.2, but actually it is a later interpretation of the earlier story. See the scholarship on the P writer as opposed to the J writer. See especially the interesting speculations of Harold Bloom in THE BOOK OF J , which posits that the J writer was a woman!)
Thank you for your response. I did not mean to imply that the classics are absolutely useless in moral instruction, like thinkers and intellectuals from the Enlightenment down to those in our day are prone to do ("presentism"). Even if I am not well versed in them personally, I am historically aware enough to acknowledge their influence on intellectual life and that our Western culture owes some debt to them (but not worship, which you do not appear to be demanding). The Homer story is, as you say, accessible to some people who have beyond, say, a high school diploma. But I would not bet anything that people who dropped out, earned only a diploma, or else obtained a strictly vocational college education (e.g., two-year "community colleges") would have any affinity for it. It is not so much its content as its form and style that are off-putting--serious and disciplined learning has been disparaged in American folk and popular culture for decades. Instant gratification at every turn and overly permissive parenting have played some roles also, of course. And the ridicule did not, as conservatives and old-line humanists (sometimes one and the same) have imagined for a long time now, originate in 1960s-1970s youth hedonism. In fact, such excess and overindulgence in pleasures of the flesh associated with that period would have not been possible had it not been for 19th-century disdain of the "common folk" for "preachers and teachers" west of the Appalachians, for example. For instance, some of the rock music from five or six decades ago was based upon populist genres like country, folk, and blues, rather than "high" forms like bebop jazz or modernist classical compositions. Let me put it simply: just telling people these days that a man who lived millennia ago found a way to balance his aggressive masculine urges with a regard for his wife as the "fairer sex" is not going to get you anywhere much in today's society, as I see it. You may blame feminism if you like (as do the people Linker cites in his piece), but accusing masculinized women and feminized men and trying to understand them are two different things. Whether you want to make the effort to try understanding, I do not know. Feminism in its current iteration is, to me, a rather inconsistent and even contradictory melange of sexual freedom and aversion to the romantic and the intimate, when it comes to relationships. Economically and socially, the consequences have been different, with their own dynamics, which I am not interested in here. The ambiguity about sexual attitudes and the toll the ambiguity takes on relationships is the main critique I have against what feminism has become, not that it is inherently ruinous to American manhood, as the antiliberal right insists that it is, or that it is the wave of the future as the so-called "woke" left imagines it to be. Neither one is a correct analysis as I see things. To conclude, I applaud your sound and interesting Biblical exegesis. Your postulation that the Divine being has no (or both) genders is something that current mainstream scholarship and theology has generally affirmed, for what it is worth. I only wish that fundamentalism was not the primary mode of American Protestantism today, and that you and I would not be instantly and thoughtlessly branded heretics on the spot. But I am afraid it is. I live in Alabama and deal with that reality on an everyday basis, as you might imagine. However, that is the case even in "blue" hotbeds like Massachusetts, New York, and California, with traditional Protestantism giving way to non-denominational, consumerist approaches to the faith even there. With those thoughts, I wish you a happy Christmas.
Yes, we live in a very confusing and confused world today, both in America and abroad. The confusion is so deep it seems to have engendered a general sense of nihilism in popular culture. The casual acceptance of constant daily mendacity from the former president — over 30,000 lies and misrepresentations in four years by the count of the old-fashioned believers in the importance of truthfulness at the Washington Post — is evidence that for millions of our fellow citizens, honesty and integrity are overrated virtues. In fact, they believe virtue is just a pose. Everything is, to them, in a word, bullshit.
Eventually, the virtues of Odysseus will be recognized again, and respected, for the simple reason that we cannot survive without them. When Volodymyr Zelensky finished his address to the joint session of Congress the other night, even the lowest of the low, Reps. Gaetz and Boebert, felt compelled to stand, despite themselves.
My first thought upon reading this column is that Twitter is not real life. I would bet any amount of money that over 99% of the American people wouldn't know who Nick Adams was if they fell over him and I don't even detect any kind of diffuse impact of ideas like his. On the contrary, for better or worse, modern men seem to have embraced a lot of feminine/therapeutic culture ideas about how to deal with their feelings. That's not so say there is a crisis of masculinity, which probably has many causes including economic changes that have made blue collar men less attractive marriage partners, a sexually libertine culture that has demoted marriage and family to one lifestyle choice among many rather than a rite of passage that confers status and respectability in and of itself and the pervasive influence of feminist ideas in various educational and cultural institutions that sometimes unfairly pathologize men and masculinity. Obviously its important for our culture to have a healthy masculinity that is congruent with both human nature and the needs of society but the rantings of a few yo-yos on Twitter aren't the real problem.
Thanks for the comment, John -- though I'm sensitive to the critique that I may be treating what people post on Twitter as more significant than it really is. I'd say in defense that an account with several hundred thousand followers, let alone one with over a million, as "Eric" has, is more than a tiny niche. But I'd also say that I picked these as exemplars of things I've seen in many places from many people. And also that the way internet trends work, at least on the right, is that things found on several accounts end up trickling down to a wider public through talk radio and cable TV. What "Eric" writes on Twitter could well be a Tucker Carlson segment reaching millions in a few months. Etc.
That's right, Linker. Twitter and its rip-offs are the intellectual and moral equivalent of a carrier of contagious disease, in my view. The best remedy is like that of a person trying to stay healthy--stay the (expletive) away; just delete the apps from your phones and tablets (and remove the bookmarks from your laptops while you are at it) and tell your friends to give you a good old-fashioned phone call, or if they must, fire off an email to you. Other than seeking attention and propagandizing, there is really no reason for an individual (this does not apply to non-profit institutions or private businesses) untrained in mass communications to have direct access to a group of people beyond a small circle of intimates. Social media is not a good way to handle discourse on serious matters--it was never really designed for that purpose, like Substack is. This week's reckoning on January 6, 2021 should tell us that hard experience demands that we make choices like that.
That's a shocking and misguided tweet. It's fascinating and upsetting to see this brand of masculinity being promoted as some kind of answer to a crisis. Very different from the caring and loving version of the ideal man that I was taught and hold to.
The idea of a bunch of lone wolf self interested, self important men running around is frightening and heartbreaking. I suppose if you want to build a walking void, you follow the advice of that tweet.
Significant concern over men not being manly enough probably predates TR by about one generation., though the UK was primary origin, in the 2nd half of the 19th C. See "Muscular Christianity", a topic which was much discussed around home during TR's childhood.
0.) The number of men who claim to be 'Alpha Males', allowing for a moment the incorrect notion that it were a valid category for primates (or even wolves—with them it is a rôle, not a caste) is surprising only if one does not know how many people 'conscious of [their] Past Lives' believe that those were spent being royalty of one sort or another.
1.) I would take 'manipulated by their wives' most often to mean 'seriously taking into account their counsel' because, even if it should be in one case or all wiser than the husband's, doing so undermines his Authority.
2.) It is interesting to note how little these conservatives trust in the romantic 'Market', one in which at least some aspects (relative attractiveness) and places (e.g., colleges and among co-workers) there is far greater initial equality than in economic doings—although I'm not so far removed from it not to notice that economic and social advantages have their effects…. Admittedly one of the columnists addressed directly in one of the "The Week" columns did suggest improving the product on-offer, explicitly stating though that nothing could be done for the brand.
3.) The 'crisis in masculinity' is certainly nothing new; I should say that the ideology of Muscular Christianity puts the 'cross' in 'CrossFit'. It is hardly novel of me to point-out that Teddy-boy Roosevelt's generation profoundly felt their non-service in the Civil War, and now we have generations of men simultaneously worshipping the military and almost entirely not serving with it.
4.) I have no such trouble: the combined seriousness and levity with which I was told that I was 'A Man' in my earliest 'teens, and a family legacy that insisted that 'masculine' meant 'staying indoors and studying hard' took care of that…no matter how often and how loud the screams impugning my manhood were every school-day.
There are times when it feels as if there were scarcely an issue of the RIght's which does not intersect with a perceived Masculine Crisis, to at least some noticeable extent, and some seem little _but_ such.
In his account of the Trojan Wars, Homer makes a point that the Greeks fought like savages because they weren't in front of their wives and children, whereas the Trojans fought with restraint because of that fact. This neo-masculine ideal is therefore very much pre-Socratic in the sense that even Homer (a pre-Socratic himself) offers us social commentary on "manliness run amok" and the carnage that ensues without masculinity being shaped by the civilizing influences of the city and of families.
You know who else was obsessed with pre-Socratic manliness? Nietzsche. A common problem with conservatives is that they can find Marx in everything but can't be bothered to find Nietzsche anywhere. I guess a certain type of conservative would find Nietzsche unobjectionable (just like there are liberals who are openly Marxist) but for religious conservatives this is hugely problematic. Nietzsche expressly set out to refute Christianity, which he blamed for the decline of pagan manliness.
Well said.
Very good piece, Linker. I would also advise men (women also) to turn away from popular religion (especially fundamentalist Protestantism, mistakenly called "evangelical," which is largely responsible for fueling this whole moral panic) and seek instead a life of serious reflection on what it means to be human instead of a beast or a god. I know you personally are Jewish and have rejected Christianity for the time being, but mid-20th century Protestant thinking along the lines of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr (whatever one's opinions are about his politics--he was very sound on matters of the Christian faith) would be a great resource for people, believer or non-believer alike, to gain some perspective and a sense of proportion on the cultural hatreds that are engulfing our civilization--few if any are actually totally new. If their works seem daunting, and they will be, especially if one has no prior education in basic theology or an extensive exposure to disciplines like history, first visit the articles on them in Wikipedia and start from there using search sites--those theologians' own works and those that introduce their thought are found aplenty on used book websites and quite a few are still in print (ebooks even). One should have no illusions about easiness of comprehension--they admittedly wrote for an audience still steeped in the folkways of Christendom unlike us moderns (by the way, spare me the lectures about this being a supposedly "post-modern age"--I am not buying it anymore), make no mistake. Those who are dogmatic fundamentalists, "orthodox," full-fledged "woke," or atheists will not find their viewpoints convincing, of course, and probably should not waste their time. But for those who are screaming for sanity, especially at this time of year when people suspect that the Christmas season had something behind it originally before the onset of consumerism some 80-odd years ago, they might well find some relief. They might also be led to a reconsideration of the Christian faith as liberating instead of enslaving; very likely there are churches nearby their residences that will proclaim that truth instead of the sorry syncretism that is now called "Christian nationalism." That is for them to decide, of course, but it is where I take my stand as I write on the day before the annual commemoration of God coming into human flesh as the ultimate "beta male"--a helpless baby boy.
I find it interesting, amuzing a sad when I see the likes of Carlson talk about masculinity and then mock possibly the bravest man in the world. Zelensky's bravery comes not from aloofness but from a genuine love of country and the Ukranian people. Carlson and his ilk worship a terrified thug and denigrate a truly brave man. The I r sense of masculinity is warped beyond belief. It is
also very disturbing to see the intersection of this warped masculinity and the christian right. The book "Jesus and John Wayne" explores this in detail.
'Masculinity', or at least its potential, is a racially-delimited birth-right, in much the same way as members of bad groups are never stoïc, they just don't feel pain the way we do.
Zelensky's a Jew, and not an Israeli, and more generally is not on the side of the Dearest Leader, therefore to much of the Right he _situationally_ can not be truly masculine. To at least some of them, 'Jews' like words and reading and learning in general, 'Jewesses' are willing to argue and sometimes ran the family business if their husband were too busy (gasp!) studying, and so we are all gender-traitors or continually suspect on that score.
I have a different view of the Trumpist right's view of Zelensky. In their view, Israeli's fight Muslims so that's ok. Plus Israel is needed for Christian end-times. But Zelensky is an uppity European Jew who fights against Christian Russia, and that's not permissible. European Jews should be helpless against their Christian 'betters'. So the Trumpist will trash Zelensky with any and all mutually contradictory/incompatible insults and stereotypes.
Your reference to Aristotle, from which you get your title, takes us back to the culture of ancient Greece, which provides the foundation of half of Western Civilization (the other half being the culture of ancient Israel). One of the four virtues Aristotle (via Plato) identifies is ANDREIA, which we normally translate as “courage” or “fortitude,” but its root meaning is “manliness” (from ANDROS, of man). The archetype of manhood for Plato and Aristotle, as for ancient Greek civilization generally, was, and remains for us Westerners today, the hero of Homer’s second epic: Odysseus.
In addition to possessing all four virtues — PHRONESIS, SOPHROSYNE, DIKAIONSYNE, and ANDREIA (prudence, temperance, justice, courage) — Odysseus as a model for manhood presents a striking image of uxoriousness: all he wants after the Trojan War is to get home to be with his wife, Penelope. We first see him weeping on the beach of Calypso’s island. Alas, the beautiful goddess forces him to make love to her every day, a task most men would die for. But he wants his Penelope
In one of poetry’s great metaphor-symbols of all time, when Odysseus finally does get home and slays (with his son Telemachus) the “suitors” who have defiled his home, he gets to enjoy his heart’s desire: a night of lovemaking with his beloved Penelope. The goddess Athena (after whom Greece’s greatest city is named) gracefully blesses her champion’s homecoming by extending the night hours, thus extending the domestic lovemaking that had been suspended for twenty years, ten at war and ten more getting home. He spends that joyous night, the end of his longing, in the marriage bed he had made himself out of a living tree, around which he built his home with Penelope. His marriage bed is rooted in the soil of Ithaka, his kingdom. His private, domestic life, and the happy duties of that life, balance the public, civic duties he exercises as king (or, the duties of all men in democratic Athens of Plato and Aristotle).
Odysseus, then, as James Joyce implies in his modern masterpiece ULYSSES, is the model of manhood for ancient Greece, and for us today. .
Beautiful
Very well written, John. Not to mention you’ve read Joyce’s Ulysses and understood it. I’ve attempted it twice. Twice was enough for me.
Thanks. — Lots of good stuff on ULYSSES on Internet. I recommend <www.ulyssesguide.com> as a helpful source of authoritative commentary addressed to ‘the common reader.’
Mr. Holt, that is excellent advice for those immersed as you are in classical thought. But what about the 99.7% of our fellow Americans who are not? You might as well tell them a children's bedtime story, as it would make more sense to them than your recollection of Homer, the whole account of Odysseus wanting a normal life of domesticity after years of fighting notwithstanding. I respect and to some extent agree with your interpretation, but the fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans have no familiarity with the "foundation of half of Western civilization," as you put it. I confess that I only got a cursory exposure to it during my days on campus--in my defense, I was too damn busy at the time trying to get a foothold in a middle-class profession (and, of course, I was an 18-to-21-year-old, not exactly a time of life when you show much enthusiasm about anything but popular culture, regardless of the quality of your education). And there is not a great deal you or I can do about it, so I am afraid we have no choice but to use narratives our contemporaries are more cognizant of to make the case that Odysseus and Penelope's monogamy, for instance, is preferable to one-night stands, prostitution, hard-core pornography, or what have you. It seems that the cultural far right has us centrists beat on that score, as its loudest voices use as a weapon the other half of Western civilization: the Old Testament. It might be understandable if Jews were the main drivers behind the Puritan reaction to sexual libertinism, but they are not, at least not in the United States. So-called "Christians" who refuse to confess that the New Testament and its message of peace and love among God's estranged yet reconciled children are at least in tension with if not in opposition to the Levitical codes found in the Old are the people raising the whole flapdoodle about sissified men and butch women--with drag queens thrown in for good measure. In other words, if you set out on a crusade to convince voters that a dose of Homer would help set them straight about sexual anxieties, I wish you luck. You are going to need it.
Mr. Stroud,
The story of Odysseus that I relate may reflect my learning, but I tell it for its simple narrative and symbolic power. Others may not be familiar with the Homeric text, but it seems to me that anyone with a pulse can relate to it.
Samuel Butler, the author of the utopian novel EREWHON (“nowhere”), in addition to writing a fine prose translation of the ODYSSEY, wrote a book titled THE AUTHORESS OF THE ODYSSEY, in which he opines that the “Homer” of the ODYSSEY must have been a woman, so contrary it is to the patriarchal values of the ancient world (and most of of the world then and since!). Be that as it may, it seems obvious to me that the evolution of consciousness in the modern world has been trending towards the mental and spiritual equality of men and women. The sexes are decidedly different — and vive la differance! — but equal. As in Genesis 1: “And God created man in his own image — MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM.” The image of God is, in a word, androgynous. (Gen. 1 thus contradicts the more poetic version of the creation of humans in Gen.2, but actually it is a later interpretation of the earlier story. See the scholarship on the P writer as opposed to the J writer. See especially the interesting speculations of Harold Bloom in THE BOOK OF J , which posits that the J writer was a woman!)
Thank you for your response. I did not mean to imply that the classics are absolutely useless in moral instruction, like thinkers and intellectuals from the Enlightenment down to those in our day are prone to do ("presentism"). Even if I am not well versed in them personally, I am historically aware enough to acknowledge their influence on intellectual life and that our Western culture owes some debt to them (but not worship, which you do not appear to be demanding). The Homer story is, as you say, accessible to some people who have beyond, say, a high school diploma. But I would not bet anything that people who dropped out, earned only a diploma, or else obtained a strictly vocational college education (e.g., two-year "community colleges") would have any affinity for it. It is not so much its content as its form and style that are off-putting--serious and disciplined learning has been disparaged in American folk and popular culture for decades. Instant gratification at every turn and overly permissive parenting have played some roles also, of course. And the ridicule did not, as conservatives and old-line humanists (sometimes one and the same) have imagined for a long time now, originate in 1960s-1970s youth hedonism. In fact, such excess and overindulgence in pleasures of the flesh associated with that period would have not been possible had it not been for 19th-century disdain of the "common folk" for "preachers and teachers" west of the Appalachians, for example. For instance, some of the rock music from five or six decades ago was based upon populist genres like country, folk, and blues, rather than "high" forms like bebop jazz or modernist classical compositions. Let me put it simply: just telling people these days that a man who lived millennia ago found a way to balance his aggressive masculine urges with a regard for his wife as the "fairer sex" is not going to get you anywhere much in today's society, as I see it. You may blame feminism if you like (as do the people Linker cites in his piece), but accusing masculinized women and feminized men and trying to understand them are two different things. Whether you want to make the effort to try understanding, I do not know. Feminism in its current iteration is, to me, a rather inconsistent and even contradictory melange of sexual freedom and aversion to the romantic and the intimate, when it comes to relationships. Economically and socially, the consequences have been different, with their own dynamics, which I am not interested in here. The ambiguity about sexual attitudes and the toll the ambiguity takes on relationships is the main critique I have against what feminism has become, not that it is inherently ruinous to American manhood, as the antiliberal right insists that it is, or that it is the wave of the future as the so-called "woke" left imagines it to be. Neither one is a correct analysis as I see things. To conclude, I applaud your sound and interesting Biblical exegesis. Your postulation that the Divine being has no (or both) genders is something that current mainstream scholarship and theology has generally affirmed, for what it is worth. I only wish that fundamentalism was not the primary mode of American Protestantism today, and that you and I would not be instantly and thoughtlessly branded heretics on the spot. But I am afraid it is. I live in Alabama and deal with that reality on an everyday basis, as you might imagine. However, that is the case even in "blue" hotbeds like Massachusetts, New York, and California, with traditional Protestantism giving way to non-denominational, consumerist approaches to the faith even there. With those thoughts, I wish you a happy Christmas.
Yes, we live in a very confusing and confused world today, both in America and abroad. The confusion is so deep it seems to have engendered a general sense of nihilism in popular culture. The casual acceptance of constant daily mendacity from the former president — over 30,000 lies and misrepresentations in four years by the count of the old-fashioned believers in the importance of truthfulness at the Washington Post — is evidence that for millions of our fellow citizens, honesty and integrity are overrated virtues. In fact, they believe virtue is just a pose. Everything is, to them, in a word, bullshit.
Eventually, the virtues of Odysseus will be recognized again, and respected, for the simple reason that we cannot survive without them. When Volodymyr Zelensky finished his address to the joint session of Congress the other night, even the lowest of the low, Reps. Gaetz and Boebert, felt compelled to stand, despite themselves.
My first thought upon reading this column is that Twitter is not real life. I would bet any amount of money that over 99% of the American people wouldn't know who Nick Adams was if they fell over him and I don't even detect any kind of diffuse impact of ideas like his. On the contrary, for better or worse, modern men seem to have embraced a lot of feminine/therapeutic culture ideas about how to deal with their feelings. That's not so say there is a crisis of masculinity, which probably has many causes including economic changes that have made blue collar men less attractive marriage partners, a sexually libertine culture that has demoted marriage and family to one lifestyle choice among many rather than a rite of passage that confers status and respectability in and of itself and the pervasive influence of feminist ideas in various educational and cultural institutions that sometimes unfairly pathologize men and masculinity. Obviously its important for our culture to have a healthy masculinity that is congruent with both human nature and the needs of society but the rantings of a few yo-yos on Twitter aren't the real problem.
Thanks for the comment, John -- though I'm sensitive to the critique that I may be treating what people post on Twitter as more significant than it really is. I'd say in defense that an account with several hundred thousand followers, let alone one with over a million, as "Eric" has, is more than a tiny niche. But I'd also say that I picked these as exemplars of things I've seen in many places from many people. And also that the way internet trends work, at least on the right, is that things found on several accounts end up trickling down to a wider public through talk radio and cable TV. What "Eric" writes on Twitter could well be a Tucker Carlson segment reaching millions in a few months. Etc.
That's right, Linker. Twitter and its rip-offs are the intellectual and moral equivalent of a carrier of contagious disease, in my view. The best remedy is like that of a person trying to stay healthy--stay the (expletive) away; just delete the apps from your phones and tablets (and remove the bookmarks from your laptops while you are at it) and tell your friends to give you a good old-fashioned phone call, or if they must, fire off an email to you. Other than seeking attention and propagandizing, there is really no reason for an individual (this does not apply to non-profit institutions or private businesses) untrained in mass communications to have direct access to a group of people beyond a small circle of intimates. Social media is not a good way to handle discourse on serious matters--it was never really designed for that purpose, like Substack is. This week's reckoning on January 6, 2021 should tell us that hard experience demands that we make choices like that.
That's a shocking and misguided tweet. It's fascinating and upsetting to see this brand of masculinity being promoted as some kind of answer to a crisis. Very different from the caring and loving version of the ideal man that I was taught and hold to.
The idea of a bunch of lone wolf self interested, self important men running around is frightening and heartbreaking. I suppose if you want to build a walking void, you follow the advice of that tweet.
Significant concern over men not being manly enough probably predates TR by about one generation., though the UK was primary origin, in the 2nd half of the 19th C. See "Muscular Christianity", a topic which was much discussed around home during TR's childhood.
0.) The number of men who claim to be 'Alpha Males', allowing for a moment the incorrect notion that it were a valid category for primates (or even wolves—with them it is a rôle, not a caste) is surprising only if one does not know how many people 'conscious of [their] Past Lives' believe that those were spent being royalty of one sort or another.
1.) I would take 'manipulated by their wives' most often to mean 'seriously taking into account their counsel' because, even if it should be in one case or all wiser than the husband's, doing so undermines his Authority.
2.) It is interesting to note how little these conservatives trust in the romantic 'Market', one in which at least some aspects (relative attractiveness) and places (e.g., colleges and among co-workers) there is far greater initial equality than in economic doings—although I'm not so far removed from it not to notice that economic and social advantages have their effects…. Admittedly one of the columnists addressed directly in one of the "The Week" columns did suggest improving the product on-offer, explicitly stating though that nothing could be done for the brand.
3.) The 'crisis in masculinity' is certainly nothing new; I should say that the ideology of Muscular Christianity puts the 'cross' in 'CrossFit'. It is hardly novel of me to point-out that Teddy-boy Roosevelt's generation profoundly felt their non-service in the Civil War, and now we have generations of men simultaneously worshipping the military and almost entirely not serving with it.
4.) I have no such trouble: the combined seriousness and levity with which I was told that I was 'A Man' in my earliest 'teens, and a family legacy that insisted that 'masculine' meant 'staying indoors and studying hard' took care of that…no matter how often and how loud the screams impugning my manhood were every school-day.
There are times when it feels as if there were scarcely an issue of the RIght's which does not intersect with a perceived Masculine Crisis, to at least some noticeable extent, and some seem little _but_ such.
In his account of the Trojan Wars, Homer makes a point that the Greeks fought like savages because they weren't in front of their wives and children, whereas the Trojans fought with restraint because of that fact. This neo-masculine ideal is therefore very much pre-Socratic in the sense that even Homer (a pre-Socratic himself) offers us social commentary on "manliness run amok" and the carnage that ensues without masculinity being shaped by the civilizing influences of the city and of families.
You know who else was obsessed with pre-Socratic manliness? Nietzsche. A common problem with conservatives is that they can find Marx in everything but can't be bothered to find Nietzsche anywhere. I guess a certain type of conservative would find Nietzsche unobjectionable (just like there are liberals who are openly Marxist) but for religious conservatives this is hugely problematic. Nietzsche expressly set out to refute Christianity, which he blamed for the decline of pagan manliness.