Gentleman 2.0
Shut up for a second and answer me this: what exactly is a “gentleman”?
Just think on that for a bit now. What comes to mind? What do you see? If you’re anything at all like one hundred percent of every author and blogger I’ve read on the subject in the past six months, you’re either imagining a clean cut and fit scholar and family man of the 1940’s complete with stylish jacket and tie or else a medieval knight of the court. If you’ve thought up something else, please let me know what it is because you fascinate me. If your image is something even remotely modern, all the better.
Why? Because I am frustrated.
Sexual politics is a difficult subject to broach in any forum, but the state of the Male identity has been bothering me for some time for reasons I can only slightly put my finger on. The men I know, including myself, have grown up with the dialogue of feminism always in our ears, and it’s had a peculiar effect on us. I don’t mean this as a barb at feminism. I’ve found that the institution and its proponents have grown smartly into feminism’s maturity, particularly in the past year or so by becoming increasingly cognizant of the need for the positive involvement of men as a replacement for the endless lambasting of guys’ inherent evil. But we young men, having heard this our entire lives even without, in many cases, ever harbouring a misogynistic thought, have been left with a warped sense of who we are and how we ought to conduct ourselves.
I’ve been reading tripe like The Art of Manliness and The Modern Gentleman on and off over the past few months, and it’s not sat well with me. Worse, I’m beginning to see the glut of such writing for what it is: a deeply misguided and unfortunate response to our identity crisis, appealing to archetypes established before the war of the sexes got so complicated. The love that these publications have for the forties/fifties man is almost nauseating, and it’s an obsession that lurks in far too many familiar places. It’s all very cookie cutter, very repetitive, and I’m finding it intolerable at this point. I don’t particularly want to be like Teddy Roosevelt and apparently that makes me a sissy.
Take a look at the Art of Manliness, I dare you. Notice anything about all of the goddamn pictures? They’re all pre-1969 by a mile. It’s eerie.
Reading this article over at Newsweek helped me piece this idea together, with it elaborating on some of the hard facts about how men under thirty are generally behaving aimless and resentful, with tremendously depressing results. It’s bad, it’s really quite bad.
So we’ve got this fetish for the turn of the century model man, which just seems too painfully, transparently like yearning for simpler days when we Y-chromosomers had monolithic and unquestioned power in relationships, education and money. It’s immature and it’s reductive, and I can understand what provokes it but it has got to stop. Regression of this kind isn’t admirable at any level, and the better part of a generation resorting to it will and is causing problems. Young men are making less money, pursuing less education, living on their own less, marrying later and later, shirking responsibilities of any sort, and generally and statistically being pathetic. It’s not alright.
Men wanting to be modern seem to run headlong into the new age of sexual politics, get upset that they don’t get to be patriarch, and say “fine!”, arguing sulkily that if women get to take over so much of their playground then they get to be stay at home dads, underachievers, layabouts, and childish. There’s this horrible quantum thinking going on where if we can’t have it all and be that 1940’s man then we’re going to do an about face and make those uppity wimmins do everything. We’ve got no readily available idea of the modern man because we’re not letting such an idea develop, and both sexes and a lot of young people are losing out because of this.
I treat the term “gentleman” as indicative of an ideal, something to work for and something worthy of respect.
So what should Gentleman 2.0 be? What should we young men aspire to be in this day and age? Is the very notion that we can have any kind of singular model of style and behaviour itself worthy of rejection? Or will leaving young men without any sort of clear identity or role model enable and worsen this demographic’s slump?
It’s time we had some new ideas in this arena, because the old stand by of a man being a totem of roughshod values which all essentially boil down to either a pugilist’s mitts or a gigolo’s charm. We can have a clear role and a strong identity without resorting to stereotypes or insisting that things like public speaking and leadership aren’t also relevant to women.
It’s worth thinking about, we’re better than this.
If Only Niezsche had Wikipedia
So there’s a link over at 3quarksdaily, ever the boiling-over cauldron of splendid eccentricities, pointing at The Philosopher’s Annual 10 best articles in philosophy over the past year. Up until this moment, I had no inkling there even existed a thing called “The Philosopher’s Annual” or that it might publish lists about stuff, but here it is, and here I am talking about it.
If you, as an enlightened yogi of the modern Internet, can stomach the antique, Summer of ’95 layout of the site (indicating that the philosophical leaders of our time really need to hire an IT intern or something) you will be treated to a reservoir of archived papers with tantalizing titles such as “Innocent Statements and their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts“, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism:The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions” and my personal favourite: “Epistemic Modals“.
Doesn’t that just get you hot? Rarrr.
Yes, I poke fun at philosophy, but I do love it. I’ve long held the perception, like many of my confederates, that the field of pure academic Philosophy is representative of the most concentrated and unfettered Ivory Tower-ness present on this Earth, which is a bold stone to throw in the shiny crystalline hallways of a Political Science degree, I’m aware. I don’t intend to demean the practice of philosophizing at all, I’m just given over to chuckle about the nature and peculiarities of these disciplines, especially when they’re so absurdly similar.
Most folks wouldn’t shy away from painting Political Science and academic Philosophy in the same stroke, especially if they’ve spent some time with introductory courses in each. They use so much of the same jargon and go over so much of the same material that it’s frequently difficult to discern the separation of one from the other, and if you’re going to make a list of the great contributors to each field in history you’d be hard pressed to not come out of the exercise with two nearly identical lists. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Aurelius, Rousseau and Hobbes, Locke and Mill, etc.
So what makes them different?
The delineation seems so clear to my mind, yet unpronounceable. At parties, and I do bring this sort of thing up at parties, I like to quip that Politics is the useful bits of Philosophy. Practical metaphysics. Applied existentialism. Solipsism in motion. You know, I’m a dick. But I wonder if some aspect of the jest doesn’t carry a gem of truth. Politics, upon my reflection, behaves much like an activated subset of Philosophy at large, something that’s drawn its livelihood and independence entirely from its algorithmic acquisition of only those pieces of the philosophical cloth that promote, demand, restrict or otherwise directly concern action.
If I were the kind of guy who throws down Venn diagrams like he throws gauntlets, and I only am just barely not such a man, I might visualize the existence of these two disciplines with Politics’s lively circle completely encompassed by the greater domain of Philosophy, and I’d be pleased with it. To call all things in Politics philosophical makes sense to me, and I find it impossible to think of something which is pure Politics without an inch of Philosophy to it, but with the caveat that not all things Philosophical are necessarily Political.
If we were to make a rule for determining where the border lies between these two strange counties, I’d gravitate toward a line being drawn along the axis of action, that whatever piece Philosophy necessitates, as part of its own terms, a contingency of doing – something normative or compelling – that is Political.
And I realize that this boundary is tremendously vague and ill-defined, but it’s difficult to offer up better when discussing wholesale academic fields on a Thursday afternoon. It adds up to my mind insofar as certain philosophical theories of metaphysics, seeking only to define the existence of phenomena as they are, not as they should be, do not enjoy Political status to my mind or in my experience with others, while the collected works of the Political philosophers I’ve read in my three years at school thus far all carried normative and active qualities at the forefront.
I wonder if this isn’t a decent way to separate the two, and it would explain my sarcastic joy in mocking the greater realm of Philosophy for being inert where there is so clearly incredible energy poured into it every day. And maybe it’s a laugh at how we Political Scientists like to do this mocking and pretend we aren’t in essence an unruly organ of the thing we’re skewering. Thoughts?
And oh my God, could you imagine a world where Applied Existentialism was a thing? It would be like Emo, only with worse haircuts and Livejournal as a leading academic publication.
Shudder.
What of Libertarians?
This amuses me immensely. Conservatism as a psychological buffer! Silly conservatives, the state of Canadian politics, among other things, makes perfect sense now. Be sure to hit the teensy audio player at the top of the article, I missed it the first time.
It’s things like this that make me adore Scientific American.
BIT PART 