THE LAST MEN: Liberalism and Death of Masculinity, pt.1
In preparation for my new book, read the first of three parts of a never-before-seen 10,000 word piece I wrote back in the autumn
Back in the autumn of last year, I travelled to London to have dinner with a publishing bigwig who was visiting from America. Over a very fine dinner, it was agreed that I would write a 10,000-word pamphlet for the publisher on testosterone decline and why conservatives should be taking it seriously. The basic idea was that I would pick up the themes of the Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which I starred in, and run with them. The pamphlet would be published as part of an existing series of polemics. Sounded good to me.
So I wrote the pamphlet—and the publisher got cold feet, for reasons that I think had less to do with the things I said in the piece than my reputation, deserved or undeserved.
No matter.
This was actually a blessing in disguise. It gave me time to think, and I quickly realised that a short pamphlet would be selling my ideas short. There’s a much bigger book here, I decided. And that’s the book I’m going to be writing later this year.
The book is going to be an extension of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis, with a focus on its undiscussed—and potentially more important—biological aspect.
Fukuyama doesn’t talk about biology at all, at least not explicitly as biology, but he does talk about thymos, the set of motivations and dispositions the Greeks believed drove men to seek competition and ultimately distinction from their fellow men. Fukuyama’s story of the End of History is one of the decline of thymos, or rather, its containment, as a necessary precondition for the emergence of the liberal order. Thymos, as far as I’m concerned, makes a pretty nice proxy for testosterone and its effects on male motivation and behaviour.
So that’s where the book will begin, with the claim that Fukuyama’s assessment of the End of History was actually not pessimistic enough. It’s not just our environment that’s no longer conducive to expressions of thymos, which are essential to proper masculine fulfilment, but also the internal environment of our bodies as well.
I thought, as a taste for the book, I’d release the pamphlet I wrote, in three parts over the coming days: the introduction today, the first part tomorrow, and the third part on Monday.
I’m always interested to know what my readers think, and this is especially true of this long essay. If you’ve got something to say, please tell me in the comments.
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 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.”
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.
Of course, if you’ve actually read Fukuyama, you’ll know that he wasn’t saying that history – i.e. the progression of time and events – had ceased. Nobody, not even a Harvard political scientist, could be that stupid. 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-20th 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 stand as a straw man for the Western liberal elite and its monumental hubris, there are other parts of his thesis that are totally 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. That warning is 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. He 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.”
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, 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.”
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.
The word “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. The Greeks believed it 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.
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 satisfied 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.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to In the Raw to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.