In a variation on a current meme for The Baltimore Sun, Andrew L. Yarrow writes:

Thanks to a long-sour economy and radically changed gender roles and expectations, American masculinity has fractured into an "Up in the Air" male and a down-in-the-dumps male. On the one hand, the corporate masculinity of the early 21st century is based largely on a soft power conveyed by money, prestige and education and their corollaries in grooming, clothing and elan. These mostly urban, upper-middle class (to rich) men read their Economists, know their pinot noirs, and speak in politically correct, complete sentences. Working-class, poor, and much middle-class masculinity is defined by declining fortunes and capabilities in school and the labor force (and even the marriage market), feeding gender- and class-based anger. The "angry white man" losers of Bruce Springsteen ballads often react with a politically conservative hypermasculinity, replete with authoritarian and homophobic streaks.[...]

We need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated. Multiple masculine identities are OK, but they can't be ever more molded by an economy of glamorous star running backs and benched, injured second-stringers.

And yet, like Hanna Rosin and others, he can offer no real suggestions as to how we might transform masculinity thus. What sort of second-string, less triumphant, noticeably weaker and obviously less impressive masculine ideal will allow our hearty but aimless working class men to feel good about themselves again? No one can really say, but everyone is certain that average men had better hurry up and get over themselves and stop wanting to be men in the way that their ancestors have always been men since the beginning of recorded history.

One good question to ask when someone like Yarrow asserts the “need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated” is: or else what? 

We need to do this, or else what?

What happens when a huge portion of the male population feels increasingly angry, defeated, dishonored and desperate?

Ask history.

The first part of this piece, here, discussed Hanna Rosin's recent piece for The Atlantic, titled "The End of Men."

Part II: Shop Class as Soulcraft, "Idiot Work" and Other Observations

We are pre-occupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in the light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.

-- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a young man, Matthew B. Crawford developed an interest in repairing automobiles and motorcycles. The son of a physicist, he found that there was a difference between his father’s abstract, theoretical understanding of things and the tacit, real-world knowledge of the experienced gearheads he bumped elbows with at the shop. He worked his way though parts of college as an electrician, and found the work to be both satisfying and mentally engaging.

After picking up a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, he took his place as a “knowledge worker,” writing abstracts-by-formula for a company that indexed scholarly articles. His more esteemed job paid less, and was somehow less mentally engaging. The work lacked integrity, because in his words, it “could not be animated by the goods that were intrinsic to it.” His company produced products (abstracts), but the company was owned by a media conglomerate, and those products were merely a set of numbers in that company’s portfolio of holdings. The quality of the abstract itself didn’t matter; it didn’t really even matter if he understood what he was writing about, and the quantity of abstracts demanded guaranteed that even a smart guy like Crawford could never really be invested in what he was doing. It was busy work, and it encouraged a kind of lackadaisical attitude among his co-workers. One fellow confessed to him that he was doing heroin on the job.

Crawford eventually went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. He took a high paying job at a Washington, D.C. think tank, and was tasked with coming up with scholarly-sounding arguments that “put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” Any honest person with a substantial vocabulary and an aptitude for fancy writing will tell you that it is easier to come up with dazzling bullshit than it is to actually think. (See also: “the art world”)

After five months at the think tank, Crawford quit and opened up his own motorcycle repair shop. An education in the “liberal” arts didn’t lead to anything as freeing as being a man who is directly accountable for the quality of his own work, solving the kinds of problems that can’t simply be talked away. A motorcycle either runs properly or it doesn’t. You end up with the satisfaction of actually having fixed something and the feeling that you earned your fee, or you to take responsibility for your inability to fix it and make it right with the customer.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how work, beginning with manufacturing work but extending to today’s “knowledge work,” has been degraded by a separation between thinking and doing. He offers the example of a nineteenth century wheelwright, whose craft demanded that he know how to select trees and when to fell them, and whose skillfulness and ingenuity was tested by the unique characteristics of each piece of wood. The work was holistic; as he did the work, he had to think about the end product. There was a sense of individual agency in the work, and each wheel he completed was proof of the quality of his labor -- something he could be proud of. However, when the individual craftsman was replaced by factory assembly line, the work could no longer be holistic. The work of one man was separated into processes to be performed by many men, interchangeably. A series of steps that were once challenging and engaging became repetitive drudgery, the performance of a process. The expert, personal, tacit knowledge of the craftsman was replaced, often inadequately, by the documentation of his “process,” and the understanding of the whole was concentrated into the hands of a few who in most cases didn’t actually do the work and understood it only in the abstract. The systemizing of work into process has become the norm, and it applies to white collar work as well.

Under Discussion: WAR, by Sebastian Junger

In WAR, Sebastian Junger notes that while pure objectivity is hard enough to maintain while covering a city council meeting -- let alone in the middle of a war -- he committed himself to writing “honestly” about the American soldiers he lived (and very nearly died) with as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger gives a raw, real, gripping and insightful account of life and death in “The Valley,” but in WAR he never comes across as pretentious, preachy or even particularly political. Instead, Junger aims to get across what it feels like to be a man at war in a place where firefights often happen several times a day.

It is common to see soldiers portrayed as “victims” of war. Even as politicians and the media mechanically display a reverence for combat veterans and speak vaguely about “heroism” and “personal sacrifice,” it is often clear that many are uncomfortable with the idea that there are men who willingly kill for a living. Junger’s take on it is that they kill to keep on living, to stop someone from killing them. But back home many people speak of war as if it is something terrible that happened to soldiers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Junger refreshingly admits that “war is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.” Like Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker (2008), a lot of men apparently end up missing combat when they are sent home.

A new study from the Masculine Pathology Department of the University of British Columbia has found, as hoped, that traditional “stoic warrior” ideals associated with masculinity contribute to a male suicide rate that is often as much as three times higher than the female suicide rate. Men who are “suffering from depression” appear to be less likely to ask for help than their female counterparts. However, John Ogrodniczuk, who is seeking publicity for the study, offered that men who “had a strong commitment to their families” and who envisioned themselves as protectors and providers were less likely to commit suicide. The positive spin seems to be that those who are trying to steer a depressed man away from suicide should focus on the “protector and provider” ideal -- but it should be noted that this masculine role is hateful to feminists and, according to Hanna Rosin’s recent report, fewer and fewer men will be their family’s “provider.” So that could prove a thorny route.

Men’s rights advocates often use the higher male suicide rate to gain favor with fence sitters who are sympathetic to pleas framed as public health concerns. The coalition currently pushing for academic “male studies” programs (to replace the expressly feminist “men’s studies” programs) cite male suicide rates as a major concern.

If suicide is always bad for society, and “choosing life” is always better for society, then suicide should always be discouraged. But is that really the case?

This essay, invoking knightly virtue, the Fall of the Roman Empire and the tale of Parzival from Tom Hoffman at The American Thinker should be of interest to readers of Virtus.

When Masculine Virtues Go Out of Fashion

The culture war begun in the sixties has, in large part, been won by the left. Nowhere is this clearer than in the feminization of men. The virtues of manhood which had been extolled and celebrated throughout the middle ages right up to the 1950s have been completely expunged from academia and pop culture. The baby boom generation was the last to be taught the values of rugged individualism, risk-taking, courage, bravery, loyalty, and reverence for tradition. John Wayne epitomized the rugged individual who was committed to fighting "the bad guy," but he was only one of a whole host of competing figures cut out of the same cloth. What happened?

Read the rest at The American Thinker.

 

Meanwhile, the left debates whether or not it should "explode" masculinity.Just in case you thought for a moment that Hoffman took it over-the-top.

Washington City Paper - Sexist Comments of the Week: Exploding Masculinity Edition

Also, Carrie Lukas notes that feminism is no longer about equality (golf clap) at National Review Online.

Under Discussion: Geoffroi de Charny's Book of Chivalry

A Western Hagakure

The Hagakure is a collection of commentaries on the Way of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, recorded between 1709 and 1716. Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a samurai during a period of peace who was not permitted to commit seppuku following the death of his retainer, Nabeshima Mitsushige. He retired to the mountains and lived as a hermit, frustrated by what he saw as a collapse of Traditional samurai culture into decadence and weakness. The Hagakure is often contradictory and curmudgeonly, and it is characterized by dark humor and what Yukio Mishima, who wrote his own commentary on the book, referred to as a "manly nihilism." Whereas Musashi's Book of Five Rings focuses more on swordsmanship and strategy, the Hagakure is more directly about a Way of living and dying.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a trained samurai, but he never saw combat. Geoffroi de Charny did.

Charny died heroically in battle, still clutching the oriflamme, a sacred banner charged to him in 1355 by Jean II, King of France. The bearer of the oriflamme was to be "the most worthy and adept warrior," a knight "noble in intention and deed, unwavering, virtuous, loyal, adept, and chivalrous." Charny had proved himself thus again and again in battle. When Jean II feared that French knights were becoming decadent, weak and cowardly, he formed the Order of the Star, a group of virtuous knights meant to reform French knighthood. Charny was an exemplary member, and it is likely that he produced The Book of Chivalry at Jean II's request.

The Book of Chivalry is not a manual on tactics or technique, it is a treatise on how to live -- and die -- like a knight. It describes "The Way of the Knight." And, importantly, it was written --likely dictated aloud to a scribe as the Hagakure was -- by an actual knight. Charny was not a monk or a poet or a politician or a novelist or a Victorian or a modern historian. He was a battle tested knight held in high regard as an exemplar of chivalry by his king and his peers. Chivalry was his Way.

Under discussion: Honor: A History by James Bowman (Encounter Books, 2007)

What happened to honor in the West? And without honor -- or at least an honest understanding of it -- are we capable of facing the challenges of the 21^st Century?

In Honor: A History, Bowman places these questions in a political context, as a clash between the old honor culture of the Islamic world and the anti-honor culture of the modern West. In this sense, his question is similar to the one Mark Steyn asks in America Alone. If Islam has all the attributes of what Osama Bin Laden famously called "a strong horse," will the pampered and polite social democracies of the West be able to survive its galloping onslaught?

This horse race bookends a rare and worthwhile exploration of the concept of honor itself, which is a confusing topic in the contemporary West where honorable ideals have been discredited as anti-modern, and the word "honor" has been reduced to a mere synonym for neutered, universal, non-hierarchical values like "goodness" or "honesty" or "integrity." The bumper sticker banality "honor diversity" renders the word honor a substitute for the verbs "value" or "esteem." While you can certainly follow the dilution of honor's meaning here, this is a world apart from a word once closely connected to glory won in battle.

I recently took part in a "males only" workshop at a local private high school. It was an unlikely opportunity for an advocate of traditional masculine ideals, especially given the fact that the workshop was part of this fairly liberal school's yearly "Diversity Conference." I was thankful for the chance to get across some countering viewpoints. I shared the floor with a veteran leader of men's groups, and I knew we had different aims from the get-go, but I had the first hour.

To begin, I played the guys my favorite scene from The Outlaw Josey Wales -- the part where Wales rides up to the Comanche chief Ten Bears and bargains for peace.

There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see. And so, there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.

There is iron in your words of death.

This is how civilization happened.

Agreements between men, backed by the threat of violence.

This is how men made this world.

On Sam Sheridan's The Fighter's Mind

If you want to study the engine of masculinity -- if you want to know what really drives men -- don't start at the junkyard. Yet, that's too often exactly where people who study men start. It's not that you can't learn anything from the rusted out, fragmented husk of a broken man, but it's always going to tell you a story about "what went wrong." You're not going to understand men if you only talk to the men who are failing, who are in therapy, who are angry at men, who aren't making it. And you aren't really getting the whole picture by crossing your legs, sliding your glasses down your nose and interviewing young men who are still figuring things out, all hopped up on testosterone, passionately reciting their manly mantras. You don't go to the student for enlightenment. You go to the teacher. You go to the man on the mountain. If you want to understand men, talk to the men who are good at being men. Talk to the men who other men worship. Talk to their heroes. Figure out how their engines run, and why they run so damn well.

Any honest, serious attempt to understand men should include a survey of sports writing and biographies of athletes -- the kind of men who men choose, organically and of their own free will, to put on pedestals. Sam Sheridan's The Fighter's Mind is as good a place as any to start, though to get your bearings I'd recommend reading his 2007 book A Fighter's Heart first. His running, informal bibliography found throughout the books should round out a solid reading list.