Books reflect their times as you write them. As I was writing this one, a number of other books appeared lamenting the decline of manhood and the lack of understanding for boys. Opinion was shifting. Then our world was shattered and transformed by the events of 9/11 and the ongoing war against terrorism. Sometimes history will not allow us the luxury of a debate. From the firefighters who gave their lives to save others to the inspiring leadership of Mayor Giuliani, American men suddenly knew exactly how to act. And, in the comparative calm of the aftermath, as people began to come out of their shock and reflect on the madness, they also began asking: Has manliness come back? Is the crisis of manliness over?
On the level of immediate events, the answer was a resounding yes. As the firefighters and rescue workers achieved daily feats of heroism, as young soldiers hunted down the Islamo-fascists of al-Qaida (brave only in murdering children and beating up women) in the treacherous barrens of Afghanistan, there was no longer any silliness about finding “gender-neutral” ways of describing them. They weren’t “persons.” They were men. They were not superior to women. But they did things that women simply could not do—not only because women lack the physical strength but because their temperaments generally do not prepare them for combat to the same degree as does a man’s. This has always been obvious to anyone with common sense, but it had been obscured by decades of vain blather and grandstanding by the professional class of the perpetually offended. Now it shone forth once more in all its self-evident clarity. Men and women aspire to the same heights of excellence, but along different paths of psychology and experience. And it’s good that this is so.
Throughout this book, I’ve looked at popular culture as a source of clues for changes in the Zeitgeist that are often still subconscious. Popular culture often runs ahead of the opinion elites in charting shifts in values. Sometimes the clues emerge from the silliest of entertainment confections, sometimes from grotesque and nihilistic excesses in music or personal style. But the clues point the way to an emerging new consensus about manliness; even as I was writing this book, I could feel it in the air.
I’ve talked about the balkanization of the sexes, first undertaken by the more radical versions of feminism on behalf of women, later imitated by elements of the men’s consciousness movement on behalf of men. That trend is still going strong. We’re still frequently trapped between the Mother Goddess and Iron John, polarized opposites that lead with equal certainty to a dead end in the search for mutual understanding between men and women. At the same time, however, there has been a loosening of the language code formerly thought necessary to preserve the two sexes as irreconcilable “gendered identities.” Suddenly you can use the forbidden words again, the everyday casual talk by which men and women relate to each other, often in the guise of jokes, as they search for a common ground for understanding one another’s differences. Guys and chicks. Guy talk. Chick flick. Be a man. Be a guy. He acted like a man. She was a great broad. The expanding guy-talk industry celebrates all the cherished old male props—sports cars, golf clubs, humidors. The Rat Pack style of Frank, Dino, and Sammy is suddenly glamorous again. When Bill Maher greeted his female guests on Politically Incorrect with a grinning “Hey Gorgeous!” he showed how acute his Zeitgeist antennas were. No one was offended. His women guests were powerful, beautiful, and successful people. They already knew they were gorgeous. And maybe without his knowing it, his ability to speak this way signaled the demise of his own show’s theme. Maybe the reign of political correctness was over.
But—not so fast! As a conservative, I do have a self-appointed duty to act as the Grinch who stole Christmas on a variety of fronts. So I’m compelled to look for the cloud that envelops the silver lining. Some of my journalistic colleagues have already rushed into print to declare that manliness is back, that everything’s fine now, that radical feminism is as dead as a dodo, and so on. But a cultural crisis that took a generation to emerge isn’t going to vanish in a week or a year or even a decade. Celebrating the fact that we can use certain politically incorrect words again in casual conversation or in the entertainment world suggests that we are evading the deeper cultural divide by keeping things on the level of fashion. The self-conscious lingo of chicks and broads and guys and man talk remains no more than fashionably and superficially contrarian, and often a little infantile. It’s a bit of daring that doesn’t cost anyone very much, and it can lull us into thinking that the deeper sources of alienation and frustration felt by boys and men have vanished overnight.
In some ways, the frankness that we now flatter ourselves we can enjoy in discussing the sexes has led to even worse levels of vulgarity and debasement in popular culture. Take the slew of television shows with the “survivor” theme, which basically select people from the suburbs and treat them like lab rats. The creepy monitors who hover nearby encourage these losers in an unrestrained flow of verbal garbage, all drawn from the psychobabble of talk-television uplift. There’s lots of emoting about guys and chicks and how they differ. There are altogether too many bared midriffs and too much bad hair, on the contestants’ unfortunate attempt to imitate their favorite celebrities from Dawson’s Creek or Friends on a Kmart budget. It’s a real-time version of Jerry Springer, a wholesale attempt to give everyone his or her long-promised fifteen minutes of fame. Andy Warhol, our Raphael of the vapid, meant his remark ironically. The entertainment industry is methodically carrying it out with the kind of Protestant rigor formally reserved for building libraries and orphanages.
So we need to ask ourselves: How much has the underlying moral and spiritual crisis of manliness genuinely subsided? I believe that, unfortunately, all its major features are still firmly in place. To take the most obvious example, the devastating effects of the divorce culture and what David Blankenhorn calls “fatherless America” on boys and young men, who often carry their sense of betrayal, pain, and distrust from their parents’ breakup far into their adult lives, where they find their own attempts to build solid marriages undermined by a nagging fear that they will be betrayed again.
But the full dimensions of this moral crisis extend far beyond family life. Throughout the lifetime of my generation of Baby Boomers, America has displayed a peculiarly divided state of mind. On the one hand, we’ve witnessed extraordinary exertions of valor and heroism again and again, from the unsuccessful but justified attempt to save Vietnam from communist tyranny to winning the Cold War to the current war on terrorism. If you look along this road from past to future, the way ahead seems to be ever brighter. On the other hand, during the period of this same steady progress against tyranny abroad, America became one of the most violent societies in the world—and one in which, with depressing regularity, from Timothy McVeigh to John Muhammad, men periodically became terrorists against their own fellow citizens.
The huge prison population of young males remains a daily source of shame in the wealthiest and freest country on earth. Whole generations of boys and youths whose aggressiveness requires a better outlet than robbery, rape, and murder are being spiritually destroyed. A recent study claims that the drop in the homicide rate thought to have taken place in the past decade is an illusion. The murder rate would be five times higher, these researchers claim, if not for medical advances during the same period that saved many crime victims who otherwise would have died. But, as the study goes on to point out, these nearly murdered victims face decades of physical and emotional trauma, and staggering costs for physical and psychological therapy that may last for the rest of their lives. There is something chilling about a society that can use medical technology unprecedented in human history and unmatched anywhere else in the world to “improve” violent crime by converting murders into maimings and lifelong trauma. And it’s young men who carry out the vast majority of those crimes.
What is the connection between these two Americas? Can we find a way of connecting that bright road of progress and the advancement of the cause of liberty at home and around the world with that darker, sadder road that leads to devastation and despair, the misbegotten warfare of the sniper’s bullet? As I’ve argued throughout this book, I believe it is the loss of an adequate moral, spiritual, and psychological vocabulary about manliness that keeps those two roads from coming together in a constructive and optimistic harmony. Men still have noble impulses. Faced with extraordinary challenges, they act as they should. America still has many strong traditions of religious faith, civic-spiritedness, military honor, charity, and community service. They are not always visible at the national level, but they feed the wellsprings of character. Everywhere you go in the United States—in neighborhoods, places of worship, schools, and service clubs—you see these forces at work.
But at the national level of the educational elites and the media, we witness a continuing culture of narcissism and the erosion of civic life and public dialogue. Politics has degenerated into an ever more insufferable caricature of battling viewpoints. Many of our educational elites still deride the need for children to learn history as a moral narrative in which good struggles to triumph over evil. The traditional role of liberal education as a character-forming experience is still, all too often, derided or treated with active hostility as an ideological camouflage for the domination of white males.
As an educator, I have a sense of what’s superficial in the behavior of young people and what isn’t. I don’t much care how my students dress, but I do care what they think. I prefer a kid with a ring through his nose and ripped jeans who loves Plato to a well-dressed aspiring yuppie who disdains any form of learning not related to a future career and moneymaking. In the long run there should be no contradiction between the two—but a young person in college needs time to be excited more by ideas than by career goals. The same subtlety that parents and educators learn through their experiences in dealing with the young needs to be brought to wider public reflection on where America should be headed. Sometimes values are absolute; sometimes they are relative. Having principles and convictions doesn’t mean embracing some ham-fisted set of prejudices, and bashing those who disagree. The art of thinking is precisely about knowing when the truth is absolute and when it is not. These nuances are lost in a lot of our public chatter, especially in the news and opinion media, where talented journalists disgrace themselves and their profession by screaming two-minute sound bites and boilerplate talking points at each other while a crowd of kids looks on cheering like they were at a wrestling match.
What is most lacking in manliness today is this mature middle ground, where you can take your time to arrive at a view, and make an argument tinged with respect, not rancor, and have it treated with similar respect in turn, not just batted aside because it doesn’t fit into the existing battle lines between Left and Right. But today moderation is often mistaken for weakness. We admire “attitude,” the in-your-face style of the raptor-executive, the pop-star Nero, the talk-show bully. The five virtues examined in this book represent one attempt to find an antidote to this culture of jaded and cynical showboating. As in the image of the chariot of the soul with which we began, the proper ordering of these five virtues can lead a man to an integrated character—thoughtful, reflective, forceful when he needs to be, unafraid to state a coherent, well-considered view, and expecting a vigorous but civil debate.
This is what I mean by a moral vocabulary. I’m not just stressing the need for exact descriptions or eloquence in public speaking. Speech itself is a deed. When a man speaks reasonably and maturely, it’s a matter of more than just correct vocabulary and sentence structure. To speak maturely engages a man’s entire moral and psychological energies, drawing together his mind and his soul, and crystallizing them in words. And those words move others, not only on the level of rational persuasion but deep in our guts. Words can move us to tears, to laughter, and to zeal on behalf of a just cause. That’s the vocabulary we need to recover.
PO-MO MAN
We hear a lot these days about “postmodernism.” A term once known only to a minority of academics, in the last decade or so it has entered the popular lingo, showing up in Vanity Fair, strewn around to discuss “po-mo” television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Simpsons. Conservative commentators now often use the term to sum up the forces of moral relativism in American culture, in the same way they use the terms liberal or leftist. Even the tendency—exemplified by Noam Chomsky or The Nation—to blame America for bringing 9/11 on itself is often dismissed as the fruit of “postmodernist” thinking.
This is not the place for a full-blown philosophical discussion of postmodernism. But its main features are directly relevant to these reflections on the continuing crisis of manliness. In the vulgar and simplified form in which it has spread throughout American universities, postmodernism has come to stand for the argument that the search for truth is really no more than a struggle for power based on gender and race. Indeed, the argument goes, there’s no such thing as “truth” at all—which is why the word itself is usually set off in sneer quotes. If one were to argue, for instance, that the principles of American liberal democracy possessed universal validity as an ideal toward which all free peoples can strive, that would be dismissed as either hopelessly naïve or a deliberate attempt to dress up corporate greed and American materialism in the garb of a universal truth. The ideal of American democracy is seen as nothing more than candy coating for the power complex of interlocking corporate and political elites, the affluent white majority, and the dominant male gender.
In reaction to this concentration of power, the postmodernists teach, a slew of “new social movements” have grown up, an emerging “global civil society” of the dispossessed and marginalized—women, minorities, the poor, environmentalists, professors, and graduate students. And yet, of course, they too are motivated by that same pursuit of power. The central absurdity of postmodernism is that it contends that the existing power structure is unjust and oppressive—even as it pushes its own, alternative power structure. But, in encouraging the new social movements, postmodernists are not claiming that they would replace unjust power with a superior ideal, or with authority exercised justly and reasonably. Postmodernists are uncomfortable with such claims, for they profess not to believe in universally or eternally valid standards for justice, truth, and reason. So postmodernists argue instead that the coming victory of the oppressed will usher in a global nirvana, in which every source of human suffering, alienation, and unhappiness will vanish forever—a world without property or class distinctions, laws, political authority, sexual restraints, or intrinsic natural distinctions between men and women.
The incoherence of postmodernism’s core claims is precisely what gives it a vague and amorphous appeal to young people in the universities, and it is directly connected to the crisis of manliness and the decline of mature argument. You begin by seeing the present predominance of American democracy as unremittingly oppressive, the source of all evil, poverty, violence, and emotional dissatisfaction everywhere on earth, and the main impediment to happiness for everyone. When the Empire’s power is finally shattered, we will live in a world without competition, merit, success, honor, reverence, or achievement—all mere tools for repressing “the new International” (to quote the leading postmodernist Jacques Derrida) of the marginalized. At bottom, it does no more than offer the perennial delusions of Marxism in a hipper, more up-to-date garb. The failure of life to be perfect in every way is America’s fault. If American power were shattered, everyone in the world would be happy.
The incoherence of postmodernism is feeding the rapid decline of intelligent civic discourse in the universities, and this decline has a direct effect on the infantilization of young men. This incoherence lies at the core of radical feminism, which maintains that men are the oppressors, that they are “systemically” or collectively incapable of being just to women, but then goes on to demand that they be just. The same line of argument lies behind many criticisms of American foreign policy. On the one hand, it is maintained that America is the unmitigated and relentless oppressor of non-Western peoples, incapable of treating them justly, and incapable of understanding their unique worldview—because, remember, there are no such things as universally valid truth or justice, these being mere camouflage for imperialism. The critics then go on to demand that America nevertheless be just toward them and understand them, while simultaneously denying that this appeal to conscience, empathy, or reasoned insight about non-Western cultures is possible. As manifested both in radical feminism and in the critique of American foreign policy, postmodernism condemns its exponents to perpetual self-undermining immaturity. By maintaining that all claims about truth and justice are reducible to power, you do nothing more than convert the alleged oppressor into a foe who can never be won over, a foe who is impervious to an appeal to conscience and incapable of self-reform. In this way, the male gender and the American Empire become entirely and irrevocably what the postmodernist claims to want to reform.
MAKING OURSELVES MORE STUPID
What are the wider effects on manhood of this dismal view of life as a struggle for power? The postmodernist believes we must see the current reality in this harsh light, in order to spark a transition to the new global millennium of happiness for all. But since there is no prospect of such a utopia ever emerging, the reduction of all thought and idealism to a crude struggle for power has the predictable and deplorable consequence of feeding the worst currents in American culture, and provides an excuse for the most callow, smarmy, and belligerent traits of young men. Since there is no truth, only power, all that counts is what I want. There is no point in trying to make a reasoned argument to persuade someone because no one is capable of agreeing or disagreeing on rational grounds. People may claim to believe in the truth or in an ideal, but only a fool doesn’t realize that they’re just out for themselves.
Although postmodernism begins by exposing the power struggles of the present in the vain and silly hope that the violence and injustice of power seeking will disappear forever, it has the practical effect of bringing maturity into disrepute. Moderation is widely derided by young people as a laughably old-fashioned notion, maintained either insincerely to camouflage selfishness or because a person who appeals to fairness and decency must be weak, lame, uncool—a loser. Like the philosophy of the ancient Greek Sophists, postmodernism—however benign its intentions when confined to literary interpretation—has a coarsening effect on the wider culture. There’s no need to make arguments, they hold, because there’s no such thing as “truth.” Moderation is sneered at as weakness or as a self-serving pose. This disdain for the possibility of the truth is exacerbated by the lack of a historical narrative in modern schooling, and derision for any kind of traditional moral restraint or reverence for the past. What’s the point in honoring traditional virtues of gratitude and obligation, since all people are out for themselves?
In the universities, as the study of history declines, the curriculum is filled with each victim group’s unique “story.” Oddly enough, the reduction of higher learning to a series of self-absorbed victim groups goes together in perfect harmony with an increased reliance on quantitative methods. It’s easier to quantify relations across or beneath national boundaries because you begin by setting aside the distinct histories of a peoples or nation-states, and the extent to which they are not compatible because of fundamental differences in religious faith, culture, political institutions, and ideals. Environmentalist groups in Buenos Aires, London, and Tokyo can sound superficially similar even though their national cultures may differ profoundly, and because of this superficial resemblance, their relationships can be mapped mathematically. Sometimes these social movements consist of no more than a thin upper crust of the Western-educated with a few fax machines and a modem. But pretending that they have more in common than they really do makes it easy to believe that a new “global civil society” is emerging.
Everywhere in the social sciences, formal modeling and other high-level quantitative skills are replacing the old-fashioned study of deep and complex differences between national cultures. Skills of advanced calculus comparable to those used in the hard sciences are deployed in the social sciences to “prove” such earth-shattering insights as: “Everyone tends to acts out of self-interest.” The older generation of giants in comparative politics and international affairs at Harvard, Yale, and other illustrious schools—people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Pipes, Adam Ulam, Stanley Hoffman, and Harvey Mansfield—are not being replaced with younger people who share their historical, cultural, and linguistic abilities. One suspects that their deep knowledge of history, comparative religion, the history of ideas and of other languages makes the new number crunchers feel ashamed. In the nation’s most prestigious universities, the study of political culture is being eaten away by an ever more barren behaviorism.
A friend of mine—a very canny psychologist and a mother very sensitive to how her boys differ from girls—recently observed that the criterion for professionalism now seems to be hatred of your own tradition: lawyers who hate the law and yearn to be social activists, academics who despise the classics, librarians who deride books as elitist. The social sciences increasingly amount to a marriage between formal modeling and victimology, the legitimization of self-willed ignorance in what are supposed to be America’s finest schools. One thinks of Sonny Corleone’s hilarious line when he slaps Michael upside the head at the end of The Godfather: Part II: “What? Didja go to college to get more stupid?” As the great American philosopher Leo Strauss once wrote, something is very wrong with the social sciences when they make us more stupid than we were in the first place.
THE VIEW FROM THE STREET
A sober and detailed knowledge of history, culture, religious faith, political institutions, and foreign languages—the only route for young men to gradually arrive at mature insights about the issues of the day—has over the last three decades increasingly been replaced by vacuous moralizing. Since students encounter an increasingly tedious emphasis on quantitative skills and methodology in the classroom, they look for some existential excitement in the tribal protests on the street. Predictably, the vast majority of those taunting the police or tearing down a fence at antiglobalization protests are young men searching for excitement and glory, Achilles in ripped jeans and ear studs butting heads with the Agamemnons of the G-8 or the International Monetary Fund.
The litany of moral abstractions can be instantly memorized—a world without violence or greed, equality for all, a world where we all live as one. These bromides substitute for a lack of substantive historical knowledge, so that a nineteen-year-old undergraduate from Oak Park or Scarsdale who knows little of the world, or even his own country, feels perfectly confident in asserting his opinions against prize-winning economists or presidents of other nations, and regards them as possessing every bit as much weight as those of lifelong scholars on the topic in question. He knows what’s best for the people of Mexico because of “globalization”—a buzzword that usually means nothing more complicated than “selfishness.” Behind many of the protests is a sophomoric maundering of the most doe-eyed, fatuous variety: Why must people hurt each other? Why can’t we all live in peace?
The answers to these questions can be found in the dusty recesses of unused library collections all over the United States. Because of our disdain for the lessons of the past, we are doomed to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Telling many undergraduates today about Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot might as well be telling them about Genghis Khan. The story of these tyrannies, their dreadful rise and their justly accomplished destruction, has disappeared from classrooms, lest it make students too “judgmental” and not “sensitive” enough to people who have no views. Taking pride in America’s defeat of Soviet tyranny might, heaven forbid, stimulate “jingoism.”
As a consequence, many of the kids protesting globalization actually believe that no one before them has ever realized that people are greedy, and that capitalism can be rapacious, or imagined a world in which mankind was united and did not compete for possessions or status. Moreover, they know disturbingly little about the fact that the worst tyrannies of history—the totalitarian regimes of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks—were founded precisely on the desire for world peace, unity, human harmony, an end to capitalistic greed, and submerging one’s individual will in the collective will of the people.
Utopias based on the accomplishment of world peace, brotherhood, equality, and love always end in tyranny. They must, because to set about actually implementing such ideals in the here and now inevitably requires crushing human nature and ridding it of its selfish impulses—by terror, by indoctrination, and by extermination. That is the irrefutable lesson of history, from the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94 to the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot. If the antiglobalizers’ dreams of a “global civil society” ever had a chance of coming into existence, it could be achieved only by a Stalin to end all Stalins, for it would require the obliteration of everything that distinguishes human beings from one another—talent, faith, property, success, family, custom, and national loyalties—in an ongoing planetary tyranny. As Edmund Burke remarked of the French revolutionaries, at the end of every shining vista stands a gallows. It’s not likely to happen. But because the history of previous projects for a utopian society and their disastrous consequences isn’t being taught, young men today will have a very rough and painful passage ahead of them as life teaches them the contradictions between such vain and baseless longings and the complexities of the human soul—a lesson that could be softened if they were reading Gibbon, Macaulay, and Emerson, or (to come closer to our own times) Churchill, Acheson, and Kissinger, right now.
HONORABLE MOTIVES?
Like most observers, I have mixed feelings about globalization and those who protest it. Many of my brightest students do, and it’s commendable in a young man to want to have a say about important issues. It’s also ambitious. Young men still crave public distinction, as they always have. In any class of students, the women are likely to do at least as well as the men. But by and large, the women are content to work hard to reap the reward of a good grade. This is almost never enough for the young men. They want to compete with the other youths for the professor’s attention. They want to be leaders. They want their own take on things to be recognized and honored. These are perfectly natural and ordinary longings, and a skilled teacher knows how to use them to motivate a young man to learn. But in the current culture, this honorable ambition for distinction has to be hidden under sententious moralizing, and the moralizing in turn enables the student to hide from his own lack of substantive knowledge. At its worst, this oblivion to his own ignorance makes a young man incapable of being shamed. No one’s opinion counts more than his, and no one can teach him anything.
That’s why, although there are genuine idealists who protest globalization, all too often such protests are an excuse for nihilism. There are too many Tyler Durdens from Fight Club, pretending to care about the oppressed but in truth just thrilled at an excuse to do drugs and smash things. Privileged kids have a blast trashing a fast-food outlet, little realizing that these hardscrabble businesses are often the only way people from backgrounds less privileged than their own can make their way in the world through hard work and talent. The American dream often begins in a Starbucks or a clothing outlet. After the fun is over, the protest kids go home and the maid washes their jeans and their “Fuck War” T-shirts.
I don’t deny that one encounters genuine idealism among the protesters. Sometimes what’s really bothering them is their instinct that the distinctive culture and character of their own country is being eroded by international economic trends. Although it seems more permissible to protest on behalf of the alleged victims in non-Western countries, at least some of the protesters in the West are experiencing the stirring of patriotism. And they’re right to feel that way. The results of globalization, like every important policy alternative, are mixed. It does undermine the nation-state, and if conservatives were more consistent-minded, they would be forced to connect their defense of patriotism to the recognition that capitalism usually prefers profit to national sovereignty. The same global dynamic that breaks down barriers between nations to promote free trade and economic efficiency also serves those who want to infringe American national sovereignty in the name of international tribunals whose members include professional minions of the world’s worst despotisms. You can’t have it both ways. If you want the one-worldism of the multinational corporations, you’re going to have a hard time resisting the one-worldism of the UN and the World Court. With a few exceptions, such as Roger Scruton, conservatives have not even begun to think through this problem, so busy are they bashing liberals and one another.
By the same token, young people who live off their parents’ investments are not in much of a position to decry “corporate greed” or ruin the livelihood of poor immigrants working at McDonald’s. Again, the problem in these debates is our lack of an adequate moral vocabulary and a mature middle ground. Men seek honor through public debate. It’s better to recognize it and even encourage it, because if someone admits he seeks legitimate honor, he can be shamed by his lack of knowledge or his impetuosity. By contrast, the tendency to vacuous moralizing about a World Without Violence is an excuse for mental laziness.
“NOTHING TO KILL OR DIE FOR”
One of the great cultural tragedies only now dawning on us is the stigmatization of patriotism by the forces of globalization on both the Left and the Right. Economic globalization on the Right and global issues like environmentalism on the Left corrode the nation-state as the forum for a manly expression of civic pride, national honor, and reasoned debate. That process of corrosion goes hand in hand with the caricature of all forms of national honor as male “hegemony.” The decline of narrative history and the weakening of the nation-state contribute to the intellectual emasculation of young males, prolonging their adolescence into their late twenties or even thirties.
When “all you need is love”—the right gut feeling for a moral abstraction—there’s no need to learn how to stand up for yourself and make a coherent, strong, and civil argument. Young men are too often trapped in a state of perpetual boyhood, mushy sentimentality about “the planet” alternating with sulkiness and tantrums. Today, vast participatory rites of shared feeling and spontaneous sentiments are believed to be more authentic than old-fashioned policy debates or received wisdom. A global satellite feed showing celebrities singing “We Are the World” is more real to a young person, more in tune with the quicksilver impulses of youth itself, than a statesman’s lengthy memoirs.
Celebrities are the role models for this amorphous and infantile character. The Proletariat of Marxist theory has given way to the Celebritariat of the stylishly disaffected, hip, and hedonistic. Rock musicians promoting “peace” or revolutionary causes of whose history they know little (like the Clash’s Sandinista! album or Billy Bragg singing a rock version of the “Internationale”) illustrate this mixture of adolescent posturing and vapid moralizing. “Child-centered learning,” a favorite doctrine among curriculum planners for schools, undermines manly self-confidence by removing moral and historical reflections from education and replacing them with spontaneous emotional reactions to snippets from the newspaper and to the kitsch and consumerism of the surrounding entertainment culture. When schools fail to provide a moral and historical ballast for the male psyche, boys become slaves to pop culture, which mirrors back to them all of their own most childish urges. My male students still instinctively want to shine and be the center of attention. But too often they crumple easily in debate, because they have never learned to make an argument based on a strong, nonrancorous, and principled difference of opinion. When pressed to justify a point, their eyes often mist up, and they lapse into angry expletives.
The decline in manly debate is connected to the rise of the Celebritariat as America’s new cultural ruling class, an aristocracy of alienation and expensive style that, for many boys and young men, provides role models for the way they would like to be. Many of the baleful trends I’ve explored here are summed up in John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” after thirty years still one of the world’s best-selling songs, and one that has more recently become a kind of secular hymn for the forces of antiglobalization.
I am rarely at a loss for words, and like most political junkies I enjoy a good rant, especially after a dose of the television and newspaper opinion makers who can be counted on to make my blood boil—and stir my appetite for more reasoned polemics. But I must confess my stupefaction at how, in the painful months after 9/11, in schools, church basements, and community centers across the land, children’s sweet voices swelled in repeated performances of John Lennon’s 1970s ballad. That decent people truly believe this song is an appropriate tribute to the victims, that it contains some profound lesson for these trying times, sums up more completely than any other single example how much we desperately need some better guides for manly reflection.
“Imagine” has become the po-mo “Internationale.” The sentiments the song arouses are genuine, but the message is their complete betrayal. Lennon was one of a handful of truly great artists of rock and roll, and a role model for male youths of my generation. His tormented voice, his command of the entire style book of pop music, and his sizzling attack on a song placed him in a class of immortals including Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. But Lennon’s essential ignorance about politics betrayed him in this song, revealing that he lacked the education, patience, or experience to season his gut instincts into a proper argument. The failure of “Imagine” is not simply that it is sophomoric; it is that its message actually amounts to a celebration of totalitarianism. Not because Lennon intended such a thing. Quite the contrary: His idealism in the song is authentic and keenly felt. Yet its words exemplify the pitfall of substituting sentimentality for knowledge—a handicap that hobbled his generation, and continues today among their children.
Lennon didn’t recognize the link between the message of “Imagine” and the principles of totalitarianism, because—like many antiglobalization protesters now—he knew little about what tyranny really is. He truly but naïvely believed that his was the first generation to realize that people should not be greedy and should give up war. You can have peace right now, he said, “if you want it.” What of the lessons of history and the past? They don’t count; we weren’t alive then. “Imagine” paints a world utopia in which people have been stripped of every source of moral and spiritual satisfaction: no religion, no patriotism, no honorable struggle, no stimulating controversy, no property, no gratitude, obligation, or reverence. It is a world where there’s “nothing to kill or die for”—two distinct pacifist images linked in what for Lennon was a single inspiring vision. But this vision is closer to what Nietzsche termed “the last man,” the herd man of consumer mass society at its most degrading, a society of listless pleasures and minds empty of thoughts either disturbing or ennobling. It’s a painful irony—the song has taken on enormous emotional meaning for a large proportion of the Western public—but at its core John Lennon’s “Imagine” is an unwitting manifesto for the kind of monolithic global culture that only a Stalinist dictatorship could support. For only an apparatus of unprecedented and methodical terror, indoctrination, and extermination could bring about a world where people were systematically stripped of every defining trait that makes life rich and worthwhile.
WHERE DID THINGS GO WRONG?
John Lennon ended up as a peace activist, but he began as a pop star. His influence as a guru for world peace flowed from his earlier, more innocent fame as a joyous rock and roller. As in many trends in the crisis of manliness, the darker and more worrisome consequences originated in the freshness and exuberance of the 1960s. When we ask ourselves how things went wrong, we’re inevitably drawn back to the sunnier beginnings of the thirty-year project to eradicate the traditional teachings about manliness.
People writing about manliness today often try to earmark exactly when the big change took place. When did manliness turn its back on tradition, whether for good or for bad? There are lots of enticing clues and defining moments from popular culture, art, and literature. Some would point to Marlon Brando’s famous scene in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire where, dressed in an undershirt, he shouts his wife’s name up the fire escape like an enraged infant bellowing for his mother. His primal and uncouth behavior is taken to signify a break with more gentlemanly standards of the past, the kind of tuxedoed smoothie with the cigarette case and the Newport accent played by Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka.
Not coincidentally, Brando’s portrayal of an unvarnished working-class slob in Streetcar was grounded in his training in the Stanislavsky Method—where high culture took low culture as its new idol. For the Method school, reliance on instinct and spontaneity were thought to be more authentic than the self-conscious perfection of craft one associates with Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud. And for that reason, in the popular culture of the times, people sensed a connection between the Method school and the emerging rock culture spearheaded by Elvis Presley, who, although a country bumpkin by contrast with the hipsters at the Actors Studio, also stood for a loosening and blurring of the traditional male character.
Elvis was an originator of what trendy cultural criticism now calls “transgression.” His music was an unearthly mix of black R & B, gut-bucket roadhouse rockabilly, and country, delivered in a ghostly vocal style straight from the swamp with a stage presence that was unabashedly androgynous—boogying hips combined with facial makeup, those weird zoot suit jackets with their plunging lines, and a high pile of swirling whiplash hair. The synthesis of New York Method acting and the new teenage culture spearheaded by Elvis was James Dean, who prefigured Elvis’s sexually ambivalent beauty—the juvenile delinquent with the soulful eyes—and blended it with the urban hipness of the Beats.
This seismic shift in the meaning of manhood reached its classic expression in the Beatles. It’s no accident that their meteoric rise in the United States took place within months of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In Britain, the band’s popularity had already been deliberately cultivated by the Labour government of Harold Wilson to give people something optimistic and fun to distract them from the dreariness of the stalled British economy, and to give them something to be proud of as Britain’s status as a world power rapidly faded away.
I believe the Beatles played a similarly important role in the United States at a time of agonizing cultural disturbance, filling a psychological and aesthetic vacuum left by the unexpected death of the brave and handsome young president. JFK had combined the pragmatism of the old politics with the vigor and freedom from convention of the rising generation. He was hardheaded, dedicated to prosecuting the Cold War, and knew all about the dirty side of American party politics, willing to do what was necessary to win. But he was also stylish and casual, optimistic and idealistic. He had a young man’s head of hair and a closetful of suits that had more in common with Savile Row and James Bond than with the baggy pants and suspenders of LBJ’s generation. In him, the torch of leadership passed to the generation who had fought in World War II. His death shattered that link, disrupted the succession of power from old to young, and in the form of his hapless successor, the mentality of the older generation returned to the White House.
Had JFK lived, the generation of the 1960s might have followed him in remaining hopeful about mainstream politics. With his death, much of that generation collectively turned its back on ordinary civic life and hurled itself into the dream of the counterculture. The Beatles’ style was in many ways a condensation and crystallization of those aspects of JFK that were most youthful and most non-conformist—the hair, the elegant suits and narrow ties, the cheeky and ironic humor. If you view one of JFK’s press conferences alongside the famous Beatles press performances a year or so later, the similarities are striking: the same playfulness and self-deprecation, the informality masking a degree of contempt for the reporters, the emotional distance concealed by an air of breezy affability. In Kennedy, if only for a brief few years, the old politics of logrolling and compromise were united with a newer, fresher style, free from the ponderous morality and grim public manner of Eisenhower and Nixon. With his death, politics returned to normal—and the idealism was shifted to pop culture.
As musicians, the Beatles brought together all the preliminary versions of the counterculture, going back to Elvis and the Beats. For, although skillfully packaged in their early years as nice boys with clean hair and suits, the Beatles were a far cry from the fantasy that their young girl fans had of them as adorable teddy bears who had pillow fights in their hotel room. The Beatles were genuine bohemians. When they first played on a regular professional basis in the red-light district of Hamburg, they quickly became a favorite of German art students. The German kids learned that John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatle who died before they hit the big time, were art students, who shared their own Dadaesque and Expressionist tastes. Indeed, for John, the Beatles as a whole were an act of Dadaesque artistic expression—a kind of ongoing experiment to find out what it would be like to be in a rock band. The famous “Beatle haircut” was a fashion the band members first adopted from their German art student fans, who had the traditional long bohemian locks, again radicalizing the androgyny and gender bending that Elvis had pioneered.
The originality of the Beatles’ early music remains shattering to this day, in its summons to a new model of young manhood. When you play one of their first albums, it roars out of the speakers sounding like nothing else that had preceded it. Their originality was the gift of their ignorance. Because the Beatles learned American rock and pop music from abroad, they had no sure sense of the actual context of those musical idioms on their American soil. To them, it was a delightful toy box full of styles. Hence, their music combines styles that no American would ever have imagined could be combined. In the course of two or three minutes in a single song from those early albums, they switch happily back and forth between rock and country, R & B and rockabilly, as well as girl groups like the Shirelles.
The androgyny of their music is striking on many levels. Like Bob Dylan with “It Ain’t Me Babe,” the Beatles reject the old greaser macho pose struck by Jerry Lee Lewis or Dion and the Belmonts, the leather-jacketed bird dog. They don’t want to be predators, any more than they want to be upstanding young men, ideal future husbands, or authority figures; they just want to be friends. The Beatles often side with the female characters in their songs, a remarkable departure for rockers in that era. One of their favorite poses is to play the part of the third party, the boy who is looking on at a relationship that is on the skids, and who gently upbraids his friend for not treating the girl more decently (as in “She Loves You” or “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl”). Much of the Beatles’ original charisma stems from the gutsiness of taking a gallant and sympathetic stance toward women that would have gotten them beaten up in many high schools of the era. They made sensitivity sexy, because they were in other respects so contemptuous of authority and so unquestionably cool in their looks, style, and powers of seduction.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
I’ve suggested that the death of JFK created a rift in the continuity of American manliness. Sometimes they are referred to as the two cultures. Although I’ve been pretty hard on the counterculture of the 1960s and its influence down to the present in this book, my comments on the early Beatles are meant to remind the reader that I don’t think its influence was all bad. The male culture of the 1950s was in many ways philistine and insensitive. The early and more innocent phase of the counterculture fostered a genuine openness to better understanding between men and women, and love based on friendship and equality.
In the years to come, though, the differences between the two cultures hardened into a much sharper conflict. Throughout this book, I’ve tried to steer a middle course between a closed-minded endorsement of one of these two cultures to the exclusion of the other and an ostrichlike wish to act as if all the hard differences have been resolved, that we’ve reached the end of history. We have to make sober judgments about what is better and what is worse for the development of a manly character, while recognizing that elements of manly virtue will be found both among the defenders of the status quo and among those who see themselves as its adversaries.
What matters most is where we go from here. I’ve suggested throughout this book that we are suffering from a temporary amnesia about the positive meaning of manliness. What seems to be far away is really only a little distance away, given the centuries of time over which the traditional teachings developed. Other writers have suggested practical solutions for some of the cultural crises I have discussed. Critics of the educational establishment are hard at work devising alternative curricular materials that try to address the decline of history as a moral narrative, and to restore some sense of the distinction between good and evil in the education of the young. Advocates of family stability are also energetically publicizing the sad story of fatherless families and their devastating effect on the social fabric, and particularly on the upbringing of boys.
My own approach has been broader and less pragmatic. I believe that the recovery of a healthy view of manliness and the manly virtues must above all else be a moral revolution, a revolution within the soul of the individual. The practical critiques of contemporary education, the statistical evidence of the family’s decline—these exist in abundance. Moreover, the accumulated treasures of three thousand years of experience and reflection on manliness are still with us, right at our fingertips, old friends we have temporarily neglected. The five virtues of love, courage, pride, family, and country are still all around us. We grope inwardly for some kind of compass for putting them into practice, and the people who love us need us to strive for them. The five virtues are not only in books, although that is the first and best place to look for a coherent portrait of them. They are woven into the fabric of our characters, and our everyday dilemmas of family life, love, faith, and citizenship constantly stimulate those virtues in our association with others. All we need to do is—Remember!
A closing thought: I have described some disturbing trends in contemporary manhood. Some readers might wonder whether I find any cause for optimism at all. That’s why I want to stress that I am very optimistic about the future of manhood in America. Indeed, the very reason for the urgency I have brought to my discussion of the negative trends is that I am so firmly convinced that it can all get better.
Why do I say this? Because, in my twenty years as an educator, I have never been so optimistic about my students as I am today. To the extent that the future is in the hands of these young people, I believe we have little to fear and everything to hope for. I know I have gone on at length about the defects in their education—their lack of historical depth, their addiction to the entertainment fashions of the present, their rush to judgment over issues that require time and maturity. But they are not to blame for those faults. We who are responsible for educating them bear the blame and the responsibility for making things better.
If I were not a university teacher, and read the things about the university that I and others who share my gloomy view of the current state of higher learning have written, I’d be tempted to give up on universities altogether. And that may happen. It’s conceivable that universities as we know them today are doomed. If they continue distancing themselves from the larger society they inhabit and its full range of views, if they continue to decline into a Jurassic Park of politically correct dinosaurs, they may slide into oblivion. One of the really striking trends of the last decade or so is the emergence of the public intellectual—people like Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Christopher Lasch who decided they wanted to break free from the confines of academia and reach a much wider audience of the educated reading public. These readers have no interest in the self-referential jargon and tiresome turf battles of professional academia; they yearn for professors to act like real professors and talk about the great affairs of the human mind and heart, like the teachers who inspired them when they were younger.
Academics who broke the mold were joined by others who had always operated outside the academy, independent scholars and historians who preferred the larger audience of the liberally educated to the narrow factionalism of the academy. During the same period, people all over America fell in love with the Great Books, as reading groups proliferated in living rooms and church basements. The brightest future for higher learning in America may well lie outside the university among these readers and writers. The true spirit of the university may actually be reborn among them. After all, universities that retain the most illustrious names today often began as modest groups of pious farmers and merchants reading books together. We may be witnessing a new beginning for the purity of that spiritual enterprise.
But that’s a long way off, if it happens at all. For now and the foreseeable future, the vast majority of gifted and spirited young people will go to the established colleges and universities. Only there do we find any realistic hope of restoring the positive tradition of manliness as a source of moral and spiritual energy for men and women to draw upon as they face the dilemmas of the new century.
And that’s why I am optimistic. I’ve given up on a lot of my colleagues. The reason we don’t hear as much about political correctness in universities as we did a few years back is not because it’s in decline but because, on the contrary, in contrast with that last rear-guard action to forestall it in the 1990s, its victory is even closer to being total. But the great thing is the students, and as long as even a small handful of people who respect liberal education make it into academia, great things can still be done. I’ve already discussed the students’ failings. But alongside these failings, they also combine all of the best qualities of the two Americas and the two cultures—the energy, the passion, the flexibility, and the desire for something new and better. And, best of all, more and more of these students crave the traditional teachings. When they arrive at university, they have already spent years being spoon-fed and encouraged to form their own reactions to little snippets of information whose wider context they know nothing about. They’ve been told always to be original, always to be a nonconformist, while being given no rich intellectual and spiritual content to be original about or to resist.
Hence, when they arrive as freshmen, they are generally sick and tired of the pussyfooting around. They want to be told the truth, the way it is. They want something solid in exchange for their often exorbitant tuition fees. They don’t want a pal who will “rap” with them about their “issues” and “concerns,” a “guide from the side” (as the educational psychologists’ lingo has it) instead of “a sage on the stage.” They want that sage. They want to know about the whole wonderful, mysterious, frightening, and inspiring world of the past. They want to know about greatness because they aspire to be great, and so need a benchmark against which to measure their striving.
If anything, as an old friend of mine and a superb teacher recently remarked, the danger with these students is not that they will resist authority but that they will drink it in uncritically. They are so eager to stop wasting time and learn how things are that they may veer to the opposite extreme of too much reverence for a teacher. So a good teacher has to maintain a delicate balance between giving his students a satisfying meal of this wonderful new diet and making them get sick.
But the qualities the students bring to this new experience are immensely promising. They have the same heartfelt yearnings for love, honor, and spiritual fulfillment as previous generations. Among the best of them, these yearnings may be keener and deeper precisely because they have been denied any constructive outlets in their education so far. They are mercifully free from the rigid ideological divisions so often characteristic of my generation. They realize instinctively what Emerson wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
They grasp intuitively that everything truly interesting in life—love, faith, learning, and honor—is shot through with paradox. It doesn’t bother them to be conservative on one issue and liberal on another. They can be cultural conservatives and political leftists, or the reverse. They can be tolerant of sexual minorities while believing firmly in the family. When the Great Books are set before them, they are charmed and thrilled, and gobble them up with an astonishing vigor. Like Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man, they finally have a challenge worthy of their talents.
As with every generation, their virtues are the flip side of their faults. The easy disdain for tradition, the impatience with reasoned argument, the impetuosity that have all been flattered and exacerbated by their education can, properly cultivated, bring forth already germinating qualities of open-mindedness, intellectual ferment, and boldness of thought. I see a lot of the nihilistic side they conceal from their parents. Yes, a lot of them do recreational drugs. They have too much casual sex. They sometimes look like they slept on a park bench. Unfortunately for simpleminded moralists, exactly these same kids can be A+ students while holding down a bartending job, starting a small on-line business, and playing in a band; they are capable of writing with astonishing brilliance, and they are strong-minded and original in their judgments.
And, most important of all, no matter how much casual sex they have, few lack the longing for a meaningful and lasting love. They don’t always know where to look for the model. More often than not, they are distant from one or both of their parents, who are frequently divorced or separated. This gives many of the young men, in particular, a wounded air and an aura of incompleteness. They seem young for their age, despite all their superficial sophistication about sex and drugs, because they are yearning for the steadying influence of a father. If they’re lucky, they will find it. Sometimes, to their surprise, they reunite with their own fathers, men who have finally overcome the bitterness of a broken marriage and realized that their sons are growing further from them every day. Some will find the right influence in surrogate fathers—teachers, grandparents, family friends. Like Telemachus, they may have to raise themselves by trial and error, but their instinct is sound and sure. They will make it. They will become men.
As dark as some of the present trends in American manhood may seem, then, I am convinced that we are poised at the brink of a tremendous Renaissance. History smiles on it. All the knowledge is at our fingertips. The world requires nothing less of us. Manhood is coming back.