Aaron Renn’s most recent newsletter reviews two popular books on manhood that approach the subject from a neopagan outlook: Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men and Ryan Landry’s Masculinity Amid Madness. Renn’s treatment is solid, and I commend it to you; this is a supplementary observation.
One of Donovan’s big points is that historically speaking, men have functioned in small, single-sex groups: hunting parties, construction crews, military squads, and so on. He’s right about that, and although contemporary male single-sex spaces are rapidly being overrun, it still happens to some extent in all the above examples, plus more modern expressions like sports teams or musical bands. Donovan argues that setting continues to be the best environment for men, proffers various prescriptions for regaining such an environment in the present day (which we should, somehow), and–here’s the howler–longs for the collapse of civilization so that roving bands of men might once again flourish on the landscape. Which is to say, he misses the whole point of all the sacrifices his ancestors made.
What those small bands of men have done, for thousands of years, is build. They built lives and homes and farms, won and married women, raised families, built towns and cities. The society that presently surrounds us is the fruit of their labors over thousands of years. That society is presently doing its best to kill its men, pursuant to killing itself, true enough. But so what?
Once upon a time–not too long ago, actually–the killers were starvation, contaminated water, large predators, infected wounds, etc. Our ancestors solved those problems. Today’s killer is a different problem entirely: a cultural autoimmune disorder. Facing a danger he doesn’t know how to navigate, Donovan’s best idea is to wipe out the accumulated contributions of generations of his ancestors, in hopes that he can spend his life going over the same familiar ground, working problems they had already solved for us. This is why you can’t trust pagans with history; they keep trying to act like it’s a circle. But the timeline is a line. History is written by God Himself, and it’s going somewhere.
The past certainly has a wealth of lessons to teach us, but the cutting edge of masculinity will never be back there in the rearview mirror. It’s here, now. The job isn’t to go back and fight hungry bears or bust sod; it’s to wrest our dying young men from the tentacles of legal weed and highly available porn, to snatch them from gears of the secularist sausage grinder that’s trying to crush them into androgynous units of consumption. Our challenge is to disciple them, to be makers and doers and inspire them to join us, to strengthen their hands in building what is true, good and beautiful–to be lights in a darkening time. We can’t do that by ignoring the past, but we can’t do that by repeating it, either.
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