What Is a Man?: 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue [Paperback]

Waller R. Newell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2001

At a time when all of America is debating the wayward course of contemporary manhood comes this rich and eye-opening anthology of 3,000 years of the most profound and inspiring writing on the subject of manliness. A source of guidance and inspiration, this wisdom-filled collection also reflects on the confusions of modern manhood by addressing contemporary issues through voices as diverse as James Dean, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Cobain. Reminding us all of the relevance of file manly tradition, What Is a Man? offers a readable and revelatory guide to the virtues of men of their best.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Newell's anthology covers an astonishing range and is a constant source of ideas about a neglected, almost a suppressed, virtue." -- --Kenneth Minogue, London School of Economics

"Newell's anthology covers an astonishing range and is a constant source of ideas about a neglected, almost a suppressed, virtue." -- --Kenneth Minogue, London School of Economics

"What Is a Man? violates all of the norms of political correctness by reminding us that men have specific virtues -- virtues that are neither the watered-down qualities of niceness and compassion nor aimless and violent aggression. This rich anthology will be an eye-opener for many, but particularly for the young men who are most confused about how they are to act in life." -- --Francis Fukuyama, George Mason University

About the Author

Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.He was educated at the University of Toronto and Yale University.The author of numerous books and articles on Classical, Renaissance, and Modern European political philosophy and literature, he is a contributor to the Weekly Standard and other publications.He has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the National Humanities Center in Research Triangel Park, North Carolina, and a John Adams Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London.

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks; Abridged edition (May 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060987588
• ISBN-13: 978-0060987589
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,173,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Gender Studies > General

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A welcome inquiry., June 26, 2006

By 

C. Matthew Curtin (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is a Man?: 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue (Paperback)

After eighteen years in education, Waller R. Newell raised a question. The question itself sounds simple enough but it is one whose answer is surprisingly elusive. A strictly biological answer seems to beg the question: technically accurate but superficial -- completely devoid of insight. It cannot easily be dismissed, for it is too close to who we are, not just as individuals but as a species. What is a man?

Less than six months after releasing my essay "Too Many Guys; Too Few Men," I happened across a used bookshop I'd never seen before and stopped in to see what treasures might be found. In short order, I came across a copy of Newell's What Is a Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue. Its back cover included such teasers as "Marcus Aurelius on self-mastery," "Jane Austen on gentlemanliness," "Cicero on the soul," "Frederick Douglass on determination," "John Locke on principles," "Plato on virtue and vice," and "Jonathan Swift on manners." By the time that I made it to the first page, I had already determined to buy the volume.

This book should find a ready welcome at this point in our history. More than ever (it would seem), boys have been growing up hearing conflicting messages and finding themselves confused, unsure of themselves and of their place in the world. Absent fathers cannot help boys to aspire to high principles, to act well, or to learn the art of self-restraint. Without a framework to govern and to direct the powerful force of testosterone, boys find themselves reaching physical maturity without having the emotional and intellectual maturity needed to aspire to manly virtue.

Thus, many of our young men are driven by their lust rather than learning to love the beauty of women and enjoying the simple pleasure of observation. Boys find themselves full of rage, becoming aggressive and even violent instead of learning to focus their energy to set right what has been made wrong. Boys find acceptance only among each other, and only through demonstration of physical prowess. And through movies and video games our boys are fed a steady stream of sex and violence. Aggression and self-satisfaction leads to high scores and admiration of scantily-clad women in this world. This is but a mild caricature of their own experience at school, where recognition and even esteem among peers comes from aggression and physicality.

Mothers, of course, want to help, but are completely unequipped to understand the experience of male adolescence. Without this understanding, finding a way to influence boys positively can be quite difficult. While mothers cannot relate to their sons as can fathers, they nevertheless can help them to aspire to high principles as celebrated throughout history and literature and as desired by themselves.

Education is historically the means by which our citizens, young and old, male and female, are helped to grow from whatever raw material they're given and into the mature, sensible, and productive members of society, well-prepared for the business of life. So, with all of the attention that education is given today, how is it that we have the trouble that we do?

The sad fact is that public education system in this country has in many cases become little more than a state-run daycare service. For fear of offending anyone (which is to say, for fear of being sued by a zealot), school systems and their teachers teach nothing of morals, ethics, or character. Even as the most critical matters theoretically addressed by education go hardly mentioned, parents to a large degree figure that their children are being "taught what is important" at school. Failing to take sufficient interest in the education of their children, many parents do not examine and augment the curriculum. Others instead examine the curriculum and try to get it changed to suit their own purposes, dictating the conclusions of various subjects in which they have no competence whatsoever.

What is worse, many of our young men are quite simply being left behind. Programs to encourage girls to pursue greater education, to look at careers in fields that are "underrepesented by women," and so on. How is it that we have such effort to bring girls into computer science while lacking similar effort to bring boys into the language arts? Because the field was "dominated by men" for so long, you'll often hear. The frightening reality is that boys are badly underrepresented in postsecondary education across the board. (See "Where the Boys No Longer Are: Recent Trends in U.S. College Enrollment Patterns" by Patricia M. Anderson Department of Economics Dartmouth College and NBER.)

Even so, many of our young men go on to some additional education or otherwise prepare for work. But postsecondary education today bears little resemblance to what we saw even a century ago. Curriculum is decreasingly covering broad studies of human interest and increasingly narrow and technical in nature. Focus is on preparation for work, rather than preparation for life. Granted, work is a significant part of life, but even in matters such as citizenship we find that the education is increasingly technical, discussing how the Federal government works, often leaving people wondering why we even have government at the state, county, and municipal levels. As for the formation of character, even higher education is disturbingly silent. Who even teaches ethics except outside of law school, where ethics are codified in the profession? (If you look long and hard, you'll find some, but not much. Even that tends to be technical in nature, such as discussion of copyright law, fair use doctrine, and legal repercussions of violations.)

Our young men find themselves in adulthood and taking on the responsibility of work and family and everything seems normal. Yet many are in dead-end jobs and many will fail in their responsibility to their families, and particularly to their sons, who will in turn become the next generation of men ill-equipped to find their place in the world. Many others will find varying degrees of success, very often through lessons painfully learned.

Against this backdrop, inquiry into what constitutes a man seems a worthy endeavor. Newell acts not as the composer of a response but as the conductor of the symphony of voices defining what makes a man. The book itself is arranged in eight chapters that address a different aspect of manliness. After a brief introduction, we consider "The Chivalrous Man," "The Gentleman," "The Wise Man," "The Family Man," "The Statesman," "The Noble Man," "The American Man," and finally "The Invisible Man." Each of these is broken into sub-themes (such as "The Manly Lover," "Unmanly Temptations," "Manliness Toward Women," etc.) that themselves are made up of excerpts from the last three millennia of literature. A ninth chapter concludes, with Newell's own commentary on the journey on which he has just taken his reader.

What we find in our readings is that while the world might be far different from what it was 3,000 years ago, the fundamentals of human experience--and of the male human experience--remain largely the same. Boys and the men that they become have always struggled to understand their place in society, how to balance the urges that they have for the pleasure of the moment and that for the esteem derived from virtue, from the proper blend of contemplation and action.

The disturbing lack of manly virtue in the world around us today is self-evident; actors, athletes, and businessmen can be found engaged in every sort of underhanded dealing to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Notions of fidelity in romantic relationships, willingness to compete honestly, and the courage to reject highly profitable but unethical or illegal business dealings seem lost. Are these problems new? Are men today simply ill-equipped for their roles in society today? Fortunately, an honest appraisal of the situation will show that although the bad boys grab the headlines, there are others who manage not to fall into these traps. Most men struggle daily with the compromises often needed to get things done while maintaining some sense of justice. Reading the thoughts of those who have come before us shows that the nature of these struggles is much today as it was last year, last century, and last millennium.

Real-time news provides up-to-the-instant information on whatever scandal is breaking. Yet no opportunity for contemplation is afforded. We know every fact about today's details but we spend precious little time thinking about how these things speak to what we are as species, as a society, and as men. "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be," wrote William Shakespeare. What Is a Man? is a powerful antidote for the inability to reflect on what we want to be and how we must shape our character to achieve it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Compendium on Manly Virtues, June 16, 2007

By 

Didaskalex "Eusebius Alexandrinus" (Kellia on Calvary, Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: What Is a Man?: 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue (Paperback)

"As a new father, I am grasping for a way to articulate manly virtue for my boy in a way that doesn't feel phony. It's impossible to imagine speaking of manliness or virtue in the world I inhabit now, filled with well-meaning, highly educated men and women who would have to put ironic quotation marks around those words or die of embarrassment." Rod Dreher, Pawpaw's World



Manly Virtue:
There's nothing more humiliating for a genuinely real man than to betray the code of manly honor, that once consisted of a canon of ethics called; 'manly virtue.' In Latin, vir means man, and a man of honor controlled his bodily passions and fears with fortitude, endurance and grace. Those are not virtues which most of today's men hope to acquire, nor their female partners promote, since a genuinely real man cannot be defined solely with female aspiration.
In classical times, these virtues were Prudence, Courage; abstinence, and Justice. Being dignified, courteous, a temperate devotee to a chivalry of Justice and truth was the ultimate social aspiration for men. These virtues have no meaning unless exercised by free men and women. But it was the clear conviction of the ancients that if citizens were not raised with these virtues, to which Faith, Hope, and Charity, were added by the Christians, democracy would soon deteriorate into soft, then hard tyranny.

Human nature and conduct:
Human nature is often invoked to explain human conduct, especially when that conduct appalls. But human nature is a slippery concept; and so great is the variety of human behavior over time and geography that many intellectuals have denied that man has any invariant nature at all. History and culture, it is said, have freed man of his biological inheritance.Very little reflection should be necessary to establish that man must have a nature, otherwise he would hardly be distinguishable from an amoeba or indeed from any other kind of creature. The fact that man-and only man-has developed language, and that, barring neurological catastrophe, every human being learns to speak a native language, should be more than sufficient to establish that there must be at least some invariant and inborn human propensities that we can call his nature. (A. Daniels Review of : The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker)

Bringing Up a Prince:
What attracted my attention to this fine book, while re-educating myself on issues and methods concerning educating my grandson Noah, in two essays from De Montaigne, and Erasmus, who wrote, "Wisdom is not only an extraordinary attribute in itself, ..., but according to Aristotle no form of wisdom is greater than that which teaches a prince how to rule beneficently. Accordingly, Xenophon was quite correct in saying in his Oeconomicus that he thought it something beyond the human sphere and clearly divine, to rule over free and willing subjects. That kind of wisdom is indeed to be sought by princes, which Solomon as a youth of good parts, spurning all else, alone desired, and which he wished to be his constant companion on the throne. This is that purest and most beautiful wisdom of Shunamite, by whose embraces alone was David pleased, he that wisest son of an all-wise father. This is the wisdom which is referred to in Proverbs: "Through me princes rule, and the powerful pass judgment." Whenever kings call this wisdom into council and exclude those basest of advisers - ambition, wrath, cupidity, and flattery- the state flourishes in every way and, realizing that its prosperity comes from the wisdom of the prince, rejoices rightly in itself with these words: "All good things together come to me with wisdom." Plato is nowhere more painstaking than in the training of his guardians of the state. He does not wish them to excel all others in wealth, in gems, in dress, in statues and attendants, but in wisdom alone. He says that no state will ever be blessed unless the philosophers are at the helm, or those to whom the task of government falls embrace philosophy.

A Compendium on Manly Virtues:
What Is a Man? Newell promises trying to inspire men and boys (into manhood) to reach for the forgotten 'Manly Virtues' of honor tempered by prudence, ambition tempered by compassion, love restrained by delicacy. Newell exploration for those virtues were within eight models; the mediaeval Chivalrous Man, the nineteenth-century Gentleman, the Wise Man, the Family Man, the Statesman, the virtual Noble Man, the Contemporary American Man, and the Invisible Man, into excerpts selected from a variety of mainly Western classical to modern literature, since Newell tries to define the Western conception and meaning of being a man.
Believing with Plato that tales which the young first hear articulate models of virtue, Newell wrote his book to the fathers, while former Secretary of Education William Bennett wrote his 'Book of Virtues': A Treasury of Great Moral Stories for the youngsters, to be read aloud in hopes of passing on such virtues to the younger generation, by great authors, and from folklore. Newell as well as Bennet did exert a charm and send a message that may have stirred American families to discuss the issues set forth, that recently has caused a great socio-political turmoil, even changing the outcome of 2004 presidential elections. Newell's book embraces a variety of fascinating issues, basically more oriented to the good old times.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, March 23, 2006

By 

Kev - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Is a Man?: 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue (Paperback)

I bought this book mainly as a source for a research paper I had to write. It was a spectacular read, at least the portions that I used for my paper. Newell does a prime job of displaying what, in his view, being a man is all about. It is quite a wonderful thing to have a compendium of this sort as it broadens knowledge both in specific fields and also generally. I'd recommend this if you're looking into readings by various famous authors and other people of the sort.

-Kev