by Greg Johnson
As Schopenhauer and Weininger will tell you, justice is something women are particularly bad at. Someone might object that women can be just if they try—but the obvious response to this is that some women are capable of being courageous as well. I do associate justice with manliness. And it’s certainly necessary in a warrior band setting, by the way—where rewards (honors) must be distributed fairly and with justification, just as blame, dishonor, and punishment must be.
Women seldom have any real concern with justice. It’s usually all about hugs and forgiveness. (Unless they’re scorned, then it’s all about revenge—but that’s not a motivation that flows from a sense of justice.) And the same is true of honesty. Women are the most dishonest, guileful, manipulative creatures on the planet. Honesty is speaking the plain truth; having the conviction that truth is paramount; that reality cannot be faked; that one must present oneself as one is without sham or fakery; that one must be, rather than seem. This is truly a part of manliness: warriors must seek to be honored for what they truly are, not for what they appear to be (hence the disgust men feel for “stolen valor,” for men who falsely claim military experience or honors). A duplicitous man, a man who is not true—to the facts and to his comrades—is despised by other men. By contrast, many women prefer seeming to being (to mention a simple example, why else do they wear makeup?). And how many arguments have you had with wife, or girlfriend, or mother, or sister about the truth of an issue, only to find that they care more about whether speaking that truth will be socially acceptable? (I am aware that many men take this attitude as well, but it is particularly prevalent among women, who seem programmed to consider what the neighbors are going to think.)
Both justice and honesty seem like very manly virtues to me. But they also seem like later, more refined developments of manly virtue. Our most primitive ancestors would probably have been incapable of them, since they require a certain facility with abstract thought and with reasoning in terms of ideals like “fairness” and “truth.”
Now, my kneejerk Aristotelianism tells me that all the above is correct—that we cannot understand manliness by looking solely to its most primitive form. Nonetheless, there are some serious problems here.
In the above, by “refined” I do not effete; I simply mean more developed or advanced. But Donovan points out, quite correctly, that as civilization developed manliness came to be more and more “refined” to the point where it did become effete. All sorts of things were claimed to be “manly” that . . . well, aren’t. For example, any man interested in the subject of manliness will surely have read one or two medieval accounts of chivalry—and found them pretty disappointing. Why? Because they tell us that, among other things, knights shall exhibit the virtues of “chastity” and “faith.” Well, that doesn’t sound too manly to me. Of course, I’ve got an imagination, and I can make up an account of how it’s manly. “Chastity” involves self-control, not giving way to your impulses, and that’s manly. “Faith” means committing yourself to belief even without evidence, fighting for that belief without wavering, etc. Sounds manly. But the trouble is that a great many women can exhibit chastity and faith—and they’re almost always better at both than men.
Today we have all sorts of absurd claims about what “refined” masculinity now must consist in. Masculinity means tolerance, non-judgmentalism, and fighting for equality. Masculinity means strength used to help the weak; courage used to help the meek; mastery used to build a prosthetic penis for transgendered Pat; and honoring “diversity.” And all the puny little men making such claims will tell you that this is the telos of masculinity’s history: masculinity in its most developed and refined form. They will agree with me that we cannot understand masculinity merely be looking to its earliest and most primitive state.
Bloody Hell! I don’t want those people agreeing with me!
Jack Donovan is clearly worried that once you start talking about “refined” forms of masculinity there is a danger you will define masculinity out of existence. He’s right. This is why he takes primal masculinity as a kind of touchstone, and there is a great deal of sense in this approach. Nevertheless, I am torn. As I argued above, it makes a lot of sense to say that our conception of manliness has grown and been enriched in some ways, as men like Aristotle came to consciously reflect on those primal manly virtues that Donovan speaks about. However, we need some non-arbitrary way of deciding when “refinement” of masculinity becomes negation of masculinity.
This is a very tricky issue. For example: according to Donovan’s four criteria, members of urban black street gangs would be exemplars of manliness. Clearly, this a problem. Yet, there is also a problem with going in the opposite direction and upholding “the gentleman” as the true exemplar of manliness. There is definitely a part of me that sees the classical conception of the “English gentleman” to be a bit effete and unmanly—yet these gentlemen at one time ruled most of the planet. There’s a Tyler Durdenish part of me that sees “civilization” itself as crying out for demolition. But isn’t that the same thing as yearning for a life akin to that of the black street gang? And isn’t that far, far beneath me?
Ultimately, the issue I’m raising—about whether masculinity becomes legitimately refined over time—really may come down to how we evaluate civilization itself. I think one factor that motivates Donovan to take his position is that he is clearly a kind of Tyler Durdenish primitivist. Quoting Tyler: “In the world I see—you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.” I think this is Donovan’s world too, but maybe I’m wrong. Again, I’m torn.
3. NIETZSCHE: HE’LL TELL US WHAT TO DO
Really, what I am suggesting above is that while Donovan gives us excellent guidance in understanding the core of masculinity, I believe his account of manly virtue can be expanded. The tricky part is how to do the expanding without diluting manliness until it’s unrecognizable. That would happen, as Donovan astutely recognizes, if we made “manliness” include virtues that we expect women to exhibit as well—or (worse yet) if we twisted manly virtue so as to make it serve unmanly ends.
I alluded to this last point when I spoke about how the PC eunuchs want manly strength to serve the weak, manly courage to serve the meek, etc. Some of my readers may have immediately recognized this sort of thing as what Nietzsche calls “slave morality.” In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche hypothesizes that the first human civilizations were ruled by the “master” type of men, who exhibited virtues (excellences) like strength, courage, mastery, and honor. Everyone in these early societies, even those who were not warriors, paid tribute to these virtues and to the men who achieved them. Nietzsche refers to this as “master morality.”
But what about those who failed to live up to these standards? The men, for example, who were physically weak or cowardly? Well, some men of this sort recognize and accept their own inferiority, but nonetheless revere their betters. (Donovan points out, correctly, that the stronger men in warrior bands are often quite gentle with the weaker men and try to find some way to make them useful—unless their weakness becomes a serious liability.)
There is another sort of man, however, who feels hatred for the men who embody the virtues he lacks. This is what Nietzsche calls the resentful type. Such men eventually find ways to turn the tables on the masters by spreading, through various means, a new “slave morality.” This involves inverting the values of the masters, so that, for example, “meekness” is celebrated instead of courage (“the meek shall inherit the earth”).
What slave morality is really all about is getting masters to do the bidding of slaves. But this means not so much destroying master virtues as perverting them so that they wind up serving slave ends. So master types are allowed
to be strong and to display courage—so long as they understand that it’s the weak and the meek that these virtues must serve. When Donovan writes about how political correctness actually tries to appeal to the very manly virtues it attacks—telling us, for example, that “real men” honor diversity—he is giving a very Nietzschean analysis. (This is particularly true of his eBook No Man’s Land where he convincingly argues that PC critics of masculinity like Michael Kimmel are motivated by resentment against the manly virtues they sorely lack.383)
Now, in The Way of Men Donovan is concerned to make the point that the manly virtues of strength, courage, mastery, and honor are “amoral.” This can easily be misunderstood. All Donovan means is that these are virtues that even gangs of scoundrels, up to no good, find useful to cultivate. Even men bent on evil purposes strive to cultivate strength, courage, and mastery. And as the old saying goes, there is honor even among thieves. This is a perfectly correct observation—but it leads us into some very deep waters. The truth is that we men admire these manly traits even when they are exhibited by evildoers. And this means that there is a kind of manly goodness that exists quite independent of what most of us think of as “moral goodness.”
My contention here is that Donovan is really resurrecting Nietzschean “master morality.” One could equally well say that he is resurrecting old-fashioned, pre-Christian pagan warrior ethics. I think this is a point with which Donovan would be sympathetic, but he does not develop this idea in The Way of Men.384 Indeed, he does not offer a very clear sense of what he means by “morality,” and more often than not (unless I am mistaken) he seems to simply identify it with Judeo-Christian slave morality. Because authentic manly virtue has nothing to do with that sort of morality, he seems to conclude that it is therefore outside the realm of ethics entirely.
For example, Donovan tells us that, “Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive” (p. 45). In a way, this is certainly true just in that men fighting to survive aren’t thinking about moral perfection. But as a good pagan moralist I would take the position that moral perfection indeed comes from developing all that it takes to survive (and to protect one’s one). Donovan actually states the pagan perspective quite well when, earlier in the book, he alludes to the fact that virtue originally had to do with manliness, and that andreia (courage) just means manliness.
The problem here seems to come from assuming that “morality” always has something to do with fealty to abstract laws which apply universally to everyone, male or female. But this is simply to take the Judeo-Christian view of morality as absolute. Again, when Aristotle speaks of moral or ethical virtue he simply means excellences of the character. I am not simply a “person,” however: I am a man. Developing my moral character, therefore, involves developing excellences exclusive to males. But this is nonetheless part of “moral character.” So, in a sense “being good at being a man” is definitely about “moral perfection.” In order to see this, however, one has to thoroughly purge any hidden vestiges of slave morality from one’s mind.
Again, I don’t think that Donovan is in principle opposed to the idea that the manly virtues can form the core of a “new” master morality (or of a resurrected one). And to give such a morality to men and say “Go and be manly, knowing that this is true virtue,” would be an enormous service. But he doesn’t do that here—and actually that’s just fine.
The first step in freeing men from the ways in which slave morality has perverted manliness is to get them to see that manly virtue doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with any kind of “higher” moral aim. Nevertheless, even though this is the case, all honest men will see that manliness is “good” whether it is exhibited by saints or sinners. Donovan accomplishes this in The Way of Men, and this is enormously important. The next step, in my view, is to go “beyond good and evil”—beyond morality as we know it—and establish a new morality altogether, from the four small seeds of manly virtue sowed by Donovan. Or: breathe new life into the oldest of old moralities. It comes to the same thing.
As the reader will no doubt have gathered by now, this is a book that is not only filled with new and bold ideas: it will also give rise to new insights, new values, new ways of living and of facing the world.
4. SAVE THE (WHITE) MALES
Suppose Donovan is right that the drive to achieve manly virtues is rooted in our biological makeup, and that no matter what setting men find themselves in, they are going to feel the desire to prove that they have these qualities. If so, then we have to recognize that men are fated never to be satisfied by the modern world. Much of The Way of Men is devoted to discussing this point. This is an important book for many reasons, but one of them is that it so clearly demonstrates that the modern world is built upon the suppression of masculinity.
Because this world is focused entirely on the achievement of material comfort and security, it satisfies only one of the three parts of the Platonic soul: the appetitive side of our nature. Ideals that rise above the desire to acquire more money and possessions are ridiculed, and the idealists who dream them are regarded as in need of better medication. It is the spirited part of us—what Plato calls thumos—that motivates us to strive for such ideals, particularly where this involves a vision of ourselves and how we ought to be. It is thumos that is the primary thing that is manly about men (as I believe Donovan recognizes).
I’ve discussed thumos in other essays, especially in my essay on Fight Club.385 Thumos can be found in both males and females, but it is far more developed in the male. We see thumos especially behind Donovan’s concept of honor, motivating us to keep to our code, to be loyal to our comrades, and to strive to be more than we are. It’s also thumos that is behind courage. Donovan speaks of courage as putting strength into action. This is true, but behind courage is thumos, which is not a “virtue” per se but the part of the soul that spurs us to achieve virtue. Thumos is even behind “mastery”: driving us to want to dominate our surroundings.
But to make this modern democratic, capitalist, egalitarian, feel-good world work, thumos has got to be ruthlessly suppressed. Male aggression, ambition, competition, and desire for dominance have got to be pathologized, lampooned, and drugged away (while, as I noted earlier, women are simultaneously encouraged to ape these very traits).
Our modern world neuters the natural male desire to construct hierarchies and to make distinctions by means of a pervasive relativism that teaches us never to judge—just like our (female) kindergarten teachers wanted. All the traditional settings in which men proved themselves as men have either been done away with or invaded by women. Male bonding has been destroyed not just through the presence of female interlopers, but through the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion that reads “latent” into everything. And, speaking of which, men who openly reject and deride masculinity are now officially welcome in what everyone once thought was the last and best school of manliness: the military.
Derek Hawthorne quotes D. H. Lawrence characterizing masculinity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.”386 But today, men no longer fulfill themselves by building a world that is noble and fine, and not merely useful. They have been conned into building “a world for you, dear,” a world for women, that enshrines the values, attitudes, and priorities of women.
Thumos is permitted to display itself today only in so far as it can be channeled into the service of this feminized world. So, for example, male aggression and honor-loving are allowed to express themselves in military service—but the military, of course, is merely a tool used to safeguard the world we’ve built “for you, dear.” One has to feel sorry for all those poor dumb recruits who think they are going off to prove their masculinity, not realizing they are just cannon fodder for Big Sister.
Make no mista
ke, this modern world is built upon the broken bodies and spirits of men. If Donovan is right about our nature, however, one can almost construct an argument for the historical inevitability of the modern world’s downfall. So long as our biology remains the same, we will continue to feel the desire to live as men—and we will continue to feel oppressed by the present situation. Can our thumotic rage be forever contained? Because it is so clearly at odds with biology, the modern world is inherently unstable. (And I might add here that while it can be argued, as noted earlier, that this world is inherently “feminized,” ultimately it leaves women unfulfilled as well.)
The logical “what do we do now?” conclusion to Donovan’s case would be “go form Project Mayhem.” In fact, he ends The Way of Men by urging men to form “gangs.” He says little here, other than encouraging men to come together and form groups of whatever kind they choose. He speaks of Mormon men forming male Mormon “gangs,” etc. It all sounds a little too non-specific. But I think there is a hidden agenda here, and I like it.
If men do form “gangs” then, by virtue of our biological programming alone, they will find themselves spurring each other on to cultivate the manly virtues. And the more these men come to realize their own masculine nature via the gang, the more they will feel cut off from modern sensibilities. The commitment to cultivate the primal masculine virtues implicitly entails a rejection of the modern world. And truly cultivating those virtues creates an ever-widening distance between ourselves and the beaten-down bonobos who are quite happy with their iPads, their porn, and with vicarious enjoyment of masculine virtue.
I have very subversive hopes for these gangs. (And Donovan’s hopes are also clearly subversive.) I would like to see these gangs proliferate, to grow in power and influence. I want more and more men to essentially “go on strike,” binding themselves to other men in loyalty, and in reaction against the modern world, coming more and more to hate that world with each passing day. And I want them to eventually come out of that basement . . .