by Greg Johnson
Now, suppose someone responds to this by saying “Yes, but I didn’t get to choose the context I was thrust into, or to define what my choices are. Therefore I’m not free.” This is simply not a reasonable position, however, for it demands the impossible—and thus sets up an impossible, chimerical notion of freedom. Hegel’s real answer to this, however, is to say that we are always fully and absolutely free so long as we recognize that the “limiting factors” in our lives are in fact the conditions for our self-realization; the conditions for such freedom as we have, in other words. The man who sees these conditions as merely alien and “oppressive” will feel himself unfree. If, on the other hand, he is able to recognize how an unchosen context has made it possible for him to be the man he is, with the choices and possibilities arrayed before him, he will not see these factors as limiting. If, in other words, he chooses the unchosen then he remains a fully autonomous individual. Hegel’s provocative way of putting this is to say that we must “will our determination.”
And this might be the way to save Western man. We cannot change the fact that what we seek is autonomy—to conquer the other, to penetrate, to know, and to control. But the next step in the historical development of Western self-understanding may be to recognize the absolute necessity and immutability of the conditions that make our nature possible. And to affirm them: to will them, to choose them. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, spoke exclusively of willing the social conditions that make possible our freedom. But let us expand this to include biological, and other conditions. Thus, for example, the cure for the West’s radical feminism is for the feminist to recognize that the biological conditions that make her a woman—with a woman’s mind, emotions, and drives—cannot be denied and are not an oppressive “other.” They are the parameters within which she can realize who she is and seek satisfaction in life. No one can be free of some set of parameters or other; life is about realizing ourselves and our potentials within those parameters.
Hegel was right about history: the telos of (Western) history really is our coming to consciousness of ourselves. But, contra Hegel’s followers, we are not at the end of history. In fact, we are going through a stage of history in which we are still profoundly deluded in our self-understanding. And it is having disastrous consequences. The next phase of the historical dialectic, if there is one, will be the antithesis of the present: We Westerners will recognize the futility and destructiveness of denying our nature; of denying the unchosen conditions—biological, cultural, historical, social—that make us who we are. And we will choose instead to affirm those conditions. This is no defeat for us, and no rejection of what makes us uniquely Western. It is the action of a fully self-aware and autonomous being. It is the Western spirit come to complete and perfect consciousness of itself: as unique, as a being of a specific nature which it simply cannot escape. And who would want to escape such a glorious nature?
So, what then? That is a uniquely Western question. For the West, there is always something yet to come, some adventure to be had. Well, willing the conditions for our freedom doesn’t mean the same thing as making peace with the world. No, we Westerners are determined to strive—to be restless. It is only this fact about ourselves that we must make peace with, and affirm. And so we will go forward to new adventures, conquering new territories (literally and metaphorically). But this time it will be with full consciousness of who we are—and pride in who we are. The end of history comes when we achieve this absolute self-consciousness and stop deluding ourselves, and denying ourselves. But the “end” of our history is only the beginning, for it is truly the point at which we come into full possession of ourselves and our possibilities. And those possibilities are limitless and will remain so, if we live and act always in the knowledge of who we are.
The above reflections go beyond what Duchesne says in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, but they are inspired by it. If you have made it to the end of this very long essay, I think you will understand why I regard this as such a brilliant and important book. Duchesne stands on the shoulders of giants like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, but this book both synthesizes their ideas, and supplements them with new and important insights. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization is a book that has come along at just the right time. It helps us to see ourselves very clearly—our glories and our faults, and the conditions that make these possible. In short, it is an important chapter in the unfolding phenomenology of the Western spirit. And it may just help to usher in that next stage of history, in which we truly realize and embrace who we are.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
April 1–5, 2013
JACK DONOVAN’S
THE WAY OF MEN
JEF COSTELLO
Jack Donovan
The Way of Men
Portland, Or.: Dissonant Hum, 2012
1. THE WAY OF MEN IS THE WAY OF THE GANG
How do you define masculinity? If you listen to today’s feminist-approved “authorities” you will be told either that masculinity means nothing at all—that it is “constructed” differently from place to place or time to time—or you will be told that masculinity is now being “redefined.”
As you may have heard, there’s a “men’s movement” today, but it more or less consists in rescuing men from having to be manly. Its aim is essentially to help men divest themselves of the burden of manliness, and to have a good cry. Time in the sweat lodge (no smoking please!) will be followed by a steaming cup of chamomile tea and a hot towel. One could call this the “new, effeminate masculinity.”
The tremendous irony here is that while good-old-fashioned manliness is being spat upon, suppressed, and defined out of existence, it is simultaneously being urged upon women. Boys need to get in touch with their feelings, but girls need to haul their asses off to soccer practice. Boys need to stop judging, while girls need to be more “assertive.” Boys need to sit still and take their Ritalin, while girls need to “question authority” (remember: “well-behaved women seldom make history”). Boys need to stop being so competitive (because that’s a bad thing), and stop recoiling from competitive girls (because that’s a good thing). And when the day is done, boys need to learn to keep their hands to themselves and let the girls go take their SlutWalk.
Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men is the best book on masculinity I’ve ever read. Why? Because Donovan isn’t out to re-define masculinity; he’s out to recover what is timelessly true about it. The trouble with the social construction theory of “gender” is that it flies in the face of thousands of years of human experience, as well as all the science on sex differences that’s been done for the better part of a century.
Everyone whose mind has not been completely warped by political correctness is aware of this. We all know that the differences between men and women are enormous. We all know that any man who thinks that “masculinity can be anything you want it to be” is just trying to change the rules in order to disguise his own pathetic failure at being manly. But even if we’re all on the same page about the falseness of PC “gender” garbage, we’re still left with the problem of how exactly to define masculinity.
Ask around and you’ll find that even those of us reactionaries who believe that masculinity is timeless and biologically-based will differ in what they think is essential to being a man. How do we settle such disputes? Donovan has come up with an ingenious solution. It’s a thought experiment, really. Imagine a primitive society concerned with day-to-day survival. We’re not talking about anything more advanced than a very small village. Given the basic biological differences between the sexes, it is men who would be charged with doing the difficult and dangerous work of hunting animals and defending the tribe’s territory from outsiders. (Donovan doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to prove that men are physically stronger and more aggressive than women. Anyone needing such proof is far too dishonest, or far too brainwashed by PC, to appreciate the rest of his argument.)
Donovan doesn’t refer to Carl Schmi
tt, but his understanding of the essence of “the political” is uncannily like Schmitt’s. The basic distinction that makes our village a social unit is “us vs. them.” We recognize insiders and outsiders. And “politics” begins when some men (and I mean males) are given authority in virtue of having the appointed task of protecting us from “them.” It’s when men go about this task together, in what Donovan calls “gangs,” that manly virtue first makes itself known.
As I will indicate a little later, there are some ambiguities in Donovan’s treatment of “virtue.” However, he essentially understands it along the lines of Aristotle’s areté, which is usually translated as “virtue” but is better translated “excellence.” (Donovan points out, however, that the Latin “virtus” comes from vir– which means “man,” so that “virtus” originally meant “manly quality.”)
The manly virtues are excellences of the male. Donovan wants to make a distinction between specifically masculine virtue (what he calls “being good at being a man”) and virtue that any “person,” male or female, can manifest (men who achieve those virtues may be “good men,” but may not be “good at being a man”). He makes this distinction in a simple and clever way. He points out that there are certain qualities which we expect men to have. When we don’t find those qualities in a man, we think less of him. However, we don’t think less of a woman if she lacks those same qualities. What are they? They are the basic attributes men must have in order to play their primal role as guardians of the tribe. Specifically, they are: strength, courage, mastery, and honor.
By “strength,” Donovan has in mind literal, physical strength. He’s not talking about Jesus’s “strength” on the cross, and still less about the “strength” that helped transgendered Pat endure all the imagined microagressions s/he received in high school. Donovan means strength in its most primal and basic sense. Men must have this in order to be guardians. If they don’t have it, they’re not good at being guardians, and they are perceived as weak links by other men. This is as true today as it was in the primeval forests. Our biological makeup remains unchanged. Life in today’s modern world may require very few displays of physical strength on the part of men, but men are still judged as inferior if they are physically weak.
Why else is it that so many men shell out billions of dollars each year for gym memberships? They want to be strong and to be seen as strong—by women, yes, but primarily by other men. Men are hard-wired not just to want to achieve masculine virtue, but to want acceptance and honor from other men based upon their masculine virtue. Why? Because that unit of men that guards our perimeter, that protects “us” from “them,” only functions if all the men are driving each other to cultivate manly virtues.
As for women, nobody thinks Vera is less of a woman if she needs help changing a tire. We never observe physical weakness in a woman and think “she’s unwomanly.” Sally may defeat Vera in an arm-wrestling contest, but no observer thinks “Wow, Vera isn’t half the woman Sally is!” Now, the feminists, of course, will claim that this way of approaching things is the worst sort of sexist ignorance: “Strength isn’t thought of as essential to being a woman, just because women have been taught to think that strength is unfeminine!”
Isn’t feminism just the most shocking hogwash? We really live in the topsy-turvy world, folks, where reality just doesn’t matter anymore. The reality, however, is that men really are stronger than women, just because there’s always been a division of labor between the sexes: men hunt and guard the perimeter, women cook the stew and have the babies that make guarding the perimeter necessary. We admire strength in men because it’s a sign that men have what it takes to play their allotted role. We don’t admire strength in women because they simply don’t need it.
Donovan essentially applies the same sort of analysis to the other three primal, masculine virtues. For example, it’s true that women can sometimes display courage in physical danger, but if a woman runs from a club-wielding Orc we don’t think “What a coward!” If a man did, we would (and even male hobbits don’t get a free pass here).
By “mastery” Donovan means a man’s ability to manipulate and control his environment. This covers everything from creating makeshift bear traps to navigating by the stars (at least, this is what it means in the “primal scene” Donovan begins from). To this day, we’re not the least surprised if women aren’t good at these things. If a woman can’t fix a toilet, we find it endearing; if a man can’t fix it for her, we feel just a little contempt for him.
When a man refuses to stop and ask for directions, it’s because he’s got a platoon full of imaginary comrades looking over his shoulder waiting to see if he has the “mastery” it takes to be one of them. His honor is at stake—which is the fourth and last of the virtues Donovan discusses. We men just can’t shake such feelings. And why should we? It’s these vestiges of our primordial drive to achieve the manly virtues that are the last slim thread connecting our doughy modern selves to an authentic sense of manhood.
For Donovan, therefore, what it means to be a man in the most basic sense is to achieve, to one degree or another, these four primary virtues. Further, the drive to achieve these virtues is rooted in our biological makeup. No matter what setting men find themselves in, they are going to feel the desire to prove their strength, courage, mastery, and honor. They will feel the desire to prove this to themselves and, primarily, to other men. Because also hard-wired in us is the desire to belong to the Männerbund—to that fraternity of men who recognize each other as comrades capable of protecting the perimeter. Men are fundamentally pack animals.
But don’t men also want to prove their virtues to women? Yes, of course. In fact, Donovan argues that the primary characteristics that make men sexually attractive to women are strength, courage, mastery, and honor. It’s this last point—honor—that’s crucial in a way, however. Honor refers to men’s desire to be honored—to be praised and accepted—by other men. And the men that women find most attractive are those who receive the most honor from other men: the alpha males, in other words. So, it is actually through making themselves accepted and admired by other men that men make themselves attractive to women.
In sum, Donovan’s approach to getting at the core of masculinity consists in identifying the most essential traits men would have to exhibit in playing their basic, primal social role—a role marked out for them by their biological makeup. The result is the most persuasive argument for the “true meaning” of masculinity I have ever encountered.
2. MASCULINITY: REFINED OR UNREFINED?
Of course, there are certain assumptions that underlie Donovan’s approach. The first is that “true masculinity” is to be found among men in their most primitive and undeveloped form. But I can imagine someone responding to him along the following lines.
There are certain human traits that have developed over time, and we have to understand them in terms of their most developed form, not in terms of their most undeveloped. Take human reason, for example. It begins with a caveman reasoning that since wild boar have to drink, and since the only water source around is this-here stream, it follows that a good place to ambush and kill wild boar would be at this stream. Flash forward a few thousand years (à la 2001) and human reason is firing rockets to the moon.
To understand reason is to understand it in terms of its excellences—in terms of what it is capable of doing. Clearly, that means that we have to understand it in terms of its most developed form, not its most primitive form. To borrow some words from old Aristotle, we have to understand reason in terms of its actuality, rather than its potentiality. To do otherwise is a bit like defining an oak tree by saying that it’s an acorn.
And shouldn’t this be true of masculinity as well? If we want to understand manliness, shouldn’t we also look to manliness in its most developed and perfected form, not exclusively to the manliness of our primitive ancestors?
Donovan several times dismisses talk about “nobility”—for example, in Aristotle’s
treatment of the noble man—as if it were merely a kind of “moral veneer” painted over primal manliness; as if it were somehow a kind of inauthentic and decadent “civilized” version of manliness. That may be one way to look at it. But another way is to see ideals such as nobility as a higher-level development of primal masculinity, arrived at when men began to consciously reflect upon the manly virtues. In other words: when men began to be more like men and less like beasts buffeted about by instincts and hormones.
While masculinity may emerge initially from instincts and hormones, as the minds of men developed it became an ideal. And men developed and refined and codified this ideal over time, until manliness actually became something pursued for its own sake. In other words, the manly virtues discussed by Donovan ceased to be thought of by men as good merely because they have utility (utility for attracting babes and guarding babies), and became things noble and fine and pursued as ends in themselves. (My language here deliberately echoes that of Aristotle, who gets a rather undeserved beating in this book.) This is, arguably, when men truly become men: when they pursue manliness consciously as an ideal; as an end-in-itself rather than, again, a means to some practical end having to do with survival or protection. I could be wrong, but such a conceptualization of manliness seems to me to be a higher-order achievement of the human mind, and not something one associates with men in their most primitive form.
Donovan sometimes makes rather arbitrary distinctions between “manly virtue” and virtue that has nothing to do (specifically) with being a man. For example, at one point, listing virtues that don’t have anything to do with being good at being a man, he gives “justice” and “honesty.” But both of these seem pretty manly to me.