Merry Manly Christmas and Hanukkah

JamesFreemanClarke (1810–1888), an American theologian and essayist, limned the distinctions between true and false manliness. His essay is a particularly interesting glimpse of the 19th-century ideal, since 20th-century feminism has worked so hard to persuade us that the “patriarchy” taught men to be tyrants and emotional stiffs.

"[Manliness]expresses the qualities which go to make a perfect man — truth, courage, conscience, freedom, energy, self-possession, self-control. But it does not exclude gentleness, tenderness, compassion, modesty. A man is not less manly, but more so, because he is gentle. . . . The manly spirit shows itself in enterprise, the love of meeting difficulties and overcoming them — the resolution that will not yield."

"A false notion of manliness leads boys astray. All boys wish to be manly; but they often try to become so by copying the vices of men rather than their virtues."

The 19thcentury had no monopoly on manliness, however, and one of the most enriching portraits in The Book of Man is that of DavidGelernter, the computer scientist, professor, artist, and socialcritic who was badly wounded by the Unabomber. This excerpt from a magazine profile focuses not on Gelernter’s scientific achievements (he has many computer breakthroughs to his credit), nor on his personal courage in overcoming his injuries from the letter bomb (it nearly killed him). Rather, it stresses his role as husband and father. Gelernter and his wife, in a countercultural act, are raising their sons to be chivalrous gentlemen. A man’s role with respect to women, Gelernter argues, “is to protect, to help, to support, [and] to cherish — as opposed to consume. We are a consumer society and the number one consumption is that of women.”.....

Theodore Roosevelt

a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

T.R. also said more pointedly, in his famous speech to the Sarbonne, that
the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.
I'm not sure he got permission from Gloria Steinem before he spoke those words . . .
Status requirements and geometrically increasing college tuition play into this very strongly.

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