reclaiming manhood

​If you wish to have a good idea of the direction that any culture is taking, spend some time observing its prevailing role models. It should not surprise us that questioning youth directly about their role models yields anything from a bored shrug to a shallowly-reasoned endorsement of Mandela or Martin Luther King. A practical way to find out for one's self is to pass by the local drug store and check out the magazine rack. Would you ever expect to see an edition of Macaulay's Horatius at the Bridge or Butler's Lives of the Saints? Or, for that matter, Edmondo de Amicis? And why not? For the Ancients, their 'drug store magazines' were filled of the heroes in the Iliad, Aeneid, the life of Scipio, perhaps Alexander. So what changed?
 
We have a serious anthropological crisis on our hands. Most recently, with ideological slogans such as toxic masculinity and self-identification abounding among the young, the diagnosis is surprisingly easy to explain. Since the 18th century, the progressive philosophical trend has been to apply Hegelian principles to many areas of study. With politics and economics, one results in Marxism. With biology, one results in evolution. And with anthropology, one is left with feminism, transgenderism, and Lords knows what else. The difficulty, you see, is that the crisis in identity is first and foremost a crisis in philosophy- or rather a forgetfulness, a self-loathing anti-intellectualism that cripples one of the foundations of Latin civilization: the concept of the human person.

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