#104： The Code of Man With Waller Newell
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Professor Waller Newell joins me to discuss what it means to be a virtuous man, what manliness has meant since the ancient Greeks, through the Renaissance, and through the Enlightenment, and why turning our backs on a rich heritage of manhood has been disastrous for our times in the 21st century.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Well, I'm
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really excited about today's guest because he's someone I've referenced several times
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throughout my writing at the Art of Manliness. His name is Waller Newell. He is a professor
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of political science at Carleton University in Canada, and he's written several books about
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manhood or like the philosophy of manliness throughout Western history. One book he wrote
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was called The Code of Man, and the second was What is a Man, which is an anthology of poems,
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essays, speeches, excerpts from literature that speak to sort of this philosophy of virtuous
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manhood that he argues has existed since the ancient Greeks and goes all the way through
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up to the 20th century, but then stopped. Anyway, in today's podcast, Professor Newell
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and I discuss what it means to be a virtuous man, what manliness has meant since the ancient
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Greeks and through the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, and what it means today
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and why turning our backs on this sort of what he calls a rich heritage of manhood has been
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disastrous for our times in the 21st century. We also get into talking about manliness and
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how it relates to terrorism. He also does a lot of research about tyranny, honor, terrorism,
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so we get into talking about what's going on today in the world with ISIS and whatnot,
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and how masculinity plays a role into that. Anyways, it's just a very fascinating discussion.
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If you love the great books, if you love Aristotle, if you love Plato, if you love some of the more
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philosophical stuff you write in the Art of Manliness, you're really going to love this
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discussion today with Professor Newell. So let's do this.
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So you are a professor of political science, but you've spent a great deal of time
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writing about Western conceptions of manliness.
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Why the interest in researching and writing about masculinity or manhood and what it's meant
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throughout history as a political science professor?
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Well, I'd always worked on issues like ambition, tyranny, honor-seeking in classical thought.
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And a journalist friend of mine some years back said to me,
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a lot of people are interested in these issues. Why don't you try writing for a larger audience?
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And that combined with some observations I had made about my students, particularly my male graduate
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students who were, I'd say, in their mid to late 20s, that they seemed particularly conflicted about
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this issue of manliness or manhood. In other words, should you try to act that way? If you should,
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what should it be? And really, that's how the two things went together. So I took a stab at writing an essay,
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which eventually was published by the Weekly Standard called The Crisis of Manliness.
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And I'd been working on it in London, England, where I was on sabbatical. And one day I walked to my local
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bookstore to take a break. And lo and behold, I came across this novel called Fight Club.
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And as I began flipping through it, I felt this mounting sense of excitement because I realized this
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guy has seen what I've seen. And that's really what inspired me to do it.
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Okay. So what you've done is you go through the canons of Western thought all the way back to the
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ancient Greeks up until modern times to kind of suss out what manhood or manliness means.
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So what did you discover? How has the West defined manhood or true manhood throughout 3,000 years?
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Well, traditionally, I would say that it's been conceived of as a balance of mind and passion
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or self-control and desire and a kind of harmonious partnership between those spheres of life. It's
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perhaps best conveyed by famous images like the chariot of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus, where
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the two passions of love and honor-seeking are controlled by the charioteer of the mind.
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And just as the passions represented by those steers will plunge downward and fall out of the sky if
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they're not controlled by the charioteer, by the same token, the chariot isn't going to get anywhere
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without the power of those horses. So it's a kind of symbiotic relationship between the intellect
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and the passions. You also find that, say, in Cicero's Dream of Scipio, where the life of martial
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virtue, civic virtue, is guided by the life of the mind in a kind of harmonious whole. Castigliones,
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the courtier, really down throughout the whole classical era, down to the renaissance, the
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enlightenment. It's been a coherent depiction, I think, of manhood at its best.
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Okay. And so it seems like manhood then is a culmination or, yeah, developing certain virtues,
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If that's the case then, like how does manhood differ from womanhood? Because, you know,
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women could be virtuous as well. So how can you be virtuous but in a manly way?
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Yeah, absolutely. I would describe it as two different paths to the same goal. In other words,
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men and women aspire or should aspire to the same virtues of character, virtues of mind. But the male
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path might be psychologically somewhat different. And so I think that traditionally it was understood
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that men, young men in particular, have a certain kind of leaning toward aggressiveness, toward ambition,
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even toward belligerence, that required a different kind of shaping to enable them to aspire to these
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higher virtues. And what I have found interesting in the years since I first wrote my books about
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manliness is that a lot of current research on human psychology seems to be suggesting that
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these male traits of aggressiveness are hardwired in the human character, that they're not just
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acculturated. So there's been a lot of interesting empirical research done about that. The fact that
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boys, for example, respond more positively to exhortation than girls do. The fact that girls
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work together better in groups in school than boys do. There's a lot of really interesting new research
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that seems to reaffirm some of the traditional approaches. Interesting. So I guess manliness then
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is sort of tempering that aggressiveness or that thumos, right, if you want to go back to the chariot.
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Yes, absolutely. I mean, really, for say, Plato's Republic, I mean, the taming of Achilles thumos,
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you could say is really the key to that entire book. That's what paideia or education has to do,
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because if you cannot bring that type of excessively ambitious man into the fold,
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then any other thoughts you might have about a just society aren't really going to get off the ground.
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Okay. So you have this great line in this book, in your book, The Code of Man,
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and I've quoted it several times in my own writing, because I think it just really captures what's
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just a really great idea, is that you say, in some ways, Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill
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have more in common with Homer and Shakespeare than they do with us. What do you mean by that line?
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You have to kind of think about it, I guess. When I first read that, I had to think about what that
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meant. But what do you mean by that? Yeah, what I mean is that figures like Teddy Roosevelt
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and Churchill stood at the end of a tradition that was still in many ways completely accessible,
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a tradition that had been handed down, the one with which I began my comments, this notion of
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a true definition of manliness as the proper balance between the passions and the mind. And
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despite the belief in progress in the Victorian era, that history was somehow getting better and
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better, that wasn't thought to be incompatible with an immersion in these deep and rich teachings
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from the past about the meaning of the soul. And so I think that for figures like that,
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standing at the end of that tradition, it still seemed like something living to them. I mean,
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Theodore Roosevelt, for example, an amazingly well-educated man, I mean, he read two cities in the
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Greek several times in his life. Once when he was out West prospecting, later on at night to relax in
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the White House. I mean, this was a living thing for them. What's happened since then, I think, is that
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we've somehow thought that the belief in progress has to lead to the wholesale rejection of this Western
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tradition. I think the 1960s had a lot to do with it, the growth of what was called child-centered
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learning, the idea that people shouldn't be burdened with dogmas from the past. And it's led to, I think,
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a rather calamitous sense of amnesia about what even three or four generations ago was still quite
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So what do you think have been some of those calamitous results of, you know, turning our
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backs or having that collective amnesia about this sort of 3,000-year-old tradition of manliness?
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Well, I think what it's led to is a kind of forgetting of this middle realm between passion and the mind.
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And it has led to what I have called the dichotomy between the wimp and the beast. And this goes back
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to Fight Club, that there's a tendency for young men today to either bear to the extreme of Ed Norton
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in the movie, sort of cruising 12-step programs to pick up women, buying IKEA furniture, trying to be
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politically correct in every way, or the opposite extreme to become a kind of fascistic brute,
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like the character played by Brad Pitt. And we've lost that sense of the middle ground.
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What happens, I think, is that young men receive a kind of distorted version of manliness, which they
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identify with being a beast. And then they think that in order to be manly, they have to act that out.
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And over the years, I can't tell you the number of times that teachers, parents have told me that,
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you know, when they read that description of the beast versus the wimp, and the attempt to kind of act out
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the beastly side, people have said to me, you know, that describes the boys I teach, or that describes
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my sons. And so I think that's the problem we face now.
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You said you saw things in your own graduate students, particularly the male students. Was
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there something in particular you saw in them where you sensed that they didn't get this middle
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ground? Were they tending on the beast side or on the wimp side?
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They would veer from one to the other. And the more thoughtful of them recognized that,
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the fact that although they felt pressured to be the Ed Norton politically correct guy,
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that they were attracted to the other more adventurous and bolder side. And I mean, it was
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often something that they laughed about, but they were aware of this in themselves.
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So also in The Code of Man, you argue that men should strive to follow a five-fold path in order
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to achieve what you call a life that's emotionally, erotically, and spiritually satisfying. What are those five
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What I tried to suggest was that maybe we could talk about five spheres that are connected but
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distinct. And they would center around love, courage, not only physical but moral, pride, which would also
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include a reflection on revelation and the limitations of pride, family, and patriotism. It's really an old-fashioned
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teaching. I don't claim any tremendous originality about it. In a way, it's straight out of Aristotle's
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ethics. But it seemed to me that that would be kind of a roadmap, maybe, whereby we could think our way
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back through these traditional teachings and how they interact with our own unique conditions in the
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present, and try to come up with some sense of wholeness that would have a distinctively masculine tone to it.
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Okay. And you also say, I thought, going back to this fight, you put an emphasis on love or the
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romantic part, because you say the best hope for reclaiming the positive meaning of manliness
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lies in the sphere of romantic relationships. Why do you believe that's the case?
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I think because articulate teachings about courage, about pride, even about family life and patriotism are
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somewhat distant from today's readers. It's something that you have to kind of go out of your way to look
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for. Whereas love, I think, the hope of love, the stirring of love is something that we all still feel.
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So I think of these five paths to manliness, love is the one that we don't really have to make any effort
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to experience. We're just going to experience it. And I think that that feeling still stirs in us the desire
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to be lovable by the beloved. Again, this goes right back to Plato. In other words, when we love somebody,
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we want to aspire to a standard of conduct that will make us lovable in their eyes. And that gives us a motive
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for self-development and self-improvement. And then as we pursue that motive to be lovable by the beloved,
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that can act as a kind of link to developing those other virtues as well. In other words, in order to make
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ourselves worthy of love, we would then explore these other facets of life, including courage, family life,
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patriotism, and so forth. And I have to say that of all the reviews of my books, even the ones that were
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most hostile, the ones that, you know, sort of said I was an anti-feminist or something like that,
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they tended to like that part of the treatment the most. And I think that shows that love era still
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That sounds very much like Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments,
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Loved by the Beloved. I guess he got that from Aristotle.
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And behind that, behind that, even Plato's Symposium, I think, which is probably the core
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So you've spent a great deal of time studying, researching honor and shame. What role does
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honor and shame play in the code of man? And does that system of honor still exist in the West?
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I would say that honor and the capacity to feel ashamed of failing to live up to our own best
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standards is really indispensable to educating people. And it's fallen into disfavor because
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we're told repeatedly that it's bad for people to feel ashamed of themselves. But it seems to me that
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while you don't want to shame people in a brutal way, if you're going to exhort people morally,
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and especially young people, to aspire to be good human beings, then their capacity to feel ashamed
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for falling short of that is really important and necessary. And I think people still, I certainly
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still feel with students that they are very much capable of feeling shame without my even prompting it,
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if they do feel that they have fallen beneath themselves. And so I do think that we have a system
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of male honor that is still intact, but it is fragile. It requires an active recovery, I think,
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to go out and find it. People like you and I have done that, and others. And I think it's an ongoing project,
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but I'm confident now that that ship is launched, and that probably we are going to, bit by bit,
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recover that heritage. I want to add as well that, as you stressed in some of your writings,
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even everyday manners are an important component of manliness, don't you think? I mean, how to groom,
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how to act properly in certain situations, good manners, gentlemanly conduct. I think these
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habits are very important for us to try and establish in young people.
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Sure, because it's all about how a man presents himself or acts in the public arena.
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Yeah. I mean, that's important. I mean, yeah, that's right.
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Yeah. And I think one of the hard things about honor that I've found is that
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we don't really have a vocabulary for it anymore because we've made honor into sort of meaning
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personal integrity, which is true. That's how, but like the ancients had a different conception of it,
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It was certainly more public-oriented. We live in large mass democracies. We have a
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code of individualism that really trumps everything else. It's not probably going to be possible for
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us to literally recover what was once held to be honor-seeking because we will never quite have that
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same public civic direction. But we can certainly enrich our own experience from those traditional
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teachings. And public honor still has an important place to play, role to play in our own politics.
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Several times in your writing, you talk about how war can be a moral wake-up call. I believe
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the Code of Man was written just shortly after 9-11. How is that? How does war play as a moral wake-up call?
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And what role do you think war and martial virtue should play in shaping a man?
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Yes. I mean, nobody in their right mind wants war, but there are occasions when war is both necessary
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and just. Certainly in the case of one's self-defense, the self-defense of one's country. But also,
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at times, one goes to war to protect other people or to rescue them from tyranny. That's what sparked
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the American Civil War. That's what sparked our involvement in World War II. So I think that
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that while everybody prefers peace to war, there are going to be times when we can't avoid the necessity of
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armed conflict. And certainly for the moral tradition of the West, courage in combat, going back to
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Aristotle was always one of the important building blocks for an education in character formation. As
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Aristotle says, if you haven't felt fear, then you don't know what courage is. Now, they did not regard
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courage as the highest virtue. And they believed that courage at all times had to be governed by
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moderation. In other words, courage is not the same thing as mad daring or insane boldness like Achilles.
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Nevertheless, though, they did believe that the capacity for self-discipline and self-control that
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one does learn through military experience can be invaluable for cultivating those higher virtues of civic
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life and the mind. So yeah, I do think that remains an important introduction to the meaning of manliness.
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Yeah. And I think you made the point in The Code of Man how in academics, we're very uncomfortable
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discussing about the morality of war, how war can be good sometimes. And you said, you sort of make the
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case that we're missing out or we're, I don't know, in a way not giving an enriching idea to our students
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about what goodness is or what it means to be a good man. Yeah, I think there's a very deep and
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widespread aversion in the academic world and in much of the world of media punditry to
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acknowledge that there can be a positive account of military virtue and battlefield courage. Look at the
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controversy over the sniper film. And it's odd in a way because everybody still, I think,
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concedes that World War II was a just war. So if people can still grasp that it would have been wrong
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to sit out a war against Hitler. I marvel at why it's so difficult to extend that to more recent
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conflicts. You know, I mean, okay, maybe the invasion of Iraq wasn't on the same level morally
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as World War II, but certainly it had an ethical dimension. So I find it very puzzling. It's a disturbing
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case of groupthink. Well, let's go back to this. Let's continue on that idea about the talking heads
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or the punditry. You know, in recent years, you've made the case that policymakers, the pundits,
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they're overlooking the driving force behind such things as school shootings and also terrorism. I
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think that's what a lot of your research has been about lately, young men and terrorism. What's the
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common explanation for these violent acts? And what do you think is the underlying cause of them?
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Well, what we're told by the current administration, and it's a view that is shared by
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many reputable opinion makers, is that the root cause of terrorism is poverty and lack of opportunity
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for economic advancement. Now, I would be the first to concede that that is certainly
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one motivation for terrorism, but I don't think it's the primary one. I think the primary one is
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a kind of perverted idealism, a kind of perverted sense of nobility in which terrorists believe that
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they are genuinely working toward a noble purpose, which is the establishment of, in the case of
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jihadism, a worldwide caliphate. But if you go back to the French Revolution, to the Jacobins, to the
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Russian Revolution, to National Socialism, to the Khmer Rouge, to Maoism, in all of these cases you will find
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the commitment to create a utopian society, a collective in which the individual will be
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submerged and all sources of alienation, unhappiness, and injustice will disappear. And that this requires
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armed conflict, terrorism, and almost always genocide against some designated out-group that is the
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embodiment of the embodiment of all evil. So I think we really have to come to terms with this, because
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number one, most of the leaders of these revolutionary groups aren't poor. They come from middle or even
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upper-class backgrounds. Bin Laden came from an extremely wealthy family, and so they are certainly not
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doing what they do for the sake of economic advantage. And I think that most of the hardened cadres,
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the people who plan the operations and carry them out, poverty is not what they're worried about.
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And so I think we really have to turn to understanding the psychology of terrorism and face the perhaps
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unpleasant notion that a kind of violent ambition to impose one's will on others in the name of a
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revolutionary vision may just be an irreducible facet of human psychology.
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How would, if we had that approach, how would it change how we approach these wars?
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Well, it's hard to say in practice, but at least you would understand that
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that any form of extending Western-style pluralism and economic materialism and prosperity to these
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combat zones may have limited success at best in winning people away from terroristic causes.
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And I think as well, you would have to think twice about, let's say, encouraging the overthrow of secular
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authoritarian dictatorships like Assad, extremely unpleasant as they are, if what you've got waiting
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in the wings is some form of Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS or collectivist jihadism, because then you're
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going to get the state taken over by truly committed revolutionaries and ideologues, and no amount of
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economic prosperity is going to deter them from their goal. So while it's hard to kind of chase the
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over this, I think we just need a kind of dose of realism about the psychological motivations
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of terrorists, and it's going to affect whatever calculations we make. You know, maybe it would
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have been better to have had a Mubarak with all of his failings and cronyism and so forth than the
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attempt of the Muslim Brotherhood to turn Egypt into a theocratic republic like Iran.
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I don't know how much you know about or how much you've researched, like,
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Muslim man or, you know, radical Islam and what their conceptions of manliness.
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Well, you know, I'm on the side of the debate that believes that radical Islamism
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is more of a descendant of European revolutionary nihilism than it is in any way directly connected
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to the intrinsic content of Islam. And I know there are people who don't agree with that, but
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I really think we're barking up the wrong tree to treat this as a so-called holy war between the
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Christian West and the Muslim East, because I think that movements like ISIS, the Taliban,
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Al-Qaeda, they've really got a lot more to do with Frantz Fanon and earlier revolutionary movements
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like National Socialism than they do with the core teachings of Islam. That's my view anyway.
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Interesting. So I'd like to just get some ideas for our readers from you while I have you here,
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because you wrote another great book called What is a Man? It's sort of an anthology of collections of
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excerpts from books, speeches, essays about what it means to be a man. And I would love for you to,
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if you have any suggestions on what our readers should go check out and start reading if they
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want to kind of understand this heritage of Western manliness.
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Well, I think often you find the best discussions of these issues not so much in purely theoretical
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writings as in great historians and memoirs. Historians like Gibbon or Macaulay, and also in the memoirs of
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statesmen like Churchill. Churchill's great contemporaries, for example, is one of my favorite
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books. And from there, one can go back and read Machiavelli or read Castiglione's The Courtier,
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back from there into the classical authors like Cicero, Plato, Aristotle. There's really just an
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enormous wealth of insights that one can explore and graze in.
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Fantastic. Well, Professor Newell, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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It's been a pleasure for me too, Brett. Thank you so much.
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Our guest today was Waller Newell. He's a professor of political science at Carleton University in
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Canada, and he's the author of several books. The ones I recommend you go check out is The Code of
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Man and also What Is a Man. What Is a Man is a fantastic book. It's one of the things you can
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open up to any part and you'll get some sort of gem that will speak to what it means to be a virtuous
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man. Also check out his latest book, Tyranny. Very fascinating book. I'm about halfway through it
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right now. It's speaking to a lot of what's going on in the world today with terrorism and how it
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relates to masculinity. It's interesting insights there. Go check it out. You can find those all on
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amazon.com. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly
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tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
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I'd really appreciate it if you can go to the store, Art of Manliness store. It's
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store.artofmanliness.com. Got lots of great AOM swag there. T-shirts, got a coffee mug that could
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also double as a weapon if need be. A journal that was inspired by Ben Franklin's virtue journal
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that he developed for himself. One of a kind. You can't find this anywhere else. Your purchases
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there will help support the podcast and what we do on the site. Again, that's store.artofmanliness.com.
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I'd really appreciate it. Until next time, stay manly.