Jack Donovan's 2012 book The Way of Men identifies three of the same foundational virtues of manhood that I decided on back in 2007: power, courage and skill. (Strength, courage and mastery, in his phrasing.) In 2011, I added honor, but as an extra. He makes this, too, his fourth basic requirement. Great minds.
I situated the question for myself in terms of the hunter-gatherer society; he posits the gang as the timeless matrix of men, regardless of societal form. In my brief and scattered blog reflections or his much more well-thought through and articulated book, we are dealing with what the Jungians call the archetype: the psycho-physical blueprint of the masculine, our "primal nature", the one that re-appears whenever times are tough and the veneer of civilization fades.
The hunter-gatherer world has long been superceded by other forms of social organization, so manhood has had to adapt. That's part of why I use the image of a constellation, a recognizable pattern composed of stars of varying intensity, to talk about these adaptations.
In the sedentary and non-nomadic societies in which most men have lived for the last several thousand years, how a man achieves and exhibits strength, bravery, competence and honor must change. There is the issue of the lifecycle: masculinity unfolding in boyhood, youth, young and mature manhood, and in old age. All different. Is he a man of high or low status? Does he live in an urban or a rural culture? Does his primary endowment consist in his strength, or in his courage, or his competence or his honor?
And if he is deficient in one or more of these elements, he can compensate for that by excelling in others: eg, a smallish man of unprepossessing physicality can gain standing by extra pluckiness or by a specially developed and valuable skill. Beowolf fathered no sons but was a virtuoso warrior, so his masculinity remains classical. In high civilizations, solitary or cenobitic celibates who renounce violence and property can still attain a kind of masculine status through metaphorical fatherhood, courageous ascetic struggle, spiritual skill and a code of religious honor. Masculinity has a definition but it is also adaptable. It has to be: both the constellation and the gang require various kinds and levels of manhood. Every male is called to become a man, but a man among men, not the same man.
In any case, the negative backgrounding remains constant: his manhood will be questionable to the extent that he is seen to be weak or afraid or inept or dishonorable. A man is not a boy. Nor is he a woman. Nor God.
And as Donovan insightfully and crucially makes clear: there is a difference between 1. being good at being a man and 2. being a good man. Grace builds on nature, as Aquinas says, but there has to be a nature there to build on in the first place. Archetypes are numinous, not necessarily ethical. Masculine honor is not the same as civilized or religious goodness.
And as Mr D rightly points out, it is men who create civilization and then who find themselves challenged by their own creation precisely as men. Being a good man comes into conflict with being good at being a man. The current virus (cancer? plague? madness?) of feminism, which is so damaging to men, could never come about without men having created the highly civilized conditions for its appearance. And then, inexplicably, assenting to its demands.
One of the virtues of Donovan's gang model is that it easily holds together both the hierarchical and the affiliative energies in a classically masculine way. Each individual male must accomplish the task of become a man, but the context is inherently social. The attainment requires recognition. All gangs have hierarchies, but these are not the enemies of belonging --as women imagine-- but the very structure of male belonging. As my riff on Anthony Stevens goes: men create affiliation through ranking, women create ranking through affiliation.
India divides men up into role-status: priests, warriors, merchants and laborers. Jungians see men as kings, warriors, magicians and lovers. (Where are the merchants and laborers?)
Toward an outline of the kinds of stars in the constellation of the masculine:
I situated the question for myself in terms of the hunter-gatherer society; he posits the gang as the timeless matrix of men, regardless of societal form. In my brief and scattered blog reflections or his much more well-thought through and articulated book, we are dealing with what the Jungians call the archetype: the psycho-physical blueprint of the masculine, our "primal nature", the one that re-appears whenever times are tough and the veneer of civilization fades.
The hunter-gatherer world has long been superceded by other forms of social organization, so manhood has had to adapt. That's part of why I use the image of a constellation, a recognizable pattern composed of stars of varying intensity, to talk about these adaptations.
The Constellation Orion
In the sedentary and non-nomadic societies in which most men have lived for the last several thousand years, how a man achieves and exhibits strength, bravery, competence and honor must change. There is the issue of the lifecycle: masculinity unfolding in boyhood, youth, young and mature manhood, and in old age. All different. Is he a man of high or low status? Does he live in an urban or a rural culture? Does his primary endowment consist in his strength, or in his courage, or his competence or his honor?
And if he is deficient in one or more of these elements, he can compensate for that by excelling in others: eg, a smallish man of unprepossessing physicality can gain standing by extra pluckiness or by a specially developed and valuable skill. Beowolf fathered no sons but was a virtuoso warrior, so his masculinity remains classical. In high civilizations, solitary or cenobitic celibates who renounce violence and property can still attain a kind of masculine status through metaphorical fatherhood, courageous ascetic struggle, spiritual skill and a code of religious honor. Masculinity has a definition but it is also adaptable. It has to be: both the constellation and the gang require various kinds and levels of manhood. Every male is called to become a man, but a man among men, not the same man.
In any case, the negative backgrounding remains constant: his manhood will be questionable to the extent that he is seen to be weak or afraid or inept or dishonorable. A man is not a boy. Nor is he a woman. Nor God.
And as Donovan insightfully and crucially makes clear: there is a difference between 1. being good at being a man and 2. being a good man. Grace builds on nature, as Aquinas says, but there has to be a nature there to build on in the first place. Archetypes are numinous, not necessarily ethical. Masculine honor is not the same as civilized or religious goodness.
And as Mr D rightly points out, it is men who create civilization and then who find themselves challenged by their own creation precisely as men. Being a good man comes into conflict with being good at being a man. The current virus (cancer? plague? madness?) of feminism, which is so damaging to men, could never come about without men having created the highly civilized conditions for its appearance. And then, inexplicably, assenting to its demands.
One of the virtues of Donovan's gang model is that it easily holds together both the hierarchical and the affiliative energies in a classically masculine way. Each individual male must accomplish the task of become a man, but the context is inherently social. The attainment requires recognition. All gangs have hierarchies, but these are not the enemies of belonging --as women imagine-- but the very structure of male belonging. As my riff on Anthony Stevens goes: men create affiliation through ranking, women create ranking through affiliation.
India divides men up into role-status: priests, warriors, merchants and laborers. Jungians see men as kings, warriors, magicians and lovers. (Where are the merchants and laborers?)
Toward an outline of the kinds of stars in the constellation of the masculine:
ELEMENT
|
ROLE
|
sacred
|
shaman, priest, ascetic, healer, magician
|
government
|
king, lord, judge
|
sex &
family |
lover, husband, father, son, brother, grandfather, uncle
|
war
|
warrior, hunter, athlete, strategist
|
food
|
farmer, hunter
|
wealth
|
merchant
|
labor
|
laborer, slave
|
ornament
|
artisan, artist
|
systems
|
scribe, clerk...bureaucrat*
|
culture
|
poet/singer/teller, musician, mentor, teacher, student
|
tools
|
technician
|
humor**
|
trickster, jokester, comedian, jester, fool
|
Anything important missing?
Oct 2014 update: Yes. Friendship. "Male bonding" in buddy, comradeship and friendship is a constant feature of the masculine world.
*As much as we dislike them, they are a quintessentially masculine creation. One thing you cannot blame on women! Yet, without the complex organizing which men create, civilizations would remain at the grass hut stage.
**Humor may seem secondary, but no one who has spent any time with men in groups would deny the crucial role that is played by laughter.
---------
2 comments:
Interesting blogging. ... A quibble from Machiavelli and Nietzsche, and the Vedas: the rule of priests, thus hier-archy strictly consider'd, is effeminate.
Effeminateness for Machiavelli and Nietzsche is not a matter of mannerisms, or of 'sexual preference for males': Alexander 6 was Machiavelli's favourite pope.
The objection to hierarchy is that when a man of virtù arrives at power, he is a senex. Alexander 6 had only a few years in which to begin reduce the church to order'dness. When Cesare Borgia's father died, Cesare was bereft of counsel and made fatal mistakes.
But a young man of virtù can rise quickly through the ranks of the army. Many Roman generals won their greatest victories when most-young ("govanissimi"?).
No doubt women don't construct hierarchy, and thus one may argufy that hierarchy is manly. But Machiavelli and Nietzsche remark that woman -- Fortuna, Truth etc -- prefer vigorous treatment by young men rather than the ministrations of senility (dixit Strauss) of hierarchy's power politics that religiously dominates the army (and can even claim to be opposed to violence: they blame evil karma on the army and pose as mere interpreters, inner-path liberators etc).
ZIlch has gone right since the Levites prefer'd to rule their conquer'd brothers by priestliness, rather than by force of arms. They establish'd Moses' Torah by force of arms, but evidently the reward they demanded was to rule as priests -- hierarchy rather than manliness.
Jung's list of employment slots in civilization -- everything from labourers to sorcerers to bureaucrats -- does not satisfy the question of manliness.
Obviously one may be an unmanly bureaucrat or poet or musician or even an unmanly general (caution rather than real phronésis; and an inability for courage). Homeric Greeks would have found Louis 14, the sun king, ridiculously effeminate.
One could imagine reserving stenography to men -- as was formerly so -- but this restriction would not establish that typists are manly.
I suppose the better question is to ask how manliness is compatible with civilization or Kultur, in which Nietzsche saw only weakening, taming; and in which even Rousseau, following Machiavelli, saw only corruption.
"Power makes stupid," observes Nietzsche.
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