The Art of Manliness As Nostalgia

There's a web site out there called The Art of Manliness. Have a look. Find yourself agreeing with a few of the things they say. Have more of a look. Find yourself wondering: do these guys know what day it is? Do they know there's been nearly forty years and several economic upheavals since the 1960's?

The basic premise at the Art of Manliness is that men today are directionless wusses, whereas their fathers and grandfathers were real men who could catch fish with their bare hands, fix a locomotive while it was still hauling freight and smackdown anyone who dis-respected them with a practiced one-two. A representative of the genre is a recent post about the fitness tests for soldiers in WW2 and today. The article infers from the much stricter test criteria for the WW2 armies, in comparison to the criteria for today's US army, that the WW2 GI was fitter than today's soldier.

Hello? The test might have been well written-up, but no-one was going home because they were two push-ups short of the target. Oh no. The US and UK armies of WW2 were conscript armies: they took just about anyone with four working limbs and two working eyes who wasn't actually coughing up blood on the day of the physical. They could not afford to be selective because they needed cannon-fodder by the brigade.

The truth is exactly the opposite. A soldier in today's professional armies is fitter and better trained than any soldier before him. This applies in most other occupations and pastimes as well. An eighteen-year old competition-level classical pianist today could outplay almost anyone from the past, and if your seriously think that a 1960's tennis player would get past the qualifying rounds at Wimbledon, you are not paying attention. The best of today are so much better than the best of the past that it's difficult to explain to anyone who wasn't there in the past. The same can be said if we step down the scale slightly. I work in an office and so did my father, and I am so much fitter and healthier than my father it isn't true, and the same can be said for most of the men of my age. It's when we look a little further down that it all starts to go wrong. But then, it always did, just in a different way. Today, the problem is high blood sugar, being overweight and inactive, back then it was, oh, black lung, asbestosis, and being underfed, underweight and working twelve-hour shifts as standard.

"Manliness" is nostalgia and nostalgia is a species of denial. The nostalgic does not understand a lot of the present, and does not like much of what they do understand. They look back to a time when the things they don't like seemed not to happen, and about which they don't know enough to know its flaws. There's a reason it's the past, which is usually that it didn't work so well. Books work well, and we still have those, penny-farthings didn't, and we don't. Sure, some progress turned out not to be so beneficial - bring back the Routemaster bus, but with modern engines - but is there anyone who wants to work down an old-fashioned coal mine? But the nostalgic doesn't know this, because they weren't there, and they only listen to those who were if what they say fits in.

The real trick for a pop guru is to exploit this ignorance by claiming that stuff that doesn't work well now, like marriage, employment, manners and the like, used to work much better back in when men were men and women were grateful. In that world, Mom and Dad had their problems, but they toughed it out and kept their marriage together, instead of Mom cashing it in through the divorce courts at the first opportunity. Except it wasn't like that. Mom and Dad didn't tough it out because they were Better Than Us, but because they Didn't Have The Options. If marriage worked as well as it was supposed to, the Divorce Reform Act (1969) would never have been proposed, let alone passed. When it took effect in 1971, years of bitterness, anger and frustration flooded into the courts and applied for divorces. Mom cleared out the moment she could find a job to go to and a simple way of cancelling the marriage.

The same goes for cars. Sure, a reasonably handy man could tune and fix his own car of a Sunday. Which means that manufacturers were making cars so crudely-designed and badly assembled from poorly-machined parts that they needed constant maintenance and tuning. I don't know how to fix my car now because I don't need to: it doesn't go wrong. Don't ask me to describe what hamburgers used to be like. There's a reason McDonalds swept all before it, and it wasn't because Wimpy made tasty, Aberdeen-Angus beef patties. Don't ask about beer either: just ask a silver-haired person about Watney's Red Barrel, the piss-water that angered Graham Lees, Bill Mellor, Michael Hardman, and Jim Makin so much, they founded CAMRA.

The Art of Manliness and a number of other sites love to re-hash quotes and style looks from men who were old in the 1940's, and who could lead their patrician or celebrity lives because of economic circumstances that no longer obtain. As for re-cycling the philosophers? Aristotle, Seneca, Catiligione, the Stoics and Epicurians, were advising the modern equivalent of today's oligarchs and billionaires. Those wisdom philosophers weren't writing for people with day jobs who spent three hours a day commuting, and if they had been asked, they would have said that servants need only honesty and humility, not philosophy.

As ever, it's the missed opportunity to do something useful that's the real loss here. A bunch of reasonably smart people are writing articles of what looks like advice and wisdom for the conduct of life, but it's pretty much a marketing exercise exploiting insecure men who can't figure out how to handle the modern world. Those guys are being handed a bunch of nostalgia that makes it their fault if it fails. Why don't those smart people write articles about how to handle the modern world? The first few lessons might be in how to identify BS and decode the lies, evasions, brush-offs and fairy tales with which we are surrounded every day.

Starting with the idea that our grandfathers knew how to live and we don't. Hogwash. Greatest Generation? Poker-playing, black-market trading conscript cannon-fodder the lot of them. Spent their post-war lives coddled in jobs-for-life companies with final-salary pensions at the end of it, protected by the Iron Curtain, the tail end of Empires and a whole mess of trade tariffs. They made such a lousy job of running the largest economies in the world that first Japan, then Korea, then China ate their breakfast, and then they handed the whole lot over to a bunch of asset-strippers and robber-barons, and retired as the jobs went to Mexico, the Philippines and any other low-wage economy that would take the work. Yeah right. Great role models.