Gentlemanliness and Self-Restraint
Self-mastery, not boorishness, is the mark of a strong man.
I very much appreciated Scott Howard’s inaugural article for the new “Steel Age Gentleman” newsletter. He quoted one of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” It seems this newsletter is destined to take Lewis’s The Abolition of Man as its cornerstone, for Scott continued on it in a more recent piece.
And rightly so. It is fitting that we begin with this passage from Lewis, for it prophecies so well our own time. Lewis saw the beginnings of a campaign to deconstruct virtue, which would become a relentless assault upon strength and character. He wrote The Abolition of Man in response to that campaign, one cornerstone of which was moral relativism.
“We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” -C.S. Lewis
For decades, our popular culture has mocked the traditional family, the father, the patriot, the statesman, and the old-fashioned hero, while celebrating the scoundrel and the antihero. While everyone can think of recent exceptions (Captain America comes to mind), there have been far too many movies and songs holding up bad guys as heroes or portraying terrible life choices as desirable. I used to think such things were harmless, and had no consequences in wider society. But it’s hard not to look at the vitriol and shamelessness of our present moment and not realize that culture has consequences.
Our music celebrates indulging oneself and the tearing down standards. Then, we are surprised that we get a figure like Donald Trump? Our movies and television shows “deconstruct” the “myth” of the hero, and we are surprised that some boys look at a figure like Trump and think he is a manly man?
Romanticizing “bad” men in fiction has consequences in real life. To get out of our present moment, we need to look to those places that have been preserving traditional virtue and bourgeois morality against the assault of deconstructionism. As part of that project, it will be vital to give young men and women models of what true strength and character look like. It is easy for someone who grew up like me—in a healthy, middle-class family integrated into an intact community where strong role models were the rule rather than the exception—to think that pop culture doesn’t have consequences. It is much harder when you grow up in a place where addiction, violence, broken relationships, and poor role models are the rule.
Too many young men have come to think that manliness is simply boorishness. They think that by being trolls on Twitter, they are exercising masculinity. Indeed, they think moralizing scolds are being “weak” for talking about prudence and self-restraint. We could wonder why they have arrived at such a warped conclusion, or we could realize that it is the logical conclusion of having been raised in a culture that discourages self-control, celebrates self-indulgence, and tells young people to trust their feelings.
These young men need a positive vision of what a strong man really looks like. They mistake the trappings of masculinity for the thing itself as if they had watched a film in which American soldiers on the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge spit tobacco on the ground before charging into enemy fire and have concluded from this that spitting tobacco was the secret sauce making these soldiers manly. Manly men are sometimes rude and dirty, but this is usually a byproduct of spending time in a world of action and hard work, in which manners aren’t always prized highly. Rudeness and dirtiness by themselves have never made anyone tough.
One of the places that has long been preserving a positive vision of traditional masculinity is Brett McKay’s blog, The Art of Manliness. McKay works hard to spread the message that a man should be both strong and good, and that manliness has both a physical and an intellectual side. One of my favorite articles of his takes its title from a pithy quotation from John Wayne, “You’ve got to be a man, before you can be a gentleman.”
This article is the best short synthesis I have ever read of the concept that the mark of a strong man was self-restraint. Self-restraint implies having something to be restrained, much as tolerance implies having something to tolerate. A civilized man could be a barbarian, but he chooses to restrain himself and instead use his strength in service of good civilization. A gentleman is not simply a nice guy who allows people to use him, but a man who uses his strength in service of others rather than in service of himself.
Jonah Goldberg, drawing on Hannah Arendt, likes to say that we begin as barbarians and only come to be civilized as we become adults. This is most especially true of young men, who are by nature the most destructive members of society. Boys go from being small and timid, to being powerful and rough, to someday becoming strong and self-controlled.
But a young man who believes that “strength” means saying mean things on Twitter—something which is so easy to do it takes no effort at all—still needs to take that first step. The only difference between him and the mild-mannered boy he ridicules is that he is rude rather than mild-mannered. His bark is louder because he has no bite.
A boy like this needs to get outside and learn that there is more to the world than what he sees online. He needs to learn to use his body, to work hard, to take physical action, perhaps to play sports or hunt or camp. He needs to learn what it is to be dirty, not because one has sought out dirt but because one has been toiling out in the sun all day and has come to be covered in salt and dust.
And then, he needs to learn that self-control is hard work. It is hard to tame one’s passions. It takes discipline, but that discipline will serve equally well in soft times as in hard. Too many young men admire impulsiveness or are impulsive themselves. But strength that wastes itself will burn out quickly. A man full of pluck, who is brash and bold in soft times, may find his strength evaporates in hard times. A man who has known deprivation, toil, hardship, and physical suffering will have the endurance to be strong when strength matters.
Plato, in his Phaedrus dialogue, observed that a human being was like a chariot driver pulled by two horses. The horses were appetite (passion, gluttony, alcoholism, sexual desire, etc.) and thumos (spiritedness, ambition, honor), and the driver was reason. In a well-ordered soul, reason governs thumos and passion, not the other way around. Reason has to fight to govern the horses, but if they are driven in the right direction, these horses can lead a person to greatness.
A self-controlled man has properly ordered his soul, such that he is in charge of his own whims and desires. He hasn’t killed those desires. He doesn’t lack for thumos. But he doesn’t indulge himself at every turn. Rather he channels his desires towards an end goal. In the article I linked by McKay above, he explains this well: a gentleman has civilized himself, not out of fear, but through self-discipline.
Some men, raised to think that self-restraint makes them weak, see manliness as consisting entirely of one or both of the horses. In the lowest case, they imagine that hard drinking and promiscuous sex make them men. Other young men imagine that thumos by itself is enough. Their model is Achilles, without doubt a manly man, but a man whose inability to control his temper leads to his downfall.
Help us to continue to provide a platform for writers like Ben Connelly.
“In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger.” – William Shakespeare, Henry V
Self-indulgence does not lead children to adulthood. It does not lead boys to manliness. Self-restraint will not “repress” anyone. Discipline does not erase individuality. Rather, it allows a man (or a woman) to channel both passion and thumos towards higher ends. Self-control usually means doing what you don’t want to do in the moment so that you can do what you really want to do in the long run. In this way, it gives a man freedom because it gives him freedom over himself. It opens up more options for him in the long run.
Self-mastery is the mark of a strong man and a free man. Donald Trump is a poor role model for young men because he lacks self-control, which makes him rude when it is easy for him to be rude and weak when being strong requires perseverance.
To bring this full circle to Lewis, the world needs men with chests, men who are both good and strong, and who know that goodness and strength are partners rather than antagonists. It needs men who have honor but also integrity. Men who are brave but also kind. Donald Trump, and his imitators on social media, use what little strength they have to hurt the weak. They go after those who are weak because they themselves are weak. A gentleman knows that strength is to be used to protect and defend the weak not to hurt them.
Weak men do what is wrong because it is often easier than doing what is right. They cover this by pretending they have the “courage” to do what is wrong, but in truth, they lack the courage to do what is difficult. It is difficult to develop self-restraint. It is difficult to stand up for the weak. It is difficult to be a gentleman.
But if the alternative is to be like Donald Trump, the alternative is to be a coward.
Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712
 | A guest post by
|