Barbarians, Wimps, Marines

[firstsgtmike]

Wimps and Barbarians
By Terrence O. Moore


This essay appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2003/moore.html

(THROUGH EDITING, I HAVE REDUCED IT'S SIZE BY 50%. Click on the above URL to read the complete text.)

For more than a decade I have been in a position to see young men in the making. As a Marine, college professor, and now principal of a K-12 charter school, I have deliberately tried to figure out whether the nation through its most important institutions of moral instruction—its families and schools—is turning boys into responsible young men.

Young women, always the natural judges of the male character, say emphatically "No." They say matter-of-factly that the males around them do not know how to act like either men or gentlemen. It appears to them that, except for a few lucky members of their sex, most women today must choose between males who are whiny, incapable of making decisions, and in general of "acting like men," or those who treat women roughly and are unreliable, unmannerly, and usually stupid.

The young men, for their part, are not a little embarrassed when they hear these charges but can't wholly deny them. Indeed, when asked the simple question, "When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?" they are typically speechless and somewhat ashamed.

Teachers cannot become their students' parents, but they can give direction to those who have ears to hear. Two lessons are essential.

First, a clear challenge must be issued to young males urging them to become the men their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were.

Second, a new generation of scholars must tell the tale of how men used to become men and act manfully, and how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness.

Manhood is not simply a matter of being male and reaching a certain age.

These are acts of nature; manhood is a sustained act of character.

Too often among today's young males, the extremes seem to predominate. One extreme suffers from an excess of manliness, or from misdirected and unrefined manly energies. The other suffers from a lack of manliness, a total want of manly spirit.

Call them barbarians and wimps. So prevalent are these two errant types that the prescription for what ails our young males might be reduced to two simple injunctions: Don't be a barbarian. Don't be a wimp. What is left, ceteris paribus, will be a man.

Today's barbarians are not hard to find. Like the barbarians of old, the new ones wander about in great packs. You can recognize them by their dress, their speech, their amusements, their manners, and their treatment of women. You will know them right away by their distinctive headgear.

They wear baseball caps everywhere they go and in every situation: in class, at the table, indoors, outdoors, while taking a test, while watching a movie, while on a date. They wear these caps frontward, backward, and sideways. They will wear them in church and with suits, if ever a barbarian puts on a suit. Part security blanket, part good-luck charm, these distinctive head coverings unite each barbarian with the rest of the vast barbaric horde.

Recognizing other barbarians by their ball caps, one barbarian can enter into a verbal exchange with another anywhere: in a men's room, at an airport, in a movie theater. This exchange, which never quite reaches the level of conversation, might begin with, "Hey, what up?" A traditional response: "Dude!" The enlightening colloquy can go on for hours at increasingly high volumes. "You know, you know!" "What I'm sayin'!" "No way, man!" "What the f---!" "You da man!" "Cool!" "Phat!" "Awesome!" And so on.

Barbarians do not use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding. Such speech as they employ serves mainly to elicit in others audible reactions to a few sensual events: football, sex, hard rock, the latest barbarian movie, sex, football. In the barbarian universe, Buckleyesque vocabularies are not required.

Today's barbarians act as though they never leave the playing field or the gym. They wear the same clothes, speak the same language (just as loudly), spit and scratch themselves just as much, whether on the field or off. More properly, nothing off the field matters to them, except perhaps sex, which they also treat as a game, and alcohol. As a result, they live almost a divided life. On the field, they can be serious, competitive, eager, and disciplined. Off the field, they are lazy, careless, disorganized, and disaffected. Such a divided life is the hallmark of barbarism.

Barbarians, strictly speaking, have no manners. Proper speech and posture and other signs of respect helped to bring him into the community of civilized human beings. No longer.

At the other extreme from true manliness is the wimp.

If barbarians suffer from a misdirected manliness, wimps suffer from a want of manly spirit altogether. They lack what the ancient Greeks called thumos, the part of the soul that contains the assertive passions: pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, anger. Thumos compels a man to defend proximate goods: himself, his honor, his lady, his country; as well as universal goods: truth, beauty, goodness, justice. Without thumotic men to combat the cruel, the malevolent, and the unjust, goodness and honor hardly have a chance in our precarious world.

But two conditions must be present for thumos to fulfill its mission. First, the soul must be properly ordered. The soul is composed of reason and appetites. Reason has the capacity to discern right from wrong, but it lacks the strength to act. Appetites, while necessary to keep the body healthy, pull the individual toward pleasures of a lower order.

The second condition that must be present is a sufficient level of thumos to enable the man to rise to the defense of honor or goodness when required. Modern education and culture, however, have conspired to turn modern males into what C. S. Lewis called "men without chests," that is, wimps. The chest of the wimp has atrophied from want of early training. The wimp is therefore unable to live up to his duties as a man:

Wimps make worthless watchdogs. But their failure as watchdogs or guardians has nothing to do with size or physique. My father used to tell me when I was growing up, "It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog" that matters. Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians. Furthermore, wimps vote. As Aristotle pointed out, to the cowardly, bravery will seem more like rashness and foolhardiness than what it really is. Hence political and social issues that require bravery for their solution elicit only hand-wringing and half-measures from the wimps.

Wimps are always looking for the easy way out.

The wimp is unmanly in other ways, especially when compared to young men in the past. Throughout history men have come of age by preparing for war, going to sea, felling forests, or even mastering Latin and Greek.

The wimp is a perfect consumer. In the largest sense, he consumes the liberties and public treasures his forefathers have passed on to him through their "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," without himself adding anything back to the common stock.

Our civilization cannot be sustained by barbarians or wimps; it needs true men.

A close look at the culture in which boys are raised reveals not only that they are no longer encouraged to become vigorous and responsible men, but also that practically every factor affecting their development is profoundly hostile to the ideals and practices of traditional manhood and the painstaking steps necessary to attain it.

The demanding regime of physical and moral instruction that used to turn boys into men and the larger cultural forces that supported that instruction have been systematically dismantled by a culture that ostensibly enables all individuals but in reality disables men.

Easy divorce has also had devastating moral and psychological effects on boys. Half of American boys growing up do not live with their natural fathers. The sons of single mothers lack strong men to usher them into the world of responsible, adult manhood.

Divorce, whether in reality or in the acrimonious rhetoric of the mother, impresses upon the boy an image of the father, and therefore of all men, as being irresponsible, deceitful, immature, and often hateful or abusive towards women. For sons, the divided loyalties occasioned by divorce actually create profound doubts about their own masculinity. As the boy approaches manhood, he is plagued by subconscious questions which have no immediate resolution: "Will I be like Dad?" "Do I want to be like Dad?" "What is a man supposed to do?"

Continued

[firstsgtmike]

Even when boys live with fathers, or when divorced mothers remarry, the erstwhile "man of the house" has diminished considerably in stature. The traditional father was the sole breadwinner, the chief disciplinarian, and the figure who sat at the head of the table and spoke with authority on matters of politics, economics, and religion. Loving his children, he did not spare the rod. A new breed of parent (fathers are hardly to be distinguished from mothers) has arrived on the scene.

The new parent has invented a new way of disciplining sons, adhering firmly to the principles of "self-esteem." The boy is never wrong, is never spanked, and is never made to feel ashamed. Postmodern parents believe, at least until it is too late, that raising children must be easy since the nature of children is basically good. I had no idea how entrenched these post-Spockian ideas were until I became a school principal and began hearing how parents talk about correcting their children.

The word "punishment" no longer exists in the parental lexicon; it has been replaced by "consequences." Boys are not made to feel ashamed for bad behavior; they must reconsider their "poor choices." Least of all will parents spank their sons; if you suggest that they should, they look at you in horror, for after all, "violence only breeds violence." Of course, this softer form of discipline does not really work. When "time-outs" and restricted use of the internet prove unavailing, then it is time for counseling and Ritalin.

The old form of discipline was quick, direct, clear-cut, and effective. The new non-punitive discipline is time-consuming, indirect, muddled, and ineffective. Every breaking of the rules requires a long discussion in which the boy gets to express his "feelings" and therefore make his case.

This new form of easy discipline actually compromises the boy's moral growth in several ways.

First, he receives no real punishment for wrongdoing and is not made to feel shame. The absence of these traditional external and internal sanctions inhibits his development of self-control.

Second, rather than truly learning to be responsible and to accept the real consequences of his actions, he learns to be litigious and whiny.

Worst of all, to the extent his father is involved in all this nonsense, he sees the man who should be his master and mentor not as an authoritative figure who imposes order and dispenses justice but as a craven coddler who shudders to injure an errant boy's self-esteem.

On the surface, the boy is glad to skim by without getting into too much trouble. Deep down, he knows that his father is no man and so looks abroad for more energetic examples of thumotic manhood.

Schools for Sissies

No less than at home, at school the boy encounters a world that thwarts any natural drive to become a true man. Even when schools are not deliberately trying to emasculate young boys, the world of education can appear feminized and overly pampering to young males.

In elementary school, over 90 percent of the teachers are women. Having no decent curriculum to guide them, as is the case in most schools, these female teachers will quite innocently and unimaginatively choose books and assignments that do not appeal to boys in the least. The boy student will have to suffer through Charlotte's Web three or four times but never hear of Captains Courageous or Treasure Island or Sherlock Holmes.

When he gets into middle and high school he may begin to have male teachers. But these are the tired, ineffective, jaded clock-watchers and pension-seekers.

Horace lets the half of the class he cannot control talk for the whole period while he passes out worksheets to the half of the class who still care about grades. Horace is a wimp.

If the boy sees any energy on the part of men at the school it is among the coaching staff. Coaches know how to appeal to the thumotic element in boys in order to train them to win, and they actually work hard on the field. They appear far less energetic and in command, however, when they must teach a history class, for there are only so many health and P.E. courses a school can offer.

Radical feminism, has in some ways undermined the relations between the sexes. What feminism has done, in conjunction with political correctness, is deprive overly non-offensive, modern parents of the language traditionally used to bring up young boys: "Be a man." "Stick up for your sister." "Quit throwing the ball like a sissy." "Quit crying like a girl." Instead, we have a lot of lukewarm, androgynous talk about "being a good person" and "showing respect to people." A naturally rambunctious and irascible boy, though, is not too interested in being a good person. For if he achieves that status, what will distinguish him from his prim and proper sister?

The parents have no language to answer their son's deepest and most natural needs.

Finally, today's boys mill about their adolescent and post-adolescent years lacking any formal, approved rite of passage that would turn them into men. The American frontier disappeared in 1890. The call of the sea did not survive much longer. All-male colleges, where young men used to compete against each other in the lecture halls and on the playing field, can now be counted on the fingers of one hand.

President Eliot of Harvard told his student body on taking office in 1869, "The best way to put boyishness to shame is to foster scholarship and manliness." Could a college president say that today to a student body in which males are the distinct minority?

While the opening up of commerce and industry to women has increased their economic freedom and equality, men have lost one more arena in which to prove themselves.

Moreover, most of the jobs offered in the new economy hardly appeal to the spiritedness in man. Certainly, the military still beckons many spirited boys coming out of high school, but the entire armed services constitute less than one percent of the American population and must make room for a fair number of women in their ranks.

In short, modern America lacks what virtually every society in the past has established and governed with great effort and concern: a proving ground for male youth seeking some legitimate expression of their erratic and as yet undisciplined spiritedness.

The sum effect is an environment that demands virtually nothing special of boys as they grow into men.

Many aspects of modern culture are debilitating for girls as well as boys, but the lack of dramatic challenge is not one of them. The recent statistics comparing girls' to boys' academic achievements worldwide demonstrate what any teacher in the country knows: that girls are achieving as never before and are outdistancing boys.

Perhaps the kinder, gentler, nurturing, egalitarian, consultative, non-competitive approach to education and family has been a boon for girls. Yet what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander.

As Father Walter Ong expressed it, the male nature, in order to prove itself, in order to distinguish itself from the potentially emasculating feminine world into which the boy is born, longs for some "againstness" in the natural or moral world which the boy can overcome.

But in our culture everything is too easy. Boys are not compelled, indeed not allowed, to fight anymore. They cannot fight on the playground. Nor can they fight for grades, for a girl, for God, or for country (though September 11 has altered this last).

Our civilization cannot be sustained by barbarians or wimps; it needs true men, (defined as "a sustained act of character").
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Mike Farrell says:

My solution works, that's one reason why it would never be accepted.

It is impractical. That adds another thousand reasons why not.

I'm too old to have wet-dreams, so I guess I've earned the right to my pipe-dreams (both explore a fantasy world).

Consider this. No draft. Every male, one week after his 18th birthday stands on the yellow footprints and looks ahead to three months of manliness training.

It will provide everyone an opportunity to overcome a dysfunctional existence in an improving world. They will be both its cause and a result. A limited number of the metamorphisized men who apply, would be accepted into the Marine Corps and the other services, based upon the needs of the services.

This draconian program would be required for ten or twelve years. After which time, the initial graduates would be the fathers, mentors, teachers, and leaders of the upcoming generation and thus its benefits would be sustained and perpetuated. Hopefully, for the next hundred years.

Then I'll sing along with Satchmo, "And I said to myself, what a wonderful world".

[marinemom]

"The new parent has invented a new way of disciplining sons, adhering firmly to the principles of "self-esteem." The boy is never wrong, is never spanked, and is never made to feel ashamed. Postmodern parents believe, at least until it is too late, that raising children must be easy since the nature of children is basically good."

Gee, I guess I am a total throwback - my son introduced me to his Senior Drill Instructor as "my first heavy"......good post, Mike.

[leroy8541]

After reading the definitions of barbarian, and wimp they don't leave much middle ground. I always wear a cap every where I go. usually camoflauge. So does my son. I normally do not like to partake in a fistfight, and won't unless there is no other way to end the confrontation. I teach my son the same. This also goes along the same line with women. I would never, want to hit a woman, but we don't always get what we want. Barbaric wimp? Who makes up these definitions anyways? Women? Sissies?