e find it easy to write what a man should not be, but it is impossible to write what a man should be without finding yourself saying things that cannot be said. To be a man is to take up the way of strength, for better or for worse. Men are not born, they are made. Any boy can be strong, but a man wields strength for the good of society. Manhood is conferred by a culture upon a boy, throughout history.
For me, a good man is a farmer, not a raider. A protector, not a rapist. And this is the paradox of manhood: Men are required to be strong because bad men are also strong. In a literal and metaphorical sense, there have always been Vikings, and thus a farmer who wants to keep his land must always defend it. And this has always fallen to men, who are both stronger than women and more biologically disposable.
But violence is a taint. It leaks from a man as anger, and a failure to be vulnerable. A man who has fought, literally and figuratively, can have a hard time laying down his weapons. Men make other men fear to be weak, usually. Bullies. It can be hard to want to be weak, ever, even in the bedroom.
While I do find that many I meet are lacking in strength, I find that it is not the cultivation of strength that I lack, but in the cultivation of gentleness.
As a young man, I wanted to be a hero, like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, the dispossesed king on a quest to save the world from evil. But as I grew older, I took up the warrior’s work of nonviolent civil disobedience, and broke the law to build a more just world, spending time in fedaral prison. There is a power in refusal to give way to violence, even unto death itself, that is at the core of nonviolent resistance.
Anne Dufourmantelle puts it like this,
As I get older, and I have become a father, I want to move toward the gentleness that helps us to cultivate the soil, that makes good things grow. J.D. Crossan wrote a book on the Lord’s Prayer, and he argues that a better translation of God “the father” is God the householder. God is the householder of the universe. In this way we can see God as a gardener who works for the wellbeing of all those that are in God’s domain.
I began writing here to bring in Leo Strauss’ work, which talks about how writers under persecution always manage to sneak their opinions past the censors by putting their best thoughts down as a kind of devil’s advocate position, and then weakly condemning it. In this way, the perceptive future reader finds the most elegant commentaries in the mouths of the condemned, while the censor, always a stupid ideologue, passes the work on by. Strauss’ point is that persecution is largely fruitless because contrary opinions always find a way to be conveyed.
There is a great gentleness in this refusal to submit to the censor’s scythe without directly challenging the censor. I have come to see this kind of quiet victory as manly.
Men with real dicks have families and responsibilities and aren’t interested in Tate-style dick-swinging. We just go about the work of bringing up young men less directly and more as a matter of example. That is, we pass the censor by not making our work public. We gently go about our work.
But there is a lack online. Men who are very online, young gamers, find discussions of masculinity that are focused on becoming an alpha through strength, and very little by those who are not interested in dick-swinging.
Thus, I am writing something that is not woke, that cannot pass the censors, and does not fit the mold of the alpha. I am writing for the young men. I am writing for my dudes out there. I am writing about the strength of gentleness.
Amen.