SNEAK PEEK: The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity

Read the first draft of the introduction to my new book

For the last few months, on top of all the other things I’ve had to do, I’ve been writing the follow-up to my last book, The Eggs Benedict Option. This new book, called The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, picks up where the Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men—which I was in—left off. The book’s about testosterone decline: its causes, its political implications, what can be done about it.

But the book isn’t just a bog-standard run through trends in testosterone levels and sperm counts. The framing, I think, is pretty unique: the book is basically an extension of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of History” thesis, substituting testosterone for the Greek concept of “thymos.” Testosterone decline, in my account, is part of a much broader political and biological decline resulting from the triumph of liberal democracy.

I’ve just finished the first draft of the book. It will be out in the middle of next year via Passage Press, who also publish MAN’S WORLD. What you’re about to read is the introduction as it currently stands.

As always, comments are very much welcome. I want to know what you think of the book so far. It will run to about 70,000 words.

Quick note: I’m in New York this week (come to Sovereign House!), so we’ll resume a full posting schedule next week (podcast, essays, etc.).

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“Man’s genital concentration is a reduction but also an intensification. He is a victim of unruly ups and downs. Male sexuality is inherently manic-depressive. Estrogen tranquilizes, but androgen agitates. Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and needles of their hormones. In sex as in life they are driven beyond—beyond the self, beyond the body. Even in the womb this rule applies. Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.”

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, p.19

Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History”, and the book it spawned three years later, is remembered as a paean to the triumph of liberal capitalism at the end of the Cold War. In Fukuyama’s own words, with the fall of communism in Europe, mankind had reached

not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[1]

To many now, after September 11, the Global War on Terror, the rise of China and the Migrant Crisis of 2015, and with the “Climate Crisis” supposedly about to make large swathes of the planet literally uninhabitable for human life, Fukuyama’s pronouncement of the End of History was premature, to say the least.

Big things are very much still happening.

Of course, if you’ve actually read Fukuyama, you’ll know he wasn’t saying that history—i.e. the onward progression of time and events—had ceased. Nobody, not even a Harvard political scientist, could be that dumb. Rather, Fukuyama believed that the evolution of social and political forms—a process which, like Marx and Hegel, he saw as developing in a linear fashion, by means of contradictions and clashes—had finally come to an end. By defeating communism, liberal capitalist democracy had shown, once and for all, its superiority as a way of ordering life. On the basis of what we know about politics, economics and ethics, and about man himself, nothing better could ever come along. And although there might be regressions, moments when the totalitarian impulses of the mid-20^th century returned, these would always prove temporary. Liberal capitalist democracy would win again.

Always.

If the basics of Fukuyama’s thesis are apt to be misrepresented, and Fukuyama himself is often made to serve as a straw man for the Western liberal elite and its monumental hubris, there are other parts of his thesis that are missed altogether. The title of his book is usually known simply as The End of History. In fact, the full title is The End of History and the Last Man. This omission from popular consciousness is telling. Because not only is the book a proclamation of victory: it is also a warning, a warning which takes up the final fifth of the book. A warning about the Last Man.

So who, or what is this Last Man?

The Last Man is a creature first identified by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late nineteenth century. Here’s what Fukuyama has to say about this creature:

Nietzsche’s Last Man was, in essence, the victorious slave. [Nietzsche] fully agreed with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Christian belief in the equality of men before God was nothing more than a prejudice, a prejudice born out of the resentment of the weak against those who were stronger than they were. The Christian religion originated in the realization that the weak could overcome the strong when they banded together in a herd, using the weapons of guilt and conscience. In modern times this prejudice had become widespread and irresistible, not because it had been revealed as true, but because of the greater numbers of weak people.[2]

Instead of being a “synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave”, as Hegel had believed, the liberal democratic state, to Nietzsche, was slave morality through and through.

For Nietzsche, it represented an unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was that individual who, schooled by Hobbes and Locke, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. For Nietzsche, democratic man was composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. But he was completely lacking in any megalothymia, content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.[3]

In simple terms, the Last Man is what you get at the End of History, when there’s no longer anything particularly important worth living for. When the great ethical, economic and political questions have all been settled, what higher purposes exist for men to strive towards? The answer is: none. Life becomes dull not through any individual defect, but on an ontological level.

Megalothymia, a Greek word, is key here. Thymos, according to the Greeks, was the part of an individual’s soul that desires recognition or dignity. The word could be translated as something approximating “spiritedness” or “warm-bloodedness”. It’s an attribute all men possess and can develop. In the Republic, Fukuyama explains, Plato “compares a man with thymos to a noble dog who is capable of great courage and anger fighting strangers in defense of his own city.”[4] Thymos can be equated, in some sense, with what might today be called “self-esteem.”

Thymos is something like an innate sense of justice: people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worthless—when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value—then they become angry.[5]

Thymos, then, is intimately tied to a person’s place in the social order, to their sense of self-worth, which must be reflected in others, and to their desire, ultimately, to assert their claim to these things. Fukuyama generally describes thymos as the “desire for recognition.”

The Greeks believed thymos came in various forms. There was isothymia, a desire to be acknowledged as equal to everybody else, which can be seen as the central impulse at the heart of the Christian and democratic ideals. Then there was megalothymia, which is the desire to seek distinction above others, in opposition to isothymia.

In the liberal democratic end-state, where all men have been decided, at last, to be equal, isothymia is satisfied, but megalothymia is not and cannot be. Ever. And that’s not good.

In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud cautioned that, when an entire population has unfulfilled or even deliberately suppressed desires, turmoil will follow. This is the crux of Fukuyama’s warning about the End of History: Man’s nature cannot be denied. While it’s entirely possible that man will be happy now as one among many billions of equals, each pursuing his own limited goals like making money, buying things, having sex and going on holiday, it’s equally possible that man, or rather some men, will rebel in the name of satisfying their desire to be different. To be better. What we might see instead of a future of contented dolts enjoying an easy contentment is “immense wars of the spirit” —and Fukuyama means, quite literally, wars—with wild men letting loose and painting the world red again in the name of personal glory and some higher purpose, whatever that might be, just anything other than endless, monotonous peace and sex and commerce.

This is the scenario dramatised by the French writer Michel Houellebecq in his second novel Platform, where a self-satisfied French sex tourist, having reconciled himself to a life of hedonism on the beaches of Thailand, is caught up in a violent Islamic terrorist attack that kills his partner and eventually drives him to suicide.

Isothymia, say hello to megalothymia!

So what supposedly began as a ringing and, despite the technical language, uncomplicated endorsement of liberal democratic capitalism, has ended with a dire warning about the degeneration of man in a social prison of his own making, and the desperate attempts he might make to free himself from it, at any cost. To my mind, whatever Fukuyama’s original intention, The End of History offers one of the most devastating criticisms not only of the democratic form, but of the forces that are making life hostile, on a planetary scale, to the human spirit. Although I don’t agree that liberal democratic capitalism is the end stage of man’s social and political development, I do agree that the “unipolar moment” that followed the fall of communism in Europe was a hollow victory, and that, so long as liberalism is in the ascendant, man—and specifically men—are going to continue to suffer from a profound crisis of meaning and purpose.

In certain respects, however, I think Fukuyama’s assessment of man’s degeneration at the End of History is too optimistic. Yes, you read that right: too optimistic. Because Fukuyama saw thymos as a fixed quantity, something men would retain even in the face of a social and political system that was utterly hostile to the expression of thymos as individual distinction.

The reality is, thymos is not a fixed quantity. Thymos can be drained—by bad food, by bad lifestyles, by bad chemicals—and that’s precisely what is happening now, and what I’m going to explain to you in this book. Fukuyama’s thesis can be extended beyond the political to the biological level.

The frustration of thymos in the modern world is not simply the frustration of liberal democracy. It’s also a deeper biological decline working in tandem with liberal democracy and modernity, with capitalism and industry.

Rather than talking in terms of thymos—or rather than talking solely in terms of thymos—I’m going to explain what’s happening by reference to the stunning decline in testosterone levels men have experienced in recent decades. Testosterone decline is something few conservatives or right-wingers have talked about until recently, but it’s something that has implications that touch some of the most fundamental issues we care, or should care, about.

Testosterone makes for a strong proxy for thymos, because testosterone is what essentially makes men men. The kinds of behaviours that are associated with thymos, and with being a man more broadly, are clearly linked to levels of testosterone in the body. A man’s testosterone levels may be the difference between a life of sex and success and a life spent rotting in a fetid basement, playing videogames and eating chicken tenders heated up in the microwave by mum. The Japanese hikikomori, extreme social recluses, have been shown to have lower levels of testosterone than normal men, for example. Indeed, reams of scientific studies show that testosterone levels are correlated with everything from attractiveness to assertiveness, that men who lack testosterone are more likely to be overweight, depressed, anxious, unmotivated and infertile. What’s more, we can measure testosterone levels in men quite nicely, in a way that simply isn’t possible with an abstract concept like thymos. By looking at testosterone levels, we can be precise, and that’s never a bad thing.

High-quality research like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, featuring many thousands of men, reveals a precipitous decline in testosterone levels across the developed world, from the US to Scandinavia and Israel. Year on year, over a period of decades, testosterone levels have been falling, as part of a broader collapse in male fertility. On the basis of the decline in sperm counts in recent decades, one expert has even suggested that within 25 years, it might be impossible for humans to reproduce by natural means at all.