“What I find, when I ask [what it means to be a good man] of men, is words like honor, integrity, doing the right thing, standing up for the little guy.” All of which are crucially different, in Kimmel’s mind, from the words they use to describe “being a man”—words like to win, get laid, get rich."...Those fraternity charters are by and large artifacts of 19th century college culture. This model of what it means to be a gentleman was self-consciously drawn from medieval sources, but the extraction was troubled by this very question. The part the 19th century proper gentleman admired was the honor, the courtesy to ladies, the moral uprightness (which I notice our left-leaning gentleman has substituted with 'standing up for the little guy'; but since it was an explicitly Christian sort of moral uprightness that the Victorians wanted, the substitution is not ridiculous).
By way of contrast, he says that he might very well be able to persuade fraternity members to show respect for women by urging them to “live up to the ideals you yourself profess in your charter.” He quiets down a little. “I think I can sell that.”
What the knights and their ladies themselves wanted, if you go back and read the Medievals directly, was first and foremost prowess. The quest to win is not severable from the quest to be a good man.
The Medievals wanted the other things too. Honor in doing one's duty was the very foundation of their civilization, which was much more fragile than ours if people lied or cheated. Keeping one's word was deeply important. Lancelot, in the long vulgate prose stories from Middle French, is so willing to be obedient to ladies that he allows himself to be kept in prison without resistance for a long time at the orders of a woman. She values his prowess, though, recognizing that it is somehow at the core of his being a good man and a good knight: when battles or tournaments occur, she paroles him to go and fight. In return, he meekly returns to resume his imprisonment after his victories.
What they were able to do, which we have not so far been able to do, is to resolve the conflict between 'developing and proving prowess' and 'being nice to the little guy and to ladies.' Those things are definitely in conflict -- one is about pursuing your own interests, and the other about relinquishing some of what your power could have claimed in order that others may be happier. Still, this conflict is not necessarily a logical contradiction.
If you want this to work, you have to be smarter than the Victorians, and as smart as that Medieval lady. If you try to force them not to win, to drive out this ethic of prowess and competition with one another, you will fail. They will not buy that at any price. This is too much at the essence of manhood.
They can strive mightily in war and competition, and yet gently in service to the lady who respects and honors them for their striving. You should want them to strive for prowess and for victory, as a precondition and training for striving for moral uprightness and kindness. Institutions, faiths, civilizations can make headway on this ground if they do not make the mistake of trying to turn this into a bloodless ethic. It is the ethic of blooded men.
13 comments:
I don't think it's so much about teaching frat boys to become gentlemen as it is simply to teach them how to be decent men, period.
The irony here is that most of them already know much of this, just as most young women know how to behave like decent women. It's just that peer pressure and the normal college rebellion shtick place a lot of pressure on both young men and women to do foolish things: to show "daring" or rebel against what they're taught by their parents.
Sadly, there's an element of traditional "masculine culture" (not universally shared) that encourages boys to show daring by dominating weaker people and treating them badly. That same element exists in female culture (the "mean girls" clique thing). But with young men, there's also this really disturbing conflation of sex with a deliberate attitude of callousness and even a certain degree of hostility/contempt towards women. I never ran into that IRL until I went to college. I don't know whether it's a toxic side effect of having raging hormones (maybe resenting women you can't have?) or where it comes from, but I have seen guys egg or shame each other into acting like complete jerks. I'm sure some groups of girls do the same - I just refused to hang out with morons.
This is probably where frats get a bad name. They don't cause the phenomenon, but do create an atmosphere that does very little to restrain it now that schools have unwisely abandoned the 'in loco parentis' view of their role in student life.
My Dad's frat had adults living there, and though there was boozing there were also rules. A lot of modern frats have no adult supervision/presence. That strikes me as dumb.
My nephew's frat appears to have been quite good for him on the whole. He was already a good kid - very responsible and honorable. I'm not anti-frat (nor do I think frats cause these problems). But we're expecting a lot from kids to give them total freedom from adult influence, total access to booze and drugs, and then expect adult behavior.
I don't have any relationship with frats at all. My father was, he tells me, in an agricultural frat briefly; it was better than the dorms (which were single-sex and had supervised visiting hours), but he preferred on the whole to get married and take up house with a woman.
So that worked out well for me.
On the other hand, I think this guy is onto something. Just because this same conflict was on display a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, as six hundred years or seven hundred years ago, it strikes me as something with a real root.
You can resolve this tension between prowess/winning and gentleness/courtesy, but not without acknowledging it. What the lady in the Medieval story does right is that she recognizes that -- somehow -- it is the same quality in Lancelot that makes him need to compete vigorously against other knights that drives him to keep his word to her at any cost to himself. If you kept him from proving himself against them, he'd never have such self-respect as to value keeping his word over the pain of months in prison.
Somehow, it's the same quality, though they seem like they are two qualities in tension.
" It's just that peer pressure and the normal college rebellion shtick place a lot of pressure on both young men and women to do foolish things: to show "daring" or rebel against what they're taught by their parents."
Yes- and this is precisely why Grim is correct- They do these things because they've not recognized the proper way to direct this urge to become 'courageous' and so fall to being brash. It manifests differently in men and women, but the need is present in both- Men need the challenge- the contest and the honor that bestows so that there is honor to protect by being a gentleman. If one has never shown prowess (as Grim is putting it), he has no honor to speak of worth protecting in this way- at least to the young man trying to find his way to make a mark on the world.
I'll add that lack of motivation in young men can also open doors to bad behaviors for similar reasons.
But we're expecting a lot from kids to give them total freedom from adult influence, total access to booze and drugs, and then expect adult behavior.
"Kids" of the same age were expected to storm Tarawa and Normandy and so forth. Meh. You're making excuses for baby-boomer culture.
Treat them like adults, they'll act like adults.
I'm trying to remember if I've ever met a fraternity member. I haven't, to my knowledge. I'm afraid I get my ideas about them mostly out of fiction.
""Kids" of the same age were expected to storm Tarawa and Normandy and so forth. Meh. You're making excuses for baby-boomer culture."
And they had Sergeants and Captains to train, guide and lead them. It's not that they aren't capable at that age, it's just that they could use some of the wisdom of age to temper their energies.
"Kids" of the same age were expected to storm Tarawa and Normandy and so forth. Meh. You're making excuses for baby-boomer culture.
What Douglas said :p There's a big difference between understanding how something came to be, and excusing it.
Treat them like adults, they'll act like adults.
I think this is true, at least to some extent, though teens don't have the same amount of experience (or self control) that adults do. Better to treat them as what they are: almost-adults who have adult desires and appetites, but have not yet acquired adult wisdom/experience. They haven't lived enough yet to have adult-level caution or compassion for others.
This is a big problem in our society - the qualities that cause young people to be more responsible in other cultures have a lot to do with scarcity/necessity. I do agree that if we helped kids less (forced them to be more self-sufficient or starve), a lot of this silliness would go away. But that would be a different world.
Grim, I read Kimmel's book a few years back and thought he was right on the money with over half of what he was arguing. But his was the kind of book I see conservatives railing against as "anti-male" (in my view, it wasn't anti-male at all, as I don't recognize the attitudes he described as essentially masculine so much as they are childish).
I've written about this for years - men's and women's have both positive and destructive aspects. I really despise that whole "anti-male" shtick - it's an identity based straw man designed to make anything a man does beyond criticism (a derivative of the feminist stance that nothing women do can be criticized or somehow, it's misogyny).
When someone starts arguing that no one can criticize their actions without attacking their very identity, it's hard to take them seriously. "You can't say that - I'm black/female/male/Muslim/transgendered Arctic wolverine!" isn't an argument with a lot of meat to it :p
A lot of the things in Japanese high schools made me question just what exactly American culture thinks it is doing to the 18 year old "elf children" here and there.
Basically, it's the ethical vs pragmatic argument in war. If Ghenghis Khan can wipe out entire tribes and thus obtain bloodless surrender and integration of ten more tribes in this fashion, why should he expend blood and morale needlessly to win wars via an inefficient method?
Thus an answer must be found, and if it isn't found, people tend to go with what works, the expedient and pragmatic route. ISIS has a working solution for colleges. Kill all the males, enslave the females, then sell the slaves for profit=win. Anyone that disagrees with that, will be either dead, enslaved, or exiled to America where they can print research papers as a tenured professor.
People who are too weak to take on the tools of Death and fight evil, are also too weak to master and control their own fellows in a social setting. People respect cunning, prowess, and results, even outside of the normal tribal and civilization limits.
The whole pro male movement and feminist movement began due to an inferiority complex, and the desire to beat the stereotype by getting rid of inefficient ways, for males and females. The pro males started off with geeks and other sub culture extremists, preferring to pick up skills to manipulate social outcomes via data crunching and planning. The feminists, in such places as Britain, imported in Japanese judo instructors to learn a SKILL that was necessary at the time to keep their speakers speaking, and not in jail or intimidated or injured. The whole point was self reliance, but it wasn't to make females into warriors or males into sensitive social aristocrats. They were just necessary at the time, because people didn't know any other ways to achieve the result they wanted.
Western culture's focus on freedom will lead to the fall. A better focus would be independence and self defense. To reinforce these concepts, social tests of skill such as tournaments, martial arts or otherwise, would be better suited to glorifying and advertising such trends than social pressure on word of mouth or FB.
Many of America's martial arts tournaments are ego trips for parents and too safe to derive much risk or Will to win.
I really despise that whole "anti-male" shtick - it's an identity based straw man designed to make anything a man does beyond criticism (a derivative of the feminist stance that nothing women do can be criticized or somehow, it's misogyny).
Many Westerners have come to despise war because of how it makes each side take on the traits of the other.
That, however, will not stop the war.
(a derivative of the feminist stance that nothing women do can be criticized or somehow, it's misogyny).
Have you ever asked yourself what happened to the original feminists, the ones that actually did all the work of fighting against stereotypes and limits?
By despising something, you automatically prevent yourself from learning what people are actually fighting for. That can be a dangerous mistake, when the people fighting for something are actual fanatics like ISIS who will do what they say they will do.
WWI caused a similar issue in the West when it caused people to despise glory in war. But that didn't actually stop WWII, if anything it helped it along since so many people thought that despising something was the same as comprehending it.
By despising something, you automatically prevent yourself from learning what people are actually fighting for.
Not so, Ymar. One can despise a tactic while fully understanding and even supporting the goal it is directed towards. I have no problem understanding the various things the "everything is misogyny/misandry" crowd are fighting for. Some of those things I support. Many, I will never support because I believe them to be morally wrong.
I will never support anyone - male or female - who reflexively labels any criticism of their group sexist, regardless of the merits of the criticism. I don't support the goal of blanket, gender-based protection from criticism.
I do support the notion that both female and male nature (IOW, human nature) needs to be channeled positively. That's pretty much the founding tenet of civilization, and I see no misandry or misogyny in that idea.
I cannot think of a single great civilization based on the idea that unrestrained human nature leads to prosperity or freedom.
Back in those days you speak of, men who failed to live up to that code were cut off from the company of men. Indeed, they were also cut off from the company of women, as women did not hesitate to judge harshly and cut off from the company of ladies those women who would keep company with such men.
Now all you have to offer are abstracts.
There remain a few absolutes. There aren't a lot of men left, and I know quite a few of them. We still cast our judgment.
Every man wants respect, but respect has to be earned. Of course, if you deny someone something he wants so badly, there are going to be consequences. You have to be prepared for that. But if you're the right kind of man, you probably are.
That's not abstract. It's a real piece of steel.
To Cassandra,
One can despise a tactic while fully understanding and even supporting the goal it is directed towards.
A tactic is not normally associated with an identity. By recognizing that it is their identity being challenged, not their tactics, you have already recognized this as their religious and cultural nature, not merely a tactic they use, no matter which side they are on.
That is a minor inconsistency, but it leads back to the other issue. People in this conflict don't treat their means as a tactic, they treat it as their ends. You note this, yet you still think it's only a tactic. What if it isn't a tactic?
I will never support anyone - male or female - who reflexively labels any criticism of their group sexist, regardless of the merits of the criticism. I don't support the goal of blanket, gender-based protection from criticism.
What if, instead of it being a means to get their goal, they are following their superior's orders, and what you see as them reflexively reacting to criticism is instead an army obeying its orders to commit atrocities merely for the sake of atrocity?
This is what I mean by not understanding what people are fighting for.
I do support the notion that both female and male nature (IOW, human nature) needs to be channeled positively. That's pretty much the founding tenet of civilization, and I see no misandry or misogyny in that idea.
And if one or more factions in this fight desires victory in war in order to channel that nature negatively, what then? Are we to look at their methods on a case by case basis while ignoring their ultimate goal?
On a different topic, social conformity, I respect the individuals in the past that bypassed social conformity based on their own conscience and judgment. If society wishes to ban someone from existence, that is one thing. Whether humans obey or not, is based on their Sheep quality and their conscience, however.
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