Perhaps it is the nature of democracies that they ignore pending disasters until they become too big and too dangerous to ignore.
So, for all his supposed prescience about the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt was a Johnny Come Lately to the threat. In the early 1930’s he supported the isolationist impulse of the progressives in Congress who blamed big corporations for launching World War I. The so-called “merchants of death” Congressional hearings were a convenient way to beat up industrial corporations and led to American disenchantment with our involvement in the Great War, fanning the flames of isolationism. Then in the mid-1930’s, FDR encouraged the passage of the infamous Neutrality Acts so that he wouldn’t have to alienate either his leftwing supporters or his Catholic, conservative ethnic supporters who supported opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War. It wasn’t until the summer of 1940, when, having sown the wind and watching Europe reap the whirlwind, FDR took measures to undo the harm he had caused.
Some may argue that it is best that governments wait until it is too late to take milder measures, because when they do take action, they tend to make a hash of it, as we’ve seen lately with a stimulus package which didn’t stimulate and a health care bill which will provide nothing of the sort. The problem with ignoring issues, however, is that, when existing policies exacerbate a situation, delay in taking action may result in much more damage than can be repaired.
Such is the case with America’s young men. I know many upper middle class couples who have marvelously successful daughters and sons whom the parents themselves will tell you don’t measure up. These couples are all fine parents, as witnessed by their daughters’ success, so something more than family dynamics is going on.
Although this seems to affect white males more than African American or Hispanic males, this phenomenon is evident across the rainbow. Statistics tell the story. Divorce is down, but that is because marriage is down even further. For the first time in history, married couples constitute a minority of households in America. A full 60% of all freshmen in college are women these days. In the last ten years, the number of babies born to whites has fallen 10% and the number born to African-Americans has fallen by 2%, while the number of Hispanic births has risen by 40%. Larger percentages than ever before live with their parents into their thirties. More women over the age of forty remain unmarried than any time in the past.
The candidates for causing this collapse of manhood all date from the postwar era, but primarily the 60’s. My personal candidates are, in order of their appearance in American society, popular culture, feminism, economics and pacifism.
POPULAR CULTURE
The first candidate, by right of seniority, is pop culture. The concept of what it took to be a man began to change shortly after World War II. Slowly the popular conception was altered by movies, novels and television. The ideal man moved from boys who became men early – whether it be Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath or Private Peter Conway in The Sands of Iwo Jima – to boys who raced their cars off cliffs and their fathers who hadn’t a clue how to deal with them as with Jim Stark and Frank Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. By the 60’s, the depiction of the mature establishment male had degenerated into Gomer Pyle and Gilligan. Meanwhile, the transgressive male – whether he be Dirty Harry and General Patton on the right or Hawkeye Pierce and Billy Jack on the left, fighting an incompetent or corrupt establishment – were the new model man. From both ends of the political spectrum, then, it became admirable for a man not to be integrated into society.
There are many reasons for this shift, one being that the authors of American postwar culture tended to be males who served as enlisted men or junior officers in World War II and chaffed under the thumb of authority. Their postwar product was another version of the same griping they did as young soldiers and sailors and by the 60s, this attitude took on a life of its own.
FEMINISM AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Another candidate is feminism, and, more broadly, the sexual revolution. Since this gets the most attention, it doesn’t need much time here, except for a few interesting nuggets:
• The rote excuse these days is that biology has programed men to flit from female to female, so that the current standards are more “normal” than the classic monogamous male. But this is a case of crafting the theory to fit the desire. Whatever biology has to say about polygamy, it also programs males to defend females, a feature of maleness that is sharply missing in the brave new world. Some women appreciate not having men open doors for them, but the damage it does to men is something to take into account.
• In his novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and philosopher, said that it only takes about six months of playing the singles scene before a person is rendered incapable of developing a deep and permanent relationship. If he is right, then the brave new world of sexual liberation has permanently infantilized many young men.
• Many commentators, such as Kay Hymowitz in her book Manning Up, have attributed the extended male adolescence to feminism. Recently Myriam Miedzam, in an article for Dissent magazine, praised Ms. Hymowitz’ book, but argued that, if it is indeed feminism which has affected male behavior, females have not benefitted either. That, I think, is exactly the point.
ECONOMICS
The next possible candidate is economic. There are two possible culprits here: affirmative action and a shift away from wealth creation in the economy.
The affirmative action argument is an obvious one. In the current recession, nearly 80% of all people laid off were males, because if a company fires a female, it invites a lawsuit, whereas, a male, particularly a young white heterosexual male, is an unprotected class who has no recourse to the courts. It is certainly possible that anyone facing that sort of societal attitude would just stop trying very hard and live life to enjoy himself.
As for wealth creation, I’ve argued before that there are only three types of jobs - wealth creation (manufacturing and farming), wealth protection (the military and medicine) and wealth redistribution (Wall Street, lawyering and most of the rest of us) – and that many current government policies serve to encourage wealth redistribution at the expense of wealth creation. It is possible that men are more comfortable in wealth creating jobs than they are in other forms of employment. The fact that females are close to half of the legal profession these days and less than 10% of entrepreneurs lends credence to that argument.
PACIFISM
The final candidate is that our knee jerk national impulse these days is to be anti-war. Nothing wrong with that per se, but to make it a primary emotion is to sacrifice much. Since Vietnam, there has been genocide and tyranny around the world and to be true to our perceived morality of opposing war requires us to turn a blind eye to it. The New York Times did not even bother to cover the hundreds of thousands of bodies, murdered by Saddam Hussein, which the Allies dug up after the Iraqi invasion.
There is only one option: you can be anti-war or you can be anti-slavery, anti-genocide and anti-tyranny. You cannot be opposed to all of these evils and if you consider war the worst evil, you have to accept all the rest. Since the dawn of civilization, it was the essence of manhood to defend right from wrong, to be willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. By altering that equation, society has redefined men out of a job.
That’s not to say that men and war was always a positive force, just that when good men believe it is wrong to defend themselves or defend the weak by force of arms, they surrender the field to the worst forms of humanity. I was in a bookstore recently and read on a dust jacket of some pacifist’s thick tome the author’s goal of stopping all “good men” from being willing to go to war. He was realistic enough not to suppose that anyone could prevent all war, so he was content just to have “good men” refuse to participate. Here, I realized, was the most evil man in the world.
So, who is to blame for the decline of the American male? All of the above, I’d wager. On the bright side, anyone who has worked with the military will recognize that the damage is reversible at any time. The military is full of intelligent, enthusiastic, mature young men who make their civilian counterparts look as if they’re from a different planet. But these men grew up in the same country as the driftless adolescents. Obviously, it is not something in the water.
Unfortunately, the military is only a fraction of society and there are not enough of them to deal with a real national emergency. If we don’t do something to turn things around, it may be too late to realize why the old male authority figure was handy to have around.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
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