This from Prof. Deneen is an important read. In a democratic society where honor isn't the currency of the realm -- no titles, no landed aristocracy, no centuries-old bloodlines -- the 'manly virtues' nonetheless persist, at least for a while, and maybe, as urges, forever in the genes of males. Squeezing away a man's desire to judge himself worthy by proving his manliness competitively is a task suited only for the most despotic of regimes. But let's face it. If there's one lesson of this democratic age it's that competition in business doesn't hack it. Men have always needed to head families, generally speaking, to live with themselves, to quench the stirrings of manly necessity. I don't buy the idea that in the 'state of nature' there would be nothing but prowling, deadbeat bachelors. There would be many, but they would be miserable, and they would kill one another off. The patriarchs would be far saner, far more humane, and far more well-loved. And they, not the prowlers, would gain the upper hand in judging manly virtue.
Still, in aristocratic Europe part and parcel of that judgment was the lionization of politics as the realm of manly excellence. Indeed part of this reason was to preserve a collection of successfully established families from the ravages of prowling losers radicalized into violence by their failure to become good fathers. But in a democratic age this has long since happened (though the interplay of radical loserhood and terrorism bears notice). At any rate neither politics nor military life is the crucible of manly virtue for most male citizens as once it was. Nor should it be: presumably commodious living increases for all when the army isn't a constant necessity of everyday life. And representative government, though it is a bit of a lie as far as political liberty is concerned, gives us great advantages, as Constant explained, in enjoying civic liberty.
So where does manly honor go in the democratic age? A close read of Tocqueville might suggest that only two places really remain: the family itself and religion. Now take a look at America today. Both of these, for reasons Tocqueville himself applauds, are becoming weaker, not stronger, social bonds. And in an era of putatively increasing gender equality, even for the time that a man is a father his fatherliness means much more, and much less, than it used to. And, in an era when Christianity often increasingly shifts away from dogma and creed toward mystical union in loving friendship among individuals, the very terms of religion disincline themselves to pump up the manly virtues. Some attempt to combat this with the slogan Real Men Love Jesus. And there is something to this. But of course it's more complex than the slogan suggests, or the slogan implicates some forms of manly life which might be good but are far different than the sort of manly virtue we once knew.
It's easy to say that this is a good thing -- from either a Christian perspective or a bourgeois libertarian one. But it's harder to say that it doesn't generate certain externalities that maybe we haven't done a good enough job figuring out. Civilians and military folk are more alienated from one another. Illegitimate birth is rampant. And religion and politics continue to blur together in the lip service of pretty profane and mundane individual interests. I could go on and on, but it seems clear to me that if we're going to go down the democratic road on which honor means less and less, we had better contend with the special problem that poses to males, and the side effects we will have to put up with and treat once that problem kicks in on a mass level.
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