What is Civilization’s Impact on Manliness?

What has the advent of civilization done to manliness? Does social progress domesticate and infantilize us? Who now are the manliest men? And is manliness a good thing in the first place?

We can compare the average male lifestyles in three stages of human development:

• the long prehistoric age of the hunter-gatherer

• the current age of civilizational strife and progressive technological empowerment

• the hints of an inchoate posthuman age.

What’s curious about this outline is that the first and third stages — what we can think of, respectively, as the input and the output of civilization — have comparable effects on manhood, leaving men’s role in civilization as a possible outlier.

Consider, first, that the nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer likely lived in what anthropologists call the “original affluent society.” Hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than sedentary farmers because the nomads didn’t have to labour to store food and other resources for long-term future use. One study from 2019 indicates that “Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbors.”

This isn’t to say that the Stone Age was a paradise. Living in the wilderness as practically just another animal species would have presented many threats to early humans. But during what was probably their shorter lifespan, even the average hunter-gatherers lived like kings, relative to their aspirations, in that they were as independent and free as only the civilized upper class would become.

Of course, Stone Age people lacked the advanced resources to luxuriate in their affluence, such as with fine cuisine, designer clothing, and private jets. Nevertheless, it’s a curious fact that the Stone Age male would have been so free that he’d have had little work to do. Low-hanging food was abundant, there were few humans to compete with, and human intelligence enabled the hunters to outwit megafauna, at least some species of which are now extinct for that reason.

This raises the question of the relevance of work itself to male identity. Two kinds of nonworkers are familiar from our civilized period:

• the aristocrat who lives off an inheritance or on the interest accruing from a fortune and can retire early

• the impoverished peasant who depends on charity and government support.

Neither individual is especially manly, despite the hype for the ultra-wealthy lifestyle. Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk carry themselves as intrepid adventurers, but this image in the press seems more like overcompensation for the obvious fact that when you have so much money, nothing you do any longer carries the slightest risk. Even if the wealthy wanted to give away all their money, they’d have a hard time doing so because capitalistic economies are typically rigged in their favour.

We admire the wealthy who earn their money, and we pity the poor and the disadvantaged. But again, arguably both the wealthy and the dregs of society are equally unmanly, according to the Western stereotype of manliness. The reasons differ, but the assessments are similar.

The wealthy are decadent, pampered, surrounded by sycophants, and infantilized. Wealthy males are more like carefree boys than like men because they can do no wrong. Even when they err, they can afford to try again and again ten thousand times until they get what they want. They treat their many possessions like disposable toys because they can always buy new and better ones. The wealthy act practically with impunity, just like children who aren’t tried in court as adults and who thus can’t commit crimes even when their behaviour is catastrophic.

As for the have-nots, they too are like children in their dependence on others and their inability to fend for themselves. In civilized societies, we look out for our interests mainly by working for a living, so the jobless resemble children who indulge in that twilight state of being able to play throughout the day before they’re forced to turn to their adult labours. Mind you, the homeless and the penniless can’t afford to play either, but they still resemble both children and the ultra-wealthy in that they lack manly virtues because their identity isn’t defined by their job title.

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In any case, my point here is that both of those opposite individuals from the civilized age also resemble the Stone Age nomads who likewise defined themselves more by their leisure than their role as foragers. Indeed, we label them “hunter-gatherers” only because we think work is crucial to anyone’s identity as a human, just as we think of ourselves primarily as doctors, lawyers, carpenters, bus drivers, farmers, and so forth, depending on our occupation.

What we see here, though, is that the unoccupied person is paradoxically both the affluent and the vagrant, the “immature,” childlike adult and the proto-human mammal. The childlike aspect of all three of these categories, of the Stone Age nomad, the billionaire, and the penniless vagabond, might better be thought of as a state of incipient animality, which would mean that the alternative state of being a civilized, hard-working person whose identity derives from his or her job is the essence of what we think of as maturity for men.

(Note that most civilized societies have been patriarchal, so women were usually relegated to an equally childlike status, as lesser members of society and even as private property, equivalent to slaves or livestock, their job being to breed and please their male captors.)

What, then, is a manly man, according to civilized standards? Notice the fine line between the man who happens to be emasculated by his occupation, and the antihero who lives on the edge of the law and thus is liable to become the above kind of man-child whose freedom from the responsibilities of work we deem to be unmanly.

We see the first dynamic play out, for example, in the animated movie The Incredibles, in which the superheroic protagonist Bob tires of his tedious family life and his boring job as an insurance adjuster. He secretly returns to his life as a superhero, drawing his family into danger. In effect, Bob rejects the civilized ideal, which is to restrain your urges and full potential, to compromise and sacrifice yourself in mundane, degrading ways for the collective good.

Clint Eastwood’s Western antihero and Dirty Harry characters take this social critique further since, as with Batman in Gotham, the gunslinger for hire operates on the lawless frontier as a pioneer or vigilante in a failed, crime-ridden city that gives the lie to civilized progress. The gunslinger struggles in a grey area like the Stone Age nomad, having to choose between good and evil even when morality hasn’t been codified. The gunslinger is more like a parasite or a predator than a manly upholder of some civilization-friendly ideal.

Perhaps the ultimate male role model in civil society is someone like Joe Rogan, a self-made man, a martial artist who can take care of himself, a comedian who — like the antihero — doesn’t take life too seriously, and an independent thinker who carves his path in life, eschewing cultish fads like Trumpism and Wokeness (until he succumbed in that latter respect). Rogan’s liberal cannabis use makes him boyish and anti-authoritarian enough to avoid the trap of losing his freedom in servitude to his superiors on the job. He works several jobs, though, as a UFC announcer, comedian, and podcaster, and he’s wealthy enough to be affluent but not enough to be infantilized by his success.

Let’s stop and notice how civilization changed the nature of manhood by domesticating most men as slaves, farmers, soldiers, elite priests, or middle managers. City states, kingdoms, and empires had to be propped up by an abundance of labour, and for thousands of years there were few machines to carry out the tasks. Livestock and men had to perform them.

The automation of labour, however, threatens to replace those human labourers with machines. Advances in artificial intelligence may do the same for the elite, white-collar occupations. Here, then, is the source of those populist revolts against so-called civilized progress. These revolts are practically just men’s rights movements. On the surface, the struggle of unions, Islamist terrorists, or right-wing populist or fascist movements is typically to secure higher wages or to terminate the machines, immigration laws, or scapegoats that are supposed to be taking the local jobs. But the more serious threat from this industrial, neoliberal “progress” that doesn’t benefit most men is that it leaves their manhood in the lurch.

Under the patriarchal norm, women’s identity had long been in limbo. After all, what’s the nature of the ideal woman? Is it to be a nurturing, beautiful slave for men, or is that obviously just the man’s self-serving preference? And is there a distinct female identity when women have equal chances as men to labour in the economy, to define their identity by their mode of work? If not, and if opposites attract, what becomes of heterosexual mating if women are becoming more manly and men are being feminized and emasculated by machines?

Leaving that aside for now, the point is that machines are doing to men what men have long done to women: pushing them out of a job-defined identity. Think of the hundreds of millions of men and women whose jobs can be filled more profitably by machines in the coming decades. Far from being manly, self-made men, these masses who can’t compete with machines or computers may be returned to the infantile state of being able to play full-time in a socialist economy of abundance. The machines might end up running themselves, generating massive wealth for everyone; capitalist struggle would be obsolete, and we’d no longer have to rationalize the atrocities committed to reinforce civilization by inventing the ideal of manliness.

Of course, that’s just a utopian scenario, but it raises the question of whether having a full-time job ought to be our dream in life. If we had to choose between (a) playing full-time “professionally,” relying on machines to do all the heavy lifting, and (b) being a self-made man (or woman), relying mainly on your talents in a capitalist competition for private gain, we’d choose (b) because we’ve been trained to esteem manliness.

Westerners, “individualists,” and neoliberals ridicule socialists and collectivist societies for heading towards the dead end of communism, for turning the masses into wards of the state who will be deprived of any reason to get out of bed in the morning, with no fulfilling job to occupy their time. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” as the Protestant proverb has it. But is that just our model of civilization speaking through us? Should we want to occupy most of our free time with what’s often an unfulfilling job?

After all, another difference between Paleolithic and civilized labour is that the former is done out of necessity, whereas the latter serves manufactured desires to generate profit (surplus value) and is therefore biologically optional. Most jobs in developed societies are therefore of the bullshit variety: they’re for middle managers that are being made obsolete by machines and computers, or they’re for widget-makers whose kitschy products end up in landfills.

So, should we approve of a society that turns most of its citizens into drones? Recall God’s curse on Adam in the Garden of Eden myth:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.

The idea is that when we saw we could progress by obtaining knowledge, we became tied to the land as we had to farm to support the instrument of that progress, which was sedentary society. This myth idealizes the remote past when we presumably didn’t have to work much for a living and could play as naïve, innocent protohumans. Again, Stone Age life was likely not so idyllic, although it probably had its advantages. Still, the biblical curse makes for a critique of civilized manhood, which raises the question: Is work more like a curse or a blessing, a burden that degrades us or a necessary condition of our maturity?

Even as we’re bound to be outcompeted by our technology, we have difficulty imagining a worthwhile life without labour. And even as we long for a God-given paradise in an afterlife, we repudiate socialist societies that try to end this degradation, because we fear that threat to our manhood. We seem ambivalent and confused, which is just as well because there’s no objective answer here or preordained life plan that we’re supposed to follow.

Perhaps manliness in our current, precarious condition is the courage to accept the humbling tautology that what will be will be. By yoking ourselves to technology, we’re no longer masters of our fate. Manly men become slaves to their work until their work is automated and they’re left behind and reduced to being socialist citizens, wealthy elites, or impoverished vagrants who live like carefree children.

Either way, macho manliness is a trap and an illusion.