The Code of Man: Love Courage Pride Family Country

302 Pages·2004·0.81 MB·English

by  Waller R. Newell

T H E C O D E
M A N
L O V E C O U R A G E P R I D E F A M I L Y C O U N T R Y
O F
W A L L E R R . N E W E L L
It is character that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a
keen, fine intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists,
successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to have those solid
qualities which we group together under the name of character—sobriety,
steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard
common sense, and, combined with it, the lift of generous enthusiasm toward
whatever is right. These are the qualities which go to make up true national
greatness.
—theodore roosevelt
Contents
epigraph ii

acknowledgments iv

introduction v

i. Love 1

ii. Courage 47

iii. Pride 99

iv. Family 145

v. Country 191

conclusion 233

index 259

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
other books by waller R. Newell

CREDITS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Acknowledgments
Once again it is my pleasure to thank Judith Regan for her continuing
strong support for this book and her keen interest in the debates and is­
sues that inform it. I am also grateful to my editor, Cal Morgan, for his
usual impeccable edit and sound instincts about the shape of the
manuscript.
Special thanks are due to the Earhart Foundation for its generous
support during the period in which I researched and wrote this book. I
should also mention that an earlier version of the introduction was deliv­
ered as a public lecture for the John M. Olin Programme on Politics,
Morality, and Citizenship at the Institute of United States Studies, the
University of London. I would like to thank the Institute and its director,
Gary McDowell, for the invitation to speak and for their hospitality dur­
ing my stay in London.
As usual, many friends and colleagues have rendered good advice,
useful tips, and practical assistance. Thanks are due in particular to my
agent, Chris Calhoun, of Sterling Lord Literistic. My student research
assistants, Geoffrey Kellow, Matthew Post, and Stephen Turpin, also
provided some very useful help.
In this as in all things, my wife, Jacqueline Etherington Newell, was
my chief partner, providing generous amounts of insight, needed criti­
cism, and inspiration.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my brother,
Richard Newell, and my uncle George Newell, both of whom passed
away while I was writing it.
Introduction
This is a book about how to be a man. I ask the reader to join me on a
search for the manly heart. There are five stages on that journey, corre­
sponding to the five main ingredients of a satisfying life—love, courage,
pride, family, and country. The correct balance of these five virtues, I will
try to show, is the secret of happiness for a man—a life that is emotion­
ally, erotically, and spiritually satisfying.
But do we really need to be reminded of how to be a man? After all,
the heroic response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on September 11, 2001, proved that manliness still exists in
abundant supply. Americans may not talk much about manliness, but
they know how to show it. At the same time, however, the recovery of
manliness in response to the calamity may have been a close call. In the
aftermath, many wondered: Were we somehow vulnerable to the attack?
By this they meant not merely vulnerable in terms of military might or
security measures, all of which were speedily addressed, but a more
troubling possibility: Were we spiritually vulnerable? Had the world
grown to believe that Americans were corrupt, lazy, self-indulgent, and
hedonistic, lacking conviction in our way of life and unwilling to defend
it? This dialogue will go on for a long time, and the meaning of manly
virtue is central to it.
Many said that 9/11 had brought the “Age of Irony” to an end. No
more frivolity, easygoing relativism, or flippant disdain for the old-
fashioned virtues. In many ways, 9/11 was a moral wake-up call, remind­
ing us that, after thirty years of debunking the traditional virtues, we are
as much in need of them as ever, and perhaps did not do enough to con­
vi Introduction
vince the enemies of democracy that we still know what those virtues are
and how to act on them. War is never desirable, and there is no silver lin­
ing to the slaughter of innocents. Still, the history of all civilizations and
countries shows that war can spark a period of soul-searching, stocktak­
ing, and moral regeneration, spanning all subcultures and reminding us
of our shared responsibilities as citizens. President Bush has wondered
aloud whether Americans spend a little bit too much time playing video
games and enjoying their other toys, and not quite enough time giving of
themselves for others. These reflections are common to all shades of the
political spectrum, and they in no way amount to blaming the victim. It
is a natural response to human suffering to wonder if we can avoid
calamities of the same kind in the future by heeding the call to improve
ourselves, individually and as a nation. If we don’t ask ourselves such
painful questions, then the innocent victims will have died in vain. If
something good can come of the tragedy, helping us avoid a repetition of
it, then their deaths will be more greatly hallowed than if we had simply
returned to our usual routines.
This has happened many times before, and it will doubtless happen
again. In his novel Nana, Emile Zola chronicled the moral disintegration
of Paris into an endless playhouse of jaded pleasure seeking. The book
portends the devastating defeat of France in 1871 by the armies of
Bismarck’s Prussia, to be delivered like the judgment of God on Sodom
and Gomorrah. Closer to our own era, the movie Casablanca summed
up the feeling produced in many by the rise of Nazi Germany—that it
was time to put aside the nightclub-hopping cynicism of the Lost
Generation and join the battle for good against evil. The further we go
back in time, the more often we encounter such reflections on the value
of war as a moral wake-up call. One of the original versions is St.
Augustine’s City of God. He used the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in
A.D. 410 to raise the same questions: Did the Roman Empire invite ag­
gression because its ancient civic and military virtues were played out as
a result of an underlying spiritual exhaustion?
The response of Americans to 9/11 was a triumph. But, far from
proving that we don’t need to reflect on the meaning of manliness, it only
shows how urgently this debate must be carried on and deepened. The
Age of Irony did not happen overnight, and however sobered we may
Introduction vii
have been by the terrorists’ devastating attack, its effects won’t disappear
overnight. They are still with us. The events of 9/11 can be a blessing in
disguise if the valor they brought forth inspires us to recover the well­
springs of manly virtue, not only in the heat of action but through longer-
lasting reflection. It’s the greatest conceivable testament to America
that, when faced with an unspeakable cataclysm, it can reach deep down
into the moral fiber built up through centuries of challenge. But during
the intervals of peace, when we have time to reflect, we need to nourish
that moral fiber with patient and thoughtful self-examination. Americans
proved their manliness on 9/11 with deeds. Now we need to recover the
words, because in the long run of a nation’s life, it is the words that in­
spire and shape the deeds.
�
There is a beautiful image, originating in Hindu thought and repeated
by the ancient philosopher Plato, that compares the human soul to a ce­
lestial chariot riding through the heavens. For me, this image best sums
up the five paths to manliness I mentioned at the beginning—love,
courage, pride, family, and country—and how they relate to one another
in an integrated and satisfying life. According to this ancient image, the
charioteer stands for the human mind. The horses stand for the two most
powerful of human passions, love and valor. The proper ordering of a
man’s soul requires that the passions of love and valor always be guided
by the dictates of reason. If the horses are not sufficiently reined in by
the charioteer, if they are allowed their own way, these powerful steeds
will pull the celestial chariot out of its heavenly arc, plunging it into a
lower world of chaotic lust and violence. If, however, the charioteer is
firmly in control of his steeds, the chariot of the soul will continue to soar
upward to the celestial heights of eternal happiness, fulfillment, and
honor.
But—and this is crucial to the secret of manliness—it’s not just a mat­
ter of controlling the horses. It’s not just a matter of repressing the pas­
sions by the dry dictates of reason. On the contrary: the charioteer can’t
make his chariot go anywhere unless the ascent to happiness is fueled by
the energy of those powerful horses. If that energy weren’t there, the
chariot would just as surely crash as when the horses are out of control.
viii Introduction
So it is in the soul of a man. The mind cannot achieve happiness unless it
is fueled by the passionate energies of love and daring. The point is not
prudishly to suppress these passions but to direct them away from bad
goals, like coarse pleasure seeking and brutal aggression, and toward
constructive goals—the cultivation of those moral and intellectual
virtues that enable us to be good family men, friends, and citizens. The
image of the chariot evokes the proper balance of love and courage in
the heart of a man. A man needs to know who—and what—is truly de­
serving of his love. Only then will he know when—and why—he may
need to fight to defend them. The proper balance of love and daring on
behalf of his family, friends, and country entitles a man to feel proud of
himself, and deservedly so.
During the last thirty years or so, we have sometimes come close to
losing sight of that balance. The harmony of the five paths has often been
disrupted by a war between love and daring in the heart of American
man. So this book is not only a journey in search of the manly heart, trav­
eling the five paths to their common destination, but a recollection of
how we have sometimes lost our way during the last three decades.
Before we can recover the key to the manly virtues, we have to remem­
ber exactly when and how we lost it. Moreover, the search for the manly
heart must never be confused with mere traditionalism, a snobbish and
sterile veneration of the old way simply because it is old. In order for the
traditional teaching to be a living one, we have to show how our need for
the five virtues emerges from our present confusions and dilemmas. It’s
not enough to mourn the passing of the good old days. We have to start
with our current longings and reflect on how our lack of an adequate
moral and erotic vocabulary gives us a road map for the journey back to
the manly heart—which is, of course, also a journey forward to the hap­
piness for which we all long. Often the key to the treasure box is a lot
closer than we imagine, right under our noses.
That’s why readers of this book will find some surprising leaps and
comparisons—Plato emerging alongside movies and sitcoms, eros lead­
ing us to Mozart and Eminem. I explore popular culture, movies, televi­
sion, video games, rock music, and fashion not because I necessarily
endorse their content, much less because I think they are adequate for
an understanding of the times they reflect. But I will argue that pop cul­
Introduction ix
ture can provide important clues to our repressed longings. Through
pop culture, we often experience the guilty pleasure of vicariously enjoy­
ing ways of life that are forbidden to us by our prevailing social ortho­
doxies. These longings may begin as frivolous or trivial, but they can,
surprisingly, furnish a more direct path back to the profound teachings
of the Western tradition than what sometimes passes for scholarship in
our centers of learning.
In this respect, my book is very much in the spirit of Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Personae or Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, al­
though I’m fairly certain Professor Paglia would not share my views,
while my old friend and teacher Bloom would have found them congen­
ial. But the point is that the creative interpretation of popular culture is
not a recent fad. When conventional academics turn their noses up at
the dread concept of “popularization,” they may believe that they are de­
fending traditional academic values against shallow faddishness, but the
opposite is true. The disdain of academics for writing about popular cul­
ture is itself a very recent development in Western culture. It is largely a
product of the high modernism of the 1950s, when the social sciences
and humanities turned to a sterile obsession with methodology in the be­
lief that the rigor of logical positivism and mathematical modeling would
enable them to distinguish themselves from the tweedy, pipe-smoking
dons of the Victorian era. This transition required writing articles that
only other methodologists could read (along with composing atonal mu­
sic that only musicologists could appreciate, and writing novels about
professors writing novels). What was all too often forsaken was the ro­
bust connection between the art of thinking in the academy and the
moral concerns of the educated public. Until the 1950s, the greatest
scholars often as not had broad appeal outside of the academy, if indeed
they held academic positions at all. That tradition has been reviving, and
we need more of it.
�
We are certainly aware today, at the start of the new millennium, that
there is a crisis of manliness in America. A spate of best-selling books
testifies to the range and seriousness of the debate. Important as it is to
expose destructive trends in the contemporary understanding of boys