On Masculinity, Matriarchy, and the Mark Steyn Show

Mark Steyn presenting the Mark Steyn Show 

GB News (30 June 2022)

 

 

I. 

 

The other evening, on the always excellent Mark Steyn Show (Mon-Thurs at 8pm on GB News), the eponymous host was decrying the state of contemporary manhood in conversation with the lovely Leilani Dowding [1]. 

 

What ever happened to men? he asked. Have they all been killed off by Wuflu ginger growlers? 

 

Steyn quoted statistics showing that women now dominate - in terms of numbers at least - university places and many professions, whilst men retreat to sad, pitiful so-called man caves in the basement, to watch sports, drink beer, and masturbate to online pornography.   

 

What's needed, Steyn suggested, is a little more confidence in the face of risk amongst modern men; a definition of manliness proposed by the American political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, rooted in the Greek notion of thumos [θυμός], which I have written about here and here.  

Rather like Jordan Peterson, Steyn seems to long for men who still bristle at those things which they find strange, threatening, or inimical (i.e. Other); men with vigour and vim, who are still in touch with their primitive instincts; the kind of men, perhaps, whom Madeline Kahn wishes for in the film At Long Last Love, (1975) [2].     

Of course, as any sociologist or reader of cultural studies will tell you, this concern about a supposed crisis of masculinity, is nothing new. During the late-Victorian period, for example, masculinity was increasingly problematized and strange new models of manhood were springing up as traditional forms of male identity became untenable; their power and authority severely eroded and compromised by modernity itself. 

 

Fear surrounding queerness and monstrosity was widespread and conservative thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and, later, Oswald Spengler, promoted ideas of social and cultural degeneration tied to questions of race, gender and sexuality. 

 

We also see this obsession with decadence in the art and literature of the period; in works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), for example. Homosexuals, drug addicts, vampires ... they all presented a threat to traditional manhood. As did emancipated women, or feminists.        

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, we also find D. H. Lawrence expressing concern about the state of modern manhood in his work (in fact, this is one of the major themes of both his fictional and non-fictional writings). 

 

In the 1928 article entitled 'Matriarchy', for example, Lawrence argues that - whether they know it or not - "the men of today are a little afraid of the women of today; and especially the younger men" [3]. Fast forward almost a hundred years, and I think we can say they are now more than a little afraid - and this fear, sadly, gives rise to resentment and misogyny, poisoning their own masculinity. 

 

Just as Steyn points to the fact that there are now more female graduates than male, Lawrence writes:

 

"They [modern men] not only see themselves in the minority, overwhelmed by numbers, but they feel themselves swamped by the strange unloosed energy of the silk-legged hordes. Women, women, everywhere, and all of them on the war-path! The poor young male keeps up a jaunty front, but his masculine soul quakes. [...] They [modern women] settle like silky locusts on all the jobs, they occupy the offices and the playing fields like immensely active ants, they buzz round the coloured lights of pleasure in amazing bare-armed swarms, and the rather dazed male is, naturally, a bit scared." [4]   

 

Obviously, this is intended to be humorous, but underneath one senses Lawrence is expressing a real concern and a real dislike of female emancipation. However, he seems to accept the fact that this has happened; that Woman has emerged "and you can't put her back again" [5]. Nor has she any wish to return to the home and to her previous roles of wife and mother. 

 

Thus, whether modern men like it or not, we are in, says Lawrence, for some form of matriarchal society. But then Lawrence asks himself if that would really be so terrible; for if you examine those societies where women run things and do most of the work, the men seem to have gained a certain carefree form of freedom (which Lawrence likes to term insouciance).

So, let the women have the jobs and own the property; let them govern the country and have full rights over the children. The men can then devote themselves to collective activity of their own, be it art, war, or philosophy. Real men, says Lawrence, should not care about earning a wage, pushing a pram round the park, or polishing their possessions.  

 

Perhaps matriarchy isn't so bad after all. It might allow a man to find himself once more and "satisfy his deeper social instincts" [6]. For when a man no longer feels king of his own castle, then he looks for something beyond the domestic space and, indeed, beyond Woman. 

 

However, we might keep in mind that this can result in all kinds of curious formations; from all-male clubs and secret societies, to criminal gangs and even fascism. All of these homosocial phenomena are, in part at least, a reaction to female emancipation and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere.

 

 

Notes

[1] I'm referring to the show broadcast on 30 June, 2022, which can be watched in full on YouTube by clicking here. 

[2] At Long Last Love is a musical comedy directed by Peter Bogdanovich (1975). Madeline Kahn plays Kitty O'Kelly and performs a Cole Porter song from 1929 called 'Find Me a Primitive Man': click here. Mark Steyn plays a clip from this song on the June 30 show I'm discussing. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Matriarchy', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 104.

[6] Ibid., p. 106.

The Greeks Had a Word For It: Thymos

 

 

I. 

 

The first time I remember hearing that the Greeks had a word for it was when listening to the 1981 single 'Chihuahua' by Bow Wow Wow [1] and it always rather amused and intrigued me; I wondered where, for example, McLaren picked the expression up from.

One possible answer is that he knew of the raunchy play of this title, written by Zoe Akins, which opened on Broadway in September 1930. She is generally given credit for coining the phrase. [2]. Of course, I don't know if that's the case - I'm just surmising; maybe he knew the expression from elsewhere.

 

 

II. 

 

Anyhoo, the above is merely a preamble - what I really want to speak of here is the Ancient Greek word thymos [θυμός] which Plato named as one of the three constituent parts of the human psyche; the others being logos (reason) and eros (sexual desire). Usually, the term is translated into modern English as anger, pride, or spiritedness. 

 

It seems to also have something to do with self-esteem and the need to be recognised by others (presumably as somebody of virtue and thus worthy of respect). As a concept, it therefore also has social and political importance. Francis Fukuyama picked up on this in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), as did Harvey Mansfield, in his book, Manliness (2006).

 

But the philosopher who has arguably given the most interesting contemporary reading of the concept thymos is Peter Sloterdijk, in his study entitled (in the English translation) Rage and Time (2010). 

 

 

III. 

 

Zorn und Zeit traces the unfolding of rage in Western history and promotes the Nietzschean argument that an active form of this emotion - free from ressentiment - might be something vital and productive. Unfortunately, however, rage in all forms has been suppressed as a form of evil within Christian-moral culture - as it has by psychoanalysis. For idealists of all stripes prefer to believe that all you need is love and mutual understanding for society to run peacefully and happily (or, at any rate, free from conflict). 

 

In an interview in which he discusses the above book, Sloterdijk says something I find very interesting in my present (extremely stressful and rage-filled) situation:

 

"If emotions weren't rational to some extent we wouldn't have them at all. That also makes sense in terms of evolutionary biology: if nature equipped us with some impulse or other it must involve a fitness benefit. It follows that pride and rage belong to the human make-up just as eroticism does. Evolution wouldn't have produced people capable of rage if that emotion were only senseless ballast. In fact, it is an important derivative of stress, and stress is the biological interpretation of acute danger, which means it is vital for survival. Normally a living being reacts to real present danger by fleeing or attacking. Both reactions require a high degree of energy, and that's exactly what the stress reaction provides. The early heroic poems describe great stress like a divine gift [...] that seems to flow into the soul from outside." [3] 

  

In other words, stress is a form of inspiration; which is a rather pleasing - thymotically positive - way to think of it ... 

 

The danger, as Sloterdijk acknowledges, is in allowing stress to become overwhelming; or bottling up rage until it becomes toxic and transforms into ressentiment. The trick is to remain calm and composed, even in those situations where it is difficult to act; which requires, of course, a certain asceticism (i.e., cruelty towards the self). Easy-peasy when you're sitting alone in your mountain cave, like Zarathustra, but difficult when providing extensive and intensive care for an elderly woman with Alzheimer's ...   

 

       

Notes

[1] It might be noted that the word given us by Annabella  - Chihuahua - is, like avocado, chocolate, and tomato, actually of Aztec origin rather than Greek, but I suppose that's by the bye. The single was taken from the brilliantly bonkers album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (RCA Records, 1981). Click here if interested in hearing the track and watching a video on YouTube.  

 

[2] Zoe Byrd Akins (1886-1958) was an American poet and playwright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1935. The Greeks Had a Word for It is perhaps her best remembered play. It tells the story of three young women looking to find rich husbands and was adapted for the big screen in 1932. A more famous film version - entitled How to Marry a Millionaire, dir. Jean Negulesco, and starring Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall - was released in 1953.

 

[3] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 197.  

Becoming-Other (Part 2): Alien Sympathy and the Poetic Imagination (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence sauvage (2009)

marcedouardnabe.com

In an essay entitled 'On Being a Man', Lawrence argues that it's very easy to know and to understand the other person as a person, but not so easy to know and to understand them as an impersonal Other who exists as a force of pure alterity and as an actual being in the world, independently of one's self.

For this requires what he calls a thought-adventure - an instinctive-intuitive process that starts in the blood and not in the mind and involves the taking of a double risk: "First, [one] must go forth and meet life in the body. Then [one] must face the result in [one's] mind."

To illustrate what he means, Lawrence asks us to imagine him sitting on a train. A stranger enters the compartment and is instantly recognizable as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, Englishman. With just a quick glance, says Lawrence, he can tell a great deal. The strangeness of the stranger - and thus the adventure of knowing him - is therefore strictly limited.

But what if the stranger is none of the above; what if, for example, they belong to a different race? Then, says Lawrence, he is unable to proceed quite so confidently with his characterization of the stranger:

"It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me.

      I now can no longer proceed from what I am and what I know I am, to what I know him to be. I am not a nigger and so I can't quite know a nigger, and I can never fully 'understand' him. 

      What then? It's an impasse.
      Then, I have three courses open. I can just plank down the word Nigger, and having labelled him, finished with him! Or I can try to track him down in terms of my own knowledge. That is, understand him as I understand any other individual. 

      Or I can do a third thing. I can admit that my blood is disturbed, that something comes from him and interferes with my normal vibration. Admitting so much, I can either put up a resistance, and insulate myself. Or I can allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us."

When it comes to the question of race relations, this, I think, is an absolutely crucial passage. If we wish to overcome common prejudice and the urge to stereotype, then, like Lawrence, we must allow our sense of self to be disrupted by the otherness of the Other and admit the peculiar alien sympathy between us.

This doesn't mean cultural appropriation, wearing black face, and pretending we are all one and the same under the skin, as idealists such as Boglarka Balogh pretend when they posit an ahistorical model of Humanity. It means, rather, exercising our poetic sensibility - as Lawrence exercises in an extraordinary verse found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he effects a becoming-negroid beneath the radiation of a dark, tropical sun:


Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.


The mistake that Balogh makes is that instead of peculiar alien sympathy, she substitutes an ideal form of moral sympathy that is rooted in her own ego. In other words, whilst she genuinely feels very sorry for people who are less privileged than herself, she lacks the ability to feel with them or be radically altered by the otherness of others. She can only see her own smiling face reflected in everyone and everything.

Ultimately, black people don't want white people to love them; for it's not a question of eros. And they don't care if white people fail to understand them; for neither is it a question of logos. They simply want a little respect and to be accorded what's proper to them as men and women; in other words, racial ethics is a question of thymos. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214-15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tropic', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, (1923). This poem can be read in full online by clicking here.

Those interested in Lawrence's important concept of sympathy might like to see the essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which he critiques the idea of merging into One Identity and exposes the danger of confusing sympathy with the Christian ideals of love and charity. The passage concerning the right conduct of a white poet with regard to a negro slave, obviously has particular relevance to our discussion above. Click here to read online.

To read part one of this post on the case of Boglarka Balogh, click here.

Anger is an Energy: On the Politics of Thymos

Thymos 2 (from a series of 50 mixed media images) 

Alejandro Tarantino

Most people are familiar with the ancient Greek terms for love (eros) and for reason (logos).

But many are unfamiliar with another crucial component of the psyche that the Greeks termed thymos and by which they referred to the desire of the male subject not merely to be found sexually attractive and in full possession of his senses, but acknowledged as one who is worthy of respect.

It is this need to be shown due regard that often leads to anger and violent confrontation within patriarchal and phallocratic society. For example, one might recall the powerful scene from A Few Good Men (dir. Rob Reiner, 1992), in which Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessep addresses Tom Cruise as US Navy lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee:

"You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I don't want money and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy!"

Staying in the cinematic universe if I may, I would suggest that it's this same (irrational) aspect of the male soul we are obliged to consider in Joel Schumacher's 1993 thriller Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as alt-right poster boy William Foster (D-FENS).

The movie suggests that, ultimately, even an average man can be pushed too far and that nobody likes to feel they've been lied to, or made a fool of. And nobody likes to feel they're invisible and thus able to be totally ignored. It makes the blood boil. One seeks justice; or some form of revenge.

Deleuzeans might dream of becoming-imperceptible. But they are a very rare and very unusual type. Most people - particularly most men - want to be seen and want to be listened to; want the world to recognise that they too have rights, including the right to freely express their views and affirm their values, whether these coincide with the views and values of a gender-neutral liberal elite or not.      

Idealists who subscribe to a philosophical fantasy of universal love and reason, will never really grasp what motivates men like Jessep and Bill Foster. If this makes them poor film critics on the one hand, so too does it make them poor political commentators on the other; people, we might say, who can't handle the truth.

And so, whilst they might write for The Guardian or appear on Dateline London, not one of them seems able or willing to conceive of why it is that reactionary and/or fascist ideas to do with cultural identity and national greatness that tap into white male rage not only persist, but have renewed appeal amongst sections of even the most prosperous and peaceful democratic societies.  


To watch the scene referred to above between Nicholson and Cruise in A Few Good Men, click here. 

To watch the official trailer to Falling Down, click here.