Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, The Big Sleep (1946)
Phillip Marlowe was, or is, a fictional private detective in Los Angeles and San Francisco; when describing his creation, author Raymond Chandler wrote one of the most memorable statements of the heroic in a disenchanted world:
“Down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
It’s a solitary picture, at odds with the social nature of human flourishing. But it entirely captures the sense of masculine virtue. It describes the interior moral substance by which a man can respond with dignity to whatever circumstances he finds himself in.
That was in the 1940's. By Fight Club, in the 1990’s, the aspiring hero is replaced by something more familiar, the morally-negligible consumer:
"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world...
We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't..." (Fight Club)
Fight Club's protagonist comes to see that the modern world is not organised to facilitate his moral development. It is not there to provide opportunities for honour through combat or chivalrous love. It is there to generate profits by the long-term consumption of industrial products:
“An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars; advertisers have you chasing cars and clothes... We have jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need...
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, was wise enough to realise there's nothing great about extended adolescence. His intention, amongst others, was to criticise the hollowed-out, anti-merit, participation-prize ethos of the education that had given him nothing:
"...back in 1994, when I was writing my book, I wasn’t insulting anyone but myself...after twenty-plus years in school, I wasn’t smart. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about anything. Instead of learning how to think I’d only learned how to game the system. But the truth was that the system had gamed me. My resume included my high school and college grade point averages, as if that fooled anyone. It included my membership in various national honor societies. My teachers had told me I was smart so now I repeated that mantra. I’m smart! To set the record straight, I was an idiot. Worse, I was an idiot who thought he was smart..."
"“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” became my mantra for deprogramming myself, for shedding those years of false praise, that evil grease meant to skid me along toward my grave with the least amount of effort."
It is difficult to know what opportunities for masculine flourishing the premodern world really did provide, but today's industrialised world is just as dispiriting as Fight Club portrays it.
However, that's not the end of the story. The state of the society or civilisation you were born into is somewhat like your football club: when it's doing well, you feel good; when it isn't, you feel bad. But however intensely you identify with your club, it really isn't something you can take credit for. Put another way, the world you were born into controls what opportunities are available, but it doesn't say anything about you morally. That is up to you.
Every circumstance, more or less, is an opportunity for virtue and character. Maybe young men should aim to be the bearer of the civilisation they want to see in the world, despite everything that it is trying to do to them. It is like a John Rawls thought experiment: if you had to advise someone else faced with these circumstances, what would you say? What would you want to see? Aspire to that.
Sometimes, becoming a grown male is presented as only external, like getting paid work or taking on a responsibility. Changes of role are certainly part of it, but the real content of "becoming a man" is clearly just as much psychological. A child cannot contain the distress he feels in difficulties, and needs someone else to do it for him. That is what immaturity is. Neither has he yet learned to distinguish between the external and the internal, or between what he can influence and what he can't. An adult is someone who can make plans in the real world, and make them happen, even if circumstances are against it. Given the bankable benefits of maturity, it seems odd, on the face of it, that the world as it is should put so much emphasis on youth. It certainly seems like they prefer people who are easily led.
A boy matures through doing something difficult for which he can legitimately take credit. This is the source of that sense of interior worth which no-one can take away, and which is obvious to anyone who cares to notice it.
I did like this - thank you Dylan. A healthy heroism is possible!
Interesting stuff thanks.
I am not sure about this though - "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” became my mantra for deprogramming myself, for shedding those years of false praise, that evil grease meant to skid me along toward my grave with the least amount of effort."... only because I THINK I took a different approach or a different approach took me !!!.
Think your last para nails it though.