The Endangered Masculine

In the evolution of the masculine in the West, particularly in America, there are two extremes now, with very little of the mean. On the one hand, many boys and young men today are fairly well feminized. We see this in schools where girls rule and go on to college in greater numbers while boys are made to adhere to emasculating behavioral norms, in the complaints of women lacking suitable dates, and in general in society, with sensitized workplaces safe from sexual harassment and full of plenty of women bosses, and homes where men share nurturing and housekeeping (too little of that though, say many wives still). This is not all bad, to be sure. Who wants a return to the previous status quo of often abusive male dominance which suppressed so much talent in women? But as the pendulum swings, there is a certain lack of vigor, of masculine drive and assertion, in the typical sensitized and sensitive guy, and young men probe in vain for approved ground to stand on in developing a differentiated, gratifying and socially acceptable inner stance of toughness, strength and noble maleness.

On the other hand, among parents and boys who adamantly refuse the feminizing influences, and particularly in our national government, we have boys and leaders whose brute assertions of maleness on the street and of American power on the world stage embarrass and shame American citizens wanting a vigorous but humane culture and strong but diplomatically astute leadership. We cringe at the brutality of hip-hop misogyny, we raise a brow and our hearts sink seeing men like Colin Powell diminished in or ousted from the councils of power. Our administration lumbers ham-fisted and arrogantly in the world, a parody of manly strength and fortitude.

Why is it so difficult to attain a balanced embodiment of the masculine, vigorous and energetic, yet kind and respectful? All virtues, Aristotle taught, require balance, an active condition of the soul which is poised as a mean between extremes. The virtue of manliness, blending mighty muscle and protective heart, neither arrogant nor bashful, seems a particularly difficult mean to attain. It is widely asserted that the feminization of the culture is the hope for the future. But we may find that a few good men, neither drained of testosterone nor given to bullying obliviousness, could help a great deal, and that many such good men will be as necessary as strong empowered women to the emergence of a more ideal state of society.

To Mr. Bush: A Memo from the Boss

In the first days after the terrible events of 9/11, you stood up in fine form. That catastrophe presented a situation and a cast of characters that played to your strength, your instinct for the role of firm wartime leader. The horrendous deed was committed by men delivered as if from central casting, costumed in the garb of unadorned evil, an enemy fit for a clear-cut morality play, inspiring in all of us the feeling of American righteousness and resolve that you expressed so clearly and forcefully in the immediate wake of the disaster. But you have stained the moral clarity and debased the American righteousness that the whole world then rallied around. Has there been a moment in American history in which such a clear mandate for expressing the best in America, a sort of ugly gift of history, was so spectacularly squandered?

After a brief steady and inspiring start, your performance, in this field suited to your strengths, needs improvement, big time, especially in these areas:

1. Knowledge and application of the fundamental American values for which we stand, in contrast to our enemies.
2. Stewardship of the American role and standing in the world: how we’re viewed and the kind of cooperation we get from the international community.

Your particular strengths—determination, single-minded focus, and so on—were called forth by this crisis, and you had every opportunity to shine as a principled war-time president. But even with history playing to your strengths, in these areas you have failed to meet performance expectations.

Moreover, in the meantime there have been other failures, most notably in the following:

• The nation’s economy: With help from your Republic congress, you’ve turned a robust surplus into a severe deficit. A cynic might wonder whether y’all did so on purpose to ensure that any future “tax ‘n spend lib’rals” would have only a threadbare, paltry purse for socialist schemes. A somewhat less cynical interpretation would be that you did so out of tough love to help wean the republic from the folly of depending on the gu’mint. Either way, or if it was done out of sheer foolhardiness and your own healthy appetite for top-heavy tax cuts combined with expanding the government programs you favor (a sort of non-tax ‘n spend policy), the result is another one on your watch that deeply injures the nation’s standing.
• Nature’s economy, the environment. Your administration’s sluggish and dimwitted response to the physical and scientific realities of global warming is an astounding, monumental accomplishment in the annals of blundering by ideologically-driven government officials.

These are cherry-picked issues your political rivals favor, which is not to say that they are no less failures to be condemned. But you have failed miserably the particular interests and the natural, red-blooded American passions of your own political base, too. You’ve degraded the martial and patriotic spirit of the nation by setting it to serve un-American policies and strategies. In my day, kids playing soldier thought of WWII, a just, moral cause. Bringing us into this quagmire of Iraq with your ill-conceived action, miserable and unadaptive military planning, and failures of intelligence and of cultural knowledge, you have badly strained the moral imagination of the nation, especially our youth. They want to be patriotic and brave in a good cause, which is now hard to do. You have crippled good-willed patriotism. In defence of a failed policy, your ideological apparatchiks have invoked the principle of good intentions, the very ploy they disdain as the refuge of liberal folly. Iraq is a disaster we did not have to start, and as it draws on, the unipolar superpower is revealed as an ill-disposed, vulnerable Goliath, a hegemonic, disingenuous, stupid bully militarily stretched thin. That is not the America I know and love and am a passionately patriotic part of. You have through your blundering taken my country from me and sent an imposter abroad in the world, and I deeply resent it. For the first time in my lifetime, it is possible to imagine American decline.

The irony of course is that you are passionately devoted to the idea of America as perennially and providentially dominant, the ordained leader of a world striving toward freedom. But one must take exception to your notion of American exceptionalism.

We are not morally exceptional through force and torture, and we will not “win the war on terror” by sacrificing our standards of human rights, freedom from government intrusion, and due process. Nor is our exceptionalism properly expressed by the self-righteous pursuit of neo-conservative unilateralism in the world. Rather than fearfully pursing this course, a leader who truly understood what it means to be American would call on us to stand fast in our highest standards of civilized conduct even in facing down barbaric enemies. The burden and privilege of American exceptionalism is that we risk a certain degree of vulnerability by behaving according to the highest ideals and truly leading. Your message to your fellow citizens should not be that we need to condone and practice torture, rendition, secret prisons and lack of due process in dealing with our terrorist enemies. It should rather be that while we use force intelligently and effectively to respond to attacks and threats, we will win the war for hearts and minds around the world by maintaining our commitments to the democratic values we aspire to spread throughout that world. Our citizens should look favorably upon due process for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Osama bin Laden, should be willing to forego measures that traduce our civil liberties. If we are faithful to our ideals, every good American slain by terrorists is a hero simply by virtue of living by our highly civilized values in the face of a deep existential threat. I would rather die a martyr to true American values, ideals and civilized practices than live in a nation whose safety depends on the betrayal, distortion or debasement of those very values and practices that make us a model of civilization worth imitating. Your and Mr. Cheney’s, your administration’s, embrace of what Mr. Cheney called “the dark side” is as much, or more, a threat to our nation’s existence than the terrorist threat. They can only kill some of our bodies. You are sacrificing the providentially-conceived essence that makes America what it is and that makes me proud to be an American.

Mr. Bush, fellow citizen, you are my servant; you work for me. Your job performance needs improvement so badly that if I could fire you today, I would. The message from the boss is this: cease hijacking my country or leave your post, letting someone do the job who respects those for whom he works and who understands in his gut the vision, mission and objectives of this proud and noble organization.

10/9/06

Postmodern Moral Reasoning about Israel

Twenty to thirty years ago, the liberal consensus was that Israel held at least some, if not all or most, of the moral high ground in the Middle East conflict. Today on college campuses and elsewhere, many liberals castigate Israel and side largely with the Palestinians. What has changed?

Perhaps Israeli tactics—appropriating settlement territory (albeit land won in a defensive war, be it remembered), bulldozing houses, killing civilians in strikes on Hamas leaders—have fostered increased negative judgment against Israel among well-meaning liberals sensitive to injustice.

But there is a tendency among those making such judgments to dismiss sound moral reasoning in two respects:

1. the incitements and terrorism of unrelenting and genocidal Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are ignored or shallowly rationalized as self-defense of an occupied people, and
2. the basic nature of the two parties is omitted from moral calculation. Israel is fundamentally a Western state with deep-rooted liberal and democratic institutions and culture, a society which has proven itself capable of self-correction, of the restraining and arresting of its militants and of acceptance of a Palestinian nation’s right to exist. In contrast, the Arab world is composed mainly of autocratic, anti-liberal states, and the Palestinians in particular have a deeply corrupt civil and political culture and a high tolerance for the virulently intolerant, anti-Semitic Hamas and others who are openly disdainful of a two-state solution, indeed proud of their devotion to the killing of Jews and the utter destruction of Israel.

How can self-professed liberals be capable of such shabby moral judgments?

Over the last twenty to thirty years, moral reasoning among many liberals has descended into a peculiar postmodernism, whereby the moral features of parties involved in a conflict matter not at all or decisively less than where the parties stand in a binary hierarchy: the oppressor and the oppressed, the powerful and the “subaltern.” The motives, methods and acts of the parties are irrelevant. The way power is exercised does not matter: democrats and fascists are equally guilty of being in authority. The only thing that matters is who has the power and who does not. In essence, this way of reasoning, beyond good and evil, derives from Nietzsche, filtered through hungover Marxism, postcolonialism and Michel Foucault’s analysis of cultural power. According to this view, all moral pretense, all reason, is merely a mask for the will to power. But whereas Nietzsche celebrated and honored the will to power and its discharge as the only “good,” his lapsed descendents sneak a collectivist sense of justice into the equation, so that a weak group and its will to power is all good and a powerful one and its will to power is all bad.

It doesn’t matter that the weak group might be corrupt, anti-democratic and viciously terroristic in targeting civilians or shamefully complicit in tolerating such terrorism. As long as it is getting the short end of the stick, it deserves support, it is “good,” it has whatever moral stature such an amoral classification system can grant. It doesn’t matter that the strong group is viably democratic and self-correcting and open to compromise. If the stronger group holds an upper hand, has a position of advantage, it is bad and to be condemned.

Aside from the flimsy foundations, or lack of them, under this line of reasoning, there is in it a residue of, ironically, a peculiarly Jewish moral tenet: support for the underdog. But the failure of attention to the actual qualities of the acts and motives of the parties represents an abysmal descent from sound moral reasoning and is more postmodernist than liberal.

This sort of reasoning is today widespread among college students and professors, under the influence of Foucault and Edward Said and others. Thus we see the weird support for Palestinian militancy and the knee-jerk condemnation of defensive Israeli action among so-called liberals.