Ever have some task you had to do, but it’s just so huge that it’s hard to see how to begin? The very prospect of beginning seems too huge, too intimidating.
Which brings me to “Wimps and Barbarians,” by Terrence O. Moore, the Mount Everest of fisking. The essay comes with an unstinting recommendation from Sara at Diotima and appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, so it’s probably not a practical joke.
Then again, maybe Moore is a joker. How else to explain a high school principal who writes this:
…a clear challenge must be issued to young males urging them to become the men their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were. This challenge must be clear, uncompromising, engaging, somewhat humorous, and inspiring. It cannot seem like a tired, fusty, chicken-little lament on the part of the old and boring…
I swear, just a handful of paragraphs after expressing a determination not to appear “old and boring,” the man is complaining that those darn young people dress in those damned modern fashions and listen to that awful rock and roll music. Oh, and he makes fun of them for having a teenage vocabulary. (Like, how original.)
Think I’m exaggerating?
You will know them [barbarians] right away by their distinctive headgear. They wear baseball caps everywhere they go and in every situation: in class, at the table, indoors, outdoors, while taking a test, while watching a movie, while on a date. They wear these caps frontward, backward, and sideways. They will wear them in church and with suits, if ever a barbarian puts on a suit. Part security blanket, part good-luck charm, these distinctive head coverings unite each barbarian with the rest of the vast barbaric horde.
Recognizing other barbarians by their ball caps, one barbarian can enter into a verbal exchange with another anywhere: in a men’s room, at an airport, in a movie theater. This exchange, which never quite reaches the level of conversation, might begin with, “Hey, what up?” A traditional response: “Dude!” The enlightening colloquy can go on for hours at increasingly high volumes. “You know, you know!” “What I’m sayin’!” “No way, man!” “What the f—!” “You da man!” “Cool!” “Phat!” “Awesome!” And so on. Barbarians do not use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding.[…]
[Heavy metal] is impossible to dance to. You can, of course, thrust your fist over and over into the air. Heavy metal lacks all rhythmic quality, sounding more like jet engines taking off while a growling male voice shouts repeated threats, epithets, and obscenities. Heavy metal lacks all subtlety, reflection, harmony, refinement’in a word, civilization.
Okay, so we’re not going to seem tired or fussy. First step: let’s attack teenage fashion, teenage vocabulary, and teenage music. That sure won’t make us seem old or boring!
Here’s another giggle-worthy bit:
…when asked the simple question, “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” [today’s young men] are typically speechless and somewhat ashamed.
Picture it: you’re a teenager in high school, a bit insecure about masculinity (as nearly all teen boys are). Suddenly, your ex-marine principal Mr. Moore gets in your face and barks “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” The question, full of contempt, assumes its own answer; but you can’t return the contempt, because if you do he’ll throw you in detention or worse.
Is it any surprise that teens react to this “simple” question by stammering and looking at the ground? Not to anyone who has any ability to put himself in a teenager’s shoes. But if Principal Moore could put himself in other people’s shoes, he’d know better than to rail against that Awful Music Kids Like.
Moore’s lack of irony isn’t funny (okay, it isn’t just funny); it also reveals a significant intellectual weakness, which is that Moore doesn’t examine himself or his own ideas critically. Obvious self-contradictions go by without comment; necessary premises underlying his essay are simply assumed, rather than supported with facts or even argument.
For example, the central premise of Moore’s article: Manhood is in decline. Over and over, Principal Moore laments “how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness.” We must return to the golden age of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when men were men.
Of course, Principal Moore’s younger students have grandfathers who, back in the day, wore their hair long, smoked pot and listened to Bob Dylan. And the boring, old Principal Moore’s of that day tore their hair out and lamented that young men nowadays lacked all manhood.
This brings up an essential point, one completely ignored by Principal Moore: How does he know manhood is in decline? If Moore wasn’t ignorant of history, he’d know that chicken littles have been declaring “the manhood is failing! The manhood is failing!” for at least a century and probably much longer.
For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, who wrote in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1908; modernize the language slightly and it could be taken straight from Principal Moore’s article:
The results of the effeminization of our schools are at last evident enough – lax discipline, lack of reverence for rules and consequently for law, inefficiency among the scholars, and helplessness among the teachers. But far worse is the utter absence of all that goes to instill ideas of honor and the higher conduct of life into the fallow ground of the young man’s mind….
It is not the making of the physical “mollycoddle” we need fear, but of the mental and moral one. It is weaklings of this sort, unreinforced with the proper stamina of soul, that have brought about the hideous reign of graft and crime that seems to devastate our land.
Like Principal Moore, Scheffauer is certain that the young men of his day are failing at manhood – so certain that he doesn’t bother providing any evidence to support his thesis. Scheffauer was by no means alone in his concern – on the contrary, that public schools (and woman teachers) were failing to make boys into virtuous men was a major concern of macho intellectuals nationwide (it was partly to address these concerns that the Boy Scouts were created in 1910).
And so it’s been for every generation of Americans. Principle Moore says that young men of today are disappointing compared to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But when the grandpas and great-grandpas were young men, they too were criticized for their lack of proper manhood.
So what’s the deal? Is it possible that manhood has been in a state of tragic decline in every generation for over a century? Maybe, but I doubt it. With hindsight, the men of the 1900s don’t seem vastly manlier than the men of the 1930s, for example. The young men (and women, who Principal Moore ignores) who fought the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s do not, to me, seem less manly and virtuous than their 1920s counterparts. In short, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think manliness has ever been in crisis, even though we’ve never lacked for chicken littles who tell us otherwise.
But Principal Moore doesn’t address this history – in fact, there’s no reason to think he’s aware of the history of his views.
This isn’t the only case where Moore appears uninformed on his subject. For instance, one of the many villains of Moore’s piece (along with rock music, baseball caps, and female teachers) is the lack of spanking:
Least of all will parents spank their sons; if you suggest that they should, they look at you in horror, for after all, “violence only breeds violence.” Of course, this softer form of discipline does not really work.
It’s the “of course” that amazes me, because it speaks of a self-confidence in one’s own rightness completely unshaken by decades of research finding the opposite. Is Principle Moore so ignorant of the research that it doesn’t even occur to him to attempt to support his “of course” with evidence, or to explain why the last 45 years of research on spanking has all been wrong? From an article on spanking by Murray Straus (a favorite social scientist of anti-feminists, by the way, cited often by Christina Hoff Sommers) in Society (Sept 2001 issue):
These 45 years saw the publication of more than 80 studies linking corporal punishment to child behavior problems such as physical violence. A meta-analysis of these studies by Gershoff (in press) found that almost all showed that the more corporal punishment a child had experienced, the worse the behavior of the child. Gershoff’s review reveals a consistency of findings that is rare in social science research. Thompson concluded that ‘Although ‘ corporal punishment does secure children’s immediate compliance, it also increases the likelihood of eleven [types of] negative outcomes [such as increased physical aggression by the child and depression later in life]. Moreover, even studies conducted by defenders of corporal punishment show that, even when the criterion is immediate compliance, non-corporal discipline strategies work just as well as corporal punishment.
Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn’t even bother to make an argument, or to address the fact that opposing views appear considerably more supported by research. It’s as if he believes that his contempt for opposing views, in and of itself, rebuts those views. More likely, Moore is so positive that he must be correct that he couldn’t be bothered researching what peer-reviewed studies have found about spanking. Is doing research – and, indeed, knowing what you’re talking about – too wimpy for a real man like Principal Moore? Maybe.
That’s part one of my climb up Mount Moore. In part two, I’ll get to what I really disliked about this essay..
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