Citizens of the Narcissus

The Higher Learning

When I was in graduate school back in the 1990’s one of my professors, a brilliant but irascible man, opened his lecture with a remark which, paraphrasing from memory, went as follows: “Back in the early 20th century we had all of these groundbreaking discoveries in physics with only a few people holding PhD’s. With all of the PhD’s nowadays we should expect a major breakthrough in physics almost every week. But that is not happening. I wonder why that is?”

It is no exaggeration to say that the scientists of the early twentieth century fundamentally altered our understanding of the physical world. Einstein’s theory of relativity drew a curious, to put it mildly, relationship between space, time, and mass. The pioneers of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, drew even more curious connections between subject and object, where the observer figures into the mathematics as a mathematical operator on a vector. Even more astonishing is the fact that all of these bizarre theories are backed up by empirical evidence.

Now with regard to university degree holders, higher education has exploded during the past century. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1910 the total number of PhD’s awarded in the United States was 443. A century later, in 2010, that number is 158,590, a three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-fold increase. Moreover, in 1910, the ratio of males to females earning PhD’s was 9:1. In 2010 it became 0.93:1. [1]

So higher education is exploding and female “empowerment” is happening on a massive scale. Around the mid-1990’s women began earning more undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees than men, and the upward trend of women continues. [2] As for university faculty, Professor Sarah Hill puts it as follows: “Most of the really competent academics I know, who are just kicking ass, and who doing a really good job in terms of discovery, are women. I think the university has fallen apart because there are a lot of people who are mediocre, who are generally old men, and who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity. ” [3]

So the evidence seems to say that the feminists are right, women really are the superior gender. Yet how to square this with the historical fact that all of the greatest scientists–not to mention artists, inventors, and explorers– are men? How to square this with the history of academic physics as observed by my old prof? Feminists blame the patriarchy, which they claim oppressed women, robbed them of opportunities, and turned a blind eye to their achievements. Some of which may be true, but as we are now a half-century deep into affirmative action for women, with female only business training ([4], for example), female only faculty positions [5], female only spaces while male only spaces are forced to admit women [6], etc., feminist philippics over patriarchal oppression grow ever more implausible.

Consider the recent spectacle of three university presidents, Liz Magill of University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Claudine Gay of Harvard, speaking before Congress in words and tone that would scarcely distinguish them from any middle manager in corporate America. [7] This is not meant as a dig at middle managers, as erudition and eloquence is neither expected nor needed from them, but as for university presidents, well, that’s their bailiwick. Hence the question arises: by what metric are these and the majority female contingent of academia, in the words of Prof Sarah Hill, “kicking ass”?

Certainly being president of an elite university would qualify as “kicking ass” from a careerist standpoint, but the issue is whether these women are upholding the standards of elite universities in any traditional sense. These three women hardly effused learnedness and profundity. One could be forgiven for suspecting that they were affirmative action beneficiaries or even frauds. Which in the case of Harvard president Claudine Gay is what Christopher Rufo has in fact alleged, pointing to numerous instances of what appears to be plagiarism in her published works. [8]

Further, to quote the podcaster and provocateur Matt Walsh: “The real problem with Claudine Gay’s plagiarized papers isn’t that they were plagiarized. It’s the fact that even if they were original thoughts, they were still vapid and dumb and pointless thoughts. It used to be that Harvard professors conducted original research on important topics like biochemistry. But now they write useless garbage for a non-existent audience solely to advance themselves.” [9]

To Walsh’s point, it does appear that the hallowed halls of academia are succumbing to rampant careerism. In the past two years, for example, the famous publishing house John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has closed four academic journals and has had to retract over eleven thousand papers determined to be fraudulent. [10] The main culprit appears to be academic “paper mills”, where aspiring academics can pay to have their papers published, or to be listed as authors on fabricated scientific papers in order to pad their CV in the “publish or perish” world of academia.

And it’s not just academia where the ranks of females are surging while standards are slipping. Consider a case from the business world, the performance of female CEO’s. Feminists never stop carping over the “glass ceiling”, in impenetrable barrier of sexism which they say keeps women from the highest offices. Well the Obama years were undeniably quite good to feminists and women, and by 2012 there were twenty female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies. Author August Løvenskiolds analyzed the five year performance of these twenty women compared with the male CEO’s of comparably ranked companies on the Fortune 500 list (e.g. if a woman was CEO of the 50th ranked company, author chose a male from the next highest ranked company with a male CEO, mostly likely the 49th ranked company). Result: only ten of the twenty women still had their position after five years, compared to fifteen of the twenty men. In addition, eight of these male CEO’s increased the ranking of their companies from 2012 to 2017. None of the female CEO’s improved the ranking of their companies. [11]

Or consider the US military. Despite what feminists and the media claim, the jury is still out on whether women can capably serve as combat soldiers–or can capably serve as soldiers at all. From “deployment pregnancies” to lowering physical fitness standards to issues with group cohesion which inevitably come about with co-ed companies, there is much evidence that women simply don’t belong in the military. Which the public rarely hears about as military discipline is often used to keep soldiers silent on the issue, a frighteningly problematic development for something so vital as national defense. One Marine captain described his experience when he “… had attended the basic-training graduation of a friend at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and saw little in the way of “military bearing” and “no pride in what should have been a life-changing event for these young adults.” He suggested that if the Army is training as it fights, it “is training soldiers for a pillow fight, not a war.” [12]

While not conclusive proof, these examples do suggest that feminism is succeeding for feminists but failing virtually everyone else. Obviously there are other forces at work in the culture, but feminism stands out as particularly corrosive. Why is this? Because, I submit, feminism undermines the patriarchal social order which is the basis of Western Civ–or any advanced, prosperous civilization. I now endeavor to explain this.

Better Homes and Gardens, Courtesy of the Patriarchy

A garden is nature beautified and defanged. Only select vegetation and cute (or at least docile) animals are allowed in. It soothes the senses of the adults and invites children to play. Since a garden is not natural it requires work to construct and maintain. In the civilized world the plot of land on which it rests, the estate, must be paid for.

In the most typical modern context “the garden” is the family home with a backyard– the archetypal American household of the 1950’s, of Leave it to Beaver. The father is head of household. He is the principle bread winner and the last word on all major decisions. The wife is his subordinate (“OK, but I’ll have to check with my husband first ..” she will say to the salesman at the door or the electrician on the phone before proceeding with a purchase) and chiefly in charge of maintaining the home and raising the kids. The feminists hate this arrangement because the woman is sacrificing her sexual freedom and a high flying career for a man. Feminists argue that the world will improve immeasurably once that women are freed from such domestic bondage, once that their great talents are unleashed and their unique leadership styles allowed to shine. Be that as it may, it should not escape our notice that the Leave it to Beaver type household of the 1950’s and 1960’s which the feminists excoriate also coincided with an extraordinary economic boom.

For Daniel Amneus, author of The Case for Father Custody, this is not a coincidence. I here quote him at length:

[The] economic boom of the 1950s and the 250% growth in the GNP were the result of the stable families of the time and the high male motivation they produced. The hated feminine mystique was women’s principal contribution to that prosperity. It meant wearing a mask and playing a role, but it kept men playing their role as husbands, fathers and providers. It was artificial, but so is everything about civilization. It worked. It kept women behaving—kept them from being as “natural” as they are in the ghettos. It gave children fathers. The “problem that has no name” of which Ms. Friedan complained was the result of women having had most of their other problems solved by the patriarchal system and being confronted with the problem at the apex of the “hierarchy of needs,” the spiritual problem of finding enlarged meaning in life. Betty Friedan, an unspiritual lady, imagined the vacuum might be filled by an elitist career, an economic solution. It hasn’t worked out. Most liberated women are more miserable than ever. They have a below-replacement birthrate and a sixty percent divorce rate. Men are roleless, children confused. [13]

In the US, the Democrat Party explicitly caters to feminists. A woman’s right to sexual freedom, particularly in the case of aborting unwanted pregnancies, is a non-negotiable. It was also the Democrat Party under President Lyndon Johnson which initiated a massive welfare state which not only supports single mothers, but encourages mothers to evict fathers in order to secure benefits. [14]

The feminist revolution convinced women that family values are not central to all aspects of life for women, but that women can establish their sexual autonomy by male-style achievement in the world of work. The result has been swarms of females taking over male jobs—and expecting Affirmative Action benefits and special favors for their sex, lest they be discriminated against, lest they be supposed to need husbands. Result: income redistribution on a massive scale, male rolelessness and demoralization on a massive scale—and female unchastity on a massive scale, entrenched and now presumed to be a right … Prisons are filled with single men unable to create partnerships with women. Subsidized housing tracts are filled with single women (and their fatherless children) unable to create stable partnerships with men. While the single males are committing their crimes and serving their prison sentences, the single women with whom they fail to form partnerships, are breeding the next generation of troublemakers.” [13, pp. 307-308]

The reason the patriarchal system leads to advanced civilizations while matriarchies lead to impoverished ghetto life is because patriarchy channels powerful biological and psychological forces in a way that benefits society at large. Let us take a moment to understand this.

Mate selection drives a good deal of human behavior. Human males prize youth and beauty in females, and females prize the qualities that typically lead to high social status in males, i.e, intelligence, ambition, emotional toughness, and above average stature. [15] Females bloom like mayflowers in their middle to late teens, and they only have to care for their hygiene and health and have a nice personality to attract most males. Men, on the other hand, have to work. They have to make something of themselves. Their characters must be formed, mental toughness inculcated, useful skills learned.

Men do this through an array of hierarchies which characterize nearly all groups of males. This begins when they are mere boys: “The reason that a male instinctively starts vying with his same-sex peers from when he is a toddler is for the very purpose of calibrating to what extent he will be able to reproduce. That women may be interested in him if he is the winner in a male–male contest is no mere by-product: it’s the very thing he is competing for.” [16]

Mating opportunities are a potent source of male motivation. While you could say, as does Daniel Amneus, that the patriarchal system is socially constructed as opposed to just occurring in nature, it nonetheless harnesses and leverages the natural power of the male sex drive. Chaste and nubile women are far more valuable to men than used up whores. The patriarchal system thus demands chastity of maidens and sexual exclusivity of wives. The latter stricture is of particular importance as the husband needs assurance that he is raising his own biological children if he is to be required to share the fruits of his labor with them. This maximizes a woman’s value to men, which in turn inspires fierce competition among men, which begets the virtuous cycle of high performing males trying to top each other– all while building, maintaining, and defending civilization. While some of these men will still hire prostitutes or have flings as an overflow valve for their lust, and women will perhaps rightly complain about the double standard, nonetheless the women who submit themselves to patriarchal rule will in general enjoy greater security and a higher standard of living compared to their liberated sisters.

It might not be an over generalization to say that this is how the West was built. In fact what many have argued was the birth place of Western Civilization, Ancient Athens, in relation to her nemesis Sparta, is instructive in this regard. I am speaking of the so called classical era, approximately from 500 to 300 BCE, when there was an unprecedented flowering of intellectual and artistic talent among the Athenians and their allies. From Archimedes to Sophocles, Thucydides to Plato, the depth and breadth of intellectual and artistic invention during this era is astonishing. Alfred North Whitehead would famously state that the philosophy of the European Enlightenment is but a series of footnotes to Plato.

Anyway, one of the great statesmen of the classical era, Pericles, would deliver a funeral oration to his fellow Athenians to commemorate the fallen soldiers in what had become a Greek civil war, the Peleponnesian War of 431-404 BCE. Breaking with tradition, instead of merely praising the dead, which he also does, he would remind his fellow citizens of what they were fighting for, why Athens is the shining city on a hill, a beacon of light to the rest of the known world. At the very end of the speech he would address the women of Athens as follows: “[If] I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad.” [17] Female excellence is thus first and foremost good behavior, in never overstepping her natural sphere of influence as a female.

Compare with her rival nation Sparta, where the women were famously powerful. A Spartan mother would address her son leaving for war: “come home with your shield or on it”, which meant come home victorious or honorably dead. Outside of those two possibilities the mother made it clear that she would disown him. She had no ear whatsoever for what the young man might have felt. Apart from being soldiers, the Spartan men were expected to marry and father children, or else: “Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled.” [18] Bachelors would be physically attacked and publicly humiliated by the Spartan women.

Writes Will Durant: “All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear society. Spartan women, says Plutarch, ‘were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.’ They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time—so great was their influence over men—nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands. They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess.” [18](p. 162)

Though nominally ruled by men, Sparta was a matriarchy. And for many decades she was invincible, at least militarily, finally bringing Athens to her knees in 404 BCE. But what of Sparta’s legacy? “The Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind … In the end Sparta’s narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar survives to declare that here there once lived Greeks.”[18] (p. 166-167)

So the same dynamic played out then as now. The patriarchal social order produced much hurly-burly on the one hand but also a profusion of human creativity and technological innovation. While the matriarchal orientation, conversely, produced a socialist state which only progresses toward ever more strict state control of its citizens, particularly of the men. This progress continues until human creativity is extinguished and finally whatever spirit animated the nation in the first place dies away and the nation becomes nothing but rote customs maintained by the threat of severe punishment for disobedience.

Our own progression toward matriarchy, which began in the 1960’s, is showing up the economic data. In a recent book Nicholas Ebertstadt states that while the US economy may appear healthy and strong, the fact is that there is a lot of artificiality to it, in particular, that soaring asset valuations are being inflated by the Fed holding interest rates near zero. The apparent vast wealth creation of the US economic engine is thus partly a chimaera as it does not entirely derive from the creation of value by a dedicated workforce. This also coincides with a great male flight from work, the subject of Ebertstadt’s book: “America’s great male flight from work began in earnest around 1965 and has continued virtually without pause since then [19] … “this mass voluntary flight from work by men—this hitherto nameless problem—lies at the center of so much of America’s new dysfunction and despair [19](p. 149) … Economically, declining LFPRs [Labor Force Participlation Rate] and falling work rates have made for slower economic growth, widening gaps in income and wealth, greater budgetary pressures, and higher deficits and national debt. They have likewise increased the risk of poverty in the United States, not least for the children whose fathers are found in our huge army of men without work [19](p. 150) …”. Additionaly he notes: “Of the American economy’s current ailments, the declining dynamism of U.S. businesses is among the most worrisome.” [19](p. 152)

Putting naturally dependent creatures like women in charge of economic wealth production while marginalizing men who at least are amenable by nature to being acculturated as self-sacrificing providers of course leads to less production and more consumption of the services which women used to look for in a husband. At the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse, we cannot overlook the extent to which the feminists have marginalized and demoralized men–recall that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was a favorite catchphrase–particularly in their role as fathers, as Daniel Amneus explains in great detail. They have bullied men in academia, the military, and many professional fields. They have wormed their way into publishing, entertainment, and the media. Think of how many commercials, TV shows, and movies that ridicule men, particularly fathers, who are routinely portrayed as incompetent oafs. Even nature shows have gotten into the act with feminist productions like “Queens” by National Geographic [20]. Eberstadt observes: “To a distressing degree, these men appear to have relinquished what we think of ordinarily as adult responsibilities not only as breadwinners but as parents, family members, community members, and citizens.” [19] (pp. 102-103) To a large extent the feminists have indeed succeeded in smashing the patriarchy resulting in sluggish economic growth, ballooning deficits, broken families, frustrated women, and legions of unemployed, unproductive, unmarriageable men.

Heart of Darkness

Was there ever a more picturesque and romantic (from a distance) episode in the history of commerce than the clipper ship era of the 19th century? The extreme tea clippers were essentially big racing yachts which could set a cloud of canvas and were a revolution in hull design with their famously shaped bows. In the tea trade a faster ship meant that you could wait longer than your competitor to buy tea from China–the longer you waited the lower the buying price as the market became saturated–and then race back to England to be among the first arrivals the season who commanded the highest sale prices. In this way you would “clip” the competition.

But it was not merely the beautiful ships, but the life and the men which has fired the imaginations of many young adventurers, as well as writers.

Joseph Conrad was a master mariner who served during the twilight years of the great sailing ships. He observed working men in a rather unique crucible, in times of extreme danger and hardship while also being hermetically isolated from the rest of humanity.

In his novel The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad introduces us to a typically hyper-masculine, well disciplined clipper ship crew, but which subsequently falls into a group psychosis triggered by a terminally ill–or possibly malingering–black man, James Wait (“the nigger”). Their newfound and maudlin empathy for an ailing shipmate takes on an absurd dimension. The ensuing soul-searching becomes transparently narcissistic and fraudulent and disrupts the operation of the ship. At one point the ship nearly capsizes and drowns them all.

(Author’s Note: I feel compelled to state my opinion on the racial aspect of this story. The only black man on the ship, James Wait, is sick and using his sickness to manipulate others. The fact that Conrad depicts the one black man as a locus of sickness and dysfunction might, in some people’s eyes, suggest that Conrad is an odious racist. What I believe is that Conrad invoked negative stereotypes of black people which were common in his time for the larger purposes of his literary creation, in the same way Shakespeare invoked negative stereotypes of Jews in his play The Merchant of Venice. In any case, I think that speculating on whether or not Conrad was a racist or Shakespeare an anti-Semite is a waste of time.)

The story opens with the Mate, Mr. Baker, calling out the crew list, as the Narcissus will soon sail. Notable among the new hands is the massive Singleton, the elder seaman among the foremast hands. He quickly settles in, and we find him absorbed in a popular novel which he is laboring to read. He is not particularly clever or literate, which explains why he has never advanced beyond the station of foremast hand. He is the unsophisticated but loyal working man, a simpleton who seldom thinks of himself and obediently offers his prodigious, muscled body and long acquired skills to the job at hand, all for some meager pay. “With his spectacles and a venerable white beard, he resembled a learned and savage patriarch, the incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of the world … The wisdom of half a century spent listening to the thunder of the waves had spoken unconsciously through his old lips.” [21]

Then we are introduced to Donkin, “a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face”, who is filthy dirty when he boards ship and immediately establishes himself as both quarrelsome and useless. “They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company.”

Mr. Baker has now called all hands but comes up one short. The remaining name he cannot read from the list, so he dismisses the crew on the bosun’s suggestion that perhaps the last man will yet show up before daybreak. Mr. Baker is about to retire for the night when a deep, loud voice is heard somewhere in the darkness: “Wait!” it says. Then the man comes into view: “The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. The men had approached and stood behind him in a body. He overtopped the tallest by a half a head. He said: ‘I belong to the ship.’ He enunciated distinctly, with soft precision. The deep, rolling tones of his voice filled the deck without effort. He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and had made up his mind not to be too hard on it.” Mr. Baker looks to his list and affirms that Wait is the remaining crew member, and instructs him to take his gear forward.

The following morning the Narcissus puts to sea. The men are set to work by the mates. Shipboard routine is established. Out of sight of the officers the men taunt each other, prank each other, argue nonsense: “They disputed endlessly, obstinate and childish; they repeated in shouts and with inflamed faces their amazing arguments; while the soft breeze, eddying down the enormous cavity of the foresail, that stood out distended above their bare heads, stirred the tumbled hair with a touch passing and light like an indulgent caress.”

The Narcissus is a happy ship. But Donkin, meanwhile, “solitary and brooding over his wrongs on the forecastle-head, moved closer to catch the drift of the discussion below him; he turned his sallow face to the sea, and his thin nostrils moved, sniffing the breeze, as he lounged negligently by the rail.” Then: “Suddenly the face of Donkin leaning high-shouldered over the after-rail became grave … The washerman plunged both his arms into the tub abruptly; the cook became more crestfallen than an exposed backslider; the boatswain moved his shoulders uneasily; the carpenter got up with a spring and walked away”. James Wait appears on deck. Though just another foremast hand, he yet commands them with some subtle power. He came up on deck to scold them for making too much noise. How could you all do such a thing to a dying man? “Donkin above blinked his red eyelids with invisible eyelashes, and smiled bitterly over the nigger’s head.”

Soon Jimmy has the crew under his spell. He has their consciences hooked. Archie, the concertina player, has stopped playing. “Our singers became mute because Jimmy was a dying man. For the same reason no chap — as Knowles remarked — could ‘drive in a nail to hang his few poor rags upon,’ without being made aware of the enormity he committed in disturbing Jimmy’s interminable last moments … The cook was over-whelmed with grief; he did not know the culprit but he knew that wickedness flourished; he knew that Satan was abroad amongst those men, whom he looked upon as in some way under his spiritual care … The Narcissus was still a peaceful ship, but mutual confidence was shaken. Donkin did not conceal his delight.”

Donkin’s insolence brings him into a confrontation with Mr. Baker, who proceeds to knock out one of Donkin’s front teeth. “Donkin grinned venomously. From that day he became pitiless; told Jimmy that he was a ‘black fraud’; hinted to us that we were an imbecile lot, daily taken in by a vulgar nigger. And Jimmy seemed to like the fellow! … Jimmy’s hateful accomplice seemed to have blown with his impure breath undreamt-of subtleties into our hearts. We were disturbed and cowardly. That we knew. Singleton seemed to know nothing, understand nothing.”

One day Singleton punctures the spell by way of his simple, bold, straightforward nature. He confronts Jimmy directly, asks him if he is actually dying. Jimmy is momentarily startled by the forwardness, “why, can’t you see I am?” he replies somewhat tentatively. ” ‘Well, get on with your dying,’ [Singleton] said with venerable mildness: ‘don’t raise a blamed fuss with us over that job. We can’t help you.’ Jimmy fell back in his bunk, and for a long time lay very still wiping the perspiration off his chin.” The statement of plain fact is crushing to Jimmy but liberating to the rest of the crew. Donkin hastily counters the momentary reprieve with another injection of psychological poison. He convinces them that Singleton is just a fool. “We perceived that after all Singleton’s answer meant nothing. We began to hate him for making fun of us. All our certitudes were going; we were on doubtful terms with our officers; the cook had given us up for lost; we had overheard the boatswain’s opinion that ‘we were a crowd of softies’. We suspected Jimmy, one another, and even our very selves. We did not know what to do.”

Approaching the Cape of Good Hope the Narcissus is beset by terrible storms. Just when it seems that the severe weather has passed, the sea strikes its blow. Singleton, at the wheel, spots a massive rogue wave tumbling toward them. “Look out for yourselves!” he shouts. The wave knocks the Narcissus down on her side–and she does not come back up.

The men struggle to re-group, to account for each other, to move about the ship which is now laying on her side. Against their salt-dried mouths the cook manages to extract some fresh water from a cask and hand it out in mugs to the crew, for which they are all exuberantly grateful. The crew are in amazingly good cheer for such dismal circumstances, but: “Suddenly some one cried: — ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ and we were appalled once more.” The sick and morose man by now had his own cabin, which was likely submerged. But the crew nonetheless execute a heroic rescue operation, smashing through the hefty timbers to get at James Wait, and they succeed in extracting him alive. “We could not get rid of the monstrous suspicion that this astounding black-man was shamming sick, had been malingering heartlessly in the face of our toil, of our scorn, of our patience — and now was malingering in the face of our devotion — in the face of death. Our vague and imperfect morality rose with disgust at his unmanly lie. But he stuck to it manfully — amazingly.”

Conditions are moderating but the Narcissus remains pinned on her side. Captain Allistoun barks: “Wear ship!” (put the ship through a jybe). Reflexively the exhausted men set to work, setting some canvas. The powerful and expert Singleton is at the wheel. Slowly the Narcissus gathers way and steers off the wind. Then she obediently puts her stern through the wind, with the pressure on the sails now working to right the ship. And the Narcissus rights herself, free from the ocean’s deathly grip.

The danger has passed and fair weather returns, and Donkin is back to his old tricks. “We remembered our danger, our toil — and conveniently forgot our horrible scare. We decried our officer — who had done nothing — and listened to the fascinating Donkin, his care for our rights, his disinterested concern for our dignity, were not discouraged by the invariable contumely of our words, by the disdain of our looks … and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers.”

Captain Allistoun is now going to have it out with James Wait. This time Jimmy loses his nerve, gets to his feet, but stumbles about. The Captain eyes him intently. “‘No. You don’t,’ said the master curtly. Bare feet shuffled, disapproving voices murmured all round; he went on as if he had not heard: — ‘You have been skulking nearly all the passage and now you want to come out. You think you are near enough to the pay-table now. Smell the shore, hey?’ ‘I’ve been sick… now — better,’ mumbled Wait glaring in the light. — ‘You have been shamming sick,’ retorted Captain Allistoun with severity: ‘Why… ‘ he hesitated for less than half a second. ‘Why, anybody can see that. There’s nothing the matter with you, but you choose to lie-up to please yourself — and now you shall lie-up to please me. Mr. baker, my orders are that this man is not to be allowed on deck to the end of the passage.’ “

The crew is in uproar, threatening to strike in protest as a gesture of solidarity with Jimmy, with Donkin devilishly egging them on. Suddenly heavy iron belaying pins land on deck, passing very close to the two mates, Mr. Baker and Mr. Creighton. The row becomes so intense that the helmsman leaves the wheel in curiosity and the Narcissus begins slowly rounding up into the wind. The sails begin to luff. “The ship trembled from trucks to keel; the sails kept on rattling like a discharge of musketry; the chain sheets and loose shackles jingled aloft in a thin peal; the gin blocks groaned. It was as if an invisible hand had given the ship an angry shake to recall the men that peopled her decks to the sense of reality, vigilance and duty.”

The men reflexively return to their duties, the Narcissus is brought back on course, and the men resume their protest but heads are cooling. Captain Allistoun says to Mr Baker: ” ‘Did you see the eyes of that sick nigger, Mr. Baker? I fancied he begged me for something. What? Past all help. One lone black beggar amongst the lot of us, and he seemed to look through me into the very hell ‘ … He disappeared below, leaving his mates facing one another, and more impressed than if they had seen a stone image shed a miraculous tear of compassion over the incertitudes of life and death…”

Shortly after sighting Flores (the Azores), Jimmy dies. All hands attend the sea burial of Jimmy. The corpse does not slide easily over the side, but only after ever increased tilting does it suddenly break loose and splash down into the deep blue sea, and “The ship rolled as if relieved of an unfair burden; the sails flapped.” Shortly thereafter Captain Allistoun commands them to square the yards. A fair wind is working in, at long last. “A week afterwards the Narcissus entered the chops of the Channel. Under white wings she skimmed low over the blue sea like a great tired bird speeding to its nest.”

Conrad evidently had little regard for “sea lawyers” and scorned those who sought to improve the lives of working men because they pitied them. When the men of the Narcissus justifiably complain that they have been pushed to their limits from working on a nearly capsized ship which has been beset by storms for days now, Mr. Baker only rebukes them: “— ‘Care for you!’ exclaimed Mr. Baker, angrily. ‘Why should [Captain Allistoun] care for you? Are you a lot of women passengers to be taken care of? We are here to take care of the ship — and some of you ain’t up to that.”

In case your thinking that such men only exist in novels, here’s a letter from a former foremast hand who served on several of the great clippers, including the famous Thermoplyae:

In my experience I have found that deep-water sailors treated like men [his italics] are the most loyal, active, dare-devil bunch in the wide world. They will put up an awful fight to save a ship they love, in which they get decent food and fair treatment. By this I do not mean that they must be coddled, because sea discipline must be maintained at all times. Treated as dogs, like we were [the author is referring to his time on an American “hell ship”], they can be sullen and unresponsive, caring less than nothing for their own lives or for that of the ship. We had a good crew on the ship above mentioned, amongst which we had five Liverpool Irishmen that, to use a sailor’s expression, ‘were hard men to shave’. I really believe that after the Liverpool gang declared themselves that the remainder of the crew were more afraid of them than they were of the Skipper and the two mates.” [22]

Men have to be men if they are going to afforded any respect at all. This is why, like it or not, the men’s rights movement will not likely ever achieve widespread acceptance, and why reformed feminists like Louise Perry will acknowledge that while men have legitimate complaints which are routinely dismissed, especially by feminists, men’s rights advocates give her “the ick”. [23]

Correspondingly, the organizations and institutions that men build are hierarchical and often pitiless to those who don’t make the cut. A man’s value is performance based. Men come up through the ranks, if they have the talent, if they have the drive. As noted earlier, boys will begin forming success hierarchies at a very early age and it serves the important purpose of calibrating their mating success later on. Boys want to win because winners get the girls. The proclivity for competition and ranking is hardwired into nearly every human male.

I think we can read a degree of callousness into the traditionally masculine shipmaster Joseph Conrad, which might be labeled “toxic masculinity” today. Even though James Wait was in fact terminally ill, Conrad still saw him as a malingerer. Donkin the socialist he regards with unalloyed contempt. At the very end of the story, when the ship reaches port, reaches the city, the crew is receiving their pay and dispersing: “‘Can’t write?’ said the clerk, shocked. ‘Make a mark, then.’ Singleton painfully sketched in a heavy cross, blotted the page. ‘What a disgusting old brute,’ muttered the clerk. Somebody opened the door for him, and the patriarchal seaman passed through unsteadily, without as much as a glance at any of us.” Then comes Donkin: “Donkin entered. He seemed out of breath, was grave, full of business. He went straight to the desk, talked with animation to the clerk, who thought him an intelligent man.” Typical of sailors of the time, Conrad looks disparagingly at city dwellers who live soft and decadent lives, the reason why they naively and perversely praise fraudsters like Donkin while deriding superb seaman like Singleton.

I chose Conrad’s story, apart from the fact that I like sea stories, because I think it presents an accurate and persuasive allegory to the so called culture war in America, and in the West in general. Donkin, “Jimmy’s hateful accomplice [who] seemed to have blown with his impure breath undreamt-of subtleties into our hearts … ” would be the postmodernist, the Critical Race Theorist, the cultural Marxist of today who puts “undreamt-of subtleties” into our minds and sows endless nesting doubts into our hearts.

As an example, consider the matter of “unconscious bias”. If you are overtly racist, well that is not OK we all can agree. But if you protest that you a not a racist, that could be even worse. You really do harbor prejudices against black people, or women, or LGBT people, only you are refusing to acknowledge it. This requires intervention and therapy to exorcise. All of which causes crippling self doubt and moral castration. The recent grooming gang scandal in the UK furnishes us with a recent example of such moral castration. The fact that the perpetrators are mostly Pakistani Muslim men and the victims young, white, British girls has the media, the police, and the UK government mute on the alleged injustices lest they be in any way seen as bigoted against dark skinned people. [24] Utter cowardice, that. “All our certitudes were going; we were on doubtful terms with our officers; the cook had given us up for lost; we had overheard the boatswain’s opinion that ‘we were a crowd of softies’. We suspected Jimmy, one another, and even our very selves. We did not know what to do.”

The universities were and are the incubators of all of this (in our time, not Conrad’s). Castration through feminization, you might say. UPenn professor Amy Wax describes the current culture of the university as follows: “the elevation of the values of the nursery and the kindergarten over the traditional, established, customary values of the academy … of truth seeking, of rigor, of empiricism … of sportsman like vigorous disagreement, and women [and minorities] have questioned those values and I think actively sought to undermine them in their kind of safetyist, anti-free expression, anti-First Amendment ethos.” [25]

The denigration of the masculine (e.g. “toxic masculinity”) and the exaltation of the feminine, which I’ve sometimes heard referred to as the “women are wonderful effect”, has resulted in generations of effeminate men. Though it may be deeply subversive to their most basic instincts as men, many men nonetheless embraced feminism because they saw it as a socially acceptable way of shirking their responsibilities, first and foremost as protectors and providers. They also thought that it would please the women, or at least keep them out of trouble with them.

There are no women around in Conrad’s story. Yet the men are similarly beguiled by an over indulgence of compassion and self-reflection, which suggests that the temptation exists for all men. Some of the sailors, especially the younger ones, are veritably bewitched: “[Belfast] spent every moment of his spare time in Jimmy ‘s cabin. He tended him, talked to him; was as gentle as a woman, as tenderly gay as an old philanthropist, as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner.”

I think Conrad correctly identifies the temptation as an instrumental “higher” moral calling which justifies mendacity, laziness, and cowardice. “Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity through pity, through sentimentalism. We set ourselves to bolster it up, from compassion, from recklessness, from a sense of fun. Jimmy’s steadfastness to his untruthful attitude in the face of the inevitable truth had the proportions of a colossal enigma”.

Like the mythical god Narcissus, the collective psyche of the crew is captured by its own self, its own politics, and this nearly results in the ship sinking and her company drowning. Too much self-focus, or “self-care” as we might say in our present day therapy culture, rots the souls of individuals and puts the larger society at risk of fragmentation and crippling dysfunction. Among the crew of the Narcissus, Singleton alone remains true and immune to the narcissistic self-absorption which has taken over, as a result of his many years spent at sea and perhaps due to his lack of intellectual vigor.

Games Without Frontiers

To once again invoke my previous metaphor of “the garden”, modern technology has effectively expanded the garden into public spaces, into men’s spaces, into the plains, the wilderness. Vast swaths of earth are now crisscrossed by highways along which towns large and small offer all kinds of goods, eateries, and entertainment. A family can drive a car three thousand miles, coast to coast across the United States, and not fear starvation, dehydration, or getting mauled by a bear. Rolling hills and miles of cornfields lay supine, nonthreatening and unchallenging, when viewed from the car windows. Mere passing scenes for the passengers inside a small, petroleum powered machine. Perhaps their nature viewing is set to a sound track as well, a popular song rendered on a hard drive as binary code which yet captures the music with better fidelity than a human ear could ever discern.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the “last man”, a ” man, motivated only by the desire for comfortable self-preservation … the most despicable man because he is no longer able to despise himself. He neither wants to rule nor be ruled, to become rich or poor; he wants everyone to do and be the same. ‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men, and they blink.”
[26

Our current conception of progress certainly has the “last man” in mind, only we see it as a good thing. No human wishes to spend his life merely eking out an existence. Even the nature freaks, the “off-the-grid” folks you see on YouTube, will take a myriad of modern devices with them so that they can be “one with nature” but not hungry and miserable at the same time. As a matter of course, modern technology and the ethos of technological progress has been universally adopted throughout the world.

It is also recognized that our technology resulted from modern science, which began in the 1600’s with men like Issac Newton.
Modern science is mechanistic. The book of nature is written in mathematics so far as the physical sciences are concerned. Science thus values truth understood as the correctness of ideas, as how precisely the mathematical model reflects observed reality. Being merely descriptive of nature the language of science cannot speak to values, including the value of science itself. Values thus get farmed out to consumers in a free market. Science produces technology, and technology makes our lives easier, more comfortable, and free.

Except without a credible science of higher purpose and without the proximate correctives imposed by nature (hunger, dangerous animals, etc.), man is perhaps too free for his own good and comes to believe that he can style his own nature. Which on the one hand affords more freedom than ever to pursue life, liberty and happiness, but dissolves the shared bedrock of moral principles. It is now becoming questionable as to whether free nations like the United States can continue to flourish as such, or will descend into anarchy and madness. Lacking a bedrock of moral principles means having no defense against subversive philosophies which can take root within a nation.

Such as postmodernism which came to America in the 1960’s. This new radical skepticism from Europe took hold in the universities, which held that the greatest works in the Western Canon are regarded as such only because their creators, mostly white Europeans, have managed cultural dominance, in part through military force. They argue that what is considered true, what is considered artistically beautiful and superlative, only reflects the value system of the dominant culture, the ones calling the shots politically. There is no actual order of rank in artistic and scientific works, only the one imposed on the people by the powerful. Whether it be Rachmaninoff or rap music, it’s all really just a matter of personal preference. If we regard the former as “high art” that is only because the people running the institutions tell us that it is so. The shared consensus on what is highest implies a shared value system, but for the postmoderns the so-called shared value system is just the value system of whichever political faction has the upper hand at the time.

The postmodernists did, however, recognize the problem they would exacerbate: “Technology also began to advance rapidly, which, together with the mass production of consumer goods, enabled this “middle culture” to fuel a new postrationing desire for art, music, and entertainment. This, in turn, sparked fears that society was degenerating into an artificial, hedonistic, capitalist, consumerist world of fantasy and play.” [27] That is, they recognized that rapid advances in technology combined with wealth production through free trade is producing the world of our dreams while at the same time producing an environment for which we are maladapted.

I will grant that Hanna Rosin is correct in pointing out that between the genders, women are better adapted to this new world than men–but only because of the natural proclivities of females which feminists despise. Females prize safety and security because they are the natural caretakers of infants. In so far as technology makes the world safer and softer, that’s to her liking. Plus a wealthy economy affords a lot of service oriented jobs which require more of social adroitness than technical skill and muscle. An incompetent in charge of a three thousand ton windjammer running in heavy wind and sea could cause her to broach to. A careless navigator could run her up on the rocks resulting in the loss of life and property. But a CEO of a consulting business like McKinsey & Company succeeds more by swaying perceptions than steering anything tangible.

So the economy of the garden, so to speak, trades and monetizes a good deal of vanity, of will o’ the wisp, the latest fashions. As the economy grows a larger percentage of the population can and will pay for fantasy, flattery, even outright lies (e.g. diet books, life coaching, stock trading, etc.). When the known world is a garden, playing at dress-ups can become a profitable industry with all the reputational seriousness as construction or petroleum engineering.

Of course the garden itself still needs to be maintained. It requires raw materials mined from the earth, petroleum extraction and refining, a functioning power grid, food production, shipping, etc. These jobs are well defined, they engage with nature and they require specific skills which cannot be finessed. A farmer has to produce actual food, not a vaunted program for higher self esteem, which may or may not affect anything. Unsurprisingly these jobs are overwhelmingly performed by men.

Yet, apart from the fact that females generally excel at the “soft skills” compared to men, who by their very nature tend to be more logical, direct, and disagreeable, I submit that the real problem for men goes much deeper. As a preliminary sketch, I refer to the work of psychologist Erich Neumann, who argued that our souls resolve experience by an array of archetypes. Archetypes are much broader than logical categories, e.g. resolving things in terms of quantity (as Kant would have it), as they engage our emotions as well. They are pattern recognition firmware which gets installed in all humans and through which our most basic instincts and predilections find expression or manifest in some way. In the ancient world these archetypes were often projected outward as gods and goddesses, of jealousy, of love, etc. There is, for example, the archetype of the Great Mother: “When analytical psychology speaks of the primordial image or archetype of the Great Mother, it is referring, not to any concrete image existing in space and time, but to an inward image at work in the human psyche. The symbolic expression of this psychic phenomenon is to be found in the figures of the Great Goddess represented in the myths and artistic creations of mankind … the dynamic action of the archetype extends beyond unconscious instinct and continues to operate as an unconscious will that determines the personality, exerting a decisive influence on the mood, inclinations, and tendencies of the personality, and ultimately on its conceptions, intentions, interests, on consciousness and the specific direction of the mind.” [28]

One’s personality is determined by the relative strength of these archetypes within him. As there are sex specific archetypes, sex differences are revealed by the relative preponderance of archetypes in a male vs. a female. One such archetype is the Great Mother. Another the male hero. “Consciousness is identified with the figure of the male hero, while the devouring unconscious is identified with the figure of the female monster. As we have elsewhere shown at length, this co-ordination is general; that is, in both sexes the active ego consciousness is characterized by a male symbolism, the unconscious as a whole by a female symbolism.” [28](p. 105)

The hero’s journey evokes the masculine element of one’s soul, a disposition resulting from a male-oriented admixture of archetypes at play which are more common to human males. Dr. Leonard Sax recently stated that boys almost universally want to be heroes. [29] What this means is that facing risk, plunging oneself into uncertainty, into the unknown, in order to bring forth order, whether it be a piece of music, a political principle, a scientific theory, etc., is the basic orientation of healthy male development. It is well known that men are more willing to take big risks for a possible big payout than women. Of course some women have also excelled at such things, those being atypically masculine females.

Thus a “global garden” threatens to smother masculine energy by closing his perceptions toward wildness, danger, actual possibilities. After all, the boy might say, there are no mountains left to scale, every peak has already been reached, so what’s the point? Seeing no useful employment for his basic masculine promptings in an increasingly feminized society, as discussed above, men may choose to lose themselves in masculine fantasy, e.g. video games, where they imagine themselves as the real adventurers of yesteryear while living off of mom or some baloney disability check from the state. Apart from the fact that the player is not actually venturing out into the world, this is faux adventure because the man remains hermetically secluded inside the walls of what is already known, predictable, and safe. Every possibility is already mapped out by the game creator, for it is a deterministic computer program. There’s a countable number of possible moves, though they may be many. He’s no more, in principle, than a piece on a chessboard. Now matter how life-like they may appear, human built machines are ipso facto dead because they cannot bring forth anything beyond what has already been revealed up to this point in human history. Only a human soul can do that.

Wildness–sometimes literally the wilderness, places yet untouched by humans–has always been a place of human renewal, of intellectual or spiritual renaissance. From Jesus in the desert to Darwin at the Galapagos to HD Thoreau at Walden, a very many seminal thinkers have left the civilized world and ventured into the wilds to free their minds, to coax something, perhaps just a vague sense, to eventually reveal itself in their souls. Recall Melville’s famous opening chapter in Moby Dick:

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

So many men are drawn to the open sea, which even today remains much a wild frontier, even though most prefer to only observe from a comfortable distance, remain in the city. He concludes the chapter:

With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.

Melville likens comfort seeking city dwellers as inmates of an asylum, their perceptions and daily routines neatly contained within safe, man-made walls. Given the advances in technology and overall wealth of Western Civ, this is progressing beyond the temptation of a safe, soft option to seem more like a destiny as the entire globe becomes ever more crafted by human doing. I’m only making the point here that as actual wildernesses disappear, so may the call to adventure, the endless possibilities for human creativity when one dares to venture into the unknown.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger meditated deeply on the dangerously dehumanizing possibilities posed by modern technology. In his tract The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger argues that modern machine technology marks a significant departure from previous technologies, like bridges and windmills and sailing ships, because it transcends mere instrumentality as it becomes a way of revealing truth. Which is a revealing as a calculable nexus of forces. Everything comes to pass by efficient causes, like giant domino chains.

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of it precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion : It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. [30]

Modern machine technology reduces nature to a mere supplier of raw materials, or “standing reserve”. Nature becomes “objectless” in the sense that it no longer presents us with a myriad of challenges and mysteries, forces we have had to contend with and which have formed us as humans over many millennia. Nowadays we can live inside a technological cocoon where nature supplies the means to human ends, which are increasingly what pleases the senses once basic needs are secured. The dangerous delusion is that the garden is all there is– that all there is is human contrivance, or that that is all that matters. Following what we’ve said earlier, this extinguishes the upward pointing beacon of the soul by blinding it to the wildness and chaos outside the garden walls. The soul no longer even knows there are walls. Moreover, if our environment is entirely human engineered, then changing it to suit one’s needs means fighting against other humans. Without strongly perceived natural conditions much of this fight lies in persuasion, winning over enough powerful people to your fashion choices. The world we live in in thus determined by who has the political power — enter the postmoderns.

Moreover, man himself can the become the raw materials for the machines, become “standing reserve”, for the longer he lives within a technological cocoon the more his responses to inputs will become predictable and amenable to mathematical modeling. Our cell phones or what comes next will become the remote control receivers the powerful will use to call up the desired behaviors from the populace. This is a dreadful possibility for all humans, but especially men.

A Call to Arms

I began this essay with a remark made by an old physics prof of mine which has long stayed with me, as to why there are so few groundbreaking scientific discoveries nowadays compared to a century ago. This seems especially puzzling considering the explosion of higher education, the nearly two-orders-of-magnitude increase in advanced science degrees awarded each year since the turn of the 20th century. One would think that more accredited scientists would mean more science getting done, which should only improve the chances for groundbreaking discoveries.

Additionally there is the fact that the explosion of higher education owes in a large part to the women’s movement of the 1960’s which propelled legions of females into professional fields, including and especially academia. The universities are now majority female, which has the feminists trumpeting victory. Hanna Rosin, for instance, gleefully reported that men are getting trounced, while Prof. Sarah Hill notes that it is the women who are “kicking ass” in the academy compared to all the mediocre, old men.

Insofar as earning the accolades goes, women are beating the men, in fact. But then one has to consider the overall present value of such accolades compared to the past. The trend line is most certainly downward. Back in the 1950’s a man with a high school diploma could get a job that paid well enough to support a family. Nowadays he’d be lucky to do that with a masters degree. [31] Might this have something to do with the massive influx of women? The universities have not only become female dominated by the numbers, but hyper-feminized culturally, as Prof. Amy Wax among others have testified to. But the world outside academia is vigorously competitive and one typically needs to be both skilled at persuasion and tough enough to stay in the fight to succeed. Hence it is little wonder that the university in so far as its role in forming the minds and characters of the youth has less value today compared to fifty years ago.

We considered the modern “garden” as the family home with the backyard, a tended and manicured version of nature that is safe for children yet still suggests adventure. We then considered that modern technology and wealth production has effectively expanded the garden into the cities and even the countryside. All of which was made possible by a science which has nothing to say of value–even its own–as it reveals nature entirely in terms of efficient causation through mathematical modeling. The result is that the environmental pressures our ancestors evolved to survive in have largely disappeared while at the same time there is no longer a Queen Science, one that deals in valuations and points to the peaks, to the highest values. Hence there is neither the force of nature nor reason underwriting values, just the marketplace and those who are able to manipulate it. The end result is that the traditional male role of protector and provider has been diminished while modern society, when all is running smoothly, incurs the age old vices of wealthy families and the aristocracies of yesteryear: decadence, effeminacy, destructive hedonism taking the place of duty and purpose.

Yet perhaps this world yet will be able to do away with masculinity. We have to consider the matter. Writing in the 19th century, Joseph Conrad yet imagines (though perhaps it is based on his own experience as a shipmaster) a windjammer crew seduced by sentimentalism, by a sudden inward consideration, a overweening self-regard. They are egged on by a self-styled socialist and rabble-rouser onboard, Donkin, and his show victim, James Wait, who serves to as the focus of all the injustices thrust upon them by evil oppressors like ship captains, ship owners, and shipping company CEO’s. And there is some truth to it. Working men were and are sometimes exploited by industrialists, in some cases scandalously so. But the safe operation of the ship, like the larger civilized world, simply cannot afford perfect justice for all. Some will be sacrificed, men will be sacrificed, which is the reason why initiations of boys into manhood have existed for centuries. Otherwise men will become too self-focused–narcissistic–a state of affairs which almost drowns the ship in Conrad’s story, and may well drown our ship of state if left uncorrected.

Allegorically I posit that Conrad’s story is still true, even in our hyper-technological, artificial world. In the first place, technology only mediates nature. At some point it must interface with reality: the reality of extracting petroleum, of building safe airplanes, of managing human waste, etc. Most of these jobs are still performed by men, and yet this does not appear to cause the feminists any concern, so confident they seem that men will just go on doing all the necessary jobs for them no matter how badly they get treated. But the truth is that the world is nowhere close to being fully automated.

Secondly, boys have to become men so that the patriarchal social order can properly function. Daniel Amneus has I believe made a convincing case that civilization is a patriarchy–no other social order as of yet has produced any similar level of peace and prosperity, not to mention the advances in science and art. The basic building block of a patriarchal order is the father-headed household. This is not to say that other arrangements should be proscribed. Allowances to our classical liberal principles of individuality, that everyone should be able to pursue their own hopes and dreams, are essential to any healthy society. The patriarchs should not be in the business of micromanaging people’s lives, only offering thoughtful guidance based on decades of life experience. However, a subversion of the natural order, which is what the feminists are attempting, will likely lead to societal collapse and it is the job of patriarchs to stop it.

Third, healthy masculinity is what brings new modes and orders to the world–keeps society growing and flourishing. There’s no standing still in life, not for individuals, not for civilizations. This is my reply to my old prof, as to why physics is stagnating, why groundbreaking scientific discoveries are rare despite the swelling ranks of scientists. Genius is more than mere mental computing power, than IQ. Its product is original, not something that can be figured out from known premises. Typically it issues from adventure, a journey sometimes literally though the wilderness, confronting darkness and danger, treading where one is constantly unsure of one’s footing. Wealth and comfort, university safe spaces, generally do not create genius, though they may host spectacular technicians.

Finally, demoralizing boys and men by disparaging and discouraging their natural development, teaching them to be more like the well behaved girls, is not going to make anyone’s lives better–not the boys, not the men, and not the women who need their love and devotion. The feminists might get to spike a football over it, but that’s about it.

In most cultures boys were turned into men through military service. Cleaved from the inclusive and compassionate world of home–of mother– this would be his first adventure. Challenge after challenge is thrown at him, and crying for help will only increase the severity of the next challenge. No one cares about the boy’s feelings, for he must become a man, and a man does not place himself above his company, his family, or God. Luckily most human males are wired to thrive from this sort of adventure, and will in time develop a deep, abiding sense of pride in their willingness to sacrifice everything if necessary. That is, after all, what heroes do. And that taps into very deep rivers of the male psyche which throughout history has show itself to be an inexhaustible fuel supply for building, protecting, and maintaining civilization, from the family unit up to all its institutions.

I think that the challenge at hand is to convince younger generations of men that there are plenty of adventures to be had–and plenty of opportunities to be a hero. I think that we need to reconstitute all-male institutions which turn boys into men, in particular, all-male military academies, but also all-male trade schools and institutions like the (former) Boy Scouts of America. The feminists will cry foul, call you sexist, threaten lawsuits for this. Well if you’re up for an adventure, up to measure your mettle, there you go.

Another is to restore father custody as the default in divorce cases, as in the patriarchal order the children are his property, so long as he does not neglect or abuse them. This will have feminist heads exploding. It should be great fun.

Or you can work at the local level. I spend a lot of time around yachtsmen and just this past summer, for example, I noted that a local yacht club was sponsoring an all-female sailing program. I have written about the unfair advantaging of women in the Ocean Race. [32] If you have any sway in these circles, gently inquire as to how specifically advantaging women is fair. If they claim that it is necessary to compensate for the supposed historical advantages that men have had over women, calmly point out that it was men who developed ocean going sailing ships; it was men who sailed them to uncharted lands; and it was men who invented the sport of yacht racing. So what exactly are you girls laying claim to? If they argue that women are proving themselves to be capable ocean sailors these days, point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Technology such as electronic navigation, satellite weather feeds, all kinds of labor saving devices such as roller furling mechanisms, was all developed by your forefathers who have made it possible for lesser talents to succeed at what only the most daring of men would attempt in the past.

I only use this example because it’s what I am familiar with. But I’m sure that you see the same dynamic playing out in many spaces as our culture is pervaded by feminist politics. The world of online gaming is another example of vigorous feminist colonization, as Joker of the YouTube channel “Better Bachelor” has discussed at some length. [33] Men need to set boundaries on their spaces. If women want to build out their own games, more power to them, but don’t expect the men to change what they like in order to accommodate the girls who never did the work.

Which reminds me of what I see coming out of Hollywood. I see a lot of classic movies getting feminist treatment, which typically means that the females are now the heroes and the males largely useless or incompetent, unless they are evil. But again these feminists seem only interested in what is already established and successful. I don’t see them creating any new franchises. I see Kathleeen Kennedy making feminist friendly Star Wars movies. Or Disney re-writing timeless classics like Snow White, where lead actress Rachel Zegler haughtily explains that in this version she will not need no prince to save her. Feminists consider this as much needed progressive updates to outdated stories, but it looks a lot more like parasitical pillaging to me.

Anyway, if face-to-face activism is too tall an order, you can write or podcast to a general audience on men’s issues, as I am doing here.

The future of our civilization, of Western civilization, of continued peace and prosperity, rests squarely on the shoulders of men, as it always has. While you younger men may complain that older generations of men, particularly the hippie generation of the 1960’s and 70’s, have betrayed you, it still does not absolve you of the responsibility. Don’t shirk, don’t fall for the sentimental lie, the soul-destroying narcissism of therapy culture, a life of ignoble ease. You deserve much better than what the culture of today has planned for you.

Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

References

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_301.20.asp

[2] Reeves, Richard V.. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (p. 25). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzDucLhmI50&t=3005s, around the 48 min mark

[4] [https://developer.apple.com/entrepreneur-camp/how-to-apply/

[5] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30973376.html

[6] https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VtAZBvmzcQ

[8] https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkPyvoBQLXU

[10] https://theweek.com/science/rise-of-fake-science-fraudulent-papers

[11] https://avoiceformen.com/featured/do-men-make-better-ceos-than-women/

[12] Browne, Kingsley. Co-ed Combat (p. 277). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[13] Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody (Primrose Press, Alhambra, CA, 1999), p. 305

[14] Schlafly, Phyllis. Who Killed the American Family? (p. 122). WND Books. Kindle Edition.

[15] Buss, David M.. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

[16] Moxon, Steve. The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society (p. 29). Andrews UK – Academic. Kindle Edition.

[17] Thucydides. The History Of The Peloponnesian War: By Thucydides – Illustrated (p. 42). Kindle Edition.

[18] Durant, Will. The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II (p. 161). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[19] Eberstadt, Nick . Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) (New Threats to Freedom Series) (p. 132). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa60pYXcTI4

[21] Conrad, Joseph; Book House. Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 36) (p. 539, 555). Kindle Edition.

[22] Letter to Alan Villiers, author wished to remain anonymous. Alan Villiers, The Way of a Ship (Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1970), pp. 176-177

[23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYgFyMJ0goE&t=1525s, 17:00

[24] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEOhqN0c-mk

[25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhMGU-rExbE, starting at 3:50

[26] Strauss, Leo; Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy (p. 1193). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

[27] Pluckrose, Helen; Lindsay, James A.. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (p. 25). Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[28] Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton Classics Book 14) (pp. 73-75). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWN36SuYSF0

[30] Martin Heidegger, William Lovitt (translator), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977), pp. 26-27

[31] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXpwAOHJsxg

[32] https://kevinboothbysailing.com/2023/07/29/the-quota-women-of-the-ocean-race/

[33] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FofWp2GnG0Q