Weekly Digest: A Crisis of Courage
Even mainstream commentators note the lack of courage in our leadership class.
Welcome to my weekly digest for September 8, 2023, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
The Crisis of Courage
I’ve frequently returned to Peter Thiel’s quote from From Zero to One that, “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
Jemima Kelly at the Financial Times took up this theme in a recent column arguing that “the west is suffering from a crisis of courage.” Some excerpts:
And the problem is much broader than politics. Society itself seems to be suffering from a crisis of courage. This is clear when corporations succumb to social pressures by firing employees to protect their brands, or when they use the Pride flag in their social media avatars but not in the Middle East. Virtue signalling might be endemic, but courage, like honour, is not deemed a virtue worth signalling. Indeed all the incentives are stacked on the opposite side: there is little to lose from going along with what everyone is saying, even if you don’t believe it yourself, and much to gain from proving that you are on the “right” side.
Moral or intellectual courage — sticking your head above the parapet and saying what you really think — can, conversely, get you into a huge amount of trouble, and, usually, you are not rewarded for it.
The mere mention of courage has been in decline for a long time. A 2012 paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology that tracked how frequently words related to moral excellence appeared in American books — both fiction and non-fiction — over the 20th century, found that the use of the words courage, bravery and fortitude (which were grouped together) had fallen by two-thirds over the period.
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Moral courage does not equate to recklessness, and neither does it mean being a provocateur for the sake of it. According to Aristotle, courage should be thought of as a kind of mediator between cowardice and recklessness. But if we want our societies to thrive, we must be courageous enough to think for ourselves and stand up for what we believe in. The late writer Maya Angelou was right when she said: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practise any other virtue consistently.”
Click over to read the whole thing. Again, the FT is a great read that alas has a hard paywall.
Best of the Web
Richard Reeves: What Men Are For - An argument against “Lone Ranger masculinity”
This relational masculinity contrasts with the masculine archetype of the Lone Ranger, especially salient in America, in which manhood is defined by fierce independence, even to the point of isolation. To discover oneself and step into adulthood, a man has to shake himself loose of social ties. It’s Thoreau in his cabin, the frontiersman riding alone, the cowboy out on the range, the astronaut alone in the vastness of space. It’s almost every role played by Kevin Costner. Lone Ranger masculinity rests on the assumption that in a state of nature, men would be wild and free.
His idea of masculinity as relational brings to mind again Jack Donovan’s idea of manhood I wrote about in newsletter #79 as being expressed within groups of men. These sorts of all male spaces were common until recently.
Mike Cosper/Christianity Today: How Then Should Men Live? - “Forgive me if this sounds harsh, but no man wants to be Allan. No man wants to go to war to help Barbie reclaim her kingdom and end up forgotten in the friend zone. Allyship alone is simply not a compelling vision of masculinity.”
Taylor Combs/Christianity Today: Men Are from Right-Leaning Mars. Women Are from Lefty Venus. - This piece argues that the church can help bridge this gender gap by encouraging cross-gender friendships. As I’ve written elsewhere, I think this is a big mistake.
The New Statesman: The manosphere is poisoning conservatism
Many looking at the manosphere will draw only negative lessons – “how do I keep my son away from this, we need to sit boys down and explain why Andrew Tate Is Bad”. But it’s a worldview that has emerged in the vacuum of a left that sees masculinity as regressive, and has ceased offering coherent critiques of capitalism, individualism and globalisation. Lessons about personal responsibility, health, hard work and confidence that would once have been imparted organically are instead being gleaned from misogynistic online father figures. The left has left the battlefield. While feminists are having important conversations about the need for female-only spaces, and have long promoted female mentorship and solidarity, the male need for mentorship and solidarity has been ignored.
Caitlin Flanagan/The Atlantic: In Praise of Heroic Masculinity - An interesting piece but continues the trend of writings on masculinity being overly dominated by female writers.
Institute for Family Studies: The Growing Class Divide in Divorce
Thus, divorce is still more likely for those who cohabit before marriage, for interracial marriages, for women who marry young, and for women from non-intact families, but it is increasingly likely for women without a BA, for black women, and for women who marry young. Given that women with less education and black women are less likely to marry in the first place, this means the myriad benefits of a stable marriage for individuals in the U.S. have become increasingly rare, and more confined to white, well-educated women from intact families.
The Free Press: I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.
David French: Ban Online Porn for Kids
Rob Henderson: Evil Eyes and Tall Poppies - A discussion of envy
Someone sent my this interesting interview with Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales. He runs a pretty big podcast called Holy Post. It takes a strongly anti-fundamentalist stance (while being open to essentially any other position). This may have long been his thinking, but I note that it is very in line with the new evangelical strategy I highlighted in newsletter #78.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was a guest this week on the Believe! podcast with Doug DeVos. We had an interesting, free-ranging conversation on a number of topics.
I had a lot of media hits this week.
I got a quote in Yahoo News about public restrooms. I also got a mention from Tyler Cowen in Marginal Revolution.
My religious work got a shout out in American Reformer, Christianity Today, in Chronicles, and from Rod Dreher in the European Conservative and in his Substack. If you didn’t notice it from my writeup, I was also cited in Sen. Marco Rubio’s new report on working men.
New this week:
Appalachia’s North-South Divide - My piece in City Journal talking about an aspect of my future of Appalachia report.
Building Counter-Institutions - Considerations for new institutions in an era that is corrosive of institutional life.
Sen. Marco Rubio's Report on the Working (and Non-Working) Man - My look at this interesting new report.
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Post-Script: Lost in the Meritocracy
This 2005 Atlantic piece by Walter Kirn, the author of the piece I highlighted last week on Mormonism, talks about his experience as a middle class Minnesota boy entering the world of elite meritocracy at Princeton.
The humiliations mounted. One afternoon a van from Bloomingdale's pulled up in front of our dormitory, and a crew of men began unloading furniture that appeared to belong on the set of a TV show about single young socialites. The men placed armchairs, lamps, tables, and a sofa in one corner of the living room and then unrolled an Oriental rug so vast that its edges curled up against the walls, blocking the electrical sockets. After directing the placement of each piece, Jennifer and her boyfriend sought me out in my tiny bedroom, whose only furnishings were a desk, a bed, and a bookcase fashioned from plastic milk crates. Owing to my budget, many of the books inside it were stolen from the university bookstore; I'd never bought books before, and couldn't believe how expensive the damned things were.
"We figured out everyone's share of the new living room," the boyfriend said. "Yours is five hundred and ten."
I laughed out loud. "But I didn't order any of it."
"Well, you'll benefit from it, won't you?" Jennifer said. This was my first encounter with a line of reasoning that would echo through my years at Princeton: even unbidden privileges must be paid for. Tuition, the university liked to tell us, covered only a fraction of the cost of our education. What's more, the benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes. I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in—to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up—was an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote.
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This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the WASP New Englanders with weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. They didn't have our test scores, but they had style, a charismatic aura of entitlement, and V and I were desperate for a piece of it.
Click through to read the whole thing.
You don't strike me as a Christian rock/CCM type fan Aaron, but you may want to look into John Cooper's podcast. He is the lead singer of Skillet and has had a bit of rivalry with Vischer over the last couple years. I think their podcasts have comparable listener numbers, but Cooper started his Cooperstuff podcast largely on the idea that Christians need lay people to rise up and train the next generation because evangelical elites are failing to respond effectively to cultural trends. He was originally an apolitical type of person not really caring about these things. He gets a little too political now, but he has some similar themes to you. But he comes from a very non-intellectual/normie (if a well known, successful singer can be called a normie) type perspective.
The interview with Vischer was a waste of 30 minutes of my time. He purposely said nothing. If this is where evangelism is headed we are in for a rough ride.