You hear that?
That's not just a Toyota truck.
That's the sound of no crowds.
No alerts.
No distractions.
And no telling what you'll find next.
You know, like a detour.
So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour?
Toyota trucks.
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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 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 20 years ago and now released in a new edition.
Today on the show Waller, 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 slash code of man.
Waller Newell, welcome back to the show.
Good to be with you.
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?
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 was, And the distinction between true manliness and toxic masculinity, as it's called, has grown ever more intense.
Far from abating 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.
And you're coming at this.
You're a political philosophy professor, political scientist, like 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.
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 you know 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.
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?
Would you mind me if I quote myself from the book?
Go right ahead.
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 or 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.
And why do you go back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans and even the Bible for your idea of manliness?
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 they're 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.
You know, 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, 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.
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 today 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, you know, acting in incredibly inappropriate ways.
I'm like, just read the iliad.
I mean there's, 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, you're 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?
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 phronomos, 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.
So you mentioned that 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?
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.
How has the biblical tradition?
What was their idea or what were the virtues that they thought you needed to develop in order to become this integrated man you're talking about?
Well, again, to me, that really all comes down to the difference between, say, Aristotle and St.
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 is 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.
Yeah, we'll 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 sort of principles is to bring back this classical idea of manliness, where it meant becoming a man of virtue and 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?
Because 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?
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 routes to that same outcome.
Yeah, I'd agree with you.
We all have the same aims, but we'll get there through different ways, based on our temperaments, our natural proclivities.
I've always thought of it as in terms of music.
So, like you know, a tuba and a flute can play the same notes of music, but they make different sounds.
So you know, men and women both pursue virtue, but the result makes different kinds of music, and we need both.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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 100 years ago, 120 years ago they had more in common with Homer than they do with us.
What do you mean by that?
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.
And also too, I think they 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.
Because 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 wry comment about reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, was that this simply described the people that he knew in his own social circle.
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 too 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.
It's 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's a great fighter?
But for those individuals who lived during that time, when they said the manliness of George Washington, they knew like 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.
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 Whig leader Charles James Fox, who wrote a wonderful encomium to Washington saying that this is a man who seems to have stridden right out of the pages of Plutarch.
And 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 in to the offer of clemency by Julius Caesar.
In other words, even under the terrible conditions of Valley Forge, Washington in effect staged a civics lesson for his own troops.
So you mentioned in your book you focus on five particular virtues and each of these virtues have like 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 is 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?
Yes, basically, it's an image based on a chariot with a charioteer and two powerful horses.
And in the analogy, the charioteer 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 passion.
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 charioteer 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.
How do you think we've lost sight of that balance in our discourse about manhood today?
Well, you know, 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 male.
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 egos, 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 and 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.
And 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 people, 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.
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.
Yeah.
I think there's something about disembodying those passions.
Like those passions are part of the body.
And if you don't keep them there, they're going to, and you like kind of let them off in the digital ether.
It's like almost they get distorted somehow.
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You hear that?
That's not just a Toyota truck.
That's the sound of no crowds.
No alerts.
No distractions.
And no telling what you'll find next.
You know, like a detour.
So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour?
Toyota trucks.
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?
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.
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.
That's right.
So what can Plato's symposium teach us about how love can lead us to true manhood?
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 Castiglione's 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 beloved's affection in return by showing that you're capable of striving for that nobility yourself.
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 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?
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 were 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 you know, maybe it is worth persevering and not expecting every single one of our own demands or desires to be satisfied.
The Greek word for love is eros or eros, however you want to pronounce it.
And there's different types of eroses.
Like there's a carnal eros, like the bodily pleasures, like 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 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 sole thing in your erotic arsenal. and also i think something that's happened too in the the 20th and 21st century is that we've kind of turned eros on ourselves like it's a self-love like what can i do for myself how can i make myself that's right good and instead of it being directed towards the other i think that's right and it's interesting that in colloquial greek eros isn't necessarily even restricted to love between two people for instance Diatima in the symposium says that the most distinctive human trait is the eros for honor.
This is what sets human beings apart.
And for instance, there is an ancient Greek statue of eros, 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.
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, you know, who is it?
Is it Augustine that talked about getting your loves in order?
Like you have to know what are the good things to love.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
And I think you could look at Jane Austen'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.
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.
Yeah, that's right.
Like the novel Sense and Sensibility.
Yeah.
Sensibility means the romantic kind of love inspired by Rousseau and Sir Walter Scott, as opposed to a more old-fashioned, level-headed 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.
No, I agree, and I think she is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, if you read closely enough.
Oh, very much so, yes.
You know, 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 Austen, because that would open the door for you back to ancient writers like Aristotle and Xenophon.
Okay, so that's love.
So 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?
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're 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 citizens.
If you think of a classical work like The Dream of Scipio 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.
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?
Well, Plato is really the most illuminating writer here about Thumos.
For Plato, 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 Plato's Republic is.
It's almost 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.
So Thumos is this sort of aggression that can be used for good or bad.
It depends on how you, you harness it.
Yeah, anger is a facet of thumos.
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 thumotic.
You know, 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.
Then you see these extremes, where you have these young men who are very thumotic but they're not directing it towards anything and it becomes chaotic.
But then I see a lot of young men who just like they lack thumos.
They just seem listless and just almost anesthetized.
Have you noticed that as well?
I certainly have noticed it.
So how do you think we can help nurture healthy thumos in young men, even men who are in their 30s, 40s and 50s?
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.
Yeah.
And I also think it's helpful to give young men books, films, where you see healthy thumos in play.
And like a lot of young men, they're not getting that in schools.
Like you 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.
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.
Yeah, 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.
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 their being able to read those books.
They kind of sell themselves.
You don't really have to sell them.
They sell themselves.
Yeah.
All right.
So, thumos 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?
Well, I think at the most fundamental level that if you love another person, then you're 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.
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.
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.
It's a school of virtue.
Yeah.
So you mentioned that these virtues can be perverted.
Love can be perverted.
How have you seen courage be perverted in the modern day?
Well, I mean, again, to refer to Aristotle, courage is a mean between cowardice and mad daring.
And like all of those virtues, it's closer to one extreme than the other.
Courage is actually closer to mad daring. than it is to cowardice.
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.
All right, 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?
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 ascent to the position that he describes as greatness of soul.
Megalos Hekia 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.
So what does a classical, virtuous, prideful man look like?
How do they carry themselves?
What do they think of themselves?
Well, for one thing, they never deign 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 deign to do that.
They reserve 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 have 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.
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...
He actually thought he was reincarnated, like he lived another life where he was a Greek general.
But yeah, he was incredibly ambitious as well.
Yeah 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 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.
So not all of us are going to be Lincolns or Washingtons or Churchills.
So what does a manly, virtuous pride look like for just a regular guy?
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 haughtiness 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.
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 achievement.
So if you wanted to be a great-souled man, you had to continually be aiming at noble deeds worthy of honor.
But in the modern world, you know, and particularly the modern West, we're pretty ambivalent about pride.
It's like, you know, do aim for great things, but, you know, don't get too big for your britches.
Why are we so conflicted about pride?
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 St.
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, you know, all three of the major monotheistic faiths, and not merely them, that pride is something to be avoided, humility is to be preferred.
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?
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.
Let's talk about the family as a path to manhood.
Why do you think family is a path to manhood?
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.
Yeah.
And then you can practice them.
As we said, the family's a school of virtue.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
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?
Well, he 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, 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 Portia, who embody 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 marriage a kind of equal partnership.
Yeah, and you see that a bit in the Odyssey with Penelope and 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.
Well, 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.
All right.
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 do they define it?
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.
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.
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, You know, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So anything that men can do to develop a virtuous patriotism today?
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.
Well, there are, of course, places like 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 College is 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 regimes.
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.
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 just, you got to start somewhere.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, I do too.
I mean Thumos certainly has a role in civic spiritedness and we shouldn't be afraid to display that.
Well, Waller, this has been a great conversation.
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
I've had a great time.
As far as your question goes, the best place would be my website, which is wwwwallernuhlecom, 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.
Fantastic.
Well, Waller Newell, thanks for your time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks very much, Bert.
I really enjoyed it.
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 awimis slash code of man, 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 artofmanagecom, where you can find our podcast archives and sign up for our new newsletter.
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Until next time.
This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
Thank you.
