A Man Is Not a Project

Why virtue matters now.

The crisis of modern masculinity is not a crisis of men.

It’s a crisis of description. Men are being handed accounts of themselves that are either too small, too hostile, or too therapeutic to be of any use, and they know it, even when they don't have the language to say so. The restlessness, the confusion, the sense that something is off — these aren’t the symptoms of a broken generation of men. No, they’re the predictable response of men who have been given inaccurate maps to an undesirable destination.

So let’s talk about the map, specifically, about why virtue ethics, a tradition two and a half millennia old, preserved in classical philosophy and deepened in the Christian Tradition, offers something our culture currently doesn’t: an account of what a man actually is, rather than a list of what he should and shouldn’t do.

Two messages, neither sufficient

Modern men are navigating a landscape shaped by two dominant and largely opposed messages about what they are and what they ought to become.

The first message is essentially hostile. Masculinity is a cultural construct and it’s toxic: a set of conditioned behaviors producing aggression, emotional suppression, dominance, and harm. The avatar is the Marlboro Man, or Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders. The solution this message offers is deconstruction: unlearn what you were taught, dismantle the structures, and, above all, become something softer and less dangerous. I’m not inventing this framing; it has been the dominant register of the cultural conversation about men for the better part of thirty years. And, I’ll admit, it does contain something true: some of what men have been handed as “masculinity” was indeed harmful, both to themselves and to others.

But the prescription — deconstruction without reconstruction, the dismantling of masculine identity without anything coherent that is offered in its place — has produced a couple or three generations of men who are confused, isolated, and rudderless. That serves nobody. (Is it any wonder that so many younger men are withdrawn, sullen, and resentful? Robert Bly was complaining about “soft males” in the early eighties, and it was among his reasons he wrote Iron John back in 1990. How much has really changed?)

The second message is essentially commercial. Your masculinity is a project. Optimize it. Track it. Quantify your testosterone, your sleep, your heart rate variability, your macros, your morning routine. Sign up for the program that will give you The Edge, The Discipline, The Results. Become a better version of yourself, which is to say, a more productive, more physically imposing, more financially successful version of yourself.

This one is less hostile than the first, and it isn’t without value; discipline, physical development, and financial responsibility are genuinely good. I pursue all three myself and I encourage other men to do the same. But it isn’t enough. It reduces a man to his outputs. It answers the question of what a man should do without first asking what a man is. And that ordering matters enormously, because what you think a man is determines what you think he should become.

Neither message offers a description of masculine nature. The first says masculinity is a problem to be fixed. The second says you’re a performance metric waiting to be improved. Both leave you without a coherent account of yourself, of what you’re for, of what a fully functioning man looks like, of what you’re oriented toward beyond avoiding harm on the one side and maximizing output on the other.

I’ll say, by the way, that I have heard “we need to redefine masculinity” more times than I can count, and I find every one of the attempts repugnant. Women change the length of their skirts and their hairstyles; men are expected to change their entire personalities. You cannot redefine what a man is any more than you can redefine what an oak tree is. The oak is what it is by nature. Men are what we are by nature. What we can do — what the tradition has always done — is describe that nature more or less accurately and then cultivate the conditions under which it can become fully what it is. That’s a very different project from redefining a man to suit a passing cultural preference, or to sell him your version of it.

Good at being a man, and a good man

Jack Donovan, in The Way of Men, draws a distinction I find analytically useful whatever one makes of his wider project. He distinguishes "being a good man" from "being good at being a man." [The Way of Men, Dissonant Hum, 2012, ch. 1.]

Being good at being a man, in Donovan’s account, has to do with the "tactical" masculine virtues: strength, courage, mastery, and honor, the things that have made men useful and effective across human history, regardless of culture. Being a good man adds the moral and relational dimension: integrity, care, justice, and responsibility to others.

The distinction is worth holding onto because a man can fail in either direction. The man who is good at being a man but isn’t a good man is capable and competent, certainly, but he can also be ruthless, self-serving, and dangerous to the people around him. The man who is a good man but isn’t good at being a man may be morally attuned and still prove to be ineffective, passive, or unable to translate his goodness into action, protection, or provision. Think of Robert Bly’s “soft male,” or Robert Glover’s “Nice Guy.” Neither is the finished product.

What the classical virtue tradition offers is a description of a man who is both a good man and good at being a man, and not as a compromise between the two but as an integration that transcends them both. The virtuous man isn’t the sensitive fellow who happens to be capable, nor the capable guy who happens to be sensitive. He’s a man whose character is fully ordered: courageous, prudent, self-controlled, and just; calm, compassionate, clear-thinking, and generative. These are not the virtues of a nice guy; they’re the virtues of a formidable man. And when those virtues are placed in the service of something beyond himself, I think you come close to a masculine ideal.

What virtue ethics actually offers

Virtue ethics, as Aristotle developed it, as the Stoics transmitted it, as the Christian tradition deepened it, gives men three things that neither of the two dominant cultural messages can.

A description of nature rather than a set of prescriptions

Virtue ethics doesn’t begin by asking what you should do. It begins by asking what you are. What kind of thing is a human being? What is a man’s nature, what are his capacities, his characteristic functions? And what does it look like when those capacities are fully actualized? That’s Aristotle’s method, and it is also, as a good many of the Christian Fathers assert, the method of the Christian Tradition.

The virtues aren’t impositions from outside. They aren’t Big Daddy, or the “gummint,” or some preacher telling you how you ought to live your life. They’re native to us, inherent, what a man looks like when he’s functioning as he was made to function. The vices are the distortions, the departures from nature, not the baseline.

This is a profoundly different starting point from either the toxic-masculinity account, which treats masculine nature as the problem, or the optimization account, which treats masculine nature as raw material to be improved. Virtue ethics says your nature is good. And your job is to cultivate it toward its proper end.

A standard that outlasts cultural fashion

The four cardinal virtues — courage, moderation, prudence, and justice — belong to the deep heritage of Western civilization. The fourfold scheme is set out by Plato in the fourth century before Christ [Republic IV, 427e–435b], carried forward by the Stoics, and taken up in the late wisdom literature of the Old Testament [Wisdom of Solomon 8:7; 4 Maccabees 1:18–19] before passing into the Christian tradition, East and West. St Ambrose calls them cardinal — from cardo, a hinge — because every other virtue turns upon them. [De excessu fratris Satyri 1.57]

They aren’t fashionable and they aren’t subject to redefinition when the cultural zeitgeist finds them inconvenient. They describe something about human nature that was true before the internet and will be true after whatever comes next.

A telos — a direction

Aristotle’s ethics is teleological: that is to say, it’s oriented toward an end. The end is what’s called in Greek eudaimonia, or human flourishing, the full actualization of what a man is for. [Nicomachean Ethics I, 1094a–1095a.] Please note that this is not “happiness” in the thin modern sense of feeling good, but the deep satisfaction of a life that is fully and characteristically human. A man who knows what he’s for, whose life is oriented toward a genuinely good end, is a man who can make sense out of sacrifice and difficulty, and of those long seasons of life when very little seems rewarding. The man without a telos has no such resource.

The patristic anchor

St John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, says something that serves as a summary of everything I’ve just argued.

The virtues which we ascribe to the soul are primarily the four cardinal virtues: courage, prudence, self-control, and justice. These give birth to the other virtues of the soul: faith, hope, love, prayer, humility, gentleness… — St John of Damascus, On the Virtues and Vices, opening section [Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 334].

Note the verb. He calls them the virtues we ascribe to the soul. Not the virtues we impose on the soul. Not the virtues we invent or redefine for a particular cultural moment. Rather, the virtues that belong to the soul by nature. This is the Christian anthropological claim, and it turns out to be the Aristotelian one as well: the virtuous man is the natural man. He is not an unreachable archetypal ideal nor a passing cultural construct. Rather, he’s the real deal, functioning as he was made to function.

For men who carry the Christian faith, that’s a confirmation. For men who don’t, it’s an invitation: the Tradition you don’t (yet) inhabit has been saying something about you that’s worth knowing.

The reframe

So here’s the reframe all of this is built on, stated as plainly as I can put it:

You are not a problem to be solved. You are not a set of conditioned behaviors to be deconstructed. You are not a performance metric to be optimized. You are a man, with a nature, with capacities, with an orientation toward a genuine end, and the work of your life is to become fully what you already are in potential. The virtues aren’t additions to your nature. They’re the actualization of it.

That is what all of this is about. Not fixing you. Forging what’s already there.

Your work this week

One sentence to finish, and don’t give me the proper answer. Give me the true one.

When I imagine a man who is fully what a man is meant to be, the quality I see most clearly in him is…

Whatever came up is telling you something about where your forging needs to happen first.

Next: the full map. The four cardinal virtues, the four masculine archetypes, and the relation between them, which is to say, the invisible architecture of this whole enterprise will be made visible. If you’ve been wondering how it all fits together, that’s the one that shows you.

The Forge is open.