Introduction
On Fatherhood, Manliness, and Failure
DIGNITY IS a delicate fortification.
I was once reasonably dignified. I dressed like a gentleman and luxuriated in the cultural heritage of Western civilization. My three places of residence—my home, my office, and my mind—were free of clutter and arranged in such a way as to allow me to both suck the marrow from my days and nibble at the edges of intellectual life. Then I became a father.
One afternoon I was changing my infant son’s diaper when he began micturating. Not in a feeble stream, but in a great, turbo-charged geyser, like one of the fountains in front of the Bellagio. As was his wont. So I reached over, cupped my hand above his manhood, and waited in quiet satisfaction as he peed on me. I was pleased—genuinely, the way I once might have been after finishing, say, Middlemarch—that my reflexes had prevented him from spraying the wall and nearby bookshelf. The dismantling of my dignity took three weeks, give or take. I don’t keep strict count of these things. Not anymore.
It was around this moment when I began to realize that the primary effect of children is that they take things from you. It begins with sleep, time, and dignity and then expands over the years to include sanity, serenity, and a great deal of money. This is an observation, not a complaint. It’s just what they do. In that way, children are like the aging process itself: an exercise in letting go of the ancillary parts of your existence until you are stripped bare, and what remains is your most elemental core. Your soul. Jews celebrate this in the Suffering Servant songs in Isaiah. Christians refer to it as the Way of the Cross. A consultant from McKinsey would call it addition by subtraction.
I’m not going to lie to you. In fatherhood there is much—so much—to be lost. But there is much to be gained, too.
Which is, more or less, what this book is about. The Dadly Virtues is something of a Swiss Army knife: part instructional guide, part meditation, part war journal. It is, frankly, the book I wish I’d had back when my first child, Cody, was born. It begins with P. J. O’Rourke talking about turkey basters. It ends with Joseph Epstein ruminating on grandfatherhood. And in between, it encapsulates every major moment along the way, from helping with homework, to first dates, to the awful day when your child moves back home after you’ve spent a quarter million dollars on college. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to be a dad all over again.
But before we get to the good stuff, I’d like to spend a moment talking about a subject that often seems diametrically opposed to the indignities of fatherhood: manliness. (You can skip ahead if you like; P. J. is just a few pages away, and there won’t be a test.)
There is a school of thought that views the idea of manliness—and even men themselves—as obsolete, or unnecessary, or perhaps even harmful. You can see it in contemporary books, such as Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men (which is more celebration than lamentation), but it stretches back a ways. At the height of the suffrage movement, for instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a novel called Herland in which three male explorers stumble upon a lost society comprised entirely of women. It’s paradise. Until the men muck everything up. Obviously.
For thousands of years masculinity and femininity were the (literal) yin and yang of the world—the sensibilities that created harmony at every level, from the societal to the personal. As such, the modern push to downgrade one-half of the human condition has created some confusion. On the one hand, it’s now socially acceptable for men in their early twenties to wear footy pajamas. Which suggests surrender. On the other hand, there has emerged a self-conscious “men’s movement.” What began with drumming and sweat lodges has since expanded to include Brooklyn hipsters paying for facial-hair transplants. It often manifests in a talk-radio-friendly form, such as Dr. Helen Smith’s book Men on Strike; or the collection of websites known as the “manosphere.” The men’s movement is fighting what it sees as a feminizing culture, with men asserting themselves as manly men. It frequently involves complaining about child custody laws and bad divorce settlements. Not that I’m judging.
Any way you slice it, manliness is in a patch of trouble—we’ll talk about that in a moment. Yet despite everything, manliness remains an indispensible, vibrant quality that shapes the world in ways large and small. Consider two men: Dave Karnes and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
You probably know about Solzhenitsyn, a dissident and writer who was one of the five or six most consequential figures of the last century. But perhaps you do not know the details. He was born in Russia in 1918, a bad time in a hard place. In 1945 he was arrested, tortured, and sent to a Gulag for criticizing the Soviet regime in a private letter. During his internment he began what would become his life’s work—a series of novels and poems dissecting communism and erecting a moral framework for opposing it. He wrote in secret, while doing hard labor, under the threat of further torture. And, by the way, while battling the early stages of cancer. During one stretch he composed an epic poem, The Trail—it’s more than seven thousand lines long—entirely in his head because he had neither pen nor paper.
When Solzhenitsyn was released, he continued writing. As his work began to leak out in samizdat form, it exposed the Soviet Gulag to the world. He was eventually labeled a “nonperson.” In 1971 the KGB tried to poison him. He survived, so a few years later they exiled him. The communists were right to be afraid of Solzhenitsyn, because he wasn’t just trying to pull the veil off of the Iron Curtain. He was fighting for the soul of his people by articulating a vision of what it meant to be Russian. That’s manliness.
Dave Karnes showed his steel on a smaller scale. A retired Marine, he was working as an accountant in Connecticut on September 11, 2001. When he heard the news, he left his office and went to a barbershop, where he got his hair buzzed high and tight. Then he went home and put on an old uniform. Then he went to church, where he asked his pastor to pray for him. And then, with his errands complete, he drove forty-one miles south to Manhattan, where he passed himself off as an “official” rescuer and set to work combing the ruins looking for survivors. In this smoldering graveyard Karnes met Chuck Sereika, another man who had come to help out on his own.
Karnes and Sereika spent hours picking their way through the twisted steel and shifting rubble, calling out, over and over, “United States Marines … If you can hear us, yell or tap.” They were alone, because the official rescue teams had been called off the pile. The conditions were deemed too dangerous. Around 7:00 p.m., Karnes and Sereika heard voices. It took them three hours, but eventually they dug out the last two survivors of the attack, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, who had been trapped twenty feet underground.
“Manliness brings change or restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks,” explains the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield. “Manliness is the next-to-last resort, before resignation and prayer.” Which is a perfect description of what Solzhenitsyn and Karnes did, each in his own way.
The problem is that manliness has a dark side. “Manliness can also be vainly boastful,” Mansfield cautions, “prone to meaningless scuffling and unfriendly.” It can drive quarrels and conflicts for small reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. Thugs and bullies are manly. I would even go so far as to say that Josef Stalin and Mohammad Atta, who forced Solzhenitsyn and Karnes into action, were acting from manliness. So manliness can be a source of troubles, and a cure for them, too. Mansfield is probably the greatest exponent of manliness since Plato, and even he admits that, on the whole, manliness “seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad.” For every Wyatt Earp, there is a Johnny Ringo; for every Fitzwilliam Darcy, a George Wickham.
The question we should ask ourselves, then, is whether there is anything that unifies the good parts of manliness. And indeed there is. If you drill all the way down to the nuclear core of manliness, Professor Mansfield says, what you find is a familiar impulse: chivalry.
The chivalric nature of manliness reasserts itself through history, from the knight, to the samurai, to the soldier. Why? Because, as Mansfield explains, “Masculinity must prove itself and do so before an audience. It is understood often to be an act of sacrifice against one’s interest, hence concerned with honor and shame rather than money and calculation.”
If you wanted to distill these two big, interlocking concepts, you’d say that manliness is chivalry. And that chivalry is the impulse to seek honor by protecting the weak and the innocent. What you have just described, then, is the essence of fatherhood. We might even take this a bit further: Fatherhood isn’t just manliness. It’s the purest form of the good side of manliness, the side that brings light into the world.
If you wanted to get really metaphysical about the whole thing, you’d note that this link between manliness and fatherhood goes even deeper. The Greeks originated the concept of thumos—it literally means “spiritedness.” It is thumos, Mansfield says, “that induces humans, and especially manly men, to risk their lives in order to save their lives.”
So this, finally, is fatherhood: We destroy our lives so that life will continue anew, with part of our selves baked into it. In the ordinary way, of course, through our DNA. But also in the transcendent way, through the ideas and truths and loves that we teach our children.
When I say “fatherhood,” I refer to the raising and caring for, as opposed to the siring of, children. And in this regard, men have, to a shameful degree, abdicated their posts. When we talk about the decline of manliness, it’s not just the footy pajamas that should worry us. The single worst thing men have done over the last two generations is to abandon their families: Today, 40 percent of children in America are born out of wed-lock—that is to say, without a father standing there, committed to help raise them.
That number is worse than you think. In America, only about 69 percent of kids live in a home with two parents. How do we stack up with the rest of the world? In 2014 the World Family Map project looked at the forty-nine countries that make up the vast majority of the world’s population. The percentage of children who live with two parents is 88 percent in the Netherlands, 85 percent in the Philippines and Indonesia, 83 percent in Germany, 78 percent in Canada, 76 percent in Nigeria—Nigeria—74 percent in Ethiopia, and 72 percent in Bolivia. With our 69 percent, the United States sits in thirty-second place. We beat out Uganda. Barely.
If you believe that (1) manliness can be problematic, yet is essential for a society; and (2) the positive aspects of manliness stem in large part from fatherhood, then this abandonment is, as the philosophers might note, a Very Bad Thing. It would lead to a society that is increasingly callow, nasty, and unpleasant—predisposed to juvenilia, ephemera, and self-centeredness. Does this ring any bells?
All of which is to say that if we are failing as a nation, it may well be because we’re failing at manliness. And if we are failing at manliness, it’s probably because we’re failing at fatherhood.
Now that’s a whole lot of grim failure, and I promised you this was going to be a fun, rollicking, good-time of a book. And besides which, I don’t mean that you, personally, are responsible for the decline of America. You’re a dad! You’ve done your bit.
You can sit back and smile at the memories as Matthew Continetti recounts the glorious, prelapsarian weeks of pregnancy, and those sweet, sleepy, first days of parenthood. Before the colic set in and the diapers started exploding. Before you were dispatched to ransack CVS at 3:00 a.m. for breast pads and butt paste. Before you felt the urge to punch strangers who sidle up to you at the grocery store while the baby is screaming and tell you to cherish these days “because they go by so fast.”
You can applaud Tucker Carlson’s inspired parenting as he builds his son a potato cannon—and then shoots his daughters’ Barbies out of it. You can sympathize with Toby Young as he massacres his kids’ fish mere hours after bringing them home from the pet store. And depending on where you are on the ride, you might even take some pointers from Matt Labash when it’s time to tell your kids about the birds and the bees. (Warning: The surgeon general has determined that taking sex-talk advice from Matt Labash can be hazardous to your marriage.)
And if you’ve made it through the grind of changing diapers and packing lunches and driving to practice and scaring off potential boyfriends, you can sit in the afterglow and revise history with Joseph Epstein. Remember, there’s always grand-fatherhood to look forward to. If you make it.
Like I said, this is the book I wish I’d had when Cody was born because it covers just about every lesson you’ll need to survive fatherhood, except one: failure.
I fear I have been—or will be—a terrible, colossal failure as a father. In part, this is because I’ve been obsessed with the idea of failure for a very long time. It began in kindergarten with a thin, prissy, middle-aged teacher named Mr. Bloomfield. Reared to worship at the altar of academic achievement, I worked hard at kindergarten, convinced that once you hit five, everything from there on out would go on your permanent record. When my first report card was sent home, Mr. Bloomfield awarded me “outstanding” on all counts: “sits still,” “listens,” “washes his hands after using the bathroom.” With one exception. When it came to “cutting in straight lines,” he marked me as “needs improvement.” Thus Mr. Bloomfield and I began our cold war.
I was furious. I was an ace with scissors, and having been programmed from an early age to be a doctor, I became convinced that Mr. Bloomfield was trying to keep me out of medical school. After that first report card I would march up to Mr. Bloomfield every time we used the shears, show him my work, and demand that he acknowledge the cuts were straight. His displeasure was evident even to my five-year-old self. I went to a different school the next year.
This preoccupation with failure followed me through my youth, through high school, and finally to college. It haunted me through physics (which was difficult), and organic chemistry (which was horrible), and physical chemistry (which was the worst of both worlds). It chased me as I studied for the MCATs. And then it devoured me whole as I was rejected from medical schools from sea to shining sea.
At which point I ended up writing for a living. (It turns out that there is no test to see who’s allowed to scribble down words. They’ll let anyone into this racket.) And then I left the idea of failure behind for a good long while. In fact, I didn’t really think about it again until I was staring down the barrel of a baby. Everyone always says that being a parent is the hardest job in the world. I figured that it would be hard in the way that organic chemistry was hard: that it was a task that could be mastered through a combination of intelligence and diligence. I had beaten organic chemistry, so I could crush parenthood. You can imagine my surprise.
A few months after Cody was born, I sat visiting with my wife and my friend Chris, who has been my best mate since childhood. It was late in the evening, and I was trying to convey to him what I had learned thus far about being a father.
“You see,” I explained, “it turns out that it’s not hard work in the intellectual sense. It’s not rocket science where some people can figure it out and others can’t. No, it’s hard work in the way that digging a ditch is hard. Anyone can dig a ditch. There’s no way to dig smarter. Or dig faster. Having a baby is like being assigned to dig a ditch. That goes all the way to the horizon.”
“Okay,” Chris replied warily. “But it’s good, right? You’re glad you did it?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s like going to the dentist. Everyone dreads the dentist. And it’s no fun. But when you’re seventy and still have your teeth, you’ll be grateful you went.”
I turned to my wife for confirmation. Her face was frozen in horror. “You just compared parenthood to ditch digging and dentistry,” she said evenly.
It was at this point I realized I might be doing fatherhood wrong.
From this first moment of failure have sprung many others—I do keep a strict count of these things. And I think a lot about how to raise Cody so that he doesn’t wind up like me.
Teaching children about failure is one of our more subtle responsibilities. Nearly everyone encounters failure in life, but people respond differently to it. Some learn; some are strengthened; some are broken. It depends on the person. It also depends on when the failure hits. Too soon and you might become habituated to it. Too late and you might not have time to recover. There’s probably a sweet spot in life where people are well equipped to absorb large-scale failure but also have ample time to emerge from it. Unfortunately, we have little control over when failure will visit our children. But we can try to prepare them nonetheless.
There are different schools of thought on the matter. One holds that failures ought to be imposed early and often, almost like hazing. Think of this as the Basic Training view, where you break them down so that you can build them up. The opposite school is best articulated by the businessman and sometime philosopher Peter Thiel. “One of the ideas I’m very skeptical of is that people learn from failure,” he says. “I think, in practice, failure’s really demotivating. Hopefully, you have the character to persevere and keep going, but I think the default is that failure is powerfully demotivating.”
Aside from the motivational aspect, Thiel thinks failure is overrated because its causes are often too complicated to yield any real lessons. When a kid gets a bad grade in organic chemistry—just to pick an example at random—is it because he didn’t work hard enough? Or because he’s not good at the subject? Or because the teacher did a lousy job? Or because he was stretched too thin with other work? What should he learn from his failure: Study more? Take easier classes? Find another major?
To my mind, when it comes to failure, what we really want to teach our children is how not to internalize it. Of course, the only way to learn this skill is to fail a number of times. There’s the rub. Fortunately, there’s an institution devoted to helping fathers and their children master this duality. It’s called baseball.
As George Will, Donald Kagan, and other philosophers have noted, baseball is the high church of ritualized failure. A great team will lose one out of every three games. A player who fails at the plate 70 percent of the time will go to the Hall of Fame. One of the game’s key statistics is actually called “errors.” And baseball’s failure is the best sort because its instances are routinized and discrete, which means that you can actually learn from them. Why didn’t I hit that pitch? Because you were too early. Why did the grounder get past me? Because you didn’t touch your glove all the way to the dirt. No big deal; happens all the time. Let’s try again.
If you want to teach your children to manage failure, you should make baseball part of your life with them. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, whether it’s playing Little League, watching the pros, or just having catch in the yard.
We have a minor league team a couple miles down the road from our house, so I started taking Cody to games when he was two—young enough to still be in diapers but old enough to enjoy peanuts and Cracker Jack. The next spring I started giving him batting practice in the front yard with one of the red, plastic fat bats that generations of kids have grown up with. When he turned five, I got him a glove. I don’t know if this will be enough to shield him from a life filled with the fear of failure. But it’s something. It’s a start.
Sometimes when I see Cody struggle and get frustrated with schoolwork, my heart breaks a little. We want our children to have only the best parts of ourselves inside them; it seems cruel that they should have to inherit our faults. But it’s a long game, and there are a lot of innings in life. What we have to remember is that winning the pennant in fatherhood doesn’t mean that we do everything perfectly. It means getting enough things right that your kid still loves you after he’s grown up. That he still looks forward to having a catch.
One more story about baseball: When I first started taking Cody to games, our routine was always the same: We’d get to the ballpark in the middle of the second, stay for a few innings, as long as his interest held, and then head home. The first time we made it to the end of a game, Cody was four. He looked at me quizzically and said, “Wait—baseball is over?” I realized that, from his perspective, baseball had always been happening. We got to the stadium and they were playing baseball; we left to go home and they were playing baseball. It wasn’t something that had a beginning and end. To him, baseball was like the ocean—omnipresent, the tides always rolling in.
Which leads me to an observation about fatherhood. A man with no children can easily be lulled into the sense that time is standing still. It is not. It is marching past you, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this unavoidably clear. It’s depressing. But also necessary. Because it means that your time on earth won’t sneak past you. And if you’re living well, it helps you focus on not wasting the time you have.
As I said at the beginning, fatherhood costs us a great deal. Every hour you spend driving your minivan to Babies“R”Us is an hour you can’t be sleeping, or watching football, or reading Dostoevsky. And in truth, I’m not sure the ditch-digging metaphor is entirely wrong. Much of childrearing—the tantrums, and the sibling rivalry, and trying to get them to sleep, and will you please eat your dinner already!—is deeply unpleasant. But to paraphrase James Madison, if children were angels, fatherhood would be unnecessary.
If you take anything from this book, I hope it’s that the struggle is worth it. As a general rule I try not to talk in the conditional mood, especially when it comes to family life. Everyone has their own circumstances, and I respect that. I really do. But if you aren’t otherwise engaged in some duty that precludes it—say, the priesthood—and you have the opportunity, then you should be a father. There is nothing more vexing, exhausting, noble, or manly.
It’s the worst job you’ll ever love.