The Lost Boys
On manhood and friendship.
The problem with manhood is that it’s a little like fight club: the first rule is that talking about it is kind of unmanly. But here I go talking about it anyway, because the second rule of manhood is not worrying how manly you look to strangers on the internet.
I’m talking about it because everyone seems to be doing so right now. The chattering classes have recently discovered something that was obvious to most of us for years: the war on “toxic masculinity” has not achieved its stated objective. Men have not repented of their aspirations to strength and dominance; they have not relinquished their admiration for daredevils or their fixation on physical courage.
Instead, many of them have resolved to hunt even more aggressively after manhood in the rawest form they can find, to steel themselves even more vigorously in the mold of bygone heroes. They feel disparaged and discouraged in their pursuit of this goal, which only makes them want it more—this, of course, is the third rule of manhood.
I have a low estimation of men like Andrew Tate, but I can see clearly what he offers: a model of strength unleashed and manhood let loose with a vengeance. Legend tells of a time before the days of Beowulf when the spear-Danes found themselves lost without a good king. They were aldorlease / lange hwile: “leaderless a long while.” The men who look to Andrew Tate for guidance have been leaderless a long while.
So of course they are ready to fall for a pimp and a scoundrel. They are ready to gather under any banner other than the pride flag, any standard painted with the colors of adventure that have been drained out of their world. They are depressed and directionless. They are angry and tempted to despair. Above all, they are lonely.
And this is the secret that is hardest to talk about. The satisfaction of manly endeavor is a satisfaction of camaraderie. People like Hillary Clinton, who have now taken to wringing their hands over the isolation of the American male, are exactly the sort of people who despise the males in question for wanting to do manly things with other men. Clinton writes with dismay in the Atlantic about “the vociferous backlash against social progress.” I wonder what on earth she expected.
Since remorseless hectoring is what created this state of the affairs in the first place, it is unlikely to be fixed by hectoring in the opposite direction: “alright men, start doing wholesome things together!” Nothing could be less likely to restore the bonds among us. Remember the first rule of manliness: you’re not supposed to go around talking about it all the time.
There is a reason for that. Men connect with one another obliquely, out of the corner of each other’s eyes at first, in shared love of some third thing. It’s an Aristotelian observation, carried forward by Cicero, that the noblest men become friends because they love the good, in one another. You don’t walk up to a guy at the gym and say “hey, let’s be friends.” You walk up to him and say “hey, how the hell did you get your traps so big?”
What this creates is a mentorship in infancy. It feels awkward to initiate, but the irony is that guys love nothing more than to hear that you admire their achievements and to be asked how they accomplished them. You are almost guaranteed to get a micro-lecture in enthusiastic detail from someone who is now deeply invested in your success.
When directed at women, this behavior has been given a very ugly name: mansplaining. As if it were a display of arrogance. It is not. It is an act of love. Between men it conceals the flicker of an unspoken affection. For all the bravado going on outwardly, there is something shy and tender moving underneath.
Look straight at it and it’s likely to fall still. But let it be and time will favor it. With enough patience the roles will eventually switch: today I coach you on the bench press, tomorrow you help me build my business. Any good male friendship will pass instruction back and forth as in a dance, like two guests at a restaurant who lose track of whose turn it is to pay the bill—because between them, there are no debts.
If we are lucky, our first experience of this relationship is one we enter into at birth: it is the one we form with our fathers. From our fathers, if we’re lucky, we learn to submit to instruction. To trust in leadership. To identify correction with devotion. A man with a good father will know by instinct that any other man who tries sincerely to teach him something is on his side.
Since that is the model from which men learn the art of loving manfully, it is perhaps no accident that in Andrew Tate we are looking at a man neglected and abandoned by his father. It’s almost too painful to name this, but we have to: at a level deeper than we like to touch, the crisis of masculinity is a crisis of fatherless boys.
No one can claim to care seriously about men’s virtue who doesn’t take this seriously, who tries to trespass on the sacredness of fatherhood by undervaluing it or wishing it away. And sacredness is what it is, since the father of fathers is the one that everybody misses most. We are all of us wandering sons.
There is a higher and a truer kind of manhood than the one that has emerged in wounded rage to bury its pain with savagery. There is a kind of manhood that finds its expression in chivalry too, and in nobility, and gentleness among the innocent.
But it is a kind of manhood that men must learn from other men—if not from their fathers, then from their true friends. We will recover it if we can bear to honor it. Can we?
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer