I often have to remind myself that the things I learned as a man, both growing up and as a Marine, are foreign to many today who might not have had the same kind of models as I had.
I was listening the Malcolm Gladwell recently talking about his Mother who grew up highly educated in Jamaica. He noted that she found racism or the idea that black people were not as smart as white people as preposterous. The reason is that it wasn’t part of her experience. If anything, she saw that some of the white people had less educational opportunities than she and she didn’t walk through life with a sense that things couldn’t be any different than what she experienced when she moved to Toronto with her British husband. I found many of the same ideas among Afro-Caribbean people from places like the Dominican Republic in the Marine Corps.
It seems to me that a lot of cultural producers don’t know how to depict men as strong, competent, and compassionate because they don’t have any way to think about them in ways that they necessarily think of as toxic. The fact that you might be unwavering in one instance where a decision needs to be made or that you project confidence in your ability to get things done is interpreted as if you will necessarily use people or be harsh toward them. I could write for a long time about how I learned leadership and how it has served me well in both the military and corporate life. I could also write tomes about men and women in corporate management who never learned good leadership principles and are either self-serving or jerks and can’t take care of people.
Yet, because I have experience in a world where a man, being a man, can succeed, the places where those ideas are challenged don’t lead me to the conclusion that being a man is a necessary disadvantage. I can also point out to my young adult and teen children how the cultural output today tries to project the idea that a strong woman can only be seen as strong in the culture if there are no men around to seemingly control her or hold her back (the binary alluded to in the post). The real world doesn’t operate like that. The most competent women I know (and have worked with) are confident and strong and are never so foolish as to think that their competence or strength is diminished because they need someone else’s strength or competence or expertise in an adjacent area to succeed. In the real world, competence and strength and compassion succeed. The challenge is trying to provide models to young men today who have been alienated from that reality because they haven’t seen it actually work in their own lives.
I would say one of the more powerful truths is the knowledge that sin takes out more than it puts in and basically requires deception. That’s why the sexual revolution needed so much propaganda for decades. People lived out the fact it made them miserable but that can’t be right because it was “liberating”, wasn’t it?
Finally small niggle but men aren’t “falling behind”, they were pushed. Everyone is a protected class except the white male, the majority of men in America, and to an extent men in general have been actively pushed aside whenever possible. Not literally always but only if enough protected class people couldn’t be found. I know for a fact some institutions spend money to ensure that the next hire for a position is not a white male if they can help it (and I know this not from secondary sources).
"I know for a fact some institutions spend money to ensure that the next hire for a position is not a white male if they can help it (and I know this not from secondary sources)."
At one point, the middle-of-the-road evangelical seminary I worked at hired four white men into important positions in short succession. I know that at least one of the positions was initially offered to a minority candidate, but they ended up declining it (something that wasn't publicly known). Some of the students were really angry about it and it became a stink on campus. Race and gender issues were a big deal on campus in general, including in hiring practices.
The dichotomy of footstool-tyrant is a response to a legitimate perception of a feature of our society. Status and power comes from exploiting and using other people as disposable consumer items. What makes our society uniquely pernicious is the ubiquity of exploitation, which is what the first movie demonstrates so well. The structure of American Modernity revolves around a series of temporary, vampiric interactions in which every person tries to drain the other of as much as possible before moving on.
And this can't be addressed without addressing the socio-economic paradigm in which this occurs. Why are most or all of our relationships temporary exchanges of value? What other relationship can you have with strangers who constantly move from city-to-city and never form a lasting social bond? I was sitting in a sermon once with one of those young, hipster, recent seminary grads and he made a comment that his church wasn't a traditional church, but a church of urban migrants. He said most of you won't remain here for more than four years and there will be a whole new church twice every decade. Therefore, rather than community building, he said we need to focus on what a "transient" church can do: give him more money for his church plants on the other side of the continent. Community building? Nah, why bother becoming a community with people who will just move away? Even the preacher was eyeing the congregation as nothing more than wallets to exploit and drain.
The dichotomy you mention above is the product of that social environment, where we cannot even conceive of the possibility of the kinds of social relationships that aren't some kind of exploitation. Every aspect of social life has been consumed by the upper-middle class market-mindset. People are nothing more than economic competitors. In such a world, it's totally reasonable to see cooperation as a foolish collaboration with one's own exploitation and hostility as the only defense. Sheepdog? To defend what? Young single men have nobody to defend and no reason to stand up for strangers who would abuse them the moment the tables turn.
The problem is that to break out of this dichotomy requires more than 1990s nostalgia. These people really *do* live in Joker world, not Batman world. People with families, friends, communities, and churches don't get it and we have an obligation to extend ourselves outside of our comfort zones. Maybe we should try to be the first to reach out to angry young men and be the first person who doesn't abuse them, doesn't exploit them, and doesn't have ulterior motives. Maybe we should be the ones to say "Yes, you have a legitimate grievance, 2020's American society is fundamentally unjust, the dominant social narratives about you really are all lies, but we have a better way in *our* community. Welcome, as long as you want. We'll have your back."
"Maybe we should try to be the first to reach out to angry young men and be the first person who doesn't abuse them, doesn't exploit them, and doesn't have ulterior motives. Maybe we should be the ones to say "Yes, you have a legitimate grievance, 2020's American society is fundamentally unjust, the dominant social narratives about you really are all lies, but we have a better way in *our* community. Welcome, as long as you want. We'll have your back.""
I think this would be great, but the evangelical industrial complex that shapes much of the thinking and practice of the American church doesn't seem to agree. If anything, they're pushing the opposite and jumping on the sidelining white men train. Major evangelical publishers like IVP now push leftist, egalitarian narratives and ideologies concerning race and gender both in print and in practice, and at least some of the seminaries do the same. I worked for six years at a seminary that identifies itself as middle-of-the-road evangelical and these race and gender narratives completely dominated the curriculum and academic practices to the point that you couldn't teach there if you weren't egalitarian. I was so immersed in this sort of theological culture for two decades that I'm not sure how widespread it's influence really is. Maybe, hopefully, it's not that widespread and it's seems that way to me because I was enmeshed in it for a long time.
It's really that bad. I worked for five years at a Southern Baptist university that had a reputation for being "fundamentalist" and got a lot of that same nonsense from recent seminary graduates. The funny part is that they're shocked when they come into contact with an real expert who can explain why their seminary professors were wrong. "John Rawls isn't a good model for Christian politics? What, he wants to put Evangelicals and Catholics in prison for their beliefs? Why didn't my seminary professor tell me that part?"
I don't like to spread gossip in public places, but oh some of the stories I could tell if I were so inclined.
That's unfortunate. At present, I feel like I'm largely done with Christian academia, not just in a personal employment sense, but in a taking it seriously sense. I don't want to promote anti-intellectualism, but it seems like the institutions are so corrupt that some other way to sustain the life of the mind as a Christian will have to be found.
I often have to remind myself that the things I learned as a man, both growing up and as a Marine, are foreign to many today who might not have had the same kind of models as I had.
I was listening the Malcolm Gladwell recently talking about his Mother who grew up highly educated in Jamaica. He noted that she found racism or the idea that black people were not as smart as white people as preposterous. The reason is that it wasn’t part of her experience. If anything, she saw that some of the white people had less educational opportunities than she and she didn’t walk through life with a sense that things couldn’t be any different than what she experienced when she moved to Toronto with her British husband. I found many of the same ideas among Afro-Caribbean people from places like the Dominican Republic in the Marine Corps.
It seems to me that a lot of cultural producers don’t know how to depict men as strong, competent, and compassionate because they don’t have any way to think about them in ways that they necessarily think of as toxic. The fact that you might be unwavering in one instance where a decision needs to be made or that you project confidence in your ability to get things done is interpreted as if you will necessarily use people or be harsh toward them. I could write for a long time about how I learned leadership and how it has served me well in both the military and corporate life. I could also write tomes about men and women in corporate management who never learned good leadership principles and are either self-serving or jerks and can’t take care of people.
Yet, because I have experience in a world where a man, being a man, can succeed, the places where those ideas are challenged don’t lead me to the conclusion that being a man is a necessary disadvantage. I can also point out to my young adult and teen children how the cultural output today tries to project the idea that a strong woman can only be seen as strong in the culture if there are no men around to seemingly control her or hold her back (the binary alluded to in the post). The real world doesn’t operate like that. The most competent women I know (and have worked with) are confident and strong and are never so foolish as to think that their competence or strength is diminished because they need someone else’s strength or competence or expertise in an adjacent area to succeed. In the real world, competence and strength and compassion succeed. The challenge is trying to provide models to young men today who have been alienated from that reality because they haven’t seen it actually work in their own lives.
First of all great review. Next check out an old blog post that deal with sheepdog metaphors not what you think https://canecaldo.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/sheepwolves/
I would say one of the more powerful truths is the knowledge that sin takes out more than it puts in and basically requires deception. That’s why the sexual revolution needed so much propaganda for decades. People lived out the fact it made them miserable but that can’t be right because it was “liberating”, wasn’t it?
Finally small niggle but men aren’t “falling behind”, they were pushed. Everyone is a protected class except the white male, the majority of men in America, and to an extent men in general have been actively pushed aside whenever possible. Not literally always but only if enough protected class people couldn’t be found. I know for a fact some institutions spend money to ensure that the next hire for a position is not a white male if they can help it (and I know this not from secondary sources).
"I know for a fact some institutions spend money to ensure that the next hire for a position is not a white male if they can help it (and I know this not from secondary sources)."
At one point, the middle-of-the-road evangelical seminary I worked at hired four white men into important positions in short succession. I know that at least one of the positions was initially offered to a minority candidate, but they ended up declining it (something that wasn't publicly known). Some of the students were really angry about it and it became a stink on campus. Race and gender issues were a big deal on campus in general, including in hiring practices.
The dichotomy of footstool-tyrant is a response to a legitimate perception of a feature of our society. Status and power comes from exploiting and using other people as disposable consumer items. What makes our society uniquely pernicious is the ubiquity of exploitation, which is what the first movie demonstrates so well. The structure of American Modernity revolves around a series of temporary, vampiric interactions in which every person tries to drain the other of as much as possible before moving on.
And this can't be addressed without addressing the socio-economic paradigm in which this occurs. Why are most or all of our relationships temporary exchanges of value? What other relationship can you have with strangers who constantly move from city-to-city and never form a lasting social bond? I was sitting in a sermon once with one of those young, hipster, recent seminary grads and he made a comment that his church wasn't a traditional church, but a church of urban migrants. He said most of you won't remain here for more than four years and there will be a whole new church twice every decade. Therefore, rather than community building, he said we need to focus on what a "transient" church can do: give him more money for his church plants on the other side of the continent. Community building? Nah, why bother becoming a community with people who will just move away? Even the preacher was eyeing the congregation as nothing more than wallets to exploit and drain.
The dichotomy you mention above is the product of that social environment, where we cannot even conceive of the possibility of the kinds of social relationships that aren't some kind of exploitation. Every aspect of social life has been consumed by the upper-middle class market-mindset. People are nothing more than economic competitors. In such a world, it's totally reasonable to see cooperation as a foolish collaboration with one's own exploitation and hostility as the only defense. Sheepdog? To defend what? Young single men have nobody to defend and no reason to stand up for strangers who would abuse them the moment the tables turn.
The problem is that to break out of this dichotomy requires more than 1990s nostalgia. These people really *do* live in Joker world, not Batman world. People with families, friends, communities, and churches don't get it and we have an obligation to extend ourselves outside of our comfort zones. Maybe we should try to be the first to reach out to angry young men and be the first person who doesn't abuse them, doesn't exploit them, and doesn't have ulterior motives. Maybe we should be the ones to say "Yes, you have a legitimate grievance, 2020's American society is fundamentally unjust, the dominant social narratives about you really are all lies, but we have a better way in *our* community. Welcome, as long as you want. We'll have your back."
"Maybe we should try to be the first to reach out to angry young men and be the first person who doesn't abuse them, doesn't exploit them, and doesn't have ulterior motives. Maybe we should be the ones to say "Yes, you have a legitimate grievance, 2020's American society is fundamentally unjust, the dominant social narratives about you really are all lies, but we have a better way in *our* community. Welcome, as long as you want. We'll have your back.""
I think this would be great, but the evangelical industrial complex that shapes much of the thinking and practice of the American church doesn't seem to agree. If anything, they're pushing the opposite and jumping on the sidelining white men train. Major evangelical publishers like IVP now push leftist, egalitarian narratives and ideologies concerning race and gender both in print and in practice, and at least some of the seminaries do the same. I worked for six years at a seminary that identifies itself as middle-of-the-road evangelical and these race and gender narratives completely dominated the curriculum and academic practices to the point that you couldn't teach there if you weren't egalitarian. I was so immersed in this sort of theological culture for two decades that I'm not sure how widespread it's influence really is. Maybe, hopefully, it's not that widespread and it's seems that way to me because I was enmeshed in it for a long time.
It's really that bad. I worked for five years at a Southern Baptist university that had a reputation for being "fundamentalist" and got a lot of that same nonsense from recent seminary graduates. The funny part is that they're shocked when they come into contact with an real expert who can explain why their seminary professors were wrong. "John Rawls isn't a good model for Christian politics? What, he wants to put Evangelicals and Catholics in prison for their beliefs? Why didn't my seminary professor tell me that part?"
I don't like to spread gossip in public places, but oh some of the stories I could tell if I were so inclined.
That's unfortunate. At present, I feel like I'm largely done with Christian academia, not just in a personal employment sense, but in a taking it seriously sense. I don't want to promote anti-intellectualism, but it seems like the institutions are so corrupt that some other way to sustain the life of the mind as a Christian will have to be found.