Posted by
David C. Innes on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 7:21:37 PM
Joe Queenan told us the other day that he is "sick of reading the 'Man Up, Barack' editorial" from the President's liberal detractors ("'Man Up, Obama' and Other Nonesense," Wall Street Journal, Oct. 26, 2009).
I am surprised that the thought of manly virtue enters the liberal mind
at all. It has been central to the New Left liberal agenda for
generations now to un-man men so that we may all live in a world that
is not only sexually more egalitarian, but also safer.
Here are two articles on how boyhood is being abolished so that virility may trouble us no more.
Anthony Esolen gives us "A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution" (Touchstone, Sept. 2005).
Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no
one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that
they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their
manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the
world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from
girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them?
Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.
The second article is by
James Bowman, the author of
Honor: A History (Encounter Books, 2006). In his article, "
The Decline of the Honor Culture: An Old Code Becomes Déclassé" (
Policy Review,
August/September 2009), he looks at how liberal passivism neuters our
boys and will leave our country defenseless insofar as we allow it to
continue.
It’s hard to persuade boys of military age that they have a
duty to fight for their country when they have been taught from their
earliest years that fighting of any kind is wrong and shameful and only
leads to more fighting.
You should read this article alongside what C.S. Lewis says about "
men without chests" in
The Abolition of Man. James Bowman is a resident scholar at the
Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.