Anthony Esolen - No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men

Anthony Esolen is one of our nations best writers because hes one of our best thinkers eloquent, bold, insightful, profound.Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D.

No Apologies

Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men

Anthony Esolen

Author of Out of the Ashes and Nostalgia

Copyright 2022 by Anthony Esolen

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I am writing a book that should not have to be written, to return to men a sense of their worth as men, and to give to boys the noble aim of manliness, an aim which is their due by right.

Let me set a few scenes. The first is from John Milton.

Adam and the affable angel Raphael have come to the end of their day-long conversation about God and the revolt of Satan in heaven, about the creation of the world, and about man and woman, the noble princes of that world. They speak as friend with friend, intellect to intellect. Adam confesses that he can behold all creation with delight, and without any disturbance in the mind, only in the presence of the beautiful woman

transported I behold,

Transported touch; here passion first I felt,

Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else

Superior and unmoved, here only weak

Against the charm of Beautys powerful glance. (Paradise Lost, 8.53034)

But Eve is no plaything. Milton reminds us throughout the poem that she is royal in her person, her bearing, her speech, and her thoughts. Before her, the most celebrated man or woman among us would appear like a cripple, hunched in mind and soul, ever hiding even from ourselves what we really believe and intend. She seems so absolute, says Adam, that

All higher knowledge in her presence falls

Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her

Loses discountenanced, and like folly shows. (55153)

It is an experience that many a good man has had in the presence of a good woman. Something in herperhaps a love that can see in an instant what reason requires many steps to attainseems to sweep argument aside, and even knowledge and wisdom.

Raphael is not one to pull rank, put on airs, or insist upon his dignity. But with contracted brow the archangel warns Adam not to give over his place as the head of his household. He recommends to him a just evaluation of his worth:

Oft-time nothing profits more

Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right

Well-managed; of that skill the more thou knowst,

The more she will acknowledge thee her Head,

And to realities yield all her shows. (57175)

Such language is not now to our taste. It is not egalitarian. I will have more to say about true and false notions of human equality quite aside from sex differences (men, from the dynamic groups they commonly form in every culture across the world, have a sense that equality and hierarchy can march shoulder to shoulder). But the question here is not whether what Raphael says is to our taste. The question is whether it is true. Would men and women both be happier if men came to a just appraisal of their worth, grounded on powers well managed? Such an appraisal would not boast. It would not swagger. But neither would it cringe or cower, or hang back in exasperated silence. It would be shy to hurt, but it would refuse to lie.

Another scene. Imagine a farmhouse, somewhere in North America, in the 1860s. It is a winter evening, already dark outside, but bright and warm within. Wood is on the fire and oil is in the lamps. The husband and wife have chores to do. She is making a pair of warm trousers for the smallest boy, from scraps cut from a woolen coat her husband has worn out. She is using one of those new Singer sewing machines, the result of a hundred years of invention and improvement. He is sharpening a pruning hook, which he will be using soon on some of the poorer branches of his apple trees. The children are reading a book of Bible stories by the lamplight.

There is a pungent odor in the air, but everyone is used to it. It comes from the oil in the lamps. Thousands of miles away, men are scrambling up the masts to cut the sails as a sudden storm tosses the ship like a cork. They are the bravest and the most blessedly foolish of men, making what fortune they can by pursuing the whale, whose oil they will render in a try-works on the ship itself and then store in hundreds of huge casks. That oil is in the lamps in that home. It was the lubricant also for the various mills that made the sewing machine, the store-bought cloth, the pruning hook, and the press that printed the book. Men commit themselves to years at sea, they fight the storms and the creatures of the deep, they eat hard fare often riddled with weevils, they sleep in bunks without room to stretch, and sometimes they sing, and sometimes they quarrel and curse, and often they die for the oil to light the lamps and make the machines run smooth. The woman at her sewing, the man at his sharpening, and the children musing upon the book depend upon some man up a mainmast, where one false move would cost him his life.

Another scene. You are standing at the edge of a vast sea of grasses, with not a tree in sight. Birds and animals there are, and the buffalo, thousands in a herd to shake the earth, have left many a sign of their passing through. But there are no farms, no roads, no houses, no towns, no barges on the shallow and sluggish rivers, no canals, no mills. Beneath your feet, for many hundreds of miles in all directions, lies some of the richest soil in the world. It is untilled, and except for the natives who hunt the grazing beasts, it feeds no one. In one century, a mere blink in the eye of the life of mankind on earth, this land will be crisscrossed with the most life-giving and life-expanding works of mans labor and intelligence, and it will feed billions. Men will make that happen.

It is still so. Look around you. Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men. You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men. You type a message on your computer; the plastic it is made of came from petroleum dredged out of the earth, often out of earth beneath hundreds of feet of sea water, by men. The electricity that powers your computerwhere did it come from? Perhaps from an enormous turbine whirled about by countless tons of water, on a great river dammed up by men, or from a power plant burning coal, harvested out of the earth, with considerable risk, by men. The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not doand that the physically weaker sex could not have done. There is more to it than physical force, as I will show. The differences between the sexes, which are manifold and profound, are all related in some way to that one, the easiest to see and the hardest to deny. But there is at least that, and it alone would be decisive.