Neal's Workshop

Below is from an email exchange I had regarding an opinion piece by Rod Dreher titled What child-men need is some tradition. You can read it in its entirety here though the main points have all been included below. Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Con" blog is here.

I have a number of thoughts about Dreher's op-ed on "child-men".  I can't recall where, but I had read this a few days ago, so I've had some time for his thoughts to fester.  As I'm wont to do, I'm going to Dreher's points by quoting them piecemeal.

The student asked a question - What is an artist? - for which his culture no longer provided an authoritative answer. But if you ask a far more important question - What is a man? - the culture comes up equally short, and for the same reason.

To be sure, the definition of manhood is culture-bound and has been talked about since time immemorial. The first-century Roman teacher Quintillian warned against spoiling boys. "If the child crawls on purple," the tutor wrote, referencing the imperial color, "what will he not desire when he comes to manhood?"

Dreher repeatedly speaks of "culture", "community", "tradition" and "authority" throughout his article.  What I find curious is Dreher's appeal to culture and authority as sources for answers to fundamental questions.  Of course, culture is an incredibly ambiguous word -- what is culture but the sum total of paradigms from some defined group of people?  And which culture are we to look to for answers?  Is it the culture of Americans in total?  The culture of moderate southern Baptists?  What about the culture of black muslims?  Or liberal northerners?  It's a tough problem to appeal to culture for answers because culture is as varying as there are individuals. 

Faced with such a dilemma of picking any one culture (To say nothing of defining one), Dreher is forced to revert to "authority" for answers.  And though I'll harp on this later, Dreher's entire article is an appeal to the authority of tradition or conservatism.

Here, Dreher cites an important question, "What is a man?"  He then indicts the current culture (Which I'll assume is some majority-American culture though I can only guess) as having no "authoritative answer".  Only then does he note, "the definition of manhood is culture-bound and has been talked about since time immemorial".  To Dreher: what is the "authoritative answer" to a question that has been asked for centuries?

Today's child-men have been formed by a culture that has lost - or, rather, thrown away – a relatively fixed standard of manhood. It used to be that virtue was the measure of a man. Was a man just? Was he brave (and not necessarily in terms of physical courage)? Was he honorable in his dealings with those weaker than he? Did he respect women? Did he believe in something higher than himself? Did he submit to the concepts of duty and respect?

It's not that all men, or even most, lived by this general code. It's that they recognized that they would be judged by it, and judged themselves by it.

Dreher appeals to virtue, as defined by some pre-Boomer generation (I think).  He cites as virtuous: justice, bravery, honor, respect, and of course, submission to authority.  He says that even those who didn't live by this code knew that they would be judged by it.

And it sounds lovely.  I've heard similar appeals to times-past made many times and I always get a little misty-eyed with their innate romanticism.  I've been guilty of making the similar appeals. It's easy to romanticize the past -- we all do it whether the past means a year or decades (Even when we weren't alive to experience those times). 

So I question how Dreher's knowledge of concepts regarding manhood as they were 70 years ago.  I think Dreher's depiction of man is probably more an extension of his own beliefs regarding manhood. To supporting these beliefs, the entire piece works:

[Man defined by his virtues, as defined by others is] mostly gone, replaced by a therapeutic model in which the autonomous self is its own judge, and personal satisfaction is the measure of a life well lived. For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority. As social critic Philip Rieff foresaw at the dawn of this revolution, the loosening of traditional constraints would make man free, but it would be a liberty fraught with anxiety, even psychological paralysis.

Our email dialogue is diverse in that we each bring different perspectives to the table regarding how we should be judged.  I take exception to Dreher's indictment of the "autonomous self".  For one, I cannot fathom how anyone could be a better judge of my life than me.  According to Dreher, I should recognize and submit to authority; rejecting authority's chains is wrong, foolish, or wicked. 

Why?  And of course I have to ask that -- Why?!?  At the base of an autonomous paradigm is the question, "why?"  Am I wrong to ask always the question, why?  If so, then how could other men, authorities, ever be righteous?  After all, they've asked and answered the question, "Why?"  That's what makes them authorities!

Therein lies the nonsense of Dreher's argument: he believes it right for men to submit to other men, some super-men, the authorities, but wrong for men to act as authorities over their own lives.  This is nefarious poppycock.  Why? Because "it's turtles all the way down", to paraphrase Hawking.  How can you have authority over others but no authority over yourself?

You can't. 

And if nothing smacks more of absurdity its the implicit statement that free men are anxious, psychologically paralyzed beings.  I'll circle back to this shortly.

Dreher goes on, hammering the point home:

Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective
code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority.

Though he starts off suggesting men submit to some "objective code of conduct", which at least implies that men came together to make a determination of right and wrong, he soon replaces that idea with submitting to "some sort of higher authority".  I'm not sure the two are all that different: both require man to put aside his own ability to reason and apply logic and replace it with the decisions of other men.

In this sense, the self could only be understood and realized in relation to one's community and its values.

I can only imagine what Dreher means here, but in the context of his write-up, it comes across as more replacing the self with the hive, the collective, the authority of other men (Indeed, any man but me).

Here is where it gets really interesting.  Dreher starts talking about culture keeping men "in a permanent state of adolescence" -- a "dependency tailor-made for a consumerist economy built on creating and exploiting wants".  Perhaps shockingly, I agree with Dreher here.  However, it seems as though he is actually indicting a highly authoritative culture.  After all, the authorities are the ones who have crammed the consumerist culture down our throats.  We're told to buy, buy, buy!  Indeed, the current economic stimulus plan is an unequivocal directive by authorities to "buy!" 

And what is adolescence but wanting to be free while having no choice but to do as you're told, submit to your parents, teachers and other adults?  Look at our education system.  Teachers speak out of both sides of their mouths.  They tell students they are unique and special snowflakes destined for great things while simultaneously cramming the same subjects down our throats for twelve years.  The choices students are allowed to make are silly choices: weight lifting or spanish 2; physics or biology.  We're shuffled from classroom to classroom taking the same poorly taught subjects year after year (English, Social studies). 

What happens when we finally complete the relay race?  We're told that we're still not ready for assimilation into the world!  No, we need to go to college so we can get jobs.  Yet college is tragically just more of the same authoritative, hoop-jumping hogwash.  Yes, we finally get to pick some of the classes we take for the first time in our lives.  But after four years, we get a degree spits us into some corporate job where the authorities tell us once more that we have no say in our lives, that we should submit graciously to others who have "paid their dues".  Convinced that we just haven't adjusted yet to "the real world" we march on with hopes that it will get better in time.  Only our time to figure life out is running short -- at least, if we want to have famlies of our own.

Then, we wake up one day miserable with our work but driven on by familial responsibilities, completely out of time, having been denied the very essence of existence: the freedom to make our own way.

Dreher is right that something seems wrong with my generation.  And though I think he rightly points the finger at the boomers, his root determination as to the cause of mess couldn't be any more wrong.  It's not a lack of tradition or authority, it's a lack of freedom.  We have been told we know nothing.  We've been told to submit to authorities and to pay our dues.  We've not been told how to reason, philosophize and try to answer the fundamental questions about life -- like "Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is right or wrong?"

The failure of prior generations and generations to come is in binding man.

What is a man? A man is free. A man questions and reasons. From there comes all else.

Authority? It's the anti-man, which is why I reject it and anyone who wishes to exert it over me without hesitation or apology.