Masculine Genius

Professor Anthony Esolen is interviewed about finding the "masculine genius:"

Men are lonely -- and they are also not universally fooled by the androgyny that is preached to them every day, in school, at church, in the workplace and in the media.

Unfortunately, I don't think they are finding "new" ways of looking at their manhood. They are finding very old ways of looking at it, or rather, they are finding a strange and finally unsatisfying version of those old ways.

Really, the human race has not changed since the days of Homer and Moses; men and women have not changed. And the mysteries of manhood and womanhood have been probed in literature for thousands of years. So we need to step back a little, take a look at that literature, or take a look at what men within our own lifetimes used to do.

For instance, though men are certainly wilder creatures than women -- the source of both their dynamism and their destructiveness -- it is men, not women, who create the civil order, as it is women, not men, who create the domestic order.

Our inability to distinguish between these orders, and our neglect of both of them in the pursuit of individual "dreams," has left us with a poor and thin domestic life, while in most places in America and probably Europe a vibrant civic life is hardly a memory. Share