Category: Parenthood/family

Tim Johnson:

I have to issue an apology. Not on my behalf, but on behalf of my generation. You see, we are the reason the world has to deal with a couple of self righteous, selfish, and entitled generations. It is because of us that things have taken such a turn for the worse.

When I was growing up, it was the beginning of the “self esteem” movement. We were taught that our self esteem was not only important, it was paramount. How we felt about ourselves was the most important part of our lives. It didn’t matter how it affected others, as long as we felt good about ourselves, we could do anything. As you can imagine, this particular attitude is not completely healthy.

So, naturally, we took that attitude and applied it to our children. Only we took it to a laughable extreme. We not only shielded our kids from negative feelings, we took steps to insure that nothing bad ever happened to them. We created the “bubble wrapped” generation. No hardships at all. Not even losing at sports. We gave them everything they wanted. We taught them that they were special and they didn’t have to worry about feeling bad and they deserve everything they want.

As you can suspect, that is not a wholly healthy attitude either. We sent out waves of young adults into the world who had no idea how to handle negative stimuli. They never were given the opportunity to experience hardships and learn how to deal with it. So now, being thrust into a world where they aren’t the center of attention, we have at least one entire generation who lack the basic skills to handle day to day life and they respond with the only mechanism that they know…primal rage.

As Razorfist described in his great rant, “Of School Shooters and Fabergé Eggs: A Rant” we created an entire generation (I think two, but that’s semantics) of Fabergé Eggs…ornate on the outside, perfectly hollow on the inside. The slightest bump or shake and the entire egg collapses in on itself…often with violent results.

We caused this. We caused the screaming. We caused the screeching. We caused the entitlement. We caused the shootings. We caused all of it. We created the most narcissistic, self obsessive, entitled generation the country has ever seen. We are now reaping what we sowed. The only question left is, can we reverse it?

So for that, I, on behalf of my generation, apologize. We didn’t mean it, but we did cause it.

Well, I don’t, because we didn’t raise our kids this way. We were not helicopter parents. I don’t believe we shielded our kids from the consequences of their actions, or from hurt feelings. Their schools may have overloaded on self-esteem, but their parents did not.

I would say our two sons have turned out quite well. They’re both fully (or more) employed responsible citizens living on their own, not in their parents’ basement, in their early 20s. Our daughter just graduated from high school, and is attending college this fall, so she doesn’t get a grade yet.

This is far from the first attempt to blame a generation for the faults of that generation’s children. Facebook Friend Greg Apologia writes the Christian Living and Influence blog in which he believes the current state of today’s permissive society is because of excessively permissive Baby Boomers, themselves the children of World War II veterans who wanted to provide for their kids and shield them from the horrors of what they witnessed. Of course, the world has the habit of creating new horrors in every generation.

I’m not entirely convinced in this theory because people of the same age who grow up during the same time might have similar shared experiences — for those of us in Gen X the space shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the Great Recession and COVID-19 — but those experiences are shaped by where we are. Those of us celebrating (if that’s what you want to call it) Madison La Follette High School’s Class of 1983 40-year reunion grew up in a largely suburban, more white-collar than blue-collar part of Madison. That is a significantly different upbringing than growing up in an inner-city single-parent household, or growing up in a rural area.

I have concluded from observation that how children turn out depends a lot on the state of their parents’ marriage. My wife’s parents were married for 54 years. My parents have been married for 62 years. My generation is reputed for being the first “latch-key kids,” in which they would go home to an empty house after school because either both parents or the single parent was working. I don’t know about the importance of that (my mother was also working while we were in middle school), but I do believe that if your parents were divorced, divorce appears to you to be the natural state instead of parents staying married. Similarly those people who had absent fathers would see that as normal as well (and then act accordingly), to the great detriment of our society today.

Aaron Renn:

Sen. Josh Hawley has a new book out called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. It’s a combination of a manhood book and a politics book. He frames it as a battle between a biblical view of manhood and an “Epicurean” one that he associates with leftism. In the balance of this battle is the future of the American Experiment. Thus Hawley presents a smaller battle – right vs. left – as an echo of a larger one – the Bible vs. Epicurus. By beating back leftism today, one is not just winning a contemporary political struggle, but striking a blow in a cosmic struggle.

Manhood is divided into two parts. The first is an overview of manhood drawn from an mythic interpretation of Genesis. I use the term mythic here in a positive sense as referring to primal truths, not in a negative one that the story isn’t true. The second is a series of chapters on archetypal roles men are supposed to play: Husband, Father, Warrior, Builder, Priest, and King. These echo the well known book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. His use of a mythic and archetypal framing – for example, his description of creation as about chaos and order – is clearly influenced by Jordan Peterson.

I have not listened to Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis, but clearly the way he talks about the world resonates strongly with young men today. So it makes sense for Hawley draw on that kind of rhetorical pattern in framing his arguments. I actually found his takes on Genesis interesting. Some of it was standard stuff, other parts of it were described in ways I have not observed in church. For example, he says:

Look closely. In the Genesis story, Eden is the only place of order and flourishing the Bible describes. It is the only park, the only garden, the only outpost of peace. When we learn anything of the land beyond Eden’s borders, it appears untamed, wild. Dark forces lurk there. A sly and wicked serpent will enter the story a chapter later in Genesis, and from where? Beyond the garden’s edge. That place, the place beyond, looms as a site of potential development, yes—God has made it and brought it forth from the deep—but also of darkness and disorder. It is, as yet, unfinished. Adam’s job is to help finish it, to bring it into order. His job is to expand the garden temple…The earth beyond the garden may be unkept, there may be malevolence there in some form, but Genesis insists God created even this world and called it good. It is not desolate; it is merely unfinished. It will respond to man’s work. And Adam is to work it. His effort will bring forth the hidden purposes of the world.

My interest here is not a theological appraisal, but rather how Hawley frames creation and man’s role in it, as a sort of avatar of God assigned to “bring forth the hidden purposes of the world.” This strikes me as relating to a sort of heroic quest for secret knowledge. It involves, like the hero’s journey, a process of personal transformation. He writes, “The Bible offers a purpose that summons each man, a purpose that will transform him. A man cannot stay as he is, not if he is to take on the mission of manhood.”

My take is that the goal with this is to create a vision of manhood linked to some noble, transcendent purpose. I have noted before that Christian teachers and other often present manhood about little more than self-sacrifice. There’s plenty of that in Hawley’s book to be sure, but he’s trying to present the masculine quest as something ennobling as well.

He also differs from many in treating men as ends and not just means. Like Peterson, he says that they matter.

Genesis encourages every man who struggles to see the point of his life, who feels that his work is a waste, or who wonders whether he will amount to anything to think again. Your work matters. Your life matters. Your character matters. You can help the world become what it was meant to be. And that is no small thing.

There is an element here of seeing men as a existing for something else (versus having value in the own right), but unlike, say, Mark Driscoll’s presentation of manhood as a life of joyless toil, this is presented as something more aspirational – putting the world in order – and more in the line of “we really need you on the team.” I see this as a significant improvement over the standard conservative line towards men.

Also very notable is his description of the King archetype, where he explicitly affirms the goodness of men exercising authority:

It is good for a man to exercise authority—good for him and for those around him, provided he does it well. It is good that a man show ambition, that he aim to do something useful with his life….To young men, we should send a clear message: Dominion is good, and you should exercise it. Aim to do something with your life. Aim to exercise some leadership. Aim to accept responsibility for yourself—and others. Aim to have the character of a king.

This is also refreshingly contrary to the standard conservative line.

And, interestingly, he rejects Richard Reeves proposal to encourage men to go into the caring professions and live in more stereotypical female ways. He says, “To the experts safely ensconced in their think tanks, I would just say this: Is it really too much to ask that our economy work for men as they are, rather than as the left wants them to be?” While it’s unlikely mass highly paid blue collar employment will reemerge in the way Hawley hopes, rejecting the idea reprogramming of men to be more like women is a positive.

While Hawley’s book is an advance over the standard conservative a Christian fare in some areas, it still has some significant issues.

The first and biggest is that it is written with essentially gender egalitarian, that is to say feminist, assumptions. This isn’t explicitly stated, but is made clear in a number of ways. The first is his use of the two separate archetypes of Husband and Father, rather than the integrated Patriarch archetype. We also see it in his treatment of covenant. He says that, “A covenant in the ancient world was an agreement between a partner of high status and a servant.” He rejects this for the marriage covenant though, saying, “For a marriage, too, is a covenant—a promise made and a vow taken, only in this case, between equals.” This is one of many areas of the book that cried out for an explanation with none forthcoming. (My point here is not to make my own argument about the nature of covenant or marriage, but to point out the weird and unexplained exception for marriage Hawley carves out in his treatment of covenant).

But most notably, we see the egalitarian stance in the treatment of the Husband and King archetypes. The Husband is supposed to make vow, endure, protect and provide. But nowhere does he discuss any concept of the Husband having headship or exercising leadership, not even of the evangelical “servant leadership” variety. (Hawley is an evangelical presbyterian). And while he praises the use of authority by the King archetype, he never situates this in a familial context.

Hawley affirms gender complementarity and a gender binary, but this is similar to evangelical egalitarianism, which talks about “complementarity without hierarchy.” He does speak about “traditional gender roles” but his application of them is thin, limited to things like different occupational types (as above), but pointedly not to men as head of the home. It’s possible he personally adheres to a complementarian gender theology – I don’t know – but if so he does not put it into this book. Tellingly, a critical review in the Washington Post notes the egalitarian flourishes in the book.

This egalitarian stance is important because it fundamentally undermines the entire argument of his book. Hawley is trying to go back to Genesis to define manhood as something ancient, eternal, and designed by God into the fabric of the world. At the same time, he wants to adopt gender egalitarianism for husband-wife relationships, something that’s only around 50-70 years old and a view that, dare I saw it, is of the Epicurean variety.

Thus Hawley is similar to other conservatives in adopting the “two sets of books” approach. Men are supposed to live up to the old set of books in terms of what is expected to them. But women are allowed to live by a new set of books that frees them from their old obligations – and men are supposed to be ok with this. This is nothing but a recipe for being a chump. It’s like the Jim Geraghty video for PragerU in which he urges men to act more like Ward Cleaver, the dad from the 1950s TV sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.” But Geraghty would never dream of telling women to act like June Cleaver, the wife and mother from that TV show.

This is one of the basic challenges with society today. It demands that men continue to fulfill the traditional obligations of manhood such as self-sacrifice, provisioning for others, etc. while giving up all the power, privileges, honors, and prestige they previously enjoyed – and freeing women completely from their previous traditional obligations.

That is essentially what a book about masculine virtues written from a de facto gender egalitarian position amounts to.

You can say that men, women, and society should live by the old rules. You can say the men, women, and society should live by new rules. But it’s ridiculous to demand that men live by the old rules (when it comes to obligations at least), while women and the rest of society live by new ones.

Some of the negatives trends in American men that Hawley identifies are a result of bad actions and bad character on the part of men. But some of them are a result of men rationally refusing to play to this mug’s game. As Helen Smith one put it, some men are going on strike.

Hawley recognizes this effect in some domains like economics, hence his call to rebuild a viable blue collar economy. But he doesn’t recognize it in areas like marriage, where we’ve institutionalized the “Epicurean” position with things like no-fault divorce, with women being the ones filing for it 70% of the time. That doesn’t factor into his analysis of marriage rates or fatherlessness at all. It’s deeply unfair to the men who wanted to be present at home with their children, but aren’t because their wives divorced them without just cause and got custody of the kids.

The book also oddly argues against the pursuit of status. Hawley writes:

There is not a man alive, not a human being drawing breath on this vast earth, who does not crave status. It is what the Bible calls the pride of life. Practically the whole of modern living is geared around it. Universities promise higher status; advertising sells consumer goods as status symbols; even entertainment has become a form of status. And you can spend your life seeking after it, thirsting and lusting for it—or you can live for something other than you. But you cannot do both. Either you live for status—which is living for you—or you sacrifice that life, that entire way of life, for something better.

Elsewhere he writes, “Sacrifice your pride. Give up the quest for status.” I say this is odd because the book is positive towards the exercise of power. He says the exercise of authority is good, ambition is good, dominion is good. Power and status aren’t the same things, but they overlap a lot. And in our society it’s frequently necessary to play status games to acquire authority. Status is also intimately linked to our ability to succeed at the basics of manhood that Hawley encourages, such as getting married. As Jordan Peterson points out, “Girls are attracted to boys that win status competitions with other boys.” A man devoid of status is unlikely to marry in our society. He will probably end up as an “incel” (involuntary celibate).

Hawley himself has obvious pursued status – and very successfully. He went to Stanford and then Yale Law School, arguably the country’s most prestigious. He won a highly competitive Supreme Court clerkship. Now he is a US Senator. And good for him that he did this. There’s nothing wrong with that. Had he not sought out status markers like a Supreme Court clerkship, he would never have found himself in the position to exercise authority that he has today. He also wouldn’t have met, much less married his wife, who is a high powered attorney in her own right.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of oddities and seeming contradictions of this variety in the book.

Finally, I will note that the book is written in a style multiple grade levels below Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. I’m not sure why that is, as he’s obviously capable of very good writing and Peterson proves men will devour higher level material. (I would personally have liked to have read a book that was not political, and gave free range to Hawley’s intellect).

Also, unlike with Jordan Peterson, there’s little practical, actionable advice. Manhood has the grand vision of masculinity, but not the guide for how to get there. I didn’t come away from the book with anything I could change practically to become a better man.

The genius of Jordan Peterson was packaging folk wisdom in elevated rhetoric. He gave the grand vision of the cosmos and manhood, but he also gave men news they can use (e.g., to attract women, you need status), and very practical steps like “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “Clean your room, bucko.” What makes these so effective is that they work metaphorically, but also practically. If you don’t know how to put your life in order, you really can start by just physically cleaning your room. Even taken naïvely, they still work.

Because Hawley’s book lacks this, it can ultimately come across as just another call to “Man up!” The book’s flaws probably also explain why he has not developed an organic following as a men’s guru. (His speech at TPUSA, for example, was to an audience someone else convened).

But I think the positive takeaway from Manhood is the way that it tries to advance the masculinity discussion in a better direction from a conservative perspective. It tries to learn from Jordan Peterson in terms of trying to frame manhood in a transcendent way as something aspirational. It treats men as having real value in themelves. And it treats men exercising authority in an appropriate way as good and proper. All of these needs to be carried forward into future conservative works on the topic of manhood.

John Kass passes on Pat Hickey:

I taught English Literature and Composition at Catholic schools from 1975 until I retired in 2017, including Honors and Advanced Placement. Since that time my hours were filled as a substitute teacher in Northwest Indiana, and I now work as a Jobs Coach for Special Education students in a large public high school.  I take troops of students to workplace locations (Al’s Grocery, WINN Machines, LaPorte County Animal Shelter and show young men and women how to wash dishes for an elementary school) and teach them how to comport themselves in a workplace.

My charges are mostly Autistic and Downs Syndrome youngsters, and they are sensational workers. Their General Education contemporaries go to college and vocational preparatory classes. I think Gen Ed kids get the short end of stick.  The Special Education kids go right into the workplace and their talents and work ethic gives them a leg up on their classmates. The students are not paid for their labors, as the time (usually 90 minutes a couple of days a week) gets credited as part of their graduation certificate. From the Workplace Program, seventeen-, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old workers very often get recruited directly into jobs. Three of my students are now salaried employees, after school.

These young people are not dependents; they are workers.

They will not go on to Valparaiso, DePauw, Purdue or Notre Dame, nor will their parents be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in college debt. They will not read The Canterbury Tales, Aeneid, The Virginian, Ethan Frome, Henry V, Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre or Invisible Man; but neither will their General Education counterparts. That is a huge problem.

The current secondary school English canon is dumbed down. It seems to me that everything of value went to hell when we politely considered the opinion of dim bulbs who interrogate with “Well, who’s to say?”  People who know something, Karen.

The Who’s to Sayers have screwed up religion, politics, and sports. Keep reading, gentle folks, because at the end of my jeremiad I post a list of essential works of literature.

What were once essential readings have disappeared from high school curricula universal. As a substitute teacher I was shocked to learn that texts once deemed essential to one’s intellectual, ethical, and civic growth are no longer taught, offered, or considered. Young people have no connection to the great conversation anymore. Thousands of years of shared thoughts have been cast aside in favor of graphic novels, critical race theory, or books related to movies.

Vanity Fair, Tom Jones, The Mysterious Stranger and Moby Dick have been erased in favor of books selected by Oprah, or room temperature I.Q.’s like former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who placed his political imprimatur on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

That tome was considered a ‘nice story’ but not remotely on a par with Jude the Obscure, much less George Eliot’s Middlemarch. After the City That Used to Work gushed over the canonization of Truman Capote’s BFF, Ms. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird climbed to top of the academic pyramid. It’s a nice story, but it is no David Copperfield. It was considered young adult fiction. Now it is mentioned in hushed tones.

Whenever I run into classmates from the 1960s, we tend to talk about the sad world the young are forced to wade through: a swamp of tepid experiences without any sense of common struggles and shared joys. This is a mean and humorless age that celebrates the balkanization of races, religions, and classes. Literature mirrors the music of the times. Chief Keef is the Old Blue Eyes and Amanda Gorman the Robert Frost. In the 1960s our common culture shared the magic of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Dusty Springfield along with Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as Shostakovich and Schubert–all through television and radio. The Sound Must Seem the Echo of Sense. That was a quote from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which these days gets a nod only in an Advanced Placement English class. It is a musical essay that once set the canons of taste.

Books and tunes make little sense these days and essential key codes to leading a vital life are not available to students today. Let me explain.

Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener is a warning about the dire consequence of copying the words of others. Most people, other than the 46th President of the United States, know that imitation is flattery, but plagiarism is soul-sucking theft. The character Bartleby refuses to write or do anything other than die. He sheds his mortal husk and finally communicates with his employer, who laments, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

That apostrophe (in poetry, an address to a dead or absent person) sums up our copy-cat culture that churns out formulaic novels, stories and ‘spoken word’ screeds that pass for poetry.

The classics were artifacts of truth. Practice, or genuine imitation, was the only passage to genius. Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope and John Dryden imitated, not duplicated, Horace, Virgil, and Juvenal. Real poets like Seamus Heaney imitated the greats and wrote the greatest translation of Beowulf, which celebrates courage and commitment. Amanda Gorman is celebrated for eschewing meter and rhyme scheme in favor of odd pauses. Seamus Heaney? Not in our high schools.

The virtues teach us to be morally excellent by taking the golden mean. Courage, for example, stands squarely between two vices (deficiency/excess: cowardice/rashness) and should never seem ambiguous or ironic. Shakespeare taught Aristotle to his audiences better than the Stagirite might have done himself. Richard III is a monster and Richard II is a vacillating whiner, but Henry V is what kingship is all about. Julius Caesar offers a simple seminar on political rhetoric: Brutus – the Attic, or closed fist and Antony the African, or open palm. The Attic school of rhetoric was from Greece and was determined by logic and cold reason, while the African school came from Egypt and appealed to the heart. Attic says, “Do what I say!”  African says, “Hey guys, give me a hand!”

The Attic style works for autocrats like our shut-down elected officials. Mandates are neither suggestions nor invitations to debate. They are an exercise of power.

The African rhetorical style worked nicely with people who were shown respect and allowed to exercise their civic duties as free men and women.

Brutus speaks to logic and Antony to emotion. Know your audience. The Roman plebs are angry that their champion Julius Caesar had been butchered by the woke senators who wanted to maintain the oligarchs’ power of the Senate over the common folks of Rome. Antony, a masker and reveler, understood the common man. Brutus, an honorable man, was convinced that his class should always lord it over the unwashed mob. Brutus’s closed fist: Romans, countrymen: Be patient till the last. Hear me for my cause and be silent that you may hear. Believe me for mine honor and have respect to mine honor that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom and awake your senses that you may the better judge.

Yeah, right.

Antony offers an open palm:  Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So, let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Well, the folks rioted and the noble Romans had to beat it out of town, and fast! Between Antony’s rash emotionalism and Brutus’s cold Attic arrogance lies Octavian, the true heir to Caesar. A common Shakespearian device in tragedy and history is to have the last speech go to the person meant to rule–the last word: According to his virtue let us use him, With all respect and rites of burial. Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie Most like a soldier, ordered honorably. So, call the field to rest, and let’s away to part the glories of this happy day.

The great ruler is fair to all. The golden mean requires it.

Do you think that our elected officials have any sense of fairness? Our young people should be introduced to eternal values and virtues. Instead, they mask up as advocates and slogan-slinging cranks.

These are empirical observations based on what I witnessed. Who’s to say?  In this case, me.

I could not be an English teacher in 2022. The Woke culture would cancel me immediately. But I was able to impart eternal truths and basic virtues via literature for four decades. Helping Special Education youngsters learn to bag groceries at Al’s in LaPorte is far more important than trying to convince young minds that Amanda Gorman is a poet. Not gonna happen.

These are a few essential readings that young people once had presented to them. N.B., I find Joseph Conrad, a Polish sailor who could write in three languages and produce the most beautiful English prose about honor, duty, dignity, and compassion to be the most important. Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison wrote the two greatest American novels: Moby Dick by the former and Invisible Man by the later. If I had one book to save from extinction to prove that humanity is the work of God, it would be John Milton’s Paradise  Lost, which seems destined to be known as a weak joke in Animal House.   The greatest comic novel is A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous indictment of cant, ignorance and pretense.

Ladies and gents, my promised list:

The N*****of the Narcissus –Joseph Conrad–also titled “The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle”

The Secret Sharer – Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

The Man Who Would be King – Rudyard Kipling

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre – Emily Bronte

Paradise Lost – John Milton

The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

Henry V – William Shakespeare

Sonnets – John Donne

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville

Red Badge of Courage – Stephan Crane

The Virginian – Owen Wister

The Big Blonde – Dorothy Parker

Poems of Emily Dickinson

Man Without a Country – Edward Everett Hale

Aeneid – Virgil

The Odyssey – Homer

The Greek Passion – Nikos Kazantzakis

The Informer – Liam O’Flaherty

Short Stories of Brett Harte

Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

U.S.A. Trilogy – John Dos Passos

The Day of the Locusts – Nathaniel West

Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

The Caine Mutiny – Herman Wouk

The Continental Op – Dashiell Hammett

The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler

The Sign of Four – Arthur Conan Doyle

Napoleon of Notting Hill – G.K. Chesterton

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor