Arthur Miller’s 1949 stage play, Death of a Salesman, resonates with me even today.  Willy Loman, the aged and sad protagonist, wants nothing more than to be liked: by his clients, by his boss, by his sons and wife.  Being liked is what gives his life meaning.  Being liked is what gives Willy Loman purpose. 

But time waits for no man, and after a failed business trip to Boston, Willy, at the prompting of his wife, Linda, approaches his boss to see about getting a local assignment.  The grind of traveling up and down the East coast has caught up with Willy, and he would like to get a less taxing arrangement.  Howard, his boss, agrees that Willy is tired, but instead of reassigning him, he lets him go, saying that Willy is no longer permitted to represent the company.  Willy loses his temper; the scene is painful to watch. 

From there, Willy Loman’s life descends into a frantic search for something to hold onto, something that will help him make sense of losing his job and getting old while simultaneously dealing with his two wayward sons, Biff and Happy, and the discovery by one of his boys of an affair Willy had in Boston some time ago. 

Life as he knows it is unraveling, and the safe spaces are becoming fewer and fewer.  Even his own kids turn on him, pretending not to know him in public.  He is not liked.  A man who worked his entire life to pay off a mortgage lives in a house nobody wants to visit.  Which explains the first suicide attempt.  Unsuccessful.  And the second.  A success.  Few attend his funeral.  His popularity merely a figment of his imagination. 

It is difficult not to feel pity for a man who tried so hard.  As his name suggests, he was the epitome of the little guy – low man – who played by the rules and, perhaps, even dared to believe that he had a reputation – that people valued him as a human being and not only as a cog in some vast money-making machine.  But the latter really was the truth.  Willy Loman was a nobody who thought he was a somebody, and he pushed his sons, especially Biff, to believe the same.  Biff used to play football.  He was poised to be a real star on the gridiron.  But in a moment of weakness, he stole a pen, foiling the entire plan.  He made nothing of himself, preferring instead to work in the open air with his shirt off. He knew his father for what he was: a man who cheats on his wife.  Biff could never subscribe to Willy’s worldview.  The damage was too great.  The facade was exposed for what it was: a facade, a pretense, a charade. 

This play, dear listeners, has much to teach us about social media and our addiction to likes.  We only show our best selves on whatever platform and enjoy the dopamine rush when our posts garner likes or hearts.  But, if we are to be honest, are we one in the same as Willy Loman?  We not only create worlds where everyone likes us, but we actually believe them, too.  We are victims of our own desire to belong and be liked, which means that we will carefully curate what is seen on social media and what is not.  Biff, you see, in his discovery of Willy Loman’s infidelity, finds out the truth.  And it damages him.  He becomes disillusioned with it all.  He wants to quit.  He wants to walk away.  Tear his shirt off.  Work outdoors. 

What does it mean, then, to live a life searching for likes?  Perhaps the answer is staring at us from the stage.  Willy Loman dies alone.  Does the quest for more and more likes result in the exact opposite of the intended purpose?  Look at the current generation, glued to their screens, subscribed to a half-dozen social media platforms.  And depressed.  Addicted.  Anxious.  Lost.  But not old.  Irony of ironies.  A despair that did not take a lifetime to reach. 

Scott Gould can be forgiven for plot structures that are a little too on the nose and convenient. The events that unfold in his book, Peace Like A River, are neatly stacked, making the story feel a bit contrived. He can also be forgiven for being a trifle too liberal with endowing each and every character with some quirk. The formula chaffs; indeed, it compromises Gould’s ultimate thesis, which, in the end, very much manages to transcend stylistic choices and blossom into a poignant and, in this day and age of father-knows-nothing, timely rallying cry for the uncompromising importance of being a dad and what that means in terms of navigating death, aging, guilt, and loss while at the same time summoning up the guts to be hopeful despite it all. 

Elwin confesses that he hooked up with a woman who was too young for him. This admission sets the tone for a story in which time factors heavily into relationships. For the middle-aged protagonist, this creeps up in clever ways. Thom, the mildly autistic son who was the result of said one-night stand, is described as talking like a person much older than the mere thirteen years he has accumulated on this earth. Another thirteen-year-old, Lonnie Tisdale, was a boyhood friend of Elwin, and he made a decision that seemed to shape how Elwin views the world – indeed, how he came to understand his relationship with the Old Man, his father, who had once taken him to the Black River to bathe in its mysterious waters as a way to begin to heal. There is even something to be said about the motel room he rents – number 113 – that underscores how the hourglass is an unspoken character in Gould’s just over two-hundred page novel. Elwin is not the only character who experiences romance in the book. Thom, too, finds love or, likely, infatuation with the bookish daughter of the motel’s proprietor. The parallel Gould draws between his coming-of-age through the untimely death of his friend and Thom’s coming-of-age through his first tender experience with feminine charms is appropriate given the larger trajectory of his story: a man coming from despair and aimlessness to clarity and stability. It all ultimately comes down to a small piece of property and the river that glides by it. The Black River, a place where some deaths were cheated and others not, remains central to the literary tapestry Gould weaves for this very reason. Like life, the current can go any way. It can be capricious and dangerous, refreshing and, yes, fun, but, in the end, it is, in this story, the single backdrop for Elwin’s own life journey. A chapter concludes with the death of the Old Man. A chapter begins with a reordered relationship with his son. He never had any choice but to stay. Perhaps this is the real peace on offer from the river. Peace Like A River may be too scripted in parts. The arrival and fast-friendship of Willie Nelson, the cat, to Thom would give cat owners their doubts. Gould’s vision, however, manages to break free of this and other creative choices to become a story worth reading – a tale about fathers and sons and the life that occurs between and among them. That he accomplishes this feat at all is a testament to his ability to see what really matters. It is on this final point, though, that I would like to editorialize.  The literary canon is not without its stories about father/son relationships.  To be sure, it is arguably upon this sort of story that Western culture was built.  It is in our society’s DNA, which, therefore, begs the question why father/son stories do not enjoy more visibility.  The boys need help, and I contend that books like Gould’s are in a position to do just that: create mental space to ask questions about what it means to be authentically male.  Not toxic. Not some silly caricature.  But real.  In line with God’s blueprint.

Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued that there is slippage in language, resulting from the break between the signifier and the signified.  A signifier is the word we see – on a piece of paper, a billboard, a computer or smartphone screen, wherever – and the signified is what that word points to in order to give it meaning.  We see the word “cat,” for example – a signifier – and the signified would be the image we conjure up or the reality before us: a whiskered creature with soft fur, a long tail, paws, and the ability to make a sound, meow.  Or we see the word “candle” -- again, the signifier – and we envision a cylindrical object with a wick in the center of one of its flat sides that can be lit to give off light and ambiance.  This is the signified.  We have the word – the signifier – and we have what that word denotes. What might be obvious already, dear listeners, is that while I might see the word “dog” and immediately think of my beloved and incredibly needy canine companion, Arrow, someone else may see their dog or the memory of a dog or the neighbor’s dog who might not be particularly friendly.  Slippage.  The signifier and the signified are not always if rarely aligned.  One person’s cat is a cuddly, rainy-day friend.  Another person’s cat is a quick trip to the pharmacy to buy allergy medication. Where I would like to direct our collective attention is on the peculiar return of modern hieroglyphics to public discourse, if we even want to call it that.  Of course, I am talking about emojis – those cartoon-like pictures we inject into written correspondence.  Emails.  Texts.  Reviews.  Threads in discussions.   They have become an extension of our alphabet.  Different letters, if you will, that shape the tone of what we are trying to convey.  It is, I would argue, a fascinating return to what our distant ancestors did on the walls in caves and pyramids.  Pictures to capture content.  Images to communicate reality.  All very rudimentary.  A regression to how we first tried to understand ourselves and the world around us. This could mean a couple of things.  One possibility might be that the emoji phenomenon is an indication that Derrida’s so-called slippage has reached its limits.  For a species to survive, there must be common ground.  That requires shared meaning, pure and simple.  Perhaps we have reverted to the use of images to communicate precisely because they are basic.   We are starting afresh.  We are returning to the fundamentals. 

The other possibility is that the signifier/signified slippage has been so great that reconciliation is impossible and that the emoji phenomenon points directly to the absurdity that our species is poised to eliminate itself, not by some terrible war or disease, but by remaining alone and isolated.  We do not have the language to get along anymore, in other words.  We just have cute images, and we are happy to defer what they mean, what our intent in using them might be in order to avoid both conflict and, importantly, contact.  Birthrates in the Western world are already plummeting with many individuals in their childbearing years choosing to forego parenthood and instead adopt a dog.  Or a cat.  And what sort?  Whatever they can imagine.  They prefer the cave.  The cave is safe.  The cave provides shelter.  But now it is not the fire that illuminates their faces but the screen.  Always now the screen with its many hieroglyphs.  

As for which possibility is more predominant, dear listeners, I will leave it to you to decide.  Understand, though, that Jacques Derrida was very much correct in how he linked language to the health of a society.  Words have meaning, and how we use them matters.  A cat emoji might be harmless.  And so, too, a dog emoji and a smiley face.  But we have all seen the smiling poop emoji.  What will be written about us in centuries to come?  Would any of it even be recognizable to the concerned literate of today? 

Years ago, my paternal grandfather taught me about the benefits of lying fallow. It is an agrarian term, meaning to leave alone for a period of time a piece of land typically used to grow produce. Simply put, it is the act of not sowing seed.  Let the field grow as it may. No planting. No fertilizing. No weeding.  Nothing.  The idea is to let a piece of land naturally replenish itself. Rest. Not be worked.  Be. Grandfather shared this idea with me at time in my life when I was all about doing, running from task to task, doing my best to get it all done.  It was a busy time, indeed.  I was taking classes, preparing to take more, and strategizing about how the beginning of my career would look.  I was, in a phrase, getting ready to launch, which is why Grandfather’s advice came at the right time. My work as a college professor involves leading and even joining my students in mentally wrestling with ideas, but it also involves a good deal of advising.  Many times, it is not the text that matters so much as it is why my students are studying the text at all.  Students are, of course, more than just minds; they are individuals with hopes and aspirations.  A true educator knows this to be true.  We mold the whole human being, not just the brain.  We help them to become better versions of themselves in all their facets. All of this is to say that I have had many students who do not want to be in class. They are not quite ready for the workforce, and the military was never really an option, so they enroll in college, forgetting that their experience in high school was lackluster. This explains the quiet hostility I sometimes receive from those who are in class only because they did not know what else to do with their lives.  They will show up late, if at all.  Scroll mindlessly on their cell phones.  Nod off.  Neglect to turn in any work.  And, I hasten to say, stand dumbfounded when they inevitably fail the class.  They ask, Why?  I ask, Why? right back at them.  And if they do not take careful stock of themselves, then all of that time has been wasted, and the college experience takes on a bitter flavor.  It happens every year. I have grown to sympathize with these students because I know what society demands of them.  Society wants constant action, constant success.  It is a go-go-go existence that leaves no room to take a breath and reflect.  This is where the concept of lying fallow can potentially become an absolute necessity. Before I turned the page on one chapter of my life and began writing the next, I took some down time; I allowed myself to lie fallow.  I have to wonder if this wouldn’t benefit so many of my students as well.  How would it positively impact a student for them to lie fallow for a season?  Would they be replenished?  Recharged?  Would they have a better understanding of what they are being called to be, called to do in their lives?  For me, the answer is yes.  But what would lying fallow look like for you, dear listeners?  How are we hurried?  How are we inhibited from pausing to reflect on the state of our lives, where we are going, what we might like to do? Time can be a tyrant.  We only have so much of it, so the tendency is to want to fill it with accomplishment after accomplishment.  We try to use our time wisely, but is it always the prudent thing to be active 24/7?  My grandfather did not think so.  Good farmers do not think so.  And I have come to agree with them both.  Even in scripture, we are called to observe a sabbath day.  It was never a random demand.  To be sure, it is a demand that has our best interests in mind.  We were not created to be bitter or constantly tired or perpetually harried.  We were created to be.  Human beings, not human doings. You have no doubt seen the concept before.  So identify an area where you might be stymied. And let the weeds grow.  Let the rains fall.  Do not take your plow to it. It is not yet ready. The direction you seek will come in its own good time. 

In an early episode, I shared how much the Transcendentalists impacted my decision to major in English.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in specific, captured my imagination with his erudite rallying calls to trust thyself, to never imitate others, to believe in the sacredness of your own mind.  In retrospect, I can see how this would be quite appealing to a young man full of ambition and (ahem) himself; however, it was not the Sage of Concord who first introduced me to the power of language.  That honor goes to Chuck D. of Public Enemy fame.  You heard correctly, dear listeners.  Before I studied Emerson and his contemporaries with the zeal of someone parched for wisdom and direction, I was listening to songs on cassette tapes with lyrics like “fight the power” and “Never badder than bad cause the brother is madder than mad at the fact that’s corrupt as a senator.”  Looking at the lyrics now, I am amazed that I was ever able to make sense of them all those years ago.  Perhaps Chuck D.’s delivery matters.  His passion.  His intensity.  The beat was simply there to scaffold the message. 

This, I believe, was my introduction to the power of literature.  Yes, the words are important, but there is something about how they come together to become more than the sum of their parts.  A good work of literature – indeed, a good song (rap, country, pop, what have you) -- has a soul, if you will, which means that a reader seeking to understand the work dissects the language, yes, but also peers into its core.  Mulls over how the words are juxtaposed.  Intuits motivation.  Appreciates diction.  And, importantly, recognizes the work as a living thing.  Public Enemy’s songs were appealing not because of their linguistic merit, per se, so much as they were appealing, at least to one kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the late eighties, because they had a spirit.  And once I grew to understand that, I could easily pivot to a study of the so-called classics to look for the same.  Chuck D. introduced me to Ralph E.  Emerson.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And he had friends.  Thoreau.  Whitman.  Fuller.  Douglass.  Transcendentalists by name or, certainly, beneficiaries of an intellectual movement that championed individualism and self-determination.  A movement whose members labored to throw off the shackles of groupthink and mindless conformity, fighting their own power so that, as Emerson writes, we can “hitch our wagon to a star” and become all that God wants us to be. 

I would, therefore, make the following argument about the humanities: It will not perish.  Indeed, it cannot perish because we are all hardwired to seek out the boundless wisdom that can be found therein.  We can all recognize the spirit in something.  We certainly gravitate to different genres.  For me, rap music served as a gateway into poetry and prose.  I admit that sounds odd but whatever.  Our paths do not have to be orthodox.  Indeed, I submit to any one of you, dear listeners, who might now have the enormous responsibility of raising children, teaching, or even mentoring somebody that what you might perceive in your charges as silly or wasteful or nonsensical as possibly being part of a much grander plan that has more color, more texture than you can imagine.  I am a tenured full professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College.  Decades ago, playing and rewinding and playing again, rewinding again, on and on, I was a youth whose curiosity was piqued by the lyrical vehemence of a man whose life experience was nothing like my own: urban-dwelling and black.  But Chuck D. flipped a switch, illuminating a room that still overflows with urgent, impassioned voices. 

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Much has been said and written about John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. The tale of two bindlestiffs, Lennie and George, teaches readers about loyalty and love, sacrifice and justice while also imparting the value of parallelism and foreshadow in storytelling.  For those who would benefit from a refresher, Lennie and George are two Depression-era laborers who crisscross the countryside looking for work. The story opens with the two about to arrive at a ranch.   Lennie has been hiding a dead mouse in his pocket.  George, clearly his caretaker, demands that his dimwitted but powerful charge give it up.  George is the intelligent member of the pair while Lennie is simple and childlike.  After a small protest, Lennie concedes. Those familiar with this novella know that Lennie has always been enamored of soft things: mice, bunnies, puppies, and the hair of attractive women.  He got himself in some trouble at their previous place of employment, which makes readers attentive to how he might do the same at the ranch.  Lennie’s fate is practically sealed from the beginning.  Too dumb to stay out of trouble, he quickly enough gets into trouble with the wife of the boss’s son, breaking her neck as he gets lost in petting her head.  He flees.  The ranch-hands put tother a posse.  But George finds him first and, after distracting his large and simple-minded friend, shoots him in the head in an act of love and protection.  The debate continues still. 

What is interesting throughout this masterpiece is Steinbeck’s command of timing.  Before George kills his friend, Carlson, a ranch-hand who has been pestering Candy, another ranch-hand up there in years, to put his equally old dog down, finally gets his way.  Carlson says to the old man, “If you want me to, I’ll put the old devil out of his misery right now and get it over with.  Ain’t nothing left for him.  Can’t eat, can’t see, can’t even walk without hurtin’.”  to which Candy, clearly affected by the thought of losing his beloved pet replies, “Maybe tomorra.  Le’s wait till tomorra.”  Carlson is not having it, and very reluctantly, Candy gives in.  “Awright -- take ‘im,” he says before refusing to look at his dog and laying back on his bunk and staring at the ceiling. 

Carlson retrieves his Luger and gently leads the old dog outside.  The anticipation begins to build. 

Someone offers to play cards.  Someone else hears a gnawing sound coming from under the floor and suggests that it might be a rat.  Candy remains motionless.  Everybody is waiting for the gunshot.  What is, in my humble opinion, dear listeners, genius about this scene is that the time it takes to read from the moment the dog is led outside to the inevitable gunshot is, roughly, the amount of time it would really take to perform this act in real life.  Steinbeck brings the reader to that sad and charged moment in how he inserts some awkward small talk into the scene.  The reader is present with Candy and the others in those dreadful moments before Carlson pulls the trigger.  Time is leveraged in such a way as to make the killing of Candy’s dog just as painful to the reader as to Candy himself.  The event is anchored to a common passage of time -- one fictional, the other very much real – and the result delivers a gut-punch of raw emotion. 

Of course, this shooting foreshadows the final shooting.  Candy later laments that it should have been him who put down his dog.  George clearly recalls this detail when he makes the decision to “put down” his friend, Lennie.  Running through it all, however, is a pacing we are all familiar with – a sense of time that is not foreign to our everyday experience – and the overall result is the ability to see the characters as we see ourselves, flawed human beings doing our best every second, every minute, every hour we are gifted. 

Popular during medieval and Renaissance Europe, The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical concept that organizes the entirety of the universe, beginning with God and going down to the lowest of life forms.  It ranks every member of creation as a way to understand it and, hence, give deference where deference is due.  First, there is the Trinitarian God, and beneath Him, the various orders of angels. After that comes humankind, and then the animal kingdom with its proper order and then the plants followed by the minerals. 

On one hand, this cosmic hierarchy is indicative of humankind’s deep urge to organize and classify surrounding creation.  We all have a penchant for establishing order out of chaos, which, itself, is indicative of the nature that was bestowed upon us by God.  As God established order out of the formless void so, too, do we do the same in our own small but significant ways.  On the other hand, however, when we look at what humankind has done with hierarchies, in general, we see quite plainly that their use unleashes in us the baser impulses, namely to assert power over others.  We see a hierarchy, and we want to jockey toward the front or, at least, as far as we can go.  So we began to expand on the hierarchy.  No longer was it just humankind; now the hierarchy broke down to the varieties of humans. I do not want to get into an exploration of colonialism.  I have covered it here and still may cover it more down the road.  My point is that the lust for power may be humankind’s most prominent Achille’s heel.  We as a species are able to look at a thing – in this case, The Great Chain of Being – and manipulate it to the extent that it favors some and not others. We continue to this day to have conversations about inequality in our midst.  Not too long ago, the place to jockey for was decidedly male and Caucasian.  That was deemed the high point, the favored position. I submit, however, that we are currently in a far worse state of affairs.  The goal in this hierarchically-framed contest is to jockey as far to the front as possible.  Many decades ago, once again, that position was white and male.  What if the new impulse is to jockey even further than that?  Toward the angelic?  Toward God even? 

Consider, dear listeners, what I am proposing. 

The Great Chain of Being served humankind well in terms of understanding creation.  There is a ranking order.  God is at the top.  But the stain of sin prompted humankind to abuse that hierarchy – add to it classifications that benefitted some and hurt others.  But while we have largely reconciled that wrong, though, admittedly, not perfectly and not completely, the stain of sin remains, which means the Achille’s heel remains. Not vanquished as we have believed.  But morphed into an even more dangerous thirst.  Being white and male has no more appeal because it has been stamped out by an army of progressives.  Now the prize is a higher order.  No longer natural but supernatural. 

And what would be the result? 

What was the result before?  The answer is already before us.  Abuse.  Violence.  Degradation of every sort. And though believing that anybody could actually jockey toward and become the angelic or godly is the very height of delusion, this would not impede those who are convinced that they have achieved the impossible from looking down their noses at mere mortals and unleashing a torrent of ill-treatment. 

The days of colonization of the outsiders by the insiders are not over.  It has only evolved to the point where those in power have god-complexes – have an understanding of themselves that puts them far above the majority in The Great Chain of Being.  Therefore, some questions remain: How far will that majority let them run with their delusion?  How long before the law of tooth and claw takes over?  When will the majority refuse to be pacified by gods of their own making?  Though time will certainly tell, history is not without answer. 

I am no theologian; however, I know enough about the Old Testament to be able to say that Christ and His cross are prefigured in it on numerous occasions: in Adam and Noah, in Joseph and David, in the rod of Moses, the prophecies of Isaiah, and, more on the nose, the sacrificial lamb.  What the Old Testament anticipates, the New Testament fulfills, making followers of Christ, Christians or little Christs, an Easter people who are a part of an ancient story set in motion by a God who loves us – who wants to be with us for eternity.  It was in Mass recently that I realized that the crucifixion and, importantly, God’s love is actually expressed in the very first sentence in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.”  Where, you might be asking yourself, is the cross in this sentence?  I submit to you, dear listeners, that the answer can be found in Luke’s Gospel.  After Jesus, nailed to the cross, replies to one of the thieves that he will, indeed, “be with me (Jesus) in Paradise,” Luke writes, “It was now about noon and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon because of an eclipse of the sun.  Then the veil of the temple was torn down the middle.  Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit;’ and when he had said this he breathed his last.”  Just like the abyss, there was darkness in Jerusalem.  Darkness in the beginning.  Darkness at the cross.  But then a mighty wind swept over the waters and gave life to what was formless.  This wind?  The Holy Spirit, sure, but also the last breath of Christ.  An exhale in the beginning gave life; an exhale on the cross gave eternal life.  The parallels are profound.  God’s love for us is immeasurable. 

The Hebrew word for this mighty wind is ruach, but interestingly, it happens to be feminine.  Just as the Spanish word hermana means sister, abuela means grandmother, and chica means girl, ruach is grammatically feminine.  Of course, this is likely extremely significant. 

Before the arrival of Adam and Eve, each gender, male and female, existed.  To be sure, the two genders seem to be integral to the formation of the universe.  God the Father breathed out the feminine ruach and began to create.  So, too, Christ breathed out His last and ushered in New Creation.  Was that event on the cross also a male/female arrangement needed to bring in salvation? 

I have said in an earlier episode – 17 to be precise – that being made in the image of God might not necessarily mean something purely physical.  Perhaps that is the superficial interpretation.  Maybe being in His image means being creators ourselves.  As God creates, so too do we create, and the height of those efforts would be hands down the creation of human life: babies, our beloved children.  That can only be done with a male and a female.  Again, a truth that is evident in the first sentence of the Book of Genesis. 

Thus, knowing this is a step toward better knowing God.  Denying this, on the other hand, is an affront toward the very Creator of the universe, the One who established form, which is also to say rationality and order, out of the formless. 

What is it we see in our current cultural and social moment but extreme efforts to return our universe to that state of formlessness?  Where there are no rules.  Where there are no structures.  Where there is no sense, no direction, no meaning.  In that place, dear listeners, we each become our own gods, but tellingly, of worlds that are self-destructing.  Divorced from the order that God created, self-annihilation would be the only result.  Thank the Creator Himself that He shows us the way to avoid this end in the first sentence of His love story to us then tells us again when His only son issued His own ruach on the cross, completing His work as he began it. 

Inez Feltscher Stepman recently made the argument in the National Review that men should have their own space.  Before the 1990s, she writes, The Elks Club, the Virginia Military Institute and the Boy Scouts were exclusively male; however, with the fanatical push of so-called progressive ideologies, these institutions are now co-ed.  In fact, the cry to eliminate all-male spaces was vociferous, resulting in the stigmatizing of anything male, not just male only.  To be a guy, in other words, was somehow to be stained with a unique sort of sin – one that prompted some men to self-flagellate, which is to say hate themselves for being men, and others to double down.  Hence, we saw the emergence of two types of men: the Beta and the Toxically masculine.  The former reviles his masculinity and embraces the feminine while the latter inflates his masculinity to absurd and dangerous proportions. Of course, the question naturally arises, What is it to be a man?  Some individuals are adamant that gender is a construct .A man, they argue, is not so because of some physical reality: his sex.  Any person can simply opt into whatever construct they feel is best for them, genitals notwithstanding.  The whole point, the whole mission is to erase the differences between genders.  Men should not have an exclusive space because there is no longer any reason to exclude.  The barrier has come down.  The distinctions are void. This viewpoint, naturally, is not without its detractors. Enter renowned psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson.  His 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos sparked some controversy by daring to proclaim that there are, in fact, objective truths that, if held onto, can steer us away from emotional, psychological, and, yes, spiritual mayhem.  In effect, his thesis is antithetical to the Postmodern mantra that there are as many truths as there are individuals – that truth is what we make of it and nothing more.  Peterson’s boldness was embraced by many, making his book a number one bestseller; however, to others, he remains a stodgy white guy from Canada who, like every other white guy, is trying to wrest power from the so-called “other”.The debate rages even still.  Do we get to create the boundaries that define our lives, or is it really a matter of discovering the boundaries that already exist? If you have been journeying with me for any bit of time, you, dear listeners, can likely discern how I would answer this question.  I am interested in what is true, for, as the saying goes, the truth will set us free.  I am alarmed, therefore, that anybody can look around our world today and see the despondent young men – bear witness to their aimlessness, their abject loss, their lack of focus, motivation, and hope – and decide that, by virtue of their sex, they had it coming.  Who harbors this hostility?  It would be easy to name a group of like-minded thinkers who zealously champion some academically grown theory about the world, but I wonder if the zeitgeist of today has deeper roots – an epicenter that actively wants to ground all things masculine into the dust.  To return to the question, What is it to be a man?, might we now conjecture that it means to stand up for what is right and true?  If we are truly in a spiritual battle between good and evil then the enemy’s best tactic would be to take out the warriors by perverting or otherwise rejecting the traditional ways boys are formed into men.  The refrain, therefore, is the following: Let a culture of cellphones, pornography, and militant feminism mold the lads.  Fathers be quiet.  Grandfathers shut up.  The grip of the patriarchy stops here because it has always been bad. But is this true?  What does the evidence say?  The cry for manly direction is only growing.  Let us hope there are still men around to offer it. 

https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0345816021

The book, entitled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had once been required reading at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The story amounts to a revealing dialogue between man and beast, the latter at the helm of a one-student classroom.  After giving his own origin story, Ishmael, the telepathic gorilla, turns his attention toward humankind’s origin story or, at least, one version – the sort of civilizational system that compels humankind to destroy the world in order to live in it.  Humankind, in other words, is in the grip of a story designed to tear down, not build up, and it is Mother Culture that perpetuates this story, convincing listeners that there is no other way.  Those who live by this code, Ishmael calls Takers.  They are who we might call civilized.  Those who live according to a different origin story, a different way of existing on this planet, the gorilla calls Leavers.  They are the uncivilized. A significant component of Taker culture is the belief that all of creation was made for humankind.  It is taken as a given, and we can hear it in common language. Our oceans need to be pollution free. Our forests need to be managed.  Our wildlife must be protected. Our sky should be free of smog. Taker culture claims the created world as its own because Takers believe that they are the pinnacle of evolution. As Ishmael says, “the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.” What does this mean? From the beginning, two models for how to live emerge with one, by its very design, intent on destroying the other. It is the agrarian or Taker model that restricts access to food for every other creature, Leavers included. That is a message from Mother Culture, and it is one we still enact today. The expansion of Taker culture only heightens their claim to, in effect, own the world, even going so far as to actively prevent nature from taking its course.  Say an impoverished community gets too big to be able to sustain itself.  It grows even poorer. The suffering is intense. What is the ethical thing to do? Nature might restore balance in ways that only nature can, but the Taker response would certainly be different. The Taker response would be to rush resources into that community to save it. Understanding that population grows or shrinks depending on the resources it has access to, is it really the right thing to tip the scales upward, knowing that the infrastructure could not sustain a population growth?  Is that what we want? It is here that a couple of facts about the author, Daniel Quinn, need to be said. First, he had been a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gesthemani where he wanted to be a Trappist monk, but, second, after his spiritual director prematurely ended his postulancy, Quinn entered publishing and abandoned his Catholic faith. This turn of events is no small detail when it comes to understanding the morality being presented in Ishmael.  In effect, the Leaver ethic would be to let people die; the Taker ethic would be to step in to prevent it. Quinn’s case for how some human beings built a civilizational structure that is neither good for them nor for the created order around them is compelling. Where I find his argument to be problematic, though, is his deference to natural law over charitable human interaction. Yes, we may be a part of the natural world, but as humans, aren’t we endowed with the task of looking out for one another.  We belong to each other, in other words.  How does that stand up to a model asserting that famines are nature’s way of decreasing the population and, hence, mouths to feed?  I will leave it up to you, dear listeners, to answer this question. Did Quinn’s break with faith have anything to do with his maligning of what is commonly called civilization? We can only wonder why it is a gorilla and not a man who possesses all the wisdom.  Perhaps if we pull this string, the wrapping will come undone. 

https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375407