Embracing the Future
On halfway measures and legacy social forms
(Photo by Joel Bengs on Unsplash)
David French today exhorts men to a renewed embrace of relationship models — fatherhood, husband-hood, and friendship — as the core way in which masculinity is to adapt to the changed set of circumstances that the new century presents.
On a very basic level, French’s approach will have a likely broad appeal to “conservatives” because while it claims to accept certain social changes which are irreversible (and French is certainly correct in that), he nevertheless identifies familiar and reliable, old school legacy forms of social relation as the core around which a reworked masculine identity can be formed under circumstances where an “external focus” (i.e., on work, physical prowess, etc) no longer avails.
In many ways this is stock “conservative” talk in the face of ingrained “liberal” social changes. That is, in the past, conservatives have generally accepted all social changes eventually, whether they opposed the changes at the time or not, because a conservative mindset appears to be focused very much on the present and living in the present given, rather than changing that in any way. Emphasis is more comfortably placed for conservatism on individuals and what they can do in their own personal lives rather than on broader social or contextual changes, even if those social and contextual conditions are things that they opposed in the past. It’s in many ways a reflection of this tendency to take an individual focus, just repackaged in terms of individual relationships on the level of the person, coupled with a downplaying of an emphasis on broader issues.
This fails, as a strategy, as the past five decades or so amply demonstrate. Appeals to individual-level behaviors will always fail in the face of strong, countervailing social changes which themselves are driven by economic and technological change. This strategy, as comfortable as it is for conservatives to take, always fails, really, which is why the left drives social change and the right does not. The left understands that individuals are profoundly molded by context. This molding is often overstated by progressives, yes, but conservatives generally make a much bigger mistake by understating it. In effect this approach largely concedes context molding to the left under the fiction that the context can be molded from the ground up — but it cannot, not in any way that is effective when compared with a true top-down comprehensive context change campaign as the left engages in mostly through non-state, non-political actors present and active in the culture itself.
This is even more the case in the contemporary setting, where technological change has centered communications technology and information in a way that permits the top-down approach to have unprecedented breadth and scope of power. In the current scenario, the “individual relationships” approach simply concedes the entire game, set and match.
Why is this? Because the context changes, and is changeable, so quickly, and so fundamentally, that trying to rely on individual level behavior to counter that change or to moderate its impact — especially when this behavior works against the technology which is driving the changes rather than with it — will simply result in being repeatedly outflanked by new sets of cascading changes, each of which further undermines what are increasingly anachronistic ways of being and relating. It is based on a make-believe view of the world that individuals can effectively hive themselves off from the negative impacts of broader social changes by abjuring an emphasis on those changes themselves, and instead by focusing on “fundamentals” like marriage, fatherhood and friendship. But the contours of each of these have themselves irrevocably changed, and will continue to change dramatically, in the years ahead, precisely because of those contextual influences and processes, the influence on which, in a top-down manner, is being abjured.
Now, of course, the context that has driven (and continues to drive) changes in fatherhood, husband-hood and marriage, is, in itself, not going to be changed very much by the way that the culture wars have been taking place, generally. The means by which the culture is influenced — media, Hollywood, academia — tend to lie outside the ways that the “conservative” side of the culture war wages itself (churches, voting), and so while the culture war rages, cultural change nevertheless has proceeded apace. The power that drives it is essentially unchecked by the ways that the “conservative” side of the culture war expresses itself, and so the resistance is, essentially, ineffective.
I suspect that French himself accepts that, more or less (while arguing that certain protections can still be secured under the judicial system, no doubt), but he remains convicted that essentially similar results, on the fundamental level, can be obtained by a focus on the legacy relationships he has identified. This will fail, because the context determines the contours of those relationships in ways that sideline them, reshape them, in ways such that they will not resurface to play the role that French seems to wish — that is, as a reworked masculinity for the new millennium that redefines manliness in the context of legacy social relationships that French finds congenial to his worldview.
What is more likely?
Well, the future is always uncertain, and that has likely rarely been more the case today, given the sheer number of social, political and economic “balls in the air” at the moment. But what appears more likely to me is a continued social drift based on technology, which encourages social entropy above all else. To me, this suggests an expanded proliferation of different personalized approaches and a seeking out of like-minded others, wherever they may be located, who share such approaches, rather than a reliance on “old reliable” institutions and relationship frameworks based on the legacy culture that has largely been denuded. That doesn’t mean avoidance of friendship, fatherhood and/or marriage, if people choose those. But it does mean that these are only a few possibilities among a myriad of others which are emerging in a fast-changing context whose ultimate shape remains exceptionally unclear.
People can thrive in this “liquid” environment by being personally nimble, intellectually and psychologically agile, flexible, open to change, and adaptive, rather than the traditional approaches of being rooted in specific patterns of life, locations, relationships and the like. That is the case whether one spins that rootedness as being “beyond the culture war” or not, precisely because the approach of rootedness is itself the subject of the culture war, and always will be since it represents the core element of the legacy context which is the main issue of contention in the culture war. Note that this does not mean “atomized” (although it may mean that for a season, or more for some than for others depending on competencies), but it does mean that a focus on these qualities of agility and flexibility will serve people — men and women alike — better for survival in the emergent world than any emphasis on legacy forms of relating will.
The universe is wide open for all in a context of social entropy, but thriving in this context requires a nimble and flexible approach. A core problem for men in particular is that many men are indeed wedded in their minds to legacy ideas of what it means to be a man. French is not wrong to put his finger on that as a problem, but he overlooks the fact that he is doing essentially the same thing by choosing to place the emphasis on relationship forms which are, themselves, a part of the same legacy ideas. In effect, he has simply taken a few steps back from the paradigm he critiques, rather than embracing the changed paradigm more completely. The second approach — embracing the changed paradigm directly in all of its potential — is what is actually required to approach the changed, and changing, circumstances we find ourselves in as a culture both today and the years ahead, and not just for men.