The Incoherence of Manliness

• “But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.”
  ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• “We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well,
  But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.”
  ― Henry Lawson, When I Was King and Other Verses

Like femininity, manliness or masculinity is a shifting cultural ideal, a model of strength, virility, and mastery for men.

Action-movie heroes like those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Jason Statham embody some young men’s conception of how men should behave. By contrast, the leading men in romantic comedies and romance novels show how women wish men would act.

Is the concept of manliness even coherent, however, or have there been so many cultural shifts over history that trying to be manly anymore is a fool’s errand? Is this an outdated ideal, not just because First World standards of political correctness are more humanistic, but because civilized men face a paradox that makes them obsolete?

Manliness is supposed to be a kind of heroism that’s more suitable for men than women. But the problem is that our impression of masculine heroism is largely shaped by both our local culture and our evolutionary past. The long Paleolithic Era established much of what feels intuitively right to us as a species. Yet the prehistoric lifestyle that prevailed for some two million years must have differed greatly from the kind that emerged in sedentary societies.

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything pointed out that the scant evidence we have for how prehistoric people lived indicates an experimental variety of lifestyles, including perhaps some seasonally dependent sedentary gatherings.

However much earlier anthropologists might have oversimplified or projected their prejudices in their attempts to explain the evidence of prehistoric societies, there was still likely a gradual transition from nonhuman primates to early humans. And nonhuman primates form small nomadic bands that adapt to environmental opportunities and dangers by roaming freely and thus living in the wild. In short, early humans were relatively dependent on the natural environment, which is to say they were more like wild animals than people.

What distinguishes animals is their body type, and that’s determined by natural selection: animals adapt to what nature provides, finding a niche in which they can excel, or they fail to do so, and their genes are less likely to be passed on to help shape the next generation’s body type.

People, however, evolve culturally rather than just biologically, and what shapes our cultures is the artificial environment we build precisely to separate us from nature. People adapt to artificial environments, which is to say we guide ourselves, confined as we are to our civilizational echo chambers that reinforce artificial norms that have no place in the wild.

As evolutionary psychologists are quick to point out, the traits that enable animals to flourish are far from those that would be welcome in a civilized setting. Nevertheless, animal heroism likely influenced our intuitions about masculinity because our prehistoric ancestors lived for such a formative period mainly in the wilderness, subject to nature’s evolutionary parameters.

This is why sports teams often hold up animals as their mascots. Tigers, bulls, panthers, grizzlies, eagles, falcons, hawks, and many more help define masculinity because living in the wild calls for great bravery, strength, speed, and cunning, which are virtues that separate winners from losers in sports competitions.

Thus, we expect a manly man to be able to fend for himself, to survive in the wild like an animal with only his inherent skills at his disposal. To that extent, manliness is anti-cultural since it belongs to our formative condition in the Stone Age.

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Prehistoric people fashioned stone tools to augment their bodies, so not even they were perfectly manly in this sense. For that matter, even animals have no inherent skills since their genes equip them, as it were, with body parts such as claws, armour, or wings. Still, the purest case of independent, authentic heroism would be an animal that flourishes in the wild, with no help from anything outside its body or naturally selected social unit, such as its hunting pack.

Action movies exemplify this admiration of animals by depicting the collapse of the civilized order that forces the hero to “take matters into his hands,” even bending the law to “get stuff done.” Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character popularized this trope, as did Batman, the famous comic book vigilante. Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 might be deemed manly for excelling under the same post-apocalyptic or failed-state conditions, although in her case, she only anticipates the inevitable nuclear war that will wipe out civilization and pit the human remnants against an AI-governed wasteland.

Now, the problem with this pro-animal conception of masculinity is that it’s supposed to appeal to civilized men. How can the average male in a developed society who’s dependent on a thousand luxuries possibly admire a barbaric, savage man without that prehistoric conception of manliness being a sheer fantasy for him? A domesticated man might fantasize about the possible world in which society vanishes, and men must revert to animal norms, but that wouldn’t mean this man should act on that fantasy. On the contrary, those who try to be manly in this sense would end up committing crimes and being sent to prison.

The average domesticated male doesn’t admire prison inmates even though they’re the ones who flout the law, so they “take matters into their hands” and “get stuff done,” like Dirty Harry. It’s just that they happen to get caught and punished because the civilized social order is in place. Still, prison life approximates in some ways life in the wild, in that both are free from civilized luxuries.

Domesticated males don’t admire criminals because criminals aren’t honourable. Honour is a mushy value that accommodates the shift in setting from the wild to a sedentary society. Think, for instance, of honour in warfare. The most honourable soldiers are those like the samurai who have minimal assistance from an infantilizing bureaucracy or an armoury of automatic weapons. They used swords rather than guns because killing with a sword takes greater discipline and courage. If the concept of honour is stretched to include some soldiers who deploy guns, a line may still be drawn between, say, the intrepid US Marine and the drone pilot who kills from a remote air-conditioned basement.

Similarly, we might compare manliness in the lower and upper economic classes. The lower-class lifestyle resembles that of the prison inmate, in that both are left to their wits. Vagrants may even be as nomadic as the prehistoric man who had the chance for animal glory and thus manliness in the Stone Age sense.

Yet again, few men admire whatever masculinity is found in lower-class males. Capitalist ideologies would help shape the sense of honour at work here. Those who are financially poor may be deemed unmanly in some more recent sense because they lack the virtues of self-determination, ambition, and ruthlessness that are supposed to propel someone to fame and riches in a capitalist economy. Here, the laissez-faire setting is assumed to approximate the natural struggle for survival, so that the sense of honour at issue would be socially Darwinian.

According to this modern sense of honour that updates our conception of manliness, we might think billionaires are more manly than working-class men. Clearly, billionaires are better capitalists than those who can’t afford their rent.

Yet we also likely suspect that billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson overcompensate in their demonstrations of manliness because they’re not manly in the more foundational sense that honours animality rather than personhood. Billionaires must be more pampered than working-class men, so the billionaire lifestyle is infantilizing, and that’s not conducive to honour. The more crutches someone relies on, such as a host of mansions, bank accounts, machines, or sycophantic underlings, the less this aristocratic individual can demonstrate inherent heroism.

Or consider collective manliness across countries. The comedian Bill Maher became infamous shortly after 9/11 for pointing out that it took bravery for the militant jihadists to carry out their terrorist attacks. He lost his show Politically Incorrect because he implied that the terrorists were at least as manly as US soldiers.

Here again, we have the split between conceptions. According to the primitive standard that would have us expect men to excel as animals in the wild, poorer countries must be more manly than richer ones because the latter are spoiled by their high technology and other luxuries. Yet that old sense of manliness doesn’t appeal to civilized folks, so it must be updated. Hence, the standard is stretched with the notion of honour that prizes some virtuous use of civilized advantages.

Even though American soldiers depend on their wealthy country for their resources, so that they rarely display an animal’s style of heroism, we may credit these soldiers for enforcing America’s superpower. These soldiers would be avatars of American supremacy, so they inherit the virtues that the US as a whole is thought to demonstrate through much of its history. By contrast, the Islamist terrorists demonstrate the vices that have held back the Muslim world for at least a century.

Plainly, there’s a tension between the heroism we’d expect an animal to display in the wild, and the kind a person could perform in a civilized setting. The wilderness dictates what counts as heroism (as in adaptability or evolutionary fitness) for wild animals, while our artificial environments shape our more muddled image of heroism that’s supposed to apply to domesticated people. Yet people evolved from animals, so we have both conceptions of men’s heroism in mind. Those conceptions pull us in different directions, leaving us with a confused, incoherent standard of manliness.

We could demonstrate this by asking whether various prominent men are manly, and noting how the different standards supply us with different answers.

For instance, Joe Rogan is manly according to the Stone Age standard. He’s athletic, a martial arts expert, a hunter, and an independent thinker who’s no functionary of the State or groupthink. We suspect that Rogan might be able to survive in a post-apocalyptic aftermath. Rogan is also manly in the social Darwinian sense since he’s rich and famous, so he excels according to capitalistic standards.

Yet once we emphasize that second, updated sense of manliness, we’re poised to rethink the merit of our first estimation. Doesn’t the primitive mentality or behaviour that makes for an animal’s wild strengths count against the late-modern honour found in domesticated manliness? Isn’t that why Rogan must backtrack for his support for Donald Trump’s political vandalism? The savagery involved in trolling America by supporting an obviously anti-American, authoritarian president who means to undo America’s greatness can have nothing to do with what made America great in the first place.

Likewise, isn’t Rogan’s mushy-headed reliance on cannabis all too compatible with his wealth, which provides him with a cushy lifestyle? Both enable Rogan to occupy a fantasy world, detached from reality. No wild animal could afford to be a happy-go-lucky dreamer, yet Rogan’s wealth and fame insulate him from the consequences of his departure from critical thinking and his cynicism about authorities.

So, is Joe Rogan manly? There’s no coherent answer because the standards contradict each other. These standards are fit for very different environments, but they’re both still operative because our evolved intuitions and prejudices guide our bodies while our cultural compromises shape our minds.

According to the humanist conception that ought to prevail for those who view themselves as people rather than tribal animals, manliness is likely an archaic notion. The more advanced our technology, the more our sense of manliness will have to stretch to the breaking point, until those who will excel in the late twenty-first century’s high-tech environments will be the opposite of manly.

Of course, if that optimistic scenario doesn’t arise, and we’ll instead face an apocalyptic reversion to savagery, due to global warming or some other mode of self-destruction, we’ll likely revert to the prehistoric standard of manly virtue, in which case “manly” will be a euphemism for animal savagery.