What does it take to be a real man? A few years ago, a national survey on favourite poetry established that Rudyard Kipling’s stoic creed, “If”, was Britain’s best-loved poem, so it would seem that many Britons still subscribe to that rather unfashionable standard. In the days when it was written, the moral code “If” encapsulates was still broadly accepted. Men who lived by it would be respected as honest men or gentlemen, according to station, and men who did not were likewise disrespected as blackguards or cads according to station.
Up to the 20th Century, back deep into ancient history, while physical gifts of strength, stamina, agility and deftness have been duly valued, the essence of manhood has been mental; courage, discipline and will to do what is right as a social creature. These were the qualities that built and sustained empires. However, in the Western World of the 21st Century, while the old paradigm may not have been totally eclipsed, a new ethos is in the ascendant.
Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, an inverted notion of manhood as exaggerated boyhood has swept America, and been dispersed beyond its borders by movies and rock and roll. I was a boy once, rather a long time ago now, admittedly, and I cringe at the memory of what awful human beings my friends and I were, and we were nice boys; a great many were even more awful than we were. As the hormones start to flow, boys’ characters deteriorate all the more from their already low base, and as teenagers external disciplines of work or military service used to be imposed to make men of them. But these days it is commonplace for brats to be indulged and empowered as they reach physical and legal manhood, without any transformative process.
We now have a cult of Machismo entrenched in America and thriving elsewhere, which overturns the age-old values. Humans are nothing if not social creatures, descended from millions of generations of monkey troops, but boyish selfishness is now inflated to a cynical and mean spirited individualism in today’s Modern Man. Manners? Courtesy? Yielding to others is for losers, and Modern Man just needs strong elbows. Respect for women? The complexities and paradoxes of relating to women have always been the biggest challenge for men as an aggregate half of humanity, but Modern Man balances instinctive attraction with social contempt, and desperately seeks sexual activity without any liking or care for those expected to provide it. Yet gullible women sometime take the view that only bad men are real men, I suppose because being ruled by testosterone proves that you have some, and reward the Modern Men with offspring, instead of letting their like drift out of the gene pool. Once upon a time, maybe still in less degenerate countries, confessing to serial indecent assaults would be the end of a political career, but if there are enough Modern Men among the voters, it can instead just signal that you are one of their kind, and win you the election. And honesty is perhaps the least valued virtue of all in our New World. Dishonesty in both senses is now seen as the hallmark of a winner; if you can can answer with an untruth then having false information to work with is the other guy’s problem and you have won, and if you can get away with theft by robbery, fraud or extortion, again that is the victim’s problem, and you have won. The indulgent attitude to dishonesty extends to an appetite for absurdly false facts. When Lewis Carroll created the character of the Red Queen, rigorously learning untruths as an exercise in willpower and mind over matter, she was a comic grotesque. A hundred and sixty years later, anyone with a Facebook account only has to scroll a few lines to encounter somebody pushing ridiculous fake stories as proof of how strong minded they are to maintain faith in the face of so much worldly disproof. I despair to see such people looked up to, instead of down on. The way of today’s world is that they are, though, and that needs to change if we are ever to recover from our historically dire situation, poised on the brink of a new Dark Age.
So far, this little essay has kept to a broad view of time and place, but there is a reason I feel that I want to write it, and that anchors it to the time of writing , and a place connected to my own by two thousand miles of water, and extensive cultural and economic links. Donald Trump, the 45th US President, is running for re-election as I write, and he is the very apotheosis of Machismo, all the things I have complained of and more, writ large. Cheat; swindler; draft-dodger; tax-dodger; faithless husband, user of juvenile prostitutes and molester of women; bully; racist; compulsive liar; financially greedy and cynically indifferent to the well-being of the American people he was elected to serve, recklessly irresponsible in all his domestic, international, social, environmental and economic policies, and about half of America loves him for all that.
I think men know Right from Wrong as well now as they ever did. The great change is that the macho Modern Men deliberately choose Wrong, both factually and morally, as they see it as more manly. But bringing this full circle, choosing wrong is not manly by any time-proven traditional measure, it is the way of naughty little boys with a little testosterone starting to flow and no mental maturity to harness it. At some point soon, we are going to have to start seeing these overgrown boys for what they are, and judging them against the old values, or else they are going to bring disaster upon us if we let them
No comments:
Post a Comment