MANLY MAXIM #3 IS VITALLY IMPORTANT, BUT GIVE ME A minute to work my way to it. I have a story to tell that will help us.
Not long ago, I changed from what we’ll call Computer System B to what we’ll call Computer System A. Now during all the years I used Computer System B, my biggest challenge was learning what I needed to know. When I bought the computer and turned it on, it just stared at me, blinking. I had to go get a book and read. I did what the book told me to do, and the computer started doing a few things. When I wanted the computer to do more things, and I installed a new piece of software, I had to go get another book and learn how that new software worked too. In fact, I sometimes had to go get a book about why the second piece of software had messed up the software that was already on the computer. Since different companies made the two pieces of software, their products didn’t necessarily play well together. The same thing happened when I added some cool new piece of hardware. More books. More arguing technologies. More books about how books on arguing technologies don’t tell you everything you need to know.
Finally, after enduring many hours of me in a grumbling, techno-ticked mood, my amazing wife, Beverly, decided to make a change. She was a longtime user of Computer System A and she knew what I was missing.
One day, she ripped all of Computer System B out of my life: every piece of squabbling software and misbehaving hardware—along with the dozens of books they required—and she gave me the notebook computer and the smartphone of Computer System A.
I can hardly find the words to describe what came next. Let’s just say there was a fit. I turned on the computer and everything I needed was just there. Every time I did something, what I needed to do next was pretty obvious. Someone had already thought it through and made the way to do it simple.
After a while, I realized something important was happening. It wasn’t the technological revolution I was experiencing, as astounding as this new system was. It was an educational revolution. I never opened a book. I never took a class. I don’t recall even consulting a website. I became a fairly sophisticated user of Computer System A all by either doing or by learning from people around me. In fact, I got good enough to teach others, having never opened a book. Doing and the example of others made me more effective than I had ever been. Doing and the example of others.
It occurred to me later that this is how I had learned most of the things that defined my life. For example, I became a pretty good football player in my early life. I’m not saying I was God’s gift to the NFL, but I was pretty good. How did I get that way? Doing and the example of others. Perhaps some coaching. No books. No seminars. No long lectures. Someone did. I watched. Then I did. Over time, I did better. That was it. It’s just how I later learned Computer System A. It’s also how, early on in my life, I learned how to drive, date, mow grass, study, find my way to the best pizza place, and dress in really cool and exotic ways. On the dark side, it’s also how I learned to lie, fight, steal, cuss, and hide porn. The point, though, is that doing and the example of others is how I learned most everything that shaped my life.
This may be how all human beings learn best, but it is certainly the way most men learn what matters: doing and the example of others. Yet, oddly, when society wants men to be better men, it gives them books and sends them to classes. This has given us male spectators. It has not given us better men.
I remember some years ago I was listening to an African bishop describe the wonderful things his churches were doing in a difficult part of his country. Hundreds of us listened to him, and we were deeply moved. After he spoke, the bishop took questions. Someone asked what a great many of us wanted to know: Why aren’t things like you describe happening here in our country?
The man wasn’t a diplomat. I liked that about him, and I liked it more after he answered this question. He said, “Here is the reason you do not have such things happening in this country. You Americans study your God. We Africans worship ours. You get smarter. We get changed. And then we change the world around us.”
I thought the audience was going to riot. The bishop wasn’t finished, though. His next words never left me. “By doing rather than merely studying, we create a culture. Newcomers and the young feed on that culture. They watch. They do. They, too, are changed. Our culture expands. You Americans create a system of thought. The most you ask is that people contemplate new ideas. You might ask them to give or to sometimes attend meetings, but no contagious culture is created. Nothing is offered to newcomers and the young but thoughts. So they think. They don’t do.”
We are changed. We craft a contagious culture. People feed on this culture and change the world.
I believe it is exactly the same with the making of men. We can inspire and teach men with study—with words, books, and classes. We can only make men, though, in the contagious culture created by other genuine men.
The good news is this happens naturally. Put a young, unformed man in the presence of older men, and the process automatically begins. It is simply the outworking of the way men are made. The young man watches. He listens. He ponders. Soon, he becomes what he beholds. He starts patterning himself, almost without intending to, after these impressive older men. This can happen without the older men intentionally teaching a lesson or addressing the younger man directly. It is a result of the contagious power of genuine manhood and the way men intuitively absorb the manly culture around them.
I had few mentors when I was young. My father was relatively distant and often away on assignment. I did have coaches and teachers who left their imprint, but my father’s military career meant that we moved to a new post almost every year. No one had the opportunity to shape me for very long.
When I finished college and moved to West Texas, I started spending time with some older men who had lived in that area all their lives. They were cowboys, really: I mean real, hat-wearing, cow-herding cowboys who carried pistols on their hips and rifles in their pickup truck windows. These men ended up providing some of the male mentoring I lacked in my life.
Don’t misunderstand. They hardly said anything directly to me. Most of them thought I was a citified Yankee who wasn’t worth speaking to.
Still, they had a way of talking that helped me. They used sentences like, “Well, if Joe was any kind of man he would do such and such.” Or, they’d say, “Seems to me a man’d have a talk with that ol’ boy who was causin’ so much trouble.” Then there was my favorite. It was like code. One guy would turn to the other and say, “A man’d know what to do.” This usually meant that something had happened and that there was a “feller” who needed to be put up against a wall and told how the world works. We just weren’t going to mention such things in front of the ladies. All the men understood, though: “A man’d know what to do.”
The point is these grizzled Texans taught me, whether they wanted to or not. It’s how man culture works. I also learned from that teacher who caught me in a lie and said, “When you’re man enough, come back and tell me the truth.” Then there was that coach who was gracious and polite to women and yet always careful not to leave the wrong impression. I noticed. I thought about it. I learned.
I learned also from my linebacker friend who saw a man yelling at his wife in the mall. My friend—six-foot, four inches tall and 240 pounds of stone muscle—walked over and just put his finger in the man’s chest. That’s all. Didn’t say a word. He just stood there and radiated: “This is wrong. Stop. Now. Or else.”
I learned. Manhood. Lesson #42.
I learned also from my pastor’s prayers and my father’s Southern manners and the way a policeman once dealt with a woman in a drunken rage and from an older friend who said, “You’re better than that” when I was demonstrating my finely honed cussing skills.
I even learned from a man in my church who said exactly two words to me. It had snowed heavily where I lived then and the man came by my house at six the morning after. When I opened the door he said, “Come on.” That’s it. Nothing more. I put on my coat and got in his truck. We started driving around town checking on the elderly. We shoveled snow. We adjusted their heaters. We made sure they had food. The old man wasn’t mean. He was on a mission. It is what men do. They take care of their people. Shut up, young man. Get to it. The old ones are waiting and afraid.
I got it. I also got that manly culture doesn’t require much more than one genuine man living a noble life before other men. It reminds me of a story they often tell in Texas. They revere the Texas Rangers there—the lawmen, not the baseball team. In the frontier days, there was a riot in a particular town and the mayor of that town frantically called for the Texas Rangers. One Ranger showed up. The mayor couldn’t believe it. “One Ranger? What in the world are you guys thinking! We need help!” The Ranger picked his teeth for a moment and then said, “Yes, one Ranger. There’s only one riot, isn’t there?” Then he ended the riot. Texans walk around to this day reminding each other: “One riot. One Ranger.”
The same is true with men as a whole. All it takes for a contagious manly culture to form is for one genuine man to live out genuine manhood. It creates a model, something for other men to feed upon and pattern themselves after. It also gives other genuine men a vital connection that sustains and extends who they are.
This, then, is Mansfield’s Manly Maxim #3: Manly men build manly men.
“A WOMAN SIMPLY IS, BUT A MAN MUST BECOME. MASCULINITY IS RISKY AND ELUSIVE . . . AND IT IS CONFIRMED ONLY BY OTHER MEN.”
—Camille Paglia, from Sex, Art and American Culture: New Essays (1992)