Supplementing manliness

“The modern world as a war on manliness” is the theme of politics in the Trump era. There have long been intimations in pop culture that the American mind would turn in this direction, but perhaps the conditions weren’t all there before—voting behavior, generational turnover, technological progress, & social disintegration (young people not getting married). The thought has emerged, however, that there is more to being human than can be reduced to conditions; you’re not the being you are because you breathe air, even though without it, you’d be dead. Condition isn’t cause. We are “conditioned” to think of conditions—incentives, for example. To begin to think of causation, instead, you have to begin by becoming aware of a being.

The power behind Trump is young & middle-aged men who are moving in the direction of considering man as a being & asking what it means to cause anything. We could call this a movement, but only if we then begin to ask who is moving what or whom. Taking responsibility for politics is one part of the problem, very new in this generation (compare MAGA to the irresponsibility typical of the ‘90s). Self-command is another part—from RFK Jr.’s idealistic, if nostalgic MAHA to Joe Rogan’s more realistic if more demotic version of man in the post-blue collar world, looking for strength & health in the service of a somewhat sophisticated hedonism. Somewhere in-between is the question of what gives power to the mind. As minions of science, we talk of nootropics—from an abstract position, we look at our very selves as machines with whose movable parts we play. As sons of modern liberal politics, we want to prove that we are clever & productive through the kinds of competitions that are supposed to establish what it means to be middle-class; DIY enlightenment, or self-knowledge through insecurity—the oddity that we call being self-aware, which seems to be some kind of pain, correlative to stress, another kind of pain, which implies like of self-awareness.

Here’s an example of trying to become Superman. A youngish journalist, Park MacDougald (of Tablet) recently wrote a kind of moral tale of the misery of the young man of some ambition—himself, unfortunately—for a new venture, Colossus Magazine. It’s called White-Collar PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs). MacDougald is one of the talented investigative journalists of our times—in some way, he loves politics, so he deserves the kind of job that would earn him admiration. The story he tells is running an “experiment” on himself, or a search for experience, taking various drugs & taking on a regimen of training to become a successful man, that is, one whose work doesn’t come at the expense of his health or self-respect, but instead gives him the pleasant feeling of accumulating & expending power. I recommend reading it, since it seems to me to describe the drama most ambitious young men are involved in.

The sources of misery for a young man are three. In the first place, he wishes to be running around, not to work at a laptop. He is accordingly restless—a trouble that perhaps starts in boyhood when one is forced into “an education system” & never goes away. Then, he is slightly horrified by the endless bureaucracy of the state, which gets in the way of dealing with people or achieving things, imposing a level of abstraction compared to modern natural science. Finally, he fears defeat—our arrangements are both mad & unjust enough that they neither show paths to success that talented young men can follow with any confidence nor do they offer the companionship of men or other young men whose characters can serve as mirrors for oneself, another source of confidence, especially needful in trying times. Perhaps it’s generally true that you could concern yourself with knowing who you are or what you’re doing, but not both—but it is nowadays neither.

The young man of the 21st c. has only digital friends; some of these keep him in touch with those human beings whom he somewhat amusingly thinks of as his real friends, but one notices that sentiment & habit are at odds with one another. Digital technology, however, does not run on a human schedule, so it’s very difficult to deal with it in our search for work or a society of which to be a part; &, on the other hand, the “mass effects in modern life” may be too strong for digital powers to contain. Automation we are used to saying we fear, yet do not have it—we are like poor people bragging; so also digital technology is something we claim to fear, yet do not have its powers at our fingertips, the technological progress that might help us overpower the impersonal indifference of vast populations, nameless to us & rendering us in turn anonymous.

The retreat to the body & the attempt to summon powers out of it seem to me to follow from that problem. The abstractions of science or ideology are very dubious, but the body seems real enough. Unfortunately, its reality is inseparable from our limits, our failures, our mortality. Young people believe otherwise, but it doesn’t last long. Hence, the next step is to stage a kind of confrontation with one’s mortality & establish morality.

Family & business are the moral life of man now as before. But the difficulty of putting them together, for example, by buying a home, is forcing young men to face more fundamental questions—the things that faith or tragedy or science takes up thematically. A certain wounded pride in being human & in being a man—this is what I see in the story. Read it for yourselves. Our political enterprise depends on encouraging & rewarding a healthy pride in young men—that would mean that habits & learning should align largely with commerce, but that they should depend not on commerce but on family & on politics. We should ask ourselves whether we can fix young men’s problems & whether they are capable of loyalty, or they’re stuck looking for pills.