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Are Men Obsolete? (Short answer, no.)

Are Men Obsolete? (Short answer, no.)

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 8:48 am by C. R. Wiley

Are Men Obsolete? (Short answer, no.) 2016-05-25T08:48:11-04:00 C. R. Wiley

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29 Sep 1932 — Construction workers eat their lunches atop a steel beam 800 feet above ground, at the building site of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper

Are men obsolete? In her book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, Hanna Rosin answers that question with an enthusiastic, yes!

She has a point. Our institutions have grown so large and comfortable that the very manliness that brought them into being now seems out of place within them.

Today, traditional masculinity exists almost entirely on the periphery. The men who embody it best patrol distant battlefields, fight fires in the wilderness, tunnel beneath the earth in search of natural resources, or hunt for profit in the jungles of venture capitalism. And since their labors are largely out of view, our dependence on them is generally unacknowledged.

The virtues we do acknowledge are those that flourish in the cubicle farms of large bureaucracies: empathy, loquaciousness, responsiveness, compliance, and good grooming. These do not come readily to some men. The most spirited of our boys are drugged throughout childhood, and when they reach physical maturity many are psychologically damaged.

Modern institutions emasculate. They foster dependency and an illusion of security. But paradoxically the term, “too big to fail” is not a vote of confidence, it is a rallying cry to do whatever is necessary to prevent failure. Typically the strategy is to puff up these institutional soufflés even more and hope that no one does anything jarring.

Traditionally, men have been clear-eyed about failure. People fail, institutions fail, good intentions fail—that’s life. It is because some failure is inevitable that men have traditionally valorized virtues that seem out of place in a cubicle farm: courage, strength, resolve, resilience, indifference to pain, reserve, and so forth.

But there is another side to the modern moment. Even as feminists celebrate the “end of men” there are people who are preparing for the end of the world as we know it. These “preppers” are stocking up on canned food and ammo.

The struggle to survive is something that traditional masculinity was made for. That’s why some men are drawn to prepping, leaving one to wonder if some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy may be at work. But generally these men give little thought to how people will live together after an apocalypse, and almost no thought is given as to how a change in our social order might even prevent one.

So, it looks as though we are left with two choices—either we do whatever we can to keep the institutions that are too big to fail from failing, or we heed the prophets and prepare for the end.

But there is a third way and that, in part, is what this book is for. That third way both recovers traditional masculinity and revitalizes small, local institutions. It is the way of the house builder.

House building is not a new art—men have raised houses from the beginning; but in the past the art was guided more by intuition and example than by precept. But we don’t trust our intuitions these days, and good examples are rare.

It may surprise the reader to learn that the house I am speaking of is invisible. It is spiritual in nature. But this is not another book on the psychology of family life with the attendant concern for emotional warmth. This book is concerned with the economic and political functions of households—those hard surfaces that shelter the tender inner-workings of family life. They are surfaces that have been peeled away by the modern world and given to other institutions in our society. Historically those were the surfaces that interested men and kept them at home. When those surfaces softened, or disappeared, men either softened or disappeared too.

So this book recalls the old pater familias. A man serves his house by enforcing boundaries, establishing justice, acquiring productive property, and preparing his successor.

(This is adapted from the original book proposal that secured the contract to write, Man of the House. For more posts on this theme, just search Glory Seed for the category “household political economy”. You can also refer to the tab above.)

Household Political Economy

Masculinity

Prepping

The End of Men

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Books by C. R. Wiley

The Purloined Boy (The Weirdling Cycle #1)

C. R. Wiley

Man of the House: A Handbook for Building a Shelter That Will Last in a World That Is Falling Apart

C. R. Wiley