Lonely interiority and the loss of bigger things.
I am very tired of hearing about the loneliness of young men. Every week there are a handful of new articles weeping over the consequences of their large-scale isolation, with the author pitching us a new fix: sports, mentorship, therapy, enforced monogamy, etc. Whatever your pet issue, you can find a way to solve male loneliness with it. The answer(s) to the question seemingly lie right in front of us. All we need to do is find something for men to sink their time into, and their problems will go away.
What is so frustrating about this discussion — and what has exhausted my patience with it — is our unwillingness to dive down to the depths of male lack that leads to this loneliness. The understanding of the situation is purely reactive. Lonely people have less sex, so lets help men have more sex. Lonely people spend less time with friends, so we should find ways to increase their social time. Lonely people are physically less healthy, so we should help them work to improve their bodies. The constellation of symptoms born out some deeper missing become the problems in and of themselves, with marketized solutions at the ready. We believe that there is something wrong with men, but we refuse to believe that there is something wrong being done to men — that they may be losing something. What these obfuscations run cover for is a much deeper social problem that is coming for everyone, but which has just hit men first — the removal of a person’s ability to transcend themselves. Major structures that previously helped men to transcend their day-to-day life physically, intellectually, or spiritually have been completely gutted, and what could feel more empty than being purely interior?
This may sound like smuggled religiosity, but I promise you, the individual’s need for transcendence is much broader and has been driven largely by the rapid transformation of relations in secular structures. We can see this clearly when we examine those institutions that previously would’ve offered the most direct methods for transcendence: the military, the academy, and the Church.
The Military: What a Purposeless Way to Die
No one is ready to go to war here, in this country. The word ‘war’ is not in its place. In January the state used republican laicity, this time it tries to use the old nationalism, France, the tricolor flag coupled with what is their perennial trump card: ‘it’s war’. But today, this coupling is obviously aberrant. And what is more, in my view, it will not work for long.
Alain Badiou, Our Wound is Not So Recent
A recent meme spreading through social media has seen sneering posts abound about how “men used to go to war, but now they [xyz].” The crux of this joke is that historically, men would be funneled into military conflict as a formative event, and this created a fundamentally different type of man than we have nowadays. While the idea that war and violence are net goods for men is ridiculous on its face, there is a kernel of truth to the insistence that the loss of meaningful war has signaled a larger loss for men. In accepting a new, post-objective conception of war and militarism, we have fundamentally changed the institution which most clearly showed men that their bodies as bodies were things that could be transcended.
Beyond any geopolitical aims, military service throughout history offered men a dual possibility: change in victory or change in death. The body may suffer, but the soldier will be made new. Over the past 70 years, however, the function of the military has changed in a way that denies our soldiers the very possibility of real victory or martyrdom. Deployed American soldiers are now little more than beat cops in exotic neighborhoods.
When considering how we got to this point, Korea and Vietnam serve as the perfect conflicts to demonstrate just how fundamentally the Western understanding of war has shifted. In Korea, the sheer lopsidedness of the conflict did away with the possibility of coming home from war as a “victor” of any real sort. Yes, the North Koreans lost, but they lost because we killed one-fifth of their population. Yet despite the overwhelming brutality from our side, we still lost ~40,000 servicemembers. Our involvement showed us that we could win, but now we would win against technologically inferior enemies, and we would win by intentionally slaughtering civilians, and the prize we get at the end is tens of thousands of our troops dead. What was the real victory here? What glory was earned?
But then Vietnam happened, and we lost a war fought on the same logic as Korea. We weren’t fighting a just war, and now we weren’t even winning! And public opinion turned against the war as the populace saw what was happening — the bloodshed that our men were being funneled into — as a waste. Military deaths became emblematic of rot at the heart of the country. These men were not martyrs, they were victims. While the USA had never fought exclusively “just” wars, they seemed to have given up even pretending that this was the aim, or that we were the moral combatants. What honor could be found here?
Military service no longer offers the opportunity for transcendence of the body because for the aggressor states, the dual transformative doors have closed. Remotely bombing a caravan with an Xbox 360 controller with no possibility of death feels a lot less heroic than fighting even a losing battle in the jungles of Vietnam. And that is assuming the conflict being fought in is even seen as just – with Afghanistan, Iraq, Niger, Yemen, and so many other recent military actions, the idea that America cares about the justness of their conflicts has officially been abandoned. The transformative possibility of military combat has disappeared, taking with it one of the a transcendent model that men have had access to since civilization began.
So if the major institution that offered men a transcendence of the body has failed to fulfill its role, what can step in? Well, for those of the wealthier classes, transcendence of the mind has always been preferable anyway. And this is still an option, right?
The Academy: Dropping Out and Dumbing Down
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class
John Williams, Stoner
Of all the changes to life on college campuses, one that seemingly everyone can agree upon is that men are cementing their place as the minority — the disagreements are just about whether this is good or not. Women will soon outnumber men on college campuses 2-to-1. At the same time, male degree completion rates are plummeting. It has reached the point that male first-time enrollment is declining at a rate seven times that of women. Something is clearly driving men out of the university, the former site of intellectual transcendence for their sex.
Many debates have been had about the cause of this, but frankly, I do not think it matters much. What matters more, in my eyes, is the coupling of this retreat of men from the universities with the retreat of universities from their positions of educational authority into positions of credentialization and diploma-stamping. Men experienced the transcendent capability of higher education for centuries, and they are seeing this ever-expansive institution gutted before their eyes.
Capital-L Liberal education has been under attack by market forces for decades, and it seems that it may have been finally defeated. English literature programs are reporting record-low enrollment, disciplines across the liberal arts are being outright dismantled, and the STEM-ification of all educational institutions is nearly complete. All “non-productive” programs are up for review and, ultimately, cuts. While the eternal call for more men to enroll in trade schools persists in the background, universities themselves have become little more than white-collar trade schools — instead of turning out wastewater workers, elevator repair techs, or nurses, they provide a steady stream of computer engineers, finance workers, and business leaders. Those who continue on to post-graduate studies are not spared from this fate, either, with Ph.D. recipients continuing to pad out the ever-expanding (and increasingly underpaid) pool of non-tenured professors. If you want a job with your hands, you go to trade school. If you want a job with your brain, you go to grad school. But if you want to really learn, and to grow through learning, you simply don’t. You are not a member of the cult of knowledge reaching back to Greece. You are a job seeker building connections on Linkedin.
All of this has been packaged in a number of ways, with proponents for the evisceration coming from both the left (celebrating the implosion of “oppressive” or culturally chauvinistic educational structures) and the right (celebrating the dismantling of educational structures that are, apparently, not chauvinistic enough). What is lost in this shift in academic purpose is any sense that education can connect our students (and particularly our men) to anything bigger than themselves. If our universities become STEM factories focused on producing members of the knowledge economy, the only thing they are connected to are the forces of capital that already pervade every other aspect of their lives. For the contemporary STEM student, there is no connection to the history of science, or the philosophies behind our approaches to technology, or even the beauty of pure math — these things are taught only insofar as they can be tools to do specific jobs. And for the non-STEM student (to the extent that their department even still exists), the ever-encroaching presentism of contemporary educational theory does away with any possibility for connection with something outside the self. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate, speaking against this very process taking place at Howard University, put to words the severity of the loss that is experienced in this current model of higher education:
Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings. The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. . . . This classical approach . . . means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.
When a college defunds its classics department or slashes history and literature budgets to build a new CS program, all students suffer. Those newly credentialed knowledge workers may be monetarily fine, but they are separated from a history and a tradition that we considered important for the formation of a healthy polity for centuries, but which we suddenly determined was superfluous at best. Connection to the eternal seems to have been given up for a few decades of personal capital accrual, and men are staring down the barrel of this reality.
All of this brings us back to our initial note on men’s participation at college. With enrollment and completion trends in view, the complete loss of a transcendent possibility for men in education becomes clear: men are not only dropping out and failing to enroll at staggering rates, but those that do are now being treated to little more than that vacuous “acquisition of labels and . . . acquisition of jargon.” This loss hurts both sexes, but with women still playing catch-up to the financial benefits that a (newly eroded) college education conferred on men for centuries, the impact on them is still yet to be seen. For men, though, the work is done: we’ve lost the realm of intellectual transcendence, and everyone seems to be cheering it on. It was once understood that by attending a university, you would be in conversation with all those who came before you (and would be continuing the conversation for all those to come after). Knowledge for knowledge’s sake was valued. That this experience was limited to a particular racial, sexual, or economic class does not reduce its value. If anything, the fact that men have had this opportunity stripped from them only after the widespread entrance of women and ethnic minorities into the university ought to raise the eyebrows of anyone shortsightedly celebrating the “progressive” attacks on how we teach. The academy has killed its past, and its future seems stillborn at best.
Tragically, the closing of an intellectual route to transcendence is not the final stop on this tour of loss. The body no longer offers an escape, nor does the mind. Yet surprisingly, the guardians of the spiritual also seem more than happy to give up their own position as de-facto portals to the divine, placing themselves firmly alongside their secular companions in abandoning any opportunity for escape.
The Church: Losing the Spirit, Losing the Men
One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world—it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Tremling: Repetition
One of the easiest pitches to make for center-right pundits responding to male loneliness is the call for a return to Christianity. The argument is simple, but it is worth addressing, since the loss of a spiritual transcendence is potentially even more complete than the physical and intellectual losses discussed earlier. For these pundits and the religious leaders they channel, the problem and solution can be stated as such:
- Young men are leaving the Church, which is bad.
- Young men are lonely because they lack strong relationships.
- Churches provide in-house social networks that historically gave men connections.
- Providing men in-house social networks will by default reduce male loneliness.
- Tying men’s relationships to the Church will by default make them return to the Church.
- We should fight male loneliness as a way to bring them back to Church.
The argument is that if young men are lonely, Church leaders can leverage that to bring them back to this place of historical spiritual transcendence. And for those denominations for whom the ritual and structure of Church still matter, they “know” that what they have to offer will work — it’s what the structures were built for.
Of course, this belief is not only simplistic, but it is wrong. No matter the denomination being represented, mainstream speakers from these faiths share one crucial element that removes their ability to grapple with the transcendent nature of this issue: a baseline Puritanism.
By Puritanism, I am referring not to the lay, contemporary usage of the word — it is not that these sects are all hyper-conservative and too restrictive to bring back young men. Rather, I mean a literal, Calvin-derived, 17th-century Puritanism in their thought and understanding of what it means to be Christian. For them, Church is overdetermined, simultaneously hyperfocused on the individual’s existence while attempting to erase what it means to be an individual within a (religious) set. It is not about developing the self, or the self as it relates to the world, or the self as it relates to God. It is about building that ever-elusive singular relationship with Jesus while ignoring the transcendental call implied therein. Christianity becomes not a spiritual project, but an interpersonal one, between Man and Christ as Man.
The Church ought to be well-oriented to bring men a base-level answer to their question of transcendence, or at least the building blocks thereof. Even if you don’t know your charism or your call, Christianity believes that there is something indelible about you, something that binds you to others, something that makes you part of a whole, something that transcends. But American Christianity today seems almost entirely soul-denying. The soul, that immaterial essence of a man, ever-present and linking him to all the angels and saints, functionally does not exist — it is only invoked as a future state. You will be a soul in the afterlife (if the denomination you are in even still believes in one), but for now, the soul is inert. It is theoretically there, and we can do things that help or hurt it, but it doesn’t mean anything that it exists. Invocations of the soul seem only to occur when it can be tied back to the material — doing x in the world will cause y to happen to your soul which will lead to z happening to you as a person. Even we Catholics, who still accept the communion of the saints and the ability for saintly intercession, abandon many of the most transcendental elements of our faith. Exact numbers vary based on survey methodology, but it is safe to say that over half of American Catholics do not believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and they are increasingly abandoning belief in things as foundational as the existence of heaven and hell. Ground has been ceded to the material, and now the Church in America is little more than a social club with a small set of true believers. Is there any surprise then that people are fleeing —with men leading the charge?
Unfortunately, the discussions of the impacts of these retreats by men buy into the same crypto-materialist Puritanism that is the cause of their issues. They complain that men are leaving and bemoan the harm this does, but only as it impacts their day-to-day lives. These people ostensibly believe in an afterlife, but there doesn’t seem to be any care for the souls of these men — there is a social and material concern almost exclusively. If one did not have the ability to transcend the body through just war, or the mind through education and a connection to history, past generations could at least turn to the fact of their soul and its ties to all other Christians through baptism. But with the current state of American Christianity, that tie has been nearly completely severed. For the first time we are about to be on our own.
Loneliness in men is definitely a problem, and I do not say all of the above to try and minimize this. There is real pain for these young men who don’t have friendships or relationships and who don’t see a future that contains either. I also do not deny that there are material things that contribute to it — isolating jobs, the loss of “third spaces,” social media, and any number of other things deserve responses due to the base reality that they are harming our citizens.
But in the same way that the Child Tax Credit and SNAP serve as bandages covering for a lack of a true social safety net in this country, efforts to roll back the signs of loneliness serve only to hide the emptiness, and lack the ability to truly catch someone once they begin to fall. If we are unable to put the cap back on social media or upend the way jobs are structured, are we just to give up? Is there nothing to be done?
This is ultimately where transcendence comes into play. If I am simply a body moving around the world, bumping into other bodies, then the loss of social connection is the loss of everything. Whatever you think of the military, the academy, or the Church, it is undeniable that they at some point gave men something to catch them once they began to fall. And when these structures with at least some socially useful potential cease to serve this purpose, the energy of young men will either be channeled nowhere or into places that are much more dangerous. If we want to tackle the problems caused by having slews of unmoored young men in our society, it is time to begin taking seriously the possibility that people need something beyond themselves and their immediately material reality for a life well lived — and that maybe we owe them some options.
Jitter 
Great read, from a lonely Brodie 🥲
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