Just a Few of Stephen Mansfields Books
Mansfields Book of Manly Men
The Character and Greatness of Winston Churchill:
Hero in a Time of Crisis
Then Darkness Fled:
The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington
Forgotten Founding Father:
The Heroic Legacy of George Whitefield
The Search for God and Guinness
Lincolns Battle with God
2016 by Stephen Mansfield
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means except for brief quotations in reviews or articles, without the written permission of the publisher.
Author photograph: Isaac Darnall
Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Blackwatch Digital.
(print) ISBN: 978-0-9977647-5-8
(ebook) ISBN: 978-0-9977647-6-5
"We few,
We happy few,
We band of brothers.
William Shakespeare, Henry V
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them."
Henry David Thoreau
"Real friendships among men are so rare that when they occur they are famous."
Clarence Day
"The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a mans success in life."
Edward Everett Hale
"No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him."
Harry Emerson Fosdick
I want you to imagine something with me. Whatever your history, whatever your race or your native country, I want you to roll the story of your people back a few hundred years in your mind. Think about the men at that time. Remind yourself of how they lived and of what sealed them to each other.
These menyour ancestorsprobably lived their whole lives in vital connection to other men. It determined nearly everything about them. In fact, it determined the meaning of manhood itself. What they knew and what they lived is part of what we need to recover today.
Keep imagining the lives of our ancestors with me. A few centuries ago families were often large, unless disease or war reduced their size. A man was likely to have brothers. He grew up with these companions, explored the world with them, and learned with them all that their parents had to teach. Often a man and his brothers lived near each other all their days, standing together against the onslaughts of the world and building together the things that made life worth living.
These brothers were also part of a larger band of men: the men of the village, town, or tribe. Survival was impossible without them. The men of this wider male community depended on each other for defense. They needed each other for the hunt. They relied on each other for help with their farms, for trade, and for the skills they did not possess themselves. They worked together, fought together, celebrated together, and worshipped together. During restful moments, they traded jokes, talked about the ways of the world, and entrusted each other with their dreams. They were tightly knit, an essential part of each others lives.
These were the commitments that bound men together centuries ago. They lived open, accountable, dutiful lives. They were connected. They had roles to play, jobs to do. They were devoted to a people their people.
Introverts had to get over themselves. Loners were suspect. A man without a people to call his own was often viewed as a threat. If he was rootless and untethered, he might also be lawless and unprincipled. This was how people thought several hundred years ago.
Sometimes we forget these truths from our history and believe myths instead. Americans, for example, have a soft place in their hearts for the image of the solitary man on horseback who rode out into the western frontier. Its true that there were men who ventured into the wilderness on their own like this and a few even built colorful reputations, but communities built the nation. Two hundred years ago, most men would have thought that a guy who went into the wild alone was a fool.
Life as part of a company of men was the way of our ancestors, but it is far from the way of men today. The majority of men today have no meaningful connection to other men. They have no band of brothers. They do not belong to a people. They do not belonganywhere. Instead, most men today live lonely, rootless, untethered lives.
It is killing them. Surveys confirm it. Medical studies confirm it. The male suicide rate confirms it.
Fortunately, the average man today can still vaguely remember what it was like when he had friends. When he was a boy, his friends were everything. He came home from that first day of school and his mother asked him if he had made any new friends. The answer was important. In the days after, he rushed through his chores and homework to be with his buddies. They were his world, or at least the companions who explored the world with him.
This didnt change much during his teen years. Sports, music, cars, goofing off, and the unending pursuit of girls sealed him to other guys. They were his tribe. They were his band of boisterous brothers.
This likely continued all through high school. Friendships were easier to find in those days. They were right at hand. Buddies lived in the same neighborhood or attended the same school or played in the same band or found each other at the same part-time jobs and during the raucous hours of fun that never seemed to end back then-back when friends were easier to find. If he went to college, this all continued for years more.
Then, it started to happen. School came to an end. Our man went to work. He got married. He had children. Or maybe he stayed single. It doesnt matter. The same forces took control. There were obligations. There were a couple of moves. His company required it. Maybe the military required it, or the search for hard-to-find jobs.
Whatever the cause, he got separated from his buddies. He got busy. A friend stopped being someone to hang out with every spare moment and became someone to call on the phone a few times a year. This kind of degraded friendship so marks our generation that psychologists have a name for it. They call them "rust friends. It means guys who used to be close but who now only check in with each other a few times a year. Rust has grown on the friendship. It isnt crucial anymore. Its just there. Its more a memory than a present reality.
This is all most men have todaya few rusty friendships. It isnt the way it was meant to be. This is why the average guy today longs for the meaningful connections he once had to other men. Like most males in the Western world, hes convinced he has lost those friendships forever and will never get them back again.
I have lived this way.
