What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was virtus — the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence.
Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book The Code of Man, first published twenty years ago and now released in a new edition. Today on the show, Waller, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that, in his view, form the classical code of manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Waller’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #104 — The Code of Man With Waller Newell
- AoM Article: What Is Manliness?
- AoM series on the origins and nature of manhood
- AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man
- AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood
- AoM Article: Got Thumos?
- AoM Article: What Is a Man? The Allegory of the Chariot
- AoM Podcast #871: Jane Austen for Dudes
- Sunday Firesides: Climb the Ladder of Love
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence. Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book, The Code of Man. First published 20 years ago and now released in the new edition. Newell, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that in his view form the classical code of Manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman.
Waller Newell, welcome back to the show.
Waller Newell:
Good to be with you.
Brett McKay:
So you published the book, The Code of Man 20 years ago. We had you on the show to discuss it a decade back. It’s been 10 years. You’ve recently released an updated version of the book. What first prompted you to write this book 20 years ago? And then what do you think has changed in the cultural conversation about manhood in the 20 years since it’s been published that you thought it warranted an update?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think the minor reason in a way to republish it was simply that it had been out of print, and I had dozens and dozens of people asking me how can I get hold of it? So for that reason alone, I thought it was worth relaunching. But the more important thing is that in the intervening years, the whole debate over the meaning of masculinity and the distinction between true manliness and toxic masculinity as it’s called, has grown ever more intense. In the last election, for example, it was a very hot topic, and so I thought, well, this really is a good time to revisit what I think the true meaning of manliness is in contrast with toxic masculinity.
Brett McKay:
And you’re coming at this, you’re a political philosophy professor, political scientist. That’s what you do. So you’re coming at it through that angle, looking at classical culture and how it can give us insights about masculinity and manhood.
Waller Newell:
Yeah, that’s right. In fact, I really began my interest in this topic because my scholarship had been very much concerned with the notion of honor seeking what it means to pursue honor. And a journalist friend of mine actually said, a lot of people out there are interested in these sorts of topics, not just academics or scholars. Why don’t you try and branch out and reach a general audience? And so that’s what I did.
Brett McKay:
So let’s start off with a Socratic question. We’re going to do definitions. Socrates always said you got to start with definitions. How do you define manliness?
Waller Newell:
Would you mind me if I quote myself from the book?
Brett McKay:
Go right ahead.
Waller Newell:
I think I can sum it up in a few lines. My view of this debate is that what is now called toxic masculinity is a perverse and destructive force that is in fact the direct opposite of the traditional western classical and biblical understanding of true manliness, which is premised on the need for virtuous behavior that could never violate anyone’s rights of freedom, least of all that of women, and instead defined manly virtue as the moderate gentlemanly and gallant treatment of others. That’s about the best I can do. That’s sort of my whole argument really is there in that few sentences.
Brett McKay:
And why do you go back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans and even the Bible for your idea of manliness?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think we have to begin with those moorings in tradition, however shaky they may have become. To the extent that we can fashion a new way of approaching manliness in the present, I think it’s got to at least begin in those older roots. It might not rest content with those older roots, but I think that’s your starting point. And I think we should also bear in mind that these classical teachings, although there are thousands of years old, have really been widespread in their influence in the West, I would say certainly up until the 19th century, even into the 20th century, I was thinking for example of Winston Churchill, he never went to a university, which I think by the way was one of the key ingredients to his success as a statesman, that he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but he was interested in the classics and he read them in translation.
So he too had that appetite for the older way of looking at things. As for the biblical approach, I think again, that those roots are so deep in us still even today, that we really have to explore what the biblical understanding of manliness is. And of course, the extent to which it isn’t simply harmonious with the classical philosophical understanding. That’s why I treated the issue of revelation in the section on pride, because in a way, the difference between the biblical approach and the classical approach can be summed up in the fact that for the classics, pride was one of the supreme human manly virtues. Whereas in the biblical tradition, of course, that’s very much called into question. Christianity, I think would argue that compassion is really, the chief virtue should be the chief virtue of a true man. And pride is actually something to be avoided. And I think out of that tension, something creative can emerge. I’m not sure that those alternatives can ultimately even be reconciled, but we have to sort of face them even to the extent to which they conflict with one another.
Brett McKay:
Something I’ve noticed in my own readings of the classics and also the biblical tradition, is that there’s a lot of insights there on what to do about what we call toxic masculinity. You see a lot of people talking about what can we do about this issue of these young men who are just unmoored and acting in incredibly inappropriate ways? And I’m like, just read the Iliad. I mean, you can make a case. It’s about toxic masculinity. You’re dealing with hubris and rage and unbridled ambition. If you look at the life of Alcibiades, there’s a case study in what unbridled ambition can do. The Bible is constantly talking about what can we do to harness or bridle those masculine passions and use them in a productive way instead of them becoming destructive.
Waller Newell:
That’s right. A lot of my other scholarship has been on the theme of tyranny and the history of tyranny, ancient and modern as a theme in political thought. And the way that goes together with manliness is that for the classics and for later traditions as well, tyranny in a way is the deepest perversion of manliness. It’s a distortion of what true manliness should be, and its derailment into a kind of lust for power and domination over others. Whereas I think the whole point of the traditional approach to manliness would be that those potentially tyrannical energies should be sublimated and redirected toward the honorable service of the common good. So you want to nip people like Alcibiades in the bud and turn them in a more constructive direction. And yes, I think I agree with you completely about Homer. If you look at the contrast between Achilles and Odysseus as they’re presented by Homer, in a way, Achilles is everything that you should not emulate because he is terribly narcissistic.
He’s totally self-absorbed, even though he in fact has a family back home, a wife and children. I think Homer deliberately presents him in the Iliad as if he is always by himself. He’s always isolated from others and angry at them. Odysseus by contrast, is very much enveloped in his love of family life. His whole voyage is the desire to get back home to his wife and son. And I think in Homer’s view, Odysseus is meant to be the more admirable character. He isn’t simply ambitious. He doesn’t simply use brute force. Homer says that he is the ultimate prudent man, the Fran Moss, and that he uses his mind whenever he can rather than brute strength. And so I think of the two models, Homer himself is pointing us toward Odysseus and really not so much toward Achilles. As you know, the very first word of the Iliad is rage, and it’s the rage of Achilles that sets the whole Iliad in motion.
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned for the Greeks and the Romans, manliness seemed to be about the development of certain virtues. What were some of those virtues that they thought a man had to develop to become a manly man?
Waller Newell:
Well, in a way, I was trying to suggest that with my own five headings of love, courage, pride, family, country, I think those comprehend a lot of the virtues that were important to the classical thinkers for living a kind of integrated life. The notion of virtue that the classics had was very much one of integrity, meaning a sort of unity of strength devoted to living a good life, serving the common good.
Brett McKay:
How has the biblical tradition, what was their idea? What were the virtues that they thought you needed to develop in order to become this integrated man you’re talking about?
Waller Newell:
Well, again, to me, that really all comes down to the difference between say Aristotle and Saint Augustine. On the question of pride versus humility. It’s a very striking contrast because for Aristotle, humility is actually a vice in the sense that a man who does not lay claim to honors to which he’s entitled, actually has a flawed character For Augustine, I think it’s the exact opposite, that he would say that humility is necessary to live a happy life, meaning to live a godly life. So there is a real divergence there. And I think that with a lot of these problems with time and age, I’ve come to realize that they just might not be ultimately harmonious, if you know what I mean. We might just have to live with the possibility that they can’t be reconciled with one another.
Brett McKay:
We will talk more about that tension between the biblical tradition and the classical tradition when we go more into detail about pride. But yeah, I agree with you. For the Art of manliness, one of the guiding principles is to bring back this classical idea of manliness, where it meant becoming a man of virtue in the development of these different positive virtues. And one thing people often push back against, and I understand the pushback is, okay, well if manliness is about the development of virtue, what does that mean for women who also develop these virtues? Yeah, these virtues that we’re talking about, courage, pride, family, humility, these are universal. So what does that mean for women who develop these virtues? Is that womanliness, is that what you’d call it?
Waller Newell:
I agree with you completely that men and women share the same aims and that my suggestion of what those should be would apply both to men and women. That said, though, I think that although men and women are pursuing the same aims, they do so along somewhat different paths. We know from, I think pretty solidly established empirical research that men and women tend to lean towards certain occupations more than others. And so I think we can combine the universalism of those goals with a recognition of the fact that temperamentally and psychologically men and women may be pursuing different roots to that same outcome.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’d agree with you. We all have the same aims, but we’ll get through different ways based on our temperaments or natural proclivities. I’ve always thought of it as in terms of music, so like a tuba and a flute can play the same notes of music, but they make different sounds. So men and women both pursue virtue, but the result makes different kinds of music and we need both.
Waller Newell:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
One thing you write in this book, and it struck me when I first read it 10 plus years ago, and I was really hit by it when I read it again, is that Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, men who lived a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, they had more in common with Homer than they do with us. What do you mean by that?
Waller Newell:
I think what I mainly meant was simply that their life had a kind of grandeur of scope that we would associate with ancient heroism. They really were truly towering figures. And so in that sense, I think it’s apt to compare them to heroic heroes out of the pages of Homer.
Brett McKay:
And also too, I think you mentioned earlier Churchill, even though he didn’t go to college, he was steeped in this classical education that gave him this notion of classical manhood that you’re talking about in this book. Same with Theodore Roosevelt, and same with the founding fathers. And today that education doesn’t really exist in our schools or even our universities.
Waller Newell:
No, that’s very true. I mean, in the case of Churchill, as I said, he sort of came to this on his own. His comment about reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, was that this simply described the people that he knew in his own social circle. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt had a superb formal education, which included reading Latin and Greek in the original. And so he drew directly upon the wellspring of these classical teachings about the virtues. And as you know from his writings, he is a superb interpreter of those virtues and how they should contribute to democratic manhood in the present. Think two of the American founders, by the way, the American founders who attended university like Jefferson, they were deeply steeped in the classics. They read all of the great ancient thinkers, historians, poets, and they also read important modern thinkers like Montesquieu and Locke. So even though they were in a way servants of an egalitarian society, they believed, if anything, that the ruling class of that society must be made up of liberally educated gentlemen.
Brett McKay:
Something I’m struck by when I read books or letters from the founding era, particularly when they’re describing George Washington, they always talk about the manliness of George Washington. And if you were to read that in the 21st century in 2025, not knowing about this classical notion of masculinity or manhood, you think manliness of George. What did that mean? Was he big and burly and did he just tear stuff up? And he was a great fighter, but for those individuals who lived during that time, when they said the manliness of George Washington, they knew that actually had some deeper, broader significance. It meant that this was a man who was, as you said, integrated. He developed the whole man.
Waller Newell:
Yes, that’s right. He had the refinement of a gentleman, and yet he was also courageous without limit, really, and self-reliant and encouraged those same qualities in others. One of my favorite references to Washington was by the great English wig leader, Charles James Fox, who wrote a wonderful encomium to Washington saying that this is a man who seems to have den right out of the pages of Plutarch. I think we all know that the American founding was very much caught up in a kind of Roman spirit, that in a way they thought they were reviving a new order of the ages that previously it had been Rome, now it was going to be America and the United States. Another anecdote that I think is very revealing about Washington is that when his troops were camping at Valley Forge under very difficult conditions, Washington actually had a troop stage, a very famous play about the life of Cato and how Cato committed suicide rather than give into the offer of clemency by Julius Caesar. In other words, even under the terrible conditions of Valley Forge, Washington in effect staged the civics lesson for his own troops.
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned in your book you focus on five particular virtues, and each of these virtues have sub virtues that you might need to develop to develop that virtue, and you picked love, courage, pride, family and country or patriotism. We’re going to talk more about these virtues in detail here in a moment, but one thing I want to talk about in the beginning of the book, you make the case that another part of manliness in this classical notion is that it’s the balance of reason and passion, and you use Plato’s allegory of the chariot to describe that balance. For those who aren’t familiar with the allegory, can you walk us through it?
Waller Newell:
Yes. Basically, it’s an image based on a chariot with a charioteer and two powerful horses. And in the analogy, the chariot here represents the mind or the intellect, which has to guide the chariot in its celestial ride through the heavens. The horses represent the power of human passion, both erotic and ambitious, vicious. And if the horses get out of the control of the charioteer, they’re going to plunge the chariot downward into the world of chaos below. So that’s why the mind has to govern the passions, but by the same token, without the energy and power of those horses, the chariot isn’t going anywhere. The chariot here by himself is not enough. The mind is not enough. There has to be a symbiotic interaction between the mind and the passions in which the passions are sublimated and placed at the service of reason. So that’s what I was trying to convey there. There has to be this harmony of the mind and the passions, even though the mind in a certain way has to be in the driver’s seat.
Brett McKay:
How do you think we’ve lost sight of that balance in our discourse about manhood today?
Waller Newell:
Well, this takes me to one of my favorite comparisons, which is Fight Club, the novel and the movie. Because I think what you see there is the tension between what I call the wimp and the beast, which sums up the modern dilemma of masculinity. On the one hand, you’ve got the character played by Ed Norton, who is a kind of pouch carrying IKEA furniture, buying self-help group, attending mail. He wants to be the new male that he thinks is required of him by feminism, but then he takes all of the energies that he thereby represses natural masculine energies, and they get shifted to his alter ego, the character played by Brad Pitt, who is a kind of macho fascist. And I think that I’ve observed, and others have confirmed this to me, teachers I know young men today when faced between the choice between the wimp and the beast, believe that in order to be manly, they have to act out the Brad Pitt side of the coin, meaning that they identify manliness with macho aggressiveness. And I think that really sums up the dilemma because rather than a harmony between the mind of the passions, you’ve got a complete contradiction between the mind, which has now been turned into something wan and weak. On the other hand, the passions have been left to become monstrous.
Brett McKay:
I think it’s interesting in 2025 with digital technology, I’m talking social media, YouTube, video games, I think you see instances of those passions of unbridled masculine passion. You see it in the real world in the terms of violence and sexual violence, but you also see it online as well, like some of the discourse you see in some of these internet subcultures that are populated by young men. It can be very pornographic, very violent, it’s very aggressive, but not in a healthy way. And so you’re seeing different outlets for that unbridled beast type you’re talking about.
Waller Newell:
Yes. And some video games, of course, are incredibly violent and simply blood drenched in violence. And I think that people are coming to think that living online is just an unhealthy experience for people in general, and particularly young men, because in a way it isolates them from any kind of wider human context. They think they’re in touch with other people, but they’re really just shouting into a void, and that tempts them to simply abandon all self-restraint and prudence and indulge themselves in really the most wicked of sentiments.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I think there’s something about embodying those passions. Those passions are part of the body, and if you don’t keep them there, they’re going and you kind of let ’em out in the digital ether. It’s like almost they get distorted somehow. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors and now back to the show. So let’s dig into the virtues that you highlight in the Code of Man. So again, those are love, courage, pride, family and country. And you started with love first. Why start with love?
Waller Newell:
I began with love because it’s the most deeply personal of the virtues and getting to know my students, my male students, their quandaries about manliness, things like ancient virtue were rather distant from them, but love was something that touched them right now immediately in the present. And so I felt that beginning with the theme of love was a way that young men could be drawn in at a level that they could already relate to, whereas as I said, notions about civic virtue and civic freedom, citizenship, those were rather more remote concerns. But I thought that starting with the personal one could then branch out into these more public other regarding virtues.
Brett McKay:
And what’s interesting is your approach of using love as an entry point into manliness or philosophy or virtue. This isn’t new. Plato did the same thing, or Socrates did the same thing in the symposium.
Waller Newell:
That’s right.
Brett McKay:
So what can Plato’s Symposium teach us about how love can lead us to true manhood?
Waller Newell:
I think two things. First of all, the symposium teaches that when we love another person, it isn’t simply a bodily love. What we’re truly in love with is the nobility in their character. And that means that we have a motivation to perfect ourselves. We want to earn the admiration of the beloved by displaying our own capacity to strive for nobility. I think that’s the core of Plato’s teaching there. You can find a similar version of this in Castile, the courtier. He makes essentially the same argument that love is a matter of longing for the nobility in the beloved and wishing to win the beloveds affection in return by showing that your are capable of striving for that nobility yourself.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’ve always really liked Plato’s idea of love as a ladder. So your love for a particular person can lead to a love of beauty overall, and then to loving knowledge and then to loving truth so it can point your perspective higher. So yeah, so loving a particular person can lead to loving virtue. How do you think our idea of love has changed in the modern West, and then how do you think that change has made it harder for love to be an on-ramp into noble manhood?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think as has frequently been observed that the divorce culture in a way whose duration is considerable at this point, made love about what was immediately satisfying for me and encouraged the notion of no fault divorce, meaning that if you as an individual were somehow not satisfied for whatever reason, then you should move on. And I think that this really undermined the notion that previous generations had, like my parents, for example, that even if you are not entirely happy in your married life, that you had a duty to your children to keep things together. Hopefully in the long run, you might reach some kind of better accommodation with your partner. So I think that’s had a big effect on why we can no longer make these appeals to duty when it comes to marital life. Although we’re told that the divorce rate is slowly but surely beginning to decline, and it appears as if people have taken a second look at the institution of marriage and thought maybe it is worth persevering and not expecting every single one of our own demands or desires to be satisfied.
Brett McKay:
The Greek word for love is eros or eros, however you want to pronounce it. And there’s different types of eros. There’s a carnal eros, like the bodily pleasures. You’re attracted to the person physically, but then as you said, there’s an eros that’s more noble you care about and love the person the other that inspires you to live up to a nobility. And I think you make the case that our version of eros in the 21st century has shifted more towards that more carnal eros. And again, the Greeks say carnal eros is fine. You need that. It’s a part of being human, but you don’t want to make it the soul thing in your erotic arsenal. And also, I think something that’s happened too in the 20th and 21st century is that we’ve kind of turned eros on ourselves. It’s a self-love. What can I do for myself? How can I make myself good. And instead of it being directed towards the other.
Waller Newell:
I think that’s right. And it’s interesting that in colloquial Greek aeros isn’t necessarily even restricted to love between two people. For instance, Dima in the symposium says that the most distinctive human trait is the aeros for honor. This is what sets human beings apart. And for instance, there is an ancient Greek statue of aeros, which depicts it as a warrior. So it’s a word that’s almost untranslatable because it has all of these nuances, and you just have to consider what context you’re in to try and fill that with content.
Brett McKay:
So it sounds like part of helping young men use love as a step into noble manhood. It seems like we have to kind of educate the moral sense of love, I think, is it Augustine that talked about getting your loves in order? You have to know what are the good things to love?
Waller Newell:
Yeah, that’s certainly true. And I think you could look at Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice, where it’s fair to say that Mr. Darcy comes to believe that he must perfect himself in order to deserve the love of Elizabeth. And that’s a lesson that he doesn’t take too readily. But he does realize that he does have to, in a way, make himself admirable in her eyes, that it’s not just automatic that everyone admires him. And so I think that literature can be another way in which people are educated to understand love as something more than physical desire.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love reading Jane Austen. We did a podcast a long time ago, with a Jane Austen scholar about why men should read Jane Austen, and that’s one of the reasons. It’s to educate your moral sense and how you can learn to balance the passion of love, but also learning to love with reason as well. You don’t want to go too far into passion, but you also don’t want to be too heady about it.
Waller Newell:
Yeah, that’s right. Like the novel Sense and Sensibility. Sensibility means the romantic kind of love inspired by Rousseau and Sir Walter Scott as opposed to a more old fashioned levelheaded approach to love and marriage. Like many men, I used to dismiss Jane Austen as just a woman’s writer, but my wife convinced me to read her, and I just love her novels. For one thing, she is just uproariously funny. She is such a comical genius, right? Every page, there’s a laugh.
Brett McKay:
No, I agree. And I think she is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, if you read closely enough.
Waller Newell:
Oh, very much so. Yes. Leo Strauss, the great political theory scholar, once remarked that if you wanted a taste for the classics, you’d be fortunate to be born with a taste for Jane Austin, because that would open the door for you back to ancient writers like Aristotle and Xenophon.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so that’s love. Love is the step into noble manhood. It can inspire us to develop these more public facing virtues. The virtue you talk about next is courage. How did the ancients define courage?
Waller Newell:
Well, they defined it in many different ways. Of course, the baseline definition would be physical courage in combat. Aristotle, for example. Interestingly remarks that in order to be courageous, you must possess fear. If you are not full of fear at the prospect of bodily harm in battle, then you’re never going to be able to rise above that and experience the virtue of courage. But then of course, there’s courage for the sake of the common good, the courage of the citizen. If you think of a classical work like the dream of Skipio by Cicero, he very much makes the point that yes, physical courage is the important baseline meaning of courage. Battlefield courage is very important too. But higher than that is public service and the life of the mind.
Brett McKay:
One thing you talk about that the ancients believed in order to develop courage, one of these sub virtues you had to develop or maybe a characteristic is thumos. What is thumos and how does it relate to the cultivation of courage?
Waller Newell:
Well, Plato is really the most illuminating here about Thumos. Thumos is really the seat in the soul of all aggressive, belligerent passions. And it can therefore be very destructive. It can culminate in the desire to exploit other people. That’s why as republic is it’s almost, its central theme, is the need to educate thumos and shape it, draw it away from those temptations, and turn it into a vigorous pursuit of serving the common good, whose reward is the honor you receive from your fellow citizens.
Brett McKay:
So thumos is this sort of aggression that can be used for good or bad. It depends on how you harness it.
Waller Newell:
Yeah. Anger is a facet of thumos.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something that I’ve noticed with the young men that I’ve worked with for the past over 10 years, there are some young men who are very thematic. They play sports, and they’re kind of directing it towards a positive end. They’re very active in their academics. They’re using that drive to do well in school. And then you see these extremes where you have these young men who are very thematic, but they’re not directing it towards anything, and it becomes chaotic. But then I see a lot of young men who just, they lack thumos. They just seem listless and just almost anesthetized. Have you noticed that as well?
Waller Newell:
I certainly have noticed it.
Brett McKay:
So how do you think we can help nurture healthy thumos and young men, and even men who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties?
Waller Newell:
Well, for one thing, I think that we should not attempt to extend to boys the same kind of learning that is extended to women and girls. In other words, frequently now in education, girls are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish. And that’s good. They should be encouraged to do that. But boys are often encouraged to not express themselves in the ways that come naturally to them. Girls, for example, there’s evidence that shows this are better team players. They work more harmoniously in groups than boys do. So I think that we ought to encourage boys to express that natural energy, that natural competitive energy, even a degree of aggressiveness in competition. And that would mean we have to really rethink the way that education is being done.
Brett McKay:
And I also think it’s helpful to give young men books, films where you see healthy thumos in play, and a lot of young men, they’re not getting that in schools. Like I said, that sort of classical education is not there anymore. They’re not reading the Odyssey, they’re not reading The Count of Monte Cristo. They’re not reading these books where you see this thumos and how it can play out in both positive and negative ways.
Waller Newell:
I think so too. And one way in which I’ve changed my approach to teaching over the years is that I now encourage not only the best books or the great books, but what I call the next best books, meaning to say history, biography, literature, art, dealing with the themes of civic virtue, honor, ambition, that people need to know something about the history of statesmanship, the history of honor seeking. So as I said, I think the more that young people can be steeped in the biographies of great statesmen in narrative history about great conflicts, that this is all to the good, but as to how this is going to be institutionalized in the formal education system, in a way I’m at a loss. I think some of it’s got to come through informal educational circles, reading groups, online discussions, programs like the Tocqueville Project in the United States that deliberately do not offer courses for university credit, but simply give students an away year in which they can steep themselves in the classics and in these books about history, biography, culture, and so on. The hope is that when they then return to the university to resume their formal education, they will somehow choose courses that are most likely to give this kind of education or encourage their own professors to teach these kinds of subjects.
Brett McKay:
So if you’re a parent of a young man, encourage them to read those classics that you’re talking about. Biographies and things like that. I mean, I’m doing that with my own son. He just finished the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he’s moving on to the count of Monte Cristo, and he loves it. And I think young men, they’re hungry for it. And if you just present it to them in a way that’s palatable, they’ll just eat it up.
Waller Newell:
I find that when I teach these books that the average young person almost take to it spontaneously. I mean, all you have to do is facilitate. They’re being able to read those books. They kind of sell themselves. You don’t really have to sell them. They sell themselves.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Alright. So is that drive, that aggression that allows you to be courageous. So whenever you’re feeling fear, you can call upon your thumos to overcome that fear, but then you’re going to want to balance that with reason, because you don’t want to be reckless with your courage. How do courage and love work together as virtues?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think at the most fundamental level, that if you love another person, then you are going to be courageous on their behalf. You’re going to want to protect them and to help them bring about their own self-fulfillment.
Brett McKay:
Right? And so then I think the argument that you make is that using that courage because you love someone else, like your family that’s close to you, you can then extend that in your social circle to family, to community, to state to country.
Waller Newell:
Yeah. I think that was one of Aristotle’s great teachings in the Nicomachean ethics, that people have to begin feeling affection for their fellow family members. This was his criticism of Plato’s Republic for abolishing the family for Aristotle. All of us learn to feel affection first for our fellow family members. Then we can extend that feeling of friendliness outward to our fellow citizens. So the family in a way, is an incubator for the wider political and civic virtues.
Brett McKay:
It’s a school of virtue.
Waller Newell:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned that these virtues can be perverted, love can be perverted. How have you seen courage be perverted in the modern day?
Waller Newell:
Well, I mean, again, to refer to Aristotle, courage is a mean between cowardice and mad daring and all of those virtues, it’s closer to one extreme than the other. Courage is actually closer to mad daring than it is to coward us. So one always has to be aware or on guard against the fact that your own virtue could actually be taken too far and become something harmful to others and to yourself.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so let’s move on to pride. We mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of tension between the classical view and the biblical view. In the chapter on pride, you say that pride is the central issue in the search for a code of man. Why is that?
Waller Newell:
I think because in a way, as Aristotle says, it’s the ornament of all the virtues that in a certain sense, being able to exercise the virtues of love and courage and family life would be a kind of as scent to the position that he describes as greatness of soul. Megalopsychia often gets translated as pride that for him is the crown of all the moral virtues. They all sort of come together and reach that pinnacle.
Brett McKay:
So what does a classical, virtuous, prideful man look like? How do they carry themselves? What do they think of themselves?
Waller Newell:
Well, for one thing, they never deed to treat inferiors cruelly because that would be beneath them. It would show that they needed the recognition of people not on their own level. And so they would not dene to do that. They reserved their sense of outrage to people on their own level who offend them. The other thing that he says is characteristic of pride is that people who serve in public life who possess this virtue only want to deal with truly great affairs matters of life and death for a country, national emergencies. That’s why I think you could say someone like Winston Churchill was really the embodiment of what the classical thinkers meant by pride. Because without World War II, Churchill’s political career would’ve been rather spotty. I’m not sure that absent the great challenge of the war that he would be remembered as a particularly outstanding politician. The same is true of Abraham Lincoln. His record before the Civil War in the minds of many people, was somewhat open to question, open to accusations of dishonor or being a kind of for sale type politician for sale to others. It was only the grand struggle of the Civil War in which he was able to find himself and operate on a scale that brought out everything that was best in him.
Brett McKay:
One thing too, that you notice with these prideful men in the classical sense, they’re also extremely ambitious. I think Abraham Lincoln even said, I’m very ambitious. He said, I want public office. Same with Churchill. He wanted to be the guy in charge of World War II, and he believed he was destined to be in that role. George Patton, same sort of thing. I think he actually thought he was reincarnated. He lived another life where he was a Greek general. But yeah, he was incredibly ambitious as well. Yeah.
Waller Newell:
Again, I mean they really only flower when placed in a position to be in charge of the greatest affairs of state during times of national app peril. There’s a great passage in Churchill’s memoirs of World War II where he talks about the day he was appointed Prime Minister to succeed Chamberlain. And he basically said that that night I slept soundly for the first time in years because I knew the situation pretty well, and I was pretty sure that I was up to dealing with it.
Brett McKay:
So not all of us are going to be Lincoln’s or Washington’s or Churchills. So what does a manly, virtuous pride look like for just a regular guy?
Waller Newell:
Well, again, I think in everyday life, not to treat other people with disdain, particularly people who are in a less advantageous situation than oneself, that one should avoid at all costs. Any display of cruelty or sort of cheap hottiness toward others, gloating over oneself in the eyes of others. Pride has a lot to do with self-restraint, not boasting, not demanding that other people praise you. Just let your works and thoughts speak for themselves.
Brett McKay:
Another part of healthy pride for Aristotle was striving for excellence in accordance with virtue. So healthy pride was only justified if it rested on real achievements. So if you wanted to be a great sold man, you had to continually be aiming at noble deeds worthy of honor. But in the modern world, and particularly the modern West, we’re pretty ambivalent about pride. It’s like do aim for great things, but don’t get too big for your britches. Why are we so conflicted about pride?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think again, it really is a fundamental conflict of values between religious revelation and a kind of secular approach to secular, political and civic psychology. That anyone who has been raised with a religious background, which is certainly true of me, it’s drilled into you from very early on, that pride is a vice that should be avoided. I think somewhat unreasonably, theologians like Saint Augustine immediately equate pride with vainglory and oppressive treatment of others. I don’t think that’s warranted, but it’s also a very, very strong content in all three of the major monotheistic faiths and not merely them that pride is something to be avoided. Humility is to be preferred.
Brett McKay:
So I think you mentioned earlier that we’re probably not going to be able to square this, but do you think there is a way we can live with that tension
Waller Newell:
Only just by living with it? I mean, I’m happy to let the contradiction reign within me. I don’t think there’s a synthesis whereby we can say we’ve got the best of both worlds. It’s just a tension. And I think a lot of psychological depth comes from recognizing those tensions and accepting the fact that there may not be a magic solution.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about the family as a path to manhood. Why do you think family is a path to manhood?
Waller Newell:
I think because in a certain way, family life draws on the other virtues that I discussed previously, that to have a successful family life, you need those qualities of love, courage, and a sense of honor. So the family in a way, draws upon all of those virtues of character, I think.
Brett McKay:
And then you can practice them. As we said, the family’s a school of virtue.
Waller Newell:
That’s right. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
And then you gave examples and counter examples from the classical tradition of what a good family man can look like. You did. The contrast between Achilles and Odysseus. Odysseus is that family man who he’s just trying to get back to his family. And then Hector and Achilles is another one. You also talk about insights that Aristotle has about being a husband and a father. What does he tell us about those roles?
Waller Newell:
Well, again, it’s often a kind of veiled or open critique of Plato, but he does say that the relationship between a husband and a wife should never be one of simply commanding obedience from the wife that a marriage should be a partnership between the husband and the wife, one in which they cooperate to raise their children to be virtuous. So I think this notion of marriage as friendship was very much shaped by Aristotle. And so by the time you get to say the Roman Republic, you find famous couples like Brutus and his wife Porsche, who embodied this kind of friendship. It’s not simply her serving him, he philosophizes, but so does she. They’re both stoic philosophers. When he embarks upon his perilous journey against Julius Caesar, she wants to join him. She wants to share his dangers. So I think that Aristotle did a great deal toward humanizing the concept of marriage and family life, making the marriage a kind of equal partnership.
Brett McKay:
And you see that a bit in the Odyssey with Penelope. Odysseus. Homer describes them as being of one mind. They think the same. They see the world as the same. They’re both sneaky Odysseus with his different tricks, and Penelope with the trick of weaving the funeral cloak, they’re of one mind. They had that really close friendship.
Waller Newell:
Well, and I find it interesting too, that on his way home, Odysseus is accompanied by Athena, who is not only the goddess of wisdom, but a woman. I think part of what Homer is implying there is that there’s a way in which a man’s character has to tap into some female traits. The fact that Odysseus is characterized more by his mental prudence, by his reliance on rhetoric and craft, trying to avoid open physical conflict when he can. I think that’s why there’s a sort of partnership from the very beginning between him and Athena. And then as you said, when he gets back and in the course of his journey home, we also find that his wife back in Ithaca has a number of the same traits that he does.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so the last path to manliness is country. And this is where you talk about patriotism. Patriotism gets a bad rap these days, but I think it’s because our idea of patriotism has been bastardized. It’s been perverted. So let’s talk about what the ancients thought about patriotism. How did they define it?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think they define it, and this I think would be something we would still recognize immediately, that patriotism is not uncritical and unswerving loyalty to your country. No matter what it does, there has to be a built in capacity for dissent and freedom of expression. So I think that would be the first thing that citizenship has to be responsible. It can’t just be blind patriotism or conformity.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So you love your country, but you love it enough where you’ll push back and criticize it when it’s warranted. What’s interesting too, for the classical thinkers to be a man, Aristotle talks about this, to be a man, you had to be active in public life. You couldn’t just retreat to your home. You had to take part in political life. And that might not mean you run for office necessarily, but you’re aware of what’s going on. You’re active in your community, you’re voting, and also you have to think about politics. I mean, not just in terms of partisan politics, but political life embraces the volunteer groups. You belong to your church, those sorts of things too. So you need to be active in that as well.
Waller Newell:
Yeah, and I just want to add, if I may, that I think that any version of globalization, whether of the left or the right, the globalization of the right, which sees the world as one single economy or the globalization of the left, which sees a kind of postmodernist society perhaps without private property. To me, this is really the death of patriotism in any constructive sense. I think that patriotism requires the nation state, and the nation states differ from one another. In many ways. You can say that modern nation states have the same general institutional frameworks, the same kinds of constitution, independent judiciary rights, division of powers. But on another level, each nation state is pursuing its own historical pathway. Americans, Frenchmen, British Italians, including newcomers in their midst, they are pursuing their own distinct pathway. And I think that patriotism has to be grounded in the context of the particular nation state in which you have grown up or in which you live. So I’m totally against the notion that there’s something unethical about borders. I think there have to be borders.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So some people will say, well, borders are arbitrary. This idea of a nation state, it’s a 17th century creation, and we’re beyond that now because we’re all connected via the internet. So maybe we don’t need that anymore. It sounds like in order for you to have a patriotism and really love your fellow countrymen or the people around you, it sounds like you need a nation state.
Waller Newell:
I think so. Again, not in a narrow, totally inward looking way. I think at its best, the nation state should be a window on the whole world, especially through its educational institutions. But I still think at the end of the day, you can’t be loyal to the globe. I think that you have to be loyal to a particular society with its own traditions.
Brett McKay:
You mentioned Tocqueville in this section on patriotism or love of country as providing some insights, maybe particularly for Americans on what healthy patriotism looks like. What can we learn from Tocqueville?
Waller Newell:
Well, I think Tocqueville shared the concern that Rousseau had originally expressed that the problem with modern democratization and the spread of modern economic prosperity would be that it might undermine the individual’s feeling of obligation to participate in civic life and just fall back on endless material pleasures. So I think Tocqueville was trying to find tendencies in America as he experienced it, that would somehow slow down or halt that process of total economic homogenization. And so he praised local self-government, the different states, the local townships that these were, in a way, incubators of citizenship in the more old fashioned sense, where your citizenship is primarily about a local community.
Brett McKay:
So anything that men can do to develop a virtuous patriotism today,
Waller Newell:
Again, I think it’s a matter of somehow being exposed or finding a way of being exposed to this pedigree of writings about the virtues and about the manly virtues, the traditional meaning of manly virtue. There are books available on this as to how one finds that in one’s own formal educational experience. While there are of course, places like the University of Austin, the University of Texas at Austin, where they are attempting to create institutes that combine liberal education with civics education. And so I think there is hope for the future here. Clemson College is another, Mercer Colleges another. These programs are beginning to spring up where you combine an interest in the canon of the great books with an interest in what you might call applied citizenship, the history of civics, and the need to know something about the founding principles of your regime. So I guess the most promising thing on the horizon would be that those institutions continue to proliferate and offer an alternative to the more conventional educational approach.
Brett McKay:
And I think another thing too is to just start practicing noble patriotism. Like I said earlier, just get involved in your community. Start small. Tocqueville talked about this. Just get involved with your kids’ school. Get involved with the booster club of your kids’ sports teams, because it’s where you learn how to work with other people. You learn how to deal with the frustrations of dealing with other people. They’re like these sort of little laboratories of democracy, and maybe that leads to getting involved in higher levels of governance, but you got to start small. You got to start somewhere.
Waller Newell:
I think that’s especially true of education. I mean, I know a lot of teachers, and I think sometimes we tend to put everything on them or expect them to do everything as far as educating their children, but they can’t assume sole responsibility for that. Most of them are very conscientious in my experience. But the parents really do need to be in the driver’s seat about guiding their children in cooperation with their teachers through school.
Brett McKay:
So after decades of studying and writing about manliness and thinking about it, is there one particular lesson from that tradition that has most shaped your life?
Waller Newell:
I would say that I’m not pessimistic about the future of manliness, if that’s an answer, because in my view, human nature does not change. And the yearning of young men for a satisfying way of living does not go away. If anything, I think it’s possibly intensifying at the present time. So I guess what I’ve learned is to be hopeful and to be persevering because I don’t think there are grounds for despair.
Brett McKay:
I love that how you’re not pessimistic, because there’s a lot of pessimism today about masculinity, and I think what we need more of is some thumotic optimism about masculinity or manhood.
Waller Newell:
Yes, I do too. I mean, Theo certainly has a rule in civic spiritedness, and we shouldn’t be afraid to display that.
Brett McKay:
Well, Waller, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Waller Newell:
I’ve had a great time as far as your question goes. The best place would be my website, which is www.wallernewell.com, all lowercase. That’s basically got links to all of my books, reviews of my books, my own publications, my whole cv. So if anyone wants to know more about me and what I do, that would be the place to go.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Well, Waller Newell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Waller Newell:
Thanks very much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Waller Newell, he’s the author of the book, The Code of Man. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, wallernewell.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
