Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Well, one of the primary roles of men across time and culture is that of the warrior. Indeed, how we define masculinity at its core is centrally shaped by warfare. For example, the virtues we think of as manly, like courage and physical strength and daring are vital in battle. And because for thousands of years men have primarily been the ones doing the fighting, we expect men to possess those masculine virtues. But the way war is waged has changed throughout human history. If warfare informs our ideas of manhood, do the changes in war change our ideas about what it means to be a man? Well, my guest today on the show answers that question in the affirmative. His name is Leo Braudy. He’s a cultural historian and film critic and the author of several in-depth and engaging cultural histories, one of them being the Frenzy of Renown.
If you haven’t read that book, it’s fantastic, check it out. But today we’re going to talk about his book From Terrorism to Chivalry: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. In this book, Leo delves deep into the culture of history of warfare in the West and shows how the changes in battlefield weaponry and tactics have changed our ideas of manhood. Today on the show, Leo and I discuss how the different ways Achilles and Odysseus fought battles created two competing ideas of manhood among the ancient Greeks and how we see that competition still going on today. We then dig deep into the Chivalry Code of the Middle Ages and how aristocratic warriors combine Christian piety with pagan warrior fierceness. Leo then walks us through how the rise of the democratic nation state changed warfare and manliness, and we end our conversation talking about how the current war on terror is suddenly changing our ideas of masculinity today.
This is a fascinating show full of keen and though-provoking insights. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/braudy. That’s B-R-A-U-D-Y. Leo Braudy, welcome to the show.
Leo Braudy:
Glad to be here, Brett.
Brett McKay:
So a big fan of your work. The first book of yours that I read was The Frenzy of Renown, which is a history of fame in the West and a fantastic book. And then Amazon recommended I check out another book you wrote, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War in the Changing Nature of Masculinity. And I’m glad it recommended it because what I love about your writing is your books are really thick. They can seem kind of intimidating, but they’re a quick read, surprisingly, because they’re just so jammed packed with all these interesting insights and historical nuggets.
Leo Braudy:
Thank you. Thank you.
Brett McKay:
You’re welcome. So from Chivalry to Terrorism, it’s about our changing notions of masculinity in the West, particularly how war influences our ideas of masculinity. I’m curious, what was the impetus behind exploring that? Was it something that you saw while you were researching and writing the Frenzy of Renown and you thought maybe there’s a lot more to mine in that little vein of cultural history?
Leo Braudy:
Yeah, I think so. And looking back a bit, just why I go from one subject to another, I mean, it reminds me sort of a Venn diagram. So there’s always some overlap between them and that’s something that say a corollary part of one subject becomes a main focus of another book. And in this one particularly, I mean, after doing Frenzy, of course, one of the issues in Frenzy of Renown is how masculine the idea of fame is. I mean, they’re certainly famous women, but they’re a very small number compared to famous men. And also there are not that many categories of famous women where there are many different categories of famous men. So that sort of started me thinking just about the whole idea of masculinity and how masculinity gets defined. And from my usual perspective, I wanted to see it not as an innate category, but as something that is potentially innate.
There’s certainly physiological differences between men and women and things like that, but how that difference gets shaped into cultural categories over the centuries.
Brett McKay:
Right. Yeah. That sort of the overarching argument you make throughout the book is you don’t discount biology completely. There’s two camps when it comes to gender. There’s the biological determinists that say biology determines everything about gendered behavior or ideas. And then there’s the social construct camp, like the extreme one saying that biology has no influence, gender’s complete social construct. You seem to make the argument sort of like thread the needle saying, yes, biology plays a part, but we can’t also discount the influence of culture on our ideas of masculinity or femininity.
Leo Braudy:
Exactly. And I start off in the book by talking about tribal rituals of masculinity, about circumcision and other kinds of wounding that occur to kind of initiate the young boy into the tribe there too. And so it already starts as something that you might even call ethnographic or anthropological and then mutates as civilization gets more complex into cultural categories.
Brett McKay:
Right. So let’s start with the ancient Greeks and Romans. That’s where you start. And I feel like we’re still haunted today by the Greeks and Romans and their ideas of masculinity. So how did the ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans waged war, because that’s the thing, you focus on war and how it influenced masculine. How was it the way they waged war influenced their ideas of manhood?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think in part, certainly with starting out with the Greeks there too, there’s very much about the importance of the group and your role within the group in a warfare situation. But when you look at an individual, I mean, there’s a famous story told about Socrates that when he was on the battlefield, he would be barefoot, he would have his armor. Everybody who was a citizen, then every male person of course, certainly not slaves, would be a fighter in that. And it was a kind of what the Romans later would call stoicism there too. So there’s a kind of stolidity, the hero is not necessarily the great warrior in battle at that point. It’s really the one who sacrifices for the group, who is part of the group, who fights with the group. So that’s sort of, I think in terms of the realities of warfare, but then there’s the fantasies of warfare.
And you might think, let’s say of the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey, a difference between Achilles and Odysseus as heroes. Achilles is the guy who can actually fight, but who has this wound, the Achilles heel that he can be defeated through. Whereas Odysseus is not so much a physical fighter as he is a wily person, as he is somebody with guile who can trick people. And that’s how he… So I mean, it’s almost like the Iliad and the Odyssey are kind of this split version, this kind of almost Jekyll and Hyde version of the Greek idea of the ideal individualist hero.
Brett McKay:
Right. Yeah. And you can see in ancient texts, they venerated the Achillean model where it’s you take on your combatant directly because that’s the honorable way to fight. And Odysseus was sort of seen as, even though he’s the guy that won, helped win the Trojan War, according to Myth with the Trojan horse, he’s sort of seen as less manly than Achilles.
Leo Braudy:
Yeah. Well, less manly in that sense. So I mean it’s a question of what is manliness then? Is manliness in the head or is it manliness in the body there? I think that’s sort of a divided thing. I mean, if you look at other kinds of physical heroes, let’s say even in the Iliad, somebody like Ajax there, I mean there’s a sort of meathead side to the excessively physical hero there. And part of what happens to Achilles, I think in the course of the Iliad is that he becomes more internal, more introspective. It’s an effort in a fictional sense for whoever Homer was, or how many people Homer was, to try to see masculinity not as single noted.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Was there one idea that won out amongst the Greeks or were they just sort of there competing amongst each other, the sort of Acheleon versus –
Leo Braudy:
I think they’re always competing and I think that’s part of the nature of masculinity in general as you see it across the ages. That is to what extent it’s single noted, to what extent it goes to one end of the spectrum, and to what extent it’s a sort of continuing argument within culture. I think this is part of the difference to me historically at least between masculinity and femininity that is because women are connected to nature, they’re considered to be kind of invariable in a certain way. They’re not single noted, but because they’re part of nature in that sense, you don’t have to argue about what women are talking in terms of the authors themselves, not necessarily in the actual nature of femininity. But then historically though, masculinity is always part of an argument. Is this kind of man better than that kind of man? And I think you can see that thread through the ages.
Brett McKay:
And how did the Romans pick up that thread?
Leo Braudy:
Well, the Romans started moving more towards the, and again, taking clues from Greek practices to different kinds of masculinity. I mean, there was the warrior and then there’s the politician. Now a lot of them, somebody like Caesar, somebody like Pompey, tried to combine the warrior and the politician, but then somebody like Cicero, really that was about the politician, the orator. And I think to a certain extent you can see this again in terms of the earliest views of what kind of man was important. Say the athlete in Greek culture is a very important figure. I mean, if you won the hundred yard dash there at the Olympian games, you could have the year named after you. And so that kind of possibility was the physical hero, but then there was the hero in front of other people like Pericles. I mean, Pericles is a leader in battle, but he’s remembered for his funeral oration.
He’s remembered for what he did as the kind of leader of Athens in a political sense. So this idea, is it the politician? Is it the orator? Is it the person who appears in front of public or is it the person of physical prowess who is really the hero? And I’ll go back to what I was saying about Socrates on the battlefield, that Socrates is a hero of thought there. And when he becomes a soldier, he becomes a hero of a kind of not active physicality, but of stoicism.
Brett McKay:
Right. Yeah. The ancient Greeks and Romans, they often define courage as the ability to stand your ground. It wasn’t necessarily to actively battle, but just be able to stand your ground with the group.
Leo Braudy:
Yeah. And one of the Roman heroes was Fabius Maximus Kunktador. In Kunktador means the delayer. He was the guy who never got to battle or took a long time getting there because he was wearing out the enemy. I mean, it’s almost like a Chinese art of war strategy.
Brett McKay:
Right. But you talk about in the book, even amongst the Romans, there was an argument about what is the most manly way to fight? You had the professional soldiers who put emphasis on standing your ground, stoicism, being well trained, but at the same time, the Romans had this admiration for the barbarians and sort of the more fierce and active way of fighting. So what was going on there? How did they incorporate the two into their idea of manhood?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think part of it is the fear and it’s a kind of fear that rises in later centuries as well. I think even in the 19th century in Europe there, it’s a fear of being too civilized. It’s a fear of being too orderly, too cultured perhaps. And so you look for a source of energy and a source of renewal and reinvigoration in the primitive. And so let’s say in Tacitus particularly, there’s a kind of hankering for that kind of warrior energy that the barbarians represent, that somehow we’ve gotten their feet, we’ve gotten civilized in quotation marks, the Romans that is. And we need that new energy.
Brett McKay:
Right. I think it’s interesting. We had a fellow on the podcast. He’s a classics professor. He does a podcast called The Fall of Rome, and we talked about the Romans and the barbarians interactions. It was interesting how both cultures, they wanted what each culture had. So the barbarians, they wanted that sort of sophistication of the Romans. And then the Romans, they started naming their kids Germanic names and wearing wolf’s clothing like the barbarians did. So it’s interesting how both cultures saw something in their culture, the manhood that they wanted.
Leo Braudy:
Yeah. And again, this is something that you can see in other cultures over the centuries. I think let’s say the relationship between the French and the English or the Americans, the French are the sophisticated ones and there’s a longing in that kind of Francophile way for that sophistication. Whereas the French value certainly in American culture and in English culture, the more primitive, what they consider to be the more primitive expressions, whether it’s in the 18th century novel or whether it’s Jerry Lewis, let’s say as a director.
Brett McKay:
Well, another theme that you explore throughout this, an important concept into our notions of manhood throughout the West is honor. We today we conceive of honor sort of as personal integrity, but that’s not how ancient or even early modern people though of as honor. So how did people think of honor? What was honor to an ancient Roman or a renaissance or medieval man?
Leo Braudy:
Well, it’s very telling that our word virtue goes back to virtus in Latin, which means something that a man have, a VIR, which is the word for man in Latin there. So it’s honor is only something and virtue by the same token is only something that a man could have. And again, women are sort of left out of the equation there. So it really depends on that it’s honor itself and virtue itself for a long time depends on an ideal actually of masculinity there. I mean, there’s a warrior ethos there. I mean, you can see this in, this is why I begin the book with chivalry because the chivalric code, the idea that there is a way of being a perfect knight in that way, a perfect warrior. It’s not just only about physical prowess. There is some idea of honor and virtue connected to it as well.
It becomes again, something to be striven for. You can almost say if you need a chivalric code, it’s because people aren’t acting very chivalricly or very honorably otherwise.
Brett McKay:
Right. And another point you make for honor to exist, there needs to be an audience. And I guess for the Greeks and the Romans, other men were the audience, other men on the same level. But how did that change with the medieval era and the rise of the chivalric code?
Leo Braudy:
Well, there’s a big conflict during the Middle Ages between the idea of the warrior, let’s say, and the idea of the Christian there. And Christianity struggles, I think, with chivalry because chivalry to a great extent comes out of paganism. It comes out of the Vikings, it comes out of the Norseman, it comes out of this idea. Something like the early English poem Beowulf of a personal direct relationship with the forces that you are fighting with. It’s not about mercy. It’s not about those New Testament values that Jesus embodies. It’s something else. And so there’s an effort to pull those together, to pull those together in a kind of Chivalric code that emphasizes both the physical masculinity as well as the moral Christianity of the warrior.
Brett McKay:
So how did they reconcile that then? I mean, how did that manifest itself, that reconciliation of the pagan warrior ethos with the Christian ethos?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think they managed it with difficulty, let’s say. I mean, one of the reasons that historians say that the crusades were first being preached was not only to, as they said, rescue Jerusalem and that area from the pagans, from the Moors and the Muslims, but also to make sure to divert the Knights of Europe who were engaged in so many internet scene battles with each other for power, for land, for whatever it was, for wealth there. I mean, there was so much killing going on in Europe. They wanted to, this is a more cynical view of the crusades. They wanted the theologians and the people who preached the crusades said, “Look, let’s focus somewhere else. Let’s look at the idea of a common enemy outside might subdue these fights within.”
Brett McKay:
Right. And who were the type of men who could lay claim to being a real man? So these were nights. So is it aristocracy only that had this sort of could claim to be a man under this medieval notion of manhood?
Leo Braudy:
Well, for the most part, although some people could rise into that, could gain that status through their own physical prowess. The Middle Ages tended to divide society into three groups. In Latin, they called them the labories, the oriests and the that is the people who work, the laborers, the people who pray, that is the priests, and the people who fight, that is the knights and the warriors. And they were the ones who protected the kingdom. So they were the three types of masculinity. And the protectors then, the warriors, were of the highest class for the most part. And the laborers, of course, the lowest class and the priesthood somewhere in between there. So yes, they were there. But the thing is, above the warriors though, and this is kind of an intriguing part of it, above the warriors were the people who actually hired the warriors, were the real aristocrats.
And one of the intriguing things that happens in the course of the Middle Ages is that because I would say because of the Chavarric Code, because of the idea that warriors have this honor or aspire to this honor, people who were actually nobles with a lot of money, who hired warriors to do whatever they wanted them to do, wanted to be though of as warriors, wanted to be though of as knights themselves. There’s an interesting detail around 10th or 11th century whereby various kinds of legal documents that used to be signed by these nobles as dominists or Lord or leader started being signed by the same people as equis or equestrian as warrior, horsemen.
Brett McKay:
Interesting. And at this time, was there any sense of, I guess we’ll get into this later, but national identity? Do these knights think I’m fighting for king and country or was it like, I’m just fighting for myself so I can make money and get glory?
Leo Braudy:
Well, nationalism is in a very embryonic stage at this point and probably, I mean even in England. England is really to me where ideas of nationalism really get started and somewhat later than this, 16th and 17th century, particularly 15th, 16th and 17th, because England and Scotland, they’re islands, so they already feel separate. And so the idea of separateness and the idea of nationalism somehow go together and so those places become a better incubator of nationalist ideas. But in the Middle Ages, you have international Catholicism kind of covers all of England and Scotland and Europe and France, et cetera there. And so people could not, they’d be fighting more. They’d fight more, let’s say, for their local Lord. I’d make some comparisons in the book with what’s happening in Japan at the same time there. And you’re fighting the Ronin, they’re all fighting the Samurai. They’re fighting for their local Lords.
They don’t really have an idea of Japan behind this at all, even when they’re fighting foreigners.
Brett McKay:
That’s interesting. And so the laborers, I mean, I understand from my understanding of medieval history, there was this competition between the priest class and the warrior class on who was the man, I guess is the way there was. But did the laborers, were they even in the debate at all or were they just sort of ignored by both the priest and the Knights?
Leo Braudy:
Pretty much ignored, I would say. They were there, they did their jobs. They didn’t fight particularly. They probably got killed in their houses, their villages burned when knights would sweep through the neighborhood. I mean, there’s a certain amount of truth in Game of Thrones and the way it depicts those periods, that the people on the ground, the lower class, the workers and artisans and people on the ground are just there to be run over by the flights between the various nightly and noble houses there. I think it’s interesting to kind of take a look, let’s say, at the Canterbury tales and the way Chaucer describes these different people because he has a whole array of social types there and he starts out with the night and the night is there and he’s supposed to tell the first tale because he’s the highest status, et cetera, et cetera.
But almost immediately the miller butts in after the night’s tale and he tells his tale. I want to tell mine he’s drunk. He’s going to tell his tale first. So Chaucer is sort of showing you, even within the Canterbury tales there, a picture of a society that is stratified socially, but is not quite, let’s say static socially at all. And there can be, is the miller representative of a rising class, a rising mercantile class in there? Who knows? I mean, you can stretch that a little bit, but there’s definitely a lot of tumult between the classes in that point. And just one other thing about the Canterbury tales, it’s interesting that the two characters on the trip that are considered to be the most holy, let’s say, that are described with the least irony, the least satire, the parson and the plowman who are actually brothers.
So it’s not the parson and kind of lower level member of the religious and the plowman, certainly very low level of the laborers there are somehow seen as ideal figures even within the social array.
Brett McKay:
Right. So we’re sort of beginning to see the rise of sort of democratic notions of not only manhood, but individualism as well.
Leo Braudy:
Yeah. And I think it’s intriguing that Chaucer is frequently being accused of being a lallard, which is a kind of negative term for an early English proto-Protestantism, a part of which wants the Bible to be translated into English so that individuals can read it. So I mean, there’s a sense that it’s the individual relationship to God without the priesthood being in between there is part of the kind of seed bed for a more secular individualism that comes later.
Brett McKay:
So another thread you explored throughout the book is how advances in technology, particularly military technology, affected notions of manhood. So how did that, how did technology change what was considered manly amongst early Europeans and even going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans?
Leo Braudy:
Well, the thing is from the ancient Greeks and Romans forward to the Middle Ages, the primary way that battles were fought was hand to hand, was direct, face to face, hand to hand. You’re using a sword, you’re using a spear. There were kinds of group strategies like the Testudo of ancient Greece where a group would get together and use its shields to be looking like a turtle there and moving across the field and being more impenetrable that way. But the ideal at least of the heroic of the individualist heroic was much more hand to hand. You are facing your opponent, you’re battling, one person is going to win and another person is going to lose. It’s really either or in that way. But in the later middle ages, when guns start coming in and cannons and things like that, it becomes very different. I mean, it’s one thing to get on your horse with all your fancy armor and your spears and what have you and ride against somebody else as opposed to being shot with a gun there.
I mean, this knocks it down. So the status of the warrior becomes much more in question there, the older warrior hero encased in his armor with his helmet and everything else. Now this, of course, one of the classical moments when this happens is not really about guns, but it’s really about archery. And again, archery is killing at a distance there. So something like the Battle of Ajinkour in the 15th century there where the English defeat the French, it’s the French aristocracy. The French are still holding to an older ideal of warfare where each person is wearing his colors and sallying forth on his horse and the horse is armored and the man is armored. And then all these lower class English archers are shooting hails of arrows at you and killing people and they don’t even know who you are. I mean, there’s so much in earlier battle about knowing who you are.
Again, thinking about the Iliad, people who face each other on the battlefield start telling their genealogies to each other. I am the son of X and the grandson of Y there. It is very personal. It is very family oriented. It’s very individualized. But with archery and then of course even more so with guns and powder and ammunition and things like that, it becomes much more depersonalized.
Brett McKay:
And was there a pushback amongst armies about adopting these technologies because it was considered less honorable?
Leo Braudy:
Oh yes. Well, certain armies wouldn’t do it. There are huge kind of screeds against the use of cannons is considered to be Satan’s instrument. Why? Because again, it obliterates the individual honor that is possible in battle.
Brett McKay:
Right. And you also point out this happened in Japan as well. I guess in the 17th century, the Ronins acquired firearms, but they made them illegal because it wasn’t –
Leo Braudy:
Yes. The Japanese managed to go back to reverse it and go back to the sword for a long period of time after firearms were first invented.
Brett McKay:
But how did this idea of being known and knowing your enemy, who you’re fighting, it was a strong idea. I mean, did this still manifest itself even in the 19th century with the advent of modern warfare with the Civil War? Did people still try to keep that sort of classical idea of what it means to be a valiant warrior?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think it got more and more difficult and it sort of moved into the realm of not quite a… Well, maybe cultural fantasy, you might call it. That is, you’ll see something like Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, dressed in an old style suit of armor almost in a portrait. That is, it comes to signify a kind of heroism, but that in fact doesn’t really exist anymore on the actual battlefield. And so the fascination, I mean, you have something like Tennyson’s Idols of the King, your fascination with the Middle Ages in the 19th century is a fascination, again, I think very much like what What we were discussing somewhat earlier about the way in which a civilized society hankers after a more primitive society, because it seemed to be pure and more direct and a closer relationship to what they consider to be real values than what happens later.
Look, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, the ability to shoot to say a single bullet over a distance increases enormously, enormously. They’re still using flint locks and things like that in the Napoleonic Wars. By the time you get to World War I, I mean, you don’t only have these huge cannons like Big Bertha and things like that, but you have guns that can shoot 1500 yards. So the distance is increasing constantly. And so there’s a tremendous pressure then on the idea of what constitutes individual heroism in battle.
Brett McKay:
We’ll explore this strand in the 19th century of romanticizing the medieval era and it’s almost like an anti-modern revolt a little bit. But before we get to there, I though this was really interesting. I never really thought about it. How did the rise of democratic nation states change warfare in the Western ideas of manhood?
Leo Braudy:
Well, the rise of nation states, which starts really in the 17th century, I mean in a self-conscious way, is very important. I mean, part of what happens and especially with the democratic states and what happens in the United States in the 18th century with breaking away from England and what happens in the French Revolution, let’s say, is I would characterize as a change from being subjects to being citizens. And that is, instead of fighting for your local leader, for your local Lord, or even for your king as a figure, you are fighting for your country. The idea of fighting for your country then. I mean, it was there in the Roman period. This is not the first time it happens, but to fight for the country, for the Patria, for Rome. But in the 17th and much more in the 18th century with the democratic revolutions in England and in the United States there, it becomes a much more of the moment, very contemporary in that way.
So as a citizen then, that is the… Before this, most of the wars, let’s say from, oh, I don’t know, let’s say from the Renaissance forward into the mid or so 18th century, most of those wars were fought by people by mercenaries, by people who were paid to fight. They didn’t necessarily have any national relationship to the country that they were fighting for. But of course, again, with the French and American revolutions, it’s about your own country. It’s when national anthems get started really. And this idea of creating a kind of emotional relationship to your country that also involves a citizen’s obligation, a male citizen at this point, of course, a citizen’s obligation to fight for your country when it’s threatened.
Brett McKay:
So that democratized manliness, more men could lay claim to manhood. It wasn’t just for an aristocratic warrior class or these mercenaries. The average citizen could also show himself a man.
Leo Braudy:
Yes, exactly. No, that’s exactly right. The social side, the time honored traditional social side of only a certain aristocratic class who then being the bulwark against invaders and enemies there kind of disappears and it becomes something that everybody can feel a part of. And certainly I think to a certain extent in World War I, but particularly in World War II, that becomes something that government propaganda of course plays upon. That is your personal obligation, the gold star mothers, the personal sacrifices that are made by every normal ordinary citizen to fight for his or her country.
Brett McKay:
And that might sound great on the… More men can be considered manly, but I think you make this point in the frenzy around. One of the downsides of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville noticed is that yes, you open up the way for more people to gain status in a society, but at the same time you increase anxiety about your status because there’s more people that you’re competing against for status. So that happened with manhood as well as more men were able to lay claim to being a man, there was more of an anxiety like, “Am I a man? Am I a real man?”
Leo Braudy:
Yeah. And I think not just masculinity, but all ideas of status then are cast into doubt there. In the old format, it was genealogical. It came out of family. My family has been here for many, many years and back to my great-great grandfather, we’ve owned these lands and things like that. But when it’s open to all, then there’s simultaneously this sense of importance of my masculinity is important as anybody else’s, but at the same time, I wonder the downside of it. I wonder whether I can measure up. Will I be able to measure up?
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned earlier that in the 19th century, there was sort of this return to medieval chivalric ideas of manhood in the 19th century. And we saw something similar in America with the rise of Teddy Roosevelt’s strenuous life. What was going on in the collective psyche of the West and the culture that saw… It seems like it was almost an anti-modernist movement where you saw in Europe people venerating knights and telling these stories of nights in America, this interest in Native Americans and this admiration of Native Americans and Roosevelt’s idea of the strenuous life. What was going on? Why did that happen?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think in part it’s about, again, trying to re-individualize it. Another one of Roosevelt’s phrases was rugged individualism there, that is you had to be tested there. Roosevelt, of course, he came out of his own autobiography there. His mother and his wife dying so close together and he leaves New York and he goes out to the Dakota territories to become a man in a sense, to kind of face what is toughest. And this is something that certainly that the United States has in that period that other countries don’t quite have in the same way. That is an idea of a testing place, an idea of a place that is beyond civilization, beyond the barriers of civilization with all its legalities and law courts and politicians and what have you to a place where it’s really about you and your gun essentially and whether you can hack it, whether you can actually discover in yourself the man that you want to be in these kinds of things.
There’s a phrase that’s often used about this period descriptively, it’s called redemption through violence. Are you going to be redeemed through going into this violent world, whether it’s the violence of other men, whether it’s the violence of the climate, the violence of wild animals, whatever it is out there, the West is the testing place for it. By the same double, the same paradoxical token there, you can be redeemed through violence, but also you could fail. You could lose through violence and violence could show you were not the man that you thought you were.
Brett McKay:
It’s really interesting. We’re here in the 19th century, we’re going into the early 20th century and there was this sort of like a renaissance of chivalric battle and then World War I starts. How did that movement in the late 19th century in Europe and America, how did that, I guess, color people’s idea of what World War I was going to be like?
Leo Braudy:
Well, most people thought that World War I was going to be over with in a couple weeks when it started. Look at the situation there. In Europe, between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, there’s almost a hundred years of comparative peace. I mean, the only major war there fought in here is the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s there, which was over actually fairly quickly. United States was much worse because of the Civil Wars and the Civil War to a certain extent becomes the model for World War I, certainly in terms of strategic thinking in Europe there. But the problem is, and the reason that people thought it was going to be over with quickly, is that they thought that weaponry had advanced so quickly that in fact it would just end. Somebody would be the obvious winner in that way. But of course it just dragged on with trench warfare.
It dragged on for years and years and years and there’s nothing very individualistic about trench warfare. It’s about masses of people trying to get over the edge, going through no man’s land, getting killed, getting bombed, getting bombed by people who can’t see you, getting shot by people who see you lighting a cigarette or something like that. Again, it’s like a totally, in terms of the past, unhonorable way of fighting.
Brett McKay:
Right. And because of that, it caused a whole bunch of disillusionment. That where we get the whole lost generation, Hemingway and all those folks.
Leo Braudy:
A lot of disillusionment. There’s the Wilfred Owen poem, Dolce Decorum S, that is it’s sweet and it’s appropriate to… It goes back to a line of Horace, a Roman line, Dolce de Corum S. Propatria Murai. It’s sweet and it’s appropriate to die for your country there. And of course the poem itself is totally ironic. It’s about slaughter. It’s about death for no reason at all.
Brett McKay:
But why is it? So a couple years, about a decade later, two decades later, World War II broke out. And for some reason, in our collective psyche, I think we remember World War I as sort of this nihilistic, just senseless war where our notions of honorable manhood were just obliterated. But in World War II, I feel like we remember it sort of as a romantic war that reinvigorated manhood. Why is it that we remember World War II like that, but not World War I?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think we do remember World War I to a certain extent, and to a great extent it’s because of the movies. In terms of air warfare, that is air warfare in World War I was where the heroes were. You were by yourself in a plane, you were fighting. The ideal of hand-to-hand battle was still preserved to a certain extent in air warfare. You were going after the Red Baron or whatever it was there. With World War II and whereas just on the ground, people were in the mud. Forget about them. They’re all de-individualized, but all the great heroes are up in the skies. By World War II, the movies have really helped a lot to present this. But I think also, what do we think of? We think of the greatest generation, we think of Band of Brothers, things like that. We’re thinking about the group and the World War I squad, excuse me, the World War II squad is like the archetypal group in American, certainly in American film and American fiction there.
And in that squad, there’s Martinez and there’s Cohen and there’s Dombrowski and there’s O’Reilly. This is like a whole panel ply of the various ethnic groups that exist in the United States there. So it’s a sense that the romance is a romance of a kind of national togetherness, I think. Fighting for an ideal, fighting for the ideal… Are they fighting for the ideal of America? It’s unclear. Are they fighting for against antisemitism, against Nazism? It’s unclear. I mean, actually they did a big sociological survey after the war called The American Soldier come multiple volumes. And one of the things they discovered in it is that for the most part, people were fighting. Why were they fighting? Why were they being heroic? Why did they do things like that? For their buddies. They were doing it for their immediate group there. If you ask them about Nazism or communism or whatever it was, if you asked them about more abstract things, they didn’t really have much relationship to it.
So this sense of the group, the sense of discovering that actually you as what? An Irishman from Boston had affinities with a Jew from New York or affinities with a Chicano from Los Angeles or whatever it was. I mean, that was the discovery of the war. I think that’s part of why we romanticize it. We’re looking back to a time, especially right now when we seem so divided, we’re looking back to a time when people actually could stand together against a common enemy.
Brett McKay:
Right. And you also make the case that the war had these large cultural implications on our ideas of manliness. It was after the World War II where we see the proliferation of Westerns, like John Wayne movies just proliferated. What was going on there? Why did the cowboy… And also you talk about the detective, the private eye. Why was this icon so popular amongst men in the post-war years?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think both the cowboy and the detective are kind of idealized individualist figures. The cowboy has to go it alone. He has to fight for what he thinks is right. He has a kind of moral charge that walks with him and the detective… And of course he’s in the wilderness, he’s in the West, he’s fighting who knows, crooked cattle barons or local town sheriffs or things like that. The detective is in the corrupt places of the city. He has to make his way, whether he’s the Raymond Chandler detective or the Mickey Spillane detective, let’s say Mike Hammer, he has to make his own path. And I think that’s the ideal… It’s that effort to retain some sense of individual moral virtue connected to violence that is lost by the nature of modern warfare.
Brett McKay:
Right. And also not the nature of modern warfare, but just the nature of modern bureaucracies, modern corporations, et cetera.
Leo Braudy:
Yeah, exactly. Modern bureaucracies, modern corporations, all the things that de-individualize you, that treat you as a number or a statistic or just a voice at the other end of the phone that they have to get rid of as quickly as possible. All that kind of de-individualizing kind of gives rise to heroes that seem more individual.
Brett McKay:
And what about the Vietnam War? Did that shift our ideas of manhood because of the way it was fought?
Leo Braudy:
I think so. I think the Vietnam War was an interesting change. I think the Vietnam War very specifically, Korea to a certain extent, but Vietnam really cemented it. It’s the idea of what that changed was the idea that we’re on one side of the line and they’re on the other side of the line. That is, I was talking about face-to-face, the importance of face-to-face in an ancient battle there. Well, it gets translated later on to us versus them. We’re over here. Then there’s this no man’s land as in World War I, and the enemy is on the other side. With Vietnam, the enemy was all around you. You didn’t know who was the enemy. That was the part of the problem. That was the confusion of it. So the sense of a world, the world that we live in now where the enemy can be anywhere, that there is no order of battle that says…
And nobody wears a uniform, you can’t tell that the guys on our side are wearing blue and the guys on the other side are wearing red or green or whatever it is. It’s not easy to tell who the enemy is. And I think that’s really the modern situation and the modern dilemma in all sorts of warfare. I think it’s responsible for kinds of racism that say all Muslims are going to be terrorists or things like that. There’s a desperate… You can’t figure out who the enemy is and you can’t figure out how to describe them.
Brett McKay:
Right. And so how does that affect our ideas of manhood? Is it just make it harder to figure out what it means to be a man? What is all this confusion? What do you think is going on there?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think in a certain way, it’s more positive. It has a positive effect now. I think that people realize, especially with gay liberation and gay marriage, things like that, LGBT things, that in fact, gender generally is on a continuum. We may have lost the either or in battle, but it’s a good thing to have lost the either or in gender, male over there, female totally on the other side. When we look at some of the other societies around the world where there’s a more polarized relationship between male and female, let’s say, and men are supposed to be entirely one way and women are supposed to be entirely the other way. We can now, I think, a lot more easily see the problems of those societies and perhaps the reason for, or at least the analogy with that kind of polarization and their own kind of absolutist violence and belief in their own definition of virtue.
Brett McKay:
So what do you think is the future of manhood in the West? Is it just going to have different conceptions, competing ideas of manliness? Are we going to see the same thread that goes all the way back to Achilles and Odysseus continuing on today or continuing on in the future?
Leo Braudy:
Well, I think that’ll always be in the background. Absolutist ideas of masculinity will always be in the background, but I think they’ll become less and less important along the way, and they have become less and less important along the way. I think there’s an acceptance of more varieties of masculinity now than there used to be, just as there’s an acceptance of more varieties of femininity and anything in between there. I think that can only be… If there’s any kind of positive gleam in the present with a lot of shadows that we know all exist, they’re all around us. I think it’s the idea that at least at the level of gender, in fact, people are more accepting of difference than they used to be. They may be upset by other kinds of things, but gender is not as much of a battlefield, I think. Certain areas, of course, it still is, but I think generally it’s improved tremendously, certainly in my lifetime.
Brett McKay:
Well, Leo, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Leo Braudy:
Well, you can check out my website, leobraudy.com. I’ll try to keep it updated. I have a couple recent books and actually when I started writing From Chivalry to Terrorism, the seeds for that happened a while ago actually in the 1980s, and at that point I considered it to be… I wanted it to be a kind of alternate chapters between what I was looking at historically and what was happening to me as I was growing up in the 1950s, especially as a teenager there. But then it seemed totally unworkable and chivalry turned into more of a view of history. But I did write a book called Trying to Be Cool, which is a kind of autobiographical thing, came out in 2013, just about being a teenager in the 1950s and being buffeted around by, among other things, movies, rock and roll and ideas of masculinity. How was I supposed to grow up.
Brett McKay:
Well, yeah, I’ll have to check that out. Well, Leo Braudy, thank you so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Leo Braudy:
My pleasure, Brett. Good to talk to you.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Leo Braudy. He’s the author of the book, Terrorism, Dischivalry, War, and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can also find out more information about his work at leobraudy.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/braudy. That’s B-R-A-U-D-Y. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
