Today I’m going to round out the last two posts on fantasy-reality mismatch and maturity with a short diatribe on responsibility and manhood. I do this in the hope that this weekend’s session will inspire me to hold forth on a completely unrelated topic next time.
By this I mean, in part, that everyone will
show up.
Somewhere on The Art of Manliness I came
across a reminder of traditional personal responsibility that seems to have
fallen by the wayside. I believe it was already on the wane when I was growing
up, because there were always certain people who failed to show up when they
said they would, or who would arrive egregiously last with barely an apology. I
can’t find the post at the moment, but Brett McKay states that when you tell
someone you’ll be somewhere at a certain time, you have in effect made a
promise to that person, and when you show up fifteen minutes late you have
broken that promise. I had suspected this to be true from a young age, but I
also perceived that it was a rare trait to uphold despite its truth value. The
situation was exacerbated when I moved from New York to California, where the
constant sunshine, or something in the water, seemed to give everyone a subjective
view of time. Besides drivers who forgot to use turn signals when they should
have and forgot to turn them off on the rare cases they did use them, and the
expectation of every customer service drone to engage in protracted and obnoxiously
friendly small-talk before any ordering could take place, it was the thing that
irked me most about living in California.
Punctuality and other promises were all the more important when the community relied on every man to uphold its standards. This is not so much the case now, when humans, even those who consider each other nominal friends, don’t appear able to contribute anything of value to one’s life that can’t be gained through the Internet or spending some disposable income for something produced in a factory—and besides, social norms have relaxed to such an extent that we don’t hold it against people when they dispense with punctuality, or with keeping any other sort of promise. We just accept that that’s the way they are.
Incidentally, Brett McKay also has a list
of 100 skills every man should know. I’m a bit upset that there are 24 things
on this list that I can’t do. That may be one way of saying I’m only 76% of a
man.
Testosterone, in fact, has been on the
decline for decades. There are numerous environmental and lifestyle factors
said to be at blame for this, including increasingly sedentary lifestyles and
the ubiquitousness of chemicals that mimic estrogen in the environment.
Whatever the cause, if you’re reading this, chances are you’re less of a man
than your father was at your age, and he in turn was a less a man than your
grandfather. The causes are subject to interpretation, depending on your
political bent and which conspiracy theory you prefer, but about the existence
of the phenomenon there is little speculation.
It cannot be denied that the invention of
electric lighting has changed the way we interact with solar cycles. Before
Edison, it was still fairly common to go to bed when it was dark. Nowadays we
turn on the lights and stay up later. The effects of sleep deprivation are well
researched. If you use an alarm clock to wake up, you are sleep-deprived.
Further, some evidence suggests that this
constant manipulation of the cycle of day and night has interfered with our physiological responses to the changes of the seasons. When living in tune with
lengths of daylight that wax and wane slowly throughout the year, our bodies
may be more aligned with the seasonal availability of food and our ability to
store it. In pre-industrial societies, when life was dependent on the harvest,
people tended to eat more during the bounty of summer and early autumn and less
in other seasons. The body stored fat during these times of longer daylight so
that it could live on excess stored fat during times of shorter daylight when
food was scarcer. With the advent of universal electric lighting, we may be
tricking our bodies into acting as if it were summer all year round—constantly consuming
excess food, and developing metabolic syndrome and all sorts of health problems
related to excess fat storage. This in tandem with lifestyles in which many of
us spend long hours in front of computers, barely moving throughout the day,
with little chance to burn off the fat. The excess fat also provides more
storage for fat-soluble xenoestrogens.
Extended use of computers, and other screen-based
technology, probably exacerbates the problem of low testosterone. I haven’t
seen any research on the subject, but my hunch is that these things are driving
our T-levels through the floor, even if there turns out to be no other reason
than a reduction of physical activity. (And no, the Wii and Pokemon Go don’t
adequately substitute carrying mortar all day, stalking big game through the
woods, or defending your life with a sword.)
Granted, the Internet offers tremendous
advantages in the sharing of information and opportunities to educate
ourselves. There is a great deal on it that it immensely beneficial. There is
also a great deal that is violent, pornographic, and just simply useless,
draining both our time and our manhood as it smothers our resources both for
self-reliance and interpersonal communication, as we swim in an information sea
of diminished expectations and vicarious pleasures.
(On the subject of pornography,
incidentally, society seems to just now be waking up to its potential for addiction. One would think, or at least I would, that this should have been
obvious: Billions of dollars in R&D had been poured into deliberately making
television addictive before the Internet was even a thing. That adding orgasms
and unlimited personal choice would lead to compulsion should be a no-brainer. Now
we’ve got an epidemic of young men who can’t achieve erections with physical
partners because their neural pathways are attuned to pixels.)
At one time, and in fact until very
recently, life was tough and sexual outlets were rare. Adversity and the
necessity of delaying gratification made us who we were. The reverse of these
factors makes us what we are today. And what we are, in the WEIRD demographic,
is an increasingly meaty, complacent, dependent, and physically weak population
of low fecundity and declining birthrates.
It’s easy to object, especially living as
we do in Japan, that the increasing feminization of society also makes it
safer. To say so is to forget that a man is supposed to be dangerous—that the
very essence of masculinity is to protect women and children, and that a man is
a man to the extent that he can do this. The expression of this ability is
complicated by the intricacies of industrial society, but the essential
definition of manhood is unchanged. A man who cannot do this at all is simply
not much of a man. We may have to tolerate a bit of danger in society in exchange for the agressive impulse that goes along with it—one that helped push history's great heroes, explorers, and inventors to accomplish all the boons to civilisation which we now enjoy.
Now get out there and practise those manly skills.
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