Dr. David Pence, a friend and correspondent of mine, has sent me his new book: Religion, Sex, and Politics: For Men Only, published by Llumina Press (www.llumina.com). Our longtime contributing editor Donna Steichen writes these words of praise: "Pence argues that American society lost its way over the past forty years because the traditional masculine qualities of fraternity, courage, and self-sacrifice withered in an atmosphere of politically correct scorn." For me, the most fruitful among the book's many insights is that there's a "missing icon," absent from our churches: the band of brothers, the men who imitate the apostles in their comradeship and their protection of the truth.
But Dr. Pence applies this insight to the civil order, too. He's reminded me that when conservative men say, with a dash of self-depreciation, that women civilize men, they clip only a piece of the target. Women domesticate men. Men civilize men. That is, historically, quite accurate. It is men who enlist other men in complex and far-reaching organizations that may bear fruit only in the long run, and perhaps after many of the men involved are dead. (Consider the excruciatingly difficult construction of canals and spillways along the flood-prone Tigris and Euphrates, rivers pitched at hardly a foot's droppage per mile from Babylon to the sea.) That we no longer perceive a difference between civilization and domestication is a symptom of our decline and of the withering of our civic order.
Civilization is a good thing, and domestication is a good thing, yet they are not the same thing; and though you can enjoy both, sometimes the one will strive against the other. People used to know that when a man abandons his brothers for the comfort of hearth and home, he puts the tribe or the city at risk. Hence the ubiquitous legends of men who lose their strength when they fall to the lassitude of sexual pleasure: Troy had been better off had Paris never been born. Here is Torquato Tasso's description of a tapestry on the palace where his hero Rinaldo lies, having abandoned his crusading army, now pouring himself out in looseness and lasciviousness:
Here they saw Hercules, hero of the wars,
gossiping with the servant ladies, spinning;
he who had harrowed hell and borne the stars
now turned his loom. Love looked upon him, grinning,
while weakling Iole fulfilled the farce,
lugging his homicidal weapons, pinning
upon her girlish frame a lion's skin --
too rough to clothe her tender members in!
Hercules happily plies the distaff in exchange for sex, while his lovely Iole drags the cudgel around and dons the floppy khakis. The big fellow had once been a friend to man, a boon to civilization, ridding the world of various tyrants and monsters, including that great Nemean lion. No more pelt-taking now.
The scene above is what Dr. Pence identifies as an "inversion ritual". It is as if, says he, we had been binging on a forty-year Fat Tuesday, reveling in putting a drunken "bishop" on an ass and turning everything upside down. Unfortunate and unhappy men who sow their seeds in sewers are lauded, are allowed to be mummers in their own parades; it is the Boy Scouts who are shunned as bizarre. Most men do still know better. But they have been domesticated too well; they are disunited and helpless; the locks of the fraternity have been shorn. Witness the vast nation of Canada, once a land of hardy farmers and pioneers, now about to suffer the imposition of marriage for the jaded denizens of postcivilized Toronto and Montreal. And they sit, these Canadian men, their natural inclination to band together to form and protect villages, towns, and cities, all but forgotten. There they sit, helpless as Samson, eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves. God help us, let that hair grow back.
Recent Comments