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Alex Kurtagic
August
6
On occasion
of my 39th birthday, my wife organized a holiday in the Lake District in
Cumbria, in the North East of England. While there we visited England’s Pencil
Museum, where we learnt much about the invention and manufacture of the pencil,
a tool that spawned a huge industry in the region during the Victorian era. One
of the most remarkable exhibits in the museum (aside from all the weirdly-shaped
Derwent
pencils) was an enlarged photograph of a group of male Victorian pencil
factory workers. The photograph was not remarkable because of the antique
machinery or the outmoded attire of the men, but because of their faces: these
were uniformly stern, grim, serious, and ferocious, to the point where they
inspired an exclamation of amazement from my wife. Indeed, as is often the case
when one looks at photographs of men from the 19th century – and
particularly working class or rural men — the image in the museum provided yet
another sample of the hostile frown, ice-cold blue eyes, and troglodytic beards
and angrily scowling moustaches that appear to have been common during the days
of the Industrial Revolution and the frontiersmen of American Old West.
When my wife
and I discussed the photograph afterwards, there was no question in our minds
that there had been a pronounced deterioration in the quality of the White male
since the days of yore, and that the etiology of this deterioration implicated
the comfort and superabundance of modern life. Granite-hard facial surfaces,
primitive gurns, and ocular lasers,
signaling assertion and social dominance, have given way to doughy flaccidity,
placid smiles, and amused festive glances, signaling agreeability, docility, and
frolicsome distraction.
I
subsequently met with Jonathan Bowden, the Nietzschean British artist and gifted
Right wing orator, with whom I once again discussed the contrast between modern
and Victorian physiognomy. He mentioned, as one of various eximious examples of
physiognomic severity, the early photographs of Shakers, adherents of
the ascetic Protestant religious sect otherwise known as the United Society of
Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.
And the
photographs of Shaker assemblies I subsequently examined on the internet were
very grim indeed.
Shaker Man
Notable in
all these images to modern eyes are the sharp gender distinctions, and the
harshness of the archetypical male. Since early 1900s the tendency has been for
masculinity and femininity increasingly to converge, for distinctions to be
blurred, and for transgressions to become socially acceptable and protected by
law.
During the
Victorian era (1837–1901),
conceptions of masculinity were grounded on historically specific power
relations among Christianity, science, industrialism, empire, and man.
The
Victorians valorized manliness as a restraint on the brutishness of primeval
maleness. Thus, by extension, the Victorians, influenced by Christianity,
idealized the notion of man as spiritual and a faithful believer. This was tied
with the notion of patriarchy: a Victorian man was the head of his household,
duty-bound to rule firmly, but also to provide for, and protect, his weaker
dependents: his wife and his children. The need to provide, especially in the
context of the industrial revolution, caused work — being active
in enterprise — to become
an essential element of Victorian masculinity, particularly among the middle
classes: Work became associated with virtue and strength, whereas being a burden
on the public was associated with sin and weakness. And, because being active in
enterprise was a way of signaling masculinity in a social climate where work and
home were segregated spheres, this in turn caused clubs and taverns to thrive as
non-domestic venues of masculine display.
With the
advent of Darwinism and the rise of biology and the natural sciences during the
second half of the 19th century, the spiritual ideal gradually gave way to a
physical ideal, leading to the cultivation of muscle and a belief that the
education of the mind was predicated on the cultivation of the body. Interest in
physical health raised the social status of athletes, and fuelled the growth of
games and sports, which were then channeled into the public school
system.
The cult of muscle also gained importance in the context of imperialism, the physical conquest and domination of non-Western cultures. Masculinity was bound with military duty and the ideal of the adventurer, the pioneer, the explorer, and the hunter: physically formidable, hard, enduring, stoic, self-sufficient, and equipped with a vast scientific knowledge. In other words, a well-educated mind in a well-educated body.
Of course,
only the most bestial aspects of this are in evidence in the photographs of the
brutalized working class of Victorian England, for conditions in the factories
of the era were so grim that they eventually destroyed the bodies and
obliterated the minds of those who fell into, and were ground for 16 hours a day
by, its mechanized maws. Wage slavery, filthy slums, and weekend drunkenness
could only produce faces of animal rage, deformity, lead poisoning, exhaustion,
indifference, and a measure of bemusement and suppressed perplexity. Images of
the Victorian working class stand in marked contrast with the stiffly dignified
portraits of the upper classes. Yet they both exude their own brand of male
fury.
The Victorian era coincided with the period we in modern times associate with the American Old West, which spans the second half of the 19th century. Victorian immigration to the wilderness of North America only helped to make the Victorian ideal extreme. The stereotype of the cowboy / frontiersmen of the Old West includes many of the above-listed attributes, only reduced to their most primal and rugged forms, until we are left with the somber, laconic, emotionally-detached, inexpressive, solitary, lawless, fiercely independent, almost misanthropic, ice-cold, and often violent man of nature, small frontier settlements, and drunken bars and saloons, popularized in Western films and implied in 20th century Marlboro advertisements. The reality in the American Old West, however, seems to have been more extreme than that suggested by Marlboro man, because when compared against the real cowboys and frontiersmen in the photographs from the 1800s, Marlboro man is, in fact, quite effeminate.
We must not,
however, allow our ancestors to romanticize themselves with these images.
Photography was a new technology during the 1800s, and being photographed was
not a familiar experience to most people. Having one’s photograph taken was an
event, which took time and preparation, and which one imagines people took
seriously. The state of the technology also allowed little room for spontaneity,
making portrait photography more akin to portrait painting. Therefore
— and
especially among the middle and upper classes — what we see
is not an accurate reflection of how people were in everyday life, but rather an
exaggeration: a reflection of how they wanted to be seen and remembered, which
is perhaps even more important.
What
Happened?
The Industrial Revolution that defined many of the old notions and attitudes gradually ushered in a world that the Victorians could have scarcely imagined. If modern man appears weaker and frivolous to us in relation to our 19th century ancestors, the probable etiological factors are not difficult to find: the accelerating cultural shift from a society based on quality to one based on quantity, made possible by mass production and aggravated by a capitalist logic that dictated the need for products with inbuilt obsolescence; the entrance of women into the labor force; improvements in medicine and public health; progressive declines in Serum Testosterone levels; a series of radical egalitarian movements, such as Marxism and Feminism; political correctness; the growth of the welfare state; the growth of credit-based economies; the triumph of the Left following World War II; the dismantling of the European empires; and, since the end of the first half of the 20th century, a long period of peace and economic prosperity and expansion.
Industrial
production caused overall standards of living to rise in the West by giving
ever-growing numbers of people access to tools, precision instruments, household
goods, and machinery that previously were either impossible or confined to the
very wealthy. Time and energy that would otherwise have been spent on mindless
chores was freed up, creating social conditions that necessitated a lower
overall level of discipline: Since only a small minority of people are highly
creative or self-driven to productive activities in the way that born artists or
entrepreneurs can be, it is easier to become placid, soft, lazy, and less
conscientious — in other
words, to grow weak — when an
electrical appliance, a robot, or a computer relieves its user of the need to be
resourceful and make a focused, consistent, and detailed effort over a long
period of time. (Let us remember that one of the methods employed by boot camps
to instill discipline is the assigning of mindless, tedious chores, such as the
daily and fastidious polishing of boots.) It is also easier to grow weak when a
broken tool, appliance, or household good can be replaced relatively quickly and
cheaply with the swipe of a credit card, and the tool itself is so flimsily made
and has become so rapidly obsolete as for it to make more sense to simply throw
it away rather than attempt to repair it and maintain it.
The entrance
of women into the workforce significantly increased the supply of labor, causing
real wages overall significantly to fall. Fifty years ago it was still possible
for a middle class man to own a house, a car, and a full complement of furniture
and goods, and also maintain his wife, children, and their pets, with his salary
alone — and this at
a time when credit was not as easily available and ubiquitous as it subsequently
became. This contrasts sharply with our present times, when spouses aspiring to
an equivalent standard of living must now both work full time and, even then,
are often forced to postpone children and amass credit card debt. In a cultural
and social context where women have been encouraged, by increasingly radical
forms of feminism and by the ever more fiercely competitive and challenging
economic environment, to adopt male roles and traits, the erosion of male
economic power and independence has stripped many modern men of the material
means with which to maintain their status as heads of their
households.
The economic
and status convergence of men and women has been further aggravated by the
leveling downward effect of the welfare state. The latter’s relentless expansion
has necessitated the introduction and enforcement of ever more extensive,
intensive, and intimidatory government-sponsored asset confiscations (popularly
known as ‘taxes’). The process, still ongoing, penalizes industry and ambition,
destroys motivation, and concludes with the citizen’s complete economic
dependency on the state, whereby a man (and a woman) is thus reduced to the
status of a child. I remember that by the mid 1980s, while living in The
Netherlands, some white collar workers already preferred to avoid promotions
(lest the consequent higher salaries put them on a more punitive tax bracket).
Many able-bodied, sane males of working age preferred to opt out of the labor
market altogether, and simply live on welfare. It is easy for a non-creative,
non-self-driven person, to grow weak when living idly for years on government
handouts, without the discipline of daily work.
The
infantilization of Western man on the economic front has been accompanied by his
infantilization on the moral front. Political correctness, with its detailed and
strict speech and behavioral codes and restrictions; the legislative regime that
has grown out of it, with its strict system of rewards for conformity and
punishments for deviance; and the monitoring and surveillance apparatus that has
been implemented to enforce it, is not substantially different from the methods
authoritarian parents employ to train their children.
And this is
because the modern nanny state does indeed seek to treat men like children: to
tell men what they can and cannot say and do, and give them an allowance.
The
expansion of the nanny state is, of course, predicated on the triumph of
Marxism, an ideology that pretends that all humans are equal in value and
potential, and which tells mediocre men that inequality of outcome in life is
not the result of mediocrity, but the result of a system of unequal opportunity,
designed by a selfish ruling elite that seeks to perpetuate its power. While
Marxists would argue that their discourse gives hope to those to whom it is
denied by so-called genetic determinists, and that a powerful and paternalistic
state apparatus is needed to prevent one class gaining dominance over another, I
would argue that their discourse also absolves the lazy, the mediocre, and even
the malevolent of responsibility for their substandard performance and failures.
In Victorian times welfare was based on deterrence: Workhouses were made as
miserable as possible in order to discourage people from becoming burdens on the
public.
Inextricably
linked to the above processes is the growth of credit-based economies. While
credit, when used judiciously, can be a useful tool for enabling enterprise, the
relative fall in wages, the tourniquet of predatory taxation, and the enervating
urges of the consumer culture (particularly when the latter is understood in
terms of status display among hyper-social primates) have made credit a
necessity for survival. The increasing availability of cheap and easy credit in
the final decades of the 20th century fomented a high-velocity culture that put
a premium of immediate gratification and discouraged consideration of long-term
consequences. It also enabled many, if not most, to live well beyond their
productive capacity. If in the past the acquisition of large or costly assets
necessitated the ability to work and save — to delay
gratification —
consistently over a long period of time, the proliferation of credit cards with
aspirational and ever-expanding credit limits, has in modern times obviated the
need for such discipline —
particularly as until very recently it appeared that there was always another
credit card and/or another loan available once credit terms and limits had been
reached. If fiscal incontinence is a sign of weakness, the consumer culture in
the post-industrial West has rewarded weakness for many
years.
Medical
advances and improvements in public heath, combined with the growth of the
welfare state, have had a similar effect, encouraging dysgenic fertility and
allowing the weak and the sickly, who would have otherwise suffered reduced
fertility and an early death, to live normal, reproductive lives. If this is
indeed the case, this has led to a progressive genetic deterioration of modern
populations. This is Richard Lynn’s argument in his book, Dysgenics:
Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations.
Recent research has shown, in addition, a trend of
progressive declines in Serum Testosterone, at least in
American men. The causes are not entirely explained as yet — they could
range from estrogen from seepage from plastic bottles for
drinking water
to birth control pills that have flooded in the water through the
sewage system.
The triumph
of the Left following the end of World War II allowed Jewish intellectual
movements to radically undermine, discredit, and marginalize the inegalitarian,
evolutionist, militarist, and racial nationalist discourses that had been
culturally acceptable in the West throughout the second half of the 19th century
and until the middle of the 20th century. The dismantling of the European
empires further intensified this cultural shift by removing the perceived need
for the cultivation of the physical and moral strength required for a role of
leadership and dominance over non-European cultures around the world. The old
discourse and media images that glorified aggressive traits (strength and
dominance) gave way to a new non-aggressive discourse of agreeability, guilt,
contrition, reparations, and apology.
"Masculine" Images in Friends
The scope
and reach of the processes, tendencies, and shifts discussed above would have
been limited without the extended a period of peace and material prosperity that
we have enjoyed in the West since 1945. It is not inconceivable that a war or a
major economic collapse could interrupt these processes and reverse at
least some of the shifts that took place during this
period.
In sum, if
images of contemporary White males suggest the latter are somewhat less
formidable than their 19th century predecessors, we owe this to a confluence of
social, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors.
Why
Care?
I do not
wish to convey the impression that I believe life was superior in Victorian
England or the American Old West, or in the 19th century in general. Modern life
has many advantages, particularly for those with creative capacity. And were
Western man living in homogeneous societies in geographical isolation, the
debilitating trade-offs of modern life could well have proven justified, in the
absence of natural predators.
The problem
is that with advent of global communications and easy travel, we are no longer
able to thrive in geographical isolation, and we are no longer able even to
choose our neighbors. Non-European populations, attracted by the comfort,
convenience, relative stability, safety, and material abundance of our complex
and technologically advanced societies, are increasingly encroaching on our
vital space and aggressively competing for resources. I do not blame them, but
not resisting this effectively ends with Whites being oppressed minorities in
their own traditional homelands — and,
eventually, with extinction. As both space and resources are finite, the
non-Europeans’ gain in political representation, economic power, cultural
influence, and demographic presence is necessarily our loss. And after over a
century of de-muscling, and after over sixty years of progressive intellectual
and moral liquefaction, at present we are no longer adequately equipped to hold
on to our culture, our ancestral homelands, or our genes.
It is this
that makes comparing the stern frowns of the men from the 19th century against
the frivolous grins of the men from the 21st a chilling experience. Men of
19th-century caliber have not entirely disappeared, but they are a dwindling
minority. I hate the thought of having to rely on the fruity queens that pass
for 21st century men, as illustrated in the photographs accompanying this
article, for the preservation of European culture and way of life.
20th century
man is obsolete: Averting total loss at the hands of the younger, hungrier, more
vigorous non-European populations in the 21st century will necessitate our
sacrificing some of the conveniences and comforts that made 20th century man
possible. The other side, already contemptuous, is hoping that we will prove too
lazy, too complacent, and too deluded to do so.
Alex Kurtagic
(
Permanent link:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Kurtagic-Men.html
