Of boys and men

I recently read Richard V. Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. The book and its many proposals have been discussed endlessly over the last year (some good essays and responses here), so I want to make just four comments.

1. The book is superb. I almost didn’t read it because I assumed the public conversation, along with the excerpts and Reeves’ own Substack, made the book itself redundant. I was wrong. It’s a model of public policy analysis and prescription made accessible to the general public. And Reeves’ willingness to step out and say things he knows he will be censured for is admirable. There’s also a quiet moral engine humming beneath the book’s hood that propels the more wonkish bits along, forming a single continuous analytical argument that’s equal parts lucid, provocative, and commonsensical.

2. Reeves constantly adverts to the old nostrum that “we can’t turn back the clock.” He trots out this maxim whenever he turns to his right (he’s constantly turning to his metaphorical right and left in order to stake out ground in the center), from which direction he hears the suggestion that if only we went back in time—say, to the 1950s—then the challenges facing the family today would be resolved. The first thing to say here is that there just aren’t that many people seriously suggesting this. The second thing to say is what Chesterton and Lewis said almost a century ago. And the third thing to say is this. It is a very odd thing, in a book about one of the most rapid, comprehensive, and unexpected social and political transformations in human history—namely, the entrance of women “out” of the home and “into” the workforce, as well as the various ways that men, once dominant, are now sliding into isolated, lonely, meandering, and unproductive lives—to insist that another transformation along those lines is quite literally impossible. Wouldn’t the same sort of author have said that in 1780 or 1870 or 1960? But then the impossible happened, and retrospectively it’s seen to have been possible all along. What one needs, instead of declarations of metaphysical impossibility, is a moral case for why “turning back the clock” ought not to occur, even if it were feasible. There are no laws of nature here. It’s not at all hard to conceive of conditions in the near, middle, or distant future that would conduce to a sort of revival of the Leave It To Beaver household. Reeves and others need to stop relying on the crutch of its supposed inconceivability and make the case instead for its undesirability (and not exclusively from their political vantage point, I might add).

3. On one hand, Reeves allows that, given real differences between the sexes, there will inevitably be reflections of those differences in the real world, for example in choice of professions, and that these differences are morally neutral. On the other hand, Reeves argues quite forcefully for public policy that would funnel boys and men into professions in which girls and women predominate, such as preschool daycare, early elementary teaching, nursing, and so on. My question here is not about his policy preferences or whether it would be good, say, for boys’ flourishing to have more Kindergarten teachers be men. My question is second-order. By what principle or criterion does Reeves decide which highly sex-differentiated professions ought to be leveled out by government and which ought not to be? How does one know, that is, when gender parity is desirable and when it is not? I’m stipulating that, given a particular profession, we have ruled out any injustice or coercion. Again, Reeves admits this; I’m not arguing against him here. My worry is that his honest answer is this: “just those professions that I, Reeves, believe should approximate greater gender parity (as opposed to those that I do not).” But what about people—women, men, or both—who don’t share Reeves’ view? It seems to me that he needs additional reasons to justify his interventions beyond the ones he gives (at most, that soft pressure to get men into “HEAL” professions would provide jobs for jobless men and/or benefit young boys without thereby disadvantaging young girls). If he doesn’t have such reasons, or a more general and widely shared principle of discrimination, then it becomes little more than personal preference, or perhaps a sort of intuitive Goldilocks rule.

4. This point leads to me to my last comment. Reading Reeves’ book solidified for me the truth of postliberal critiques of liberalism as a political philosophy. Namely, there is always a vision of the good operative in a given society, including liberal ones. What’s more, this liberal vision of the good takes precedence over democratic preferences. As evidence, consider that Reeves simply takes for granted that the vision of gender he is promoting is one that the liberal state exists to protect, promote, and advance via law and public policy. He does not believe this vision requires consent or advocacy on the part of voters; their views are quite beside the point. The government ought right now to be enacting policy that will lead to the world envisioned by Reeves’ book, which is to say, will employ both the soft and the hard power of the state to nudge society’s common life ever closer toward a particular normative vision of the common good. This is just what any state and its government exists to do, after all. It is not and could never be neutral, or feign to be. Yet the question never arises for Reeves whether the populace as a whole wants to live in his world. His argument doesn’t take democratic citizens into account. What he does is argue, morally and concretely, for what counts as the objective common good, and proposes what policy levers would create conditions for achieving it. In this he’s acting like every statesman, politician, minister, president, and monarch who has ever lived, at least those who took their duties seriously. In doing so, however, he gives the lie both to liberalism’s neutrality and to liberalism’s deference to democracy. That’s quite a thing. I don’t fault him for it. I appreciate his honesty. I wish everyone were so forthright. But I wish, too, that we could stop having conversations in which we pretend this isn’t the case—for everyone, for every society, of every kind, always, everywhere, and without exception.

On “Christian masculinity”

Christian talk about what it means to be a man begins and ends with the man Jesus Christ. The church looks to Jesus the Nazarene first in everything, and this topic is no exception. The church does not begin elsewhere, either in Scripture or in tradition or in history or in literature or in contemporary culture. The church begins with the gospel of Jesus, always.

The gospel tells us of the Word made flesh, the man who was and is God incarnate. Jesus contains the fullness of wisdom and knowledge concerning all things, but it is not as though we have to try hard to see the relevance of Jesus to questions about masculinity. We aren’t asking about the capital gains tax or whether plants have souls. The man Jesus shows Christian men what it means to “be a man”—which is an implication of, though not the same as, the claim that Jesus, qua human, shows Christians what it means to be human—and he does so together with the great cloud of witnesses that surround him like so many echoes and images of the one archetypal anthropos. So in answering this question we look first to Jesus but also to his exemplary followers: apostles, saints, martyrs, doctors; Paul and Peter, Francis and Ignatius, Maximus and Cyprian, Basil and Gregory, et al.

What do we see when we look at these men, looking at Christ?

Here is what we don’t see. We don’t see worldly power. We don’t see physical potency. We don’t see wives. We don’t see children. We don’t see virility. We don’t see households. We don’t see possessions or estates or acclaim or family names passed on by sons, generation to generation. We don’t see dominion, rule, or lordship—not of the pagan kind, anyway. We don’t see violence. We don’t see what our culture understands as “manliness,” whether that word calls forth adulation or repudiation.

Here’s what we see instead.

We see dispossession. We see abstinence. We see defenselessness. We see, in worldly terms, powerlessness. We see loss, pain, rejection, and suffering. We see poverty, obedience, and celibacy. We see the end of a family name, the selling or giving away of inherited wealth. We see passivity: being mocked, being scourged, being handed over, being arrested, being tortured, being killed. We see public shame in public death.

These are the marks of the Messiah and, just so, the marks of his holy ones. They do not look like “masculinity” by any common definition I have encountered. Inasmuch as they relate to such a concept, they appear to be nothing so much as its refusal or inversion.

This is why I find myself so confused and repulsed by popular writing about “Christian masculinity.” I don’t reject all of its premises. Many parts of our culture today have made “being a man” a kind of pathology, at the very same time that young men, and men in general, are in dire straits. Our young men—society’s, to be sure, but I have in mind the boys in our churches—absolutely need our attention, our care, our instruction, our help. They need a vision of the good life straight from God. They need a word from Christ that meets them where they are. I am trying to do that with my own sons and with the young men in my classroom. It’s a group effort, and it’s all hands on deck. Let’s work up solutions to this crisis!

Yet invariably when I click on a link or open up a book on the subject, what I find is either pure paganism or a strange alchemy of biblical and cultural ideas about capital-m Manliness. Always such Manliness finds its highest expression in notions like physical strength, protection, procreation, provision, husbandhood, fatherhood, forging a household, entrepreneurship, forms of exercise, diet, hobbies like hunting, and military service. None of these things (with one or two possible exceptions) are bad in themselves. But they have next to nothing to do with a Christian understanding of manhood.

Again, fix your eyes on Jesus. Did Jesus marry? No. Did Jesus father children? No. Did Jesus protect others? No. Did Jesus defend himself? No. Did Jesus own possessions? Not really. Did Jesus build or maintain a household? No. Was he physically or socially impressive? Not by the standards of his day or ours.

Okay, granted, Jesus is the Son of God. What about a mere human man like Paul? Every single answer is the same. And unlike Jesus Paul is explicit that he wishes other believers were like him: sexless, childless, itinerant, and willing to suffer every hardship, including penury and mockery, for the sake of Christ crucified. When the world looks at Jesus and Paul, they see foolishness. The church believes this foolishness is the wisdom of God, but in earthly terms, it is foolishness nonetheless. Paul spends half his letters defending himself against the very sort of accusations the Manliness crowd would throw at him today: What a fool! Unimpressive! Chronically ill, physically disabled, dependent on others, a poor public speaker—who is this man? Why should we listen to him? There are certainly others (call them super apostles) who would make a better impression, not least on pagan neighbors who have reasonable expectations about manly church leadership.

But that’s just why Jesus chose Paul: “for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15-16). As Paul confirms:

on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:5-10)

Worldly weakness is Christian strength. Human impotence is divine power. Suffering and death are signs of the Lord’s favor.

Earlier this year one author wrote:

A man embodying healthy masculinity knows who he is. He is physically healthy and strong. He is pursuing and developing his skills and capabilities to make him more competent and able to take action. He has a sense of agency, drive, and desire to make his mark on the world.

The indispensable Eve Tushnet replied on Twitter:

a man embodying healthy masculinity knows Whom he loves. he receives the stigmata regularly. he is pursuing and developing his prayer life to make him better prepared to suffer. he has a sense of obedience, humility, and desire to take the last place.

Eve is right. The paradigm of a faithful male human being is Jesus of Nazareth, and he doesn’t measure up to the earthly standards of masculine glory. Read The Iliad and see if you can find intimations of Jesus or Paul there. You won’t. The men of Achaea and Troy win glory and honor through killing other men, begetting other men, taking other men’s women, and plundering other men’s wealth. Neither Jesus nor his apostles does any of these things. Conjure up an image of them, as well as other male saints. They do not have the praise of men. They sire no sons, “win” no prizes (whether in gold or in flesh). The world accords them no honor. The contrast is extreme: They are instead punctured and penetrated, humbled and humiliated. The nails leave scars; the lungs expire; the blood spills; the skin is flayed; the head is lopped off. Jesus dies naked on a tree, to show pilgrims to Jerusalem who’s boss. All while peasant Peter, traitor and coward, weeps alone, away from the action.

These are the men who define what it means to be a Christian man; and they have countless imitators and exemplars who have persisted in their stubborn witness to Jesus’s way down through the centuries. To be sure, it is permitted to Christian men to marry, to have children, to own possessions. But this is the lesser way. The greater way is found in the monastery, where vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy offer a taste, in this life, of the life of the world to come; a glimpse, in this earthly flesh, of the kingdom of heaven, come and coming in Christ. For in heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage; there will be no procreation; there will be no walls or armies or violence, for there will be no need for them. The Lord will provide all that we need. That life, the heavenly life to which we are all destined, is not the calling of all believers on earth, here and now, while we continue our sojourn from Eden to new creation; but it is available to all, and the vocation of some. In them—in those who renounce money and family along with their very autonomy—we see, not a pitiable lower estate, but the highest form of human flourishing this side of glory. What they have now, in part, we all will have then, in full. They are therefore, at present, the church’s models of the good life; accordingly, when they are men, they are models of masculinity. In them we see the Christ life made manifest among us. In them we see just what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good. For all they have is him. To have the Lord alone is by definition to have everything one needs. To have the Lord is to know him, and this knowledge is intimate, even conjugal. The monastic soul, figured feminine by sacred tradition, is betrothed to Christ the bridegroom; she has made room for him to enter, longing eagerly for the kiss of his mouth. In sweet union with him, in utter dependence on him, in total transparency to his will and his action, she is made complete. She is happy, at rest at last.

In a word, the monk of whose soul we speak has finally become what he was made to be: a man of God.

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Silicon Eden: creation, fall, and gender in Alex Garland's Ex Machina

I originally wrote this piece two years ago next month. My opinion of the film has not changed: it's one of the best movies released in the last 20 years.

Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.

Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).

In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.

(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)

Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.

And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.

There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.

The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?

Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.

If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.

In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.

So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.

This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.

For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.

In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.

Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)

Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.

Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.