BRANDON writes:

I AM a 22-year-old male college student in Denver who reads your site daily. I have great appreciation for your message. I’m writing for two reasons. First, I have an interesting reflection to share with you and second, I shall make a request for some wisdom if you are willing to offer it.
 
Regarding my reflection: As a member of Generation Y, I have noticed that despite the feminist bravado of women my age, most of them are intimidated by or at the very least uncomfortable around a truly traditional expression of masculinity. A reason for this is because traditional masculinity is so incredibly rare among young men. Most of us grew up believing the “men and women are the same” lies and it shows. Many, many of the young college men I come in contact with on a daily basis are weak, thin, slouched, slovenly dressers with effeminate mannerisms. They also tend to be extremely weak of character, standing for nothing and going along with everything women want.

I, on the other hand, try to conduct myself in the manner the men of my grandparent’s generation would have. It is from them I draw my inspiration. I walk upright, with head and shoulders high, I walk confidently, refuse to shave or wax my body hair, and look people in the eye. I’ve also got an unusually deep voice for my age. I find that this all makes young women uneasy. Many of them seem incapable of looking me in the eye or even talking that much to me beyond formalities. I’ve noticed this even from self-professed feminists as well. No wonder, I suppose, I do my best to be a walking embodiment of everything Women’s Studies departments attack with vicious rancor. Thankfully, I also have a decent traditional girlfriend, or else I imagine this would hinder my prospects of finding a mate in today’s environment. As it is, I find it somewhat humorous.
 
Which brings me to the second part of my letter: There is much psychological strife that comes with being a radical traditionalist who upholds masculinity in today’s liberal dominated world order. I know that for most of my teen years I was consumed with self-hatred and depression. With God’s help I have vanquished these demons for the most part, but from time to time I have thoughts about the seeming futility of trying to forge a traditionalist path in today’s climate. My girlfriend and I would both like to get married and raise a family but the difficulties seem rather daunting at times. Also, despite how much I trust my girlfriend, I am suspicious of marriage due to the destruction divorce has brought to many men’s lives. As far as children go, sometimes I seriously question the morality of bringing children into a world so full of darkness. I know these are negative thoughts, but I can’t help but experience them from time to time. It’s a solitary existence being a young traditionalist. I refuse to give up because that would be surrendering to the problem. However, the odds of tradition ever gaining a foothold again appear slim, especially as so called “conservatives” shift ever leftward. So, I was wondering if you could share any wisdom you may have for me on this predicament. Do you have any words of inspiration or any thoughts from your own experiences? I would be grateful.
 
Once again, keep up the good work, God Bless, and please know that if I were a rich man, I would donate a million dollars to your site just to keep the message going!

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing, and for that million bucks. It’s the thought that counts. : – )

You write, There is much psychological strife that comes with being a radical traditionalist who upholds masculinity in today’s liberal-dominated world order.

As you say, look all around you and the evidence is there in the effeminacy and diffidence of men today: the alternative is far worse. You don’t really have a choice, do you? You know the truth and there’s no turning back. So let’s look at the problems you may face in the years ahead:

Ostracism  As a traditionalist who affirms enduring values, who rejects sexual hedonism and consumerism, you will encounter hostility. There will be occasions when you simply can’t hide who you are and people will find out. They will not like you and they will make this clear in various passive-aggressive or openly hostile ways, as you already know. But, these are only momentary encounters, passing headaches. The truth is, you don’t need them. You can build a life entirely without them in all meaningful senses. While preserving your social equanimity and outward good will, direct none of your energies to being liked by those who stand on the other side. Remind yourself of this again and again.

Loneliness  This is related to the first problem. The truth is, most loneliness is an illusion. It really is a fixation on what we can’t have. We live continually in the company of those who are dead and not yet alive, and if you add up all these people, you have too many friends and compatriots to count. The dead you can easily seek out. They are there waiting for you in the great books and works of art that make up our heritage. There is no time to lose in participating in this conversation through the ages, and the more you participate in it the more you will be joined to the living. Companionship will inevitably come to you if you cultivate your attentiveness to the world. Most loneliness is an illusion.

Poverty If you are going to pursue a traditional life in which you are supporting a wife and family, you will find one of your supreme challenges is to keep from being envious of others, all those friends and family members who are choosing things over family. There will be something not quite right about your shabbiness. It will conflict with the nobility of your mission. You may see others buying and enjoying nicer houses, better clothes, vacations, gadgets and cars. Ironically, these things often have the air of permanence and virtue your own life may outwardly lack. For instance, a couple who spends lots of money on an old house and antiques may seem to be engaged in a project that is beautiful and right. Their taste may be refined and, compared to them, in your tiny Cape Cod, your garden apartment or your rancher, you seem to be engaged in something relatively suspect. You will have to muster character here and resist the tyranny of appearances. You will have to reject comfort for higher goods. In the years ahead, it will be you who will have much more. You will have children who are raised right and they will reward you. You will have a wife who is a mother to these children; your children will thank you for giving them this care and you will find contentment in this gratitude. You will be master of your small commonwealth. Your dominion will live on long after you are no longer in this world in the form of your descendents, the surest companions you will ever have. This is something real and vital. Houses and cars do not last.

In short, there is no future in a life built on things. In that way, we lose our dignity, our beauty, and our greatness. It is no accident that people have become more greedy the more they presume that all is matter. Materialism is materialistic. Nihilism and luxury go hand in hand. I am not advocating scorn of wealth, but a realistic appraisal of its limitations. Put God first, orient your life to eternity, and He will give you enough. Remember this: despair is sinful, and we are obligated to resist it in the same way we would resist any other destructive temptation.

Divorce Please see these figures by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University (on page 20 of the State of Our Unions report for 2007). Your chances of experiencing divorce if you are college-educated, have a religious affiliation, and do not have children before seven months after your marriage are relatively small. Those who have an income of $50,000 have a 30 percent less chance of divorcing than those with an income of $25,000 or less and those who come from intact families themselves have a 14 percent less chance. Traditional women who are full-time wives and mothers file for divorce less often than women who are working full-time (this figure is not included in this report; I promise to include it here as soon as I can.) Your chances of being divorced by your wife given your traditional values are probably less than one in ten. It is unlikely that your wife will leave you.

But of course it could happen. It definitely could happen. You can’t live your life in fear of divorce and it is wrong not to start off marriage with an attitude of trust toward your spouse. If the worst should happen, you will survive.  Some from the men’s movement will say that by stating this, I am engaging in mindless and clannish defense of my own sex. So be it. The fact remains: the chances of your being married for the rest of your life are much greater than the chances of your being divorced if you fit some of the criteria above. If the worst should happen, you will find another woman and still be a father for the rest of your life. You can do absolutely nothing to guarantee that others will act virtuously toward you. You can only control how you act toward others and you are obligated to do what is right. Suspicion and distrust will make you miserable, but you must be firm with your wife. She makes her own happiness in this life.   

The call for men to avoid marriage because of the trend of divorce by women is demonic in its intentions, however much it may be inspired by real-world misfortune and wrongdoing. This is the way of cowardice, not strength. The widespread cultural approval of divorce developed relatively quickly. This approval is not irreversible. Women respond first and foremost to the subtle and overt social cues they receive from those around them.

Like Robinson Crusoe, who looked around his island after 18 years and fell to his knees in gratitude, you will be thankful someday for your hardships. Right now, it seems that being a traditionalist is like being shipwrecked. But years from now, you will thank God that you were flung into the waves to fend for yourself. Character matters most. God wants truth and goodness to survive on a million separate islands. I entirely disagree with you about the odds of traditionalism flourishing. But neither of us knows what will happen. Whether traditionalism flourishes at large or not, the fact is, it will indeed flourish in the lives of individuals. That is a certainty.

                                                                                                   — Comments —

John E. writes:

Your entire response was very good, but the paragraph on Poverty was excellent. I thought your titling it “Poverty” was appropriate, but I can’t exactly explain why. After all, the end result for the traditionalist is riches in all that is ultimately important, and even in regards to material possessions, the traditionalist you describe appears to be making it by sufficiently, or at least not in danger of starving. Perhaps it has something to do with Poverty as the Church prescribes it, which doesn’t always mean an absence of material possessions, but does always mean holding whatever possessions you have been given lightly, as though they were not quite your own.

Laura writes:

Very rarely do people like to acknowledge that their most basic beliefs about ultimate matters are related to granite countertops and minivans.

Peter S. writes:

Regarding loneliness, the following, seen on a personal bookplate, might be apropos: 

Thou fool!  To seek companions in a crowd!
Into thy room and there upon thy knees,
Before thy bookshelves, humbly thank thy God
That thou hast friends like these. 

One might also add the observation, only partly tongue in cheek, made in Roger Scruton’s very moving essay “Stealing from Churches,” which I warmly recommend:

 “All the best people are dead.”  Fortunately, many of them have left their best thoughts behind.

 Regarding divorce, I would recommend detailed perusal of the more comprehensive document referenced in the 2007 State of our Unions report: the CDC Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States Vital and Health Statistics Report here.  This is the only document I am aware of that breaks down the microstructure of divorce statistics across various sociological measures.  Even though the average divorce rate is around 40%, the rate relevant to a given sociological situation may vary from this considerably.  The national average statistic actually doesn’t matter for the specific individual case; what matters is the statistical rate relevant to the sociological categories that individual falls within.  The decision to marry for men has become one fraught with risk; at the same time the decision not to marry bears very real opportunity costs.  The odds have to be finely weighed, and it is helpful if one has the best information available.

Brandon writes:

Thank you for posting a most thoughtful reply. I agree with you on loneliness being an illusion. Some of the best friends I’ve ever had are historical, yet everlasting: Jesus, Confucius, St. Paul, Aquinas, Aristotle, etc.

I also I agree that running from marriage is the way of the coward, it’s just that making the decision to marry must be made with the utmost care and sense of responsibility. I really have reached a point in my life where I do not fear what a woman can do to me. When I was a teenager, I allowed myself to be treated horribly by females (twice they even threatened to have me arrested for petty reasons). Now I know that whatever happens, I’ll live. I suppose I just have a twinge of what John Derbyshire refers to a “conservative pessimism” in my outlook. Unlike Derbyshire though, I have faith in the power of God. 

I must respectfully point out that I never said the odds of traditionalism flourishing were impossible, but they just appear rather slim for the course of my lifetime. However, I have seen a major traditionalist streak in my generation. They just don’t have anyone to effectively articulate their latent intuitions for them. I will give you an example: I am a Philosophy major in college. About two years ago I was taking an Introduction to Ethics course where each student had to construct a philosophical argument for a major ethical issue and present it before the class. I chose Sexuality and wrote up a well reasoned defense of traditional sexual morality and human dignity. I expected to be booed, attacked, and shouted down. Something amazing happened instead. I received a standing ovation. Several of the female members of the class just stared at me wide eyed. The positive response blew me away. So, I believe that as the situation of families and relationships deteriorates further, we shall see more stirrings of these traditionalist longings in younger people.

Laura writes:

Yes, finding and choosing a spouse demands a lot, especially if there is no help from a community of relatives and friends. Not that you’d ever want a matchmaker to make a decision for you but it’d be nice to have a little help, or at least that’s what I thought when I was young. The arranged marriages of yesteryear had their own drawbacks, but with complete freedom, we have only ourselves to blame for our choices and this is a terrible responsibility.  My sense is, whomever you marry will be a very lucky woman.

I stand corrected in my understanding of your point. Perhaps the chances are slim in your lifetime. However, everything changed very quickly from, say, 1955 to 1975 so we can’t rule out dramatic changes in a short time. I agree that it would be foolish to count on them.

That’s interesting that the female students were “wide-eyed” at your presentation. I imagine the experience of a man arguing for sexual restraint was entirely new to them.

I wish you the very best.

Brandon writes:

Yes, I imagine the experience was a new one for them. At least coming from a man who wasn’t old enough to be their grandfather. I was barely 20 at the time.

Laura writes:

A true campus radical.

Kristor writes:

I was struck by Brandon’s story of his presentation to his philosophy class in which he justified traditional sexual morality, and was met with a standing ovation. Like anyone else, the young long for the Good, and recognize it in their bones when they see it. This is the basis of the traditionalist hope. Plus the fact that falsehood is inherently weak. 

The key epistemological claim of modernity, of which liberalism is an aspect, is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. From this claim, the impetus toward non-discrimination flows directly. There are two immediate problems with this claim: in the first place, it is self-refuting, and in the second, one can’t put it into practice in one’s life. On the contrary, to live we have no choice but to act as if real knowledge of the world were possible to us, for in no other way could it make sense to have plans, or to speak to one another; and we know in our guts that it just can’t be true that there are no truths. Finally, because the Good and the True are coterminous with the Beautiful, the whole modern tradition that rejects the True and the Good, that rejects all form and tradition, and that tries to reinvent everything along radically novel lines, cannot help but produce artifacts that are ugly and unpleasant. 

So those who believe in modernity are all at war with themselves, and in particular they are at war with their guts, which are deeply uneasy with the whole modern project. Offer them a way out, offer them a vision that accords with their deepest longings, and they will respond.  

 Alan Roebuck writes:

Brandon said:

It confirms my intuition. The young know, if only subconsciously, that they are slackers and losers compared to their ancestors. I also know it because once, when I was a young liberal, I recognized my plight. That’s why so many of the young eagerly participate in the campaign to condemn, and then erase, the system of the past. Like a sinner trying to deny his sinful state, they try to make themselves virtuous by obliterating true virtue. And the young also have a sense that it is the system the authorities present which is largely responsible for their plight.

So it is as I have been saying: If somebody will present the good news that they need not participate in the evil system of liberalism, that there is a better way, many will respond. There is hope.

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