Knowledge of Men Archives | The Art of Manliness https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/ Men's Interest and Lifestyle Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:47:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Podcast #1,095: Masculinity as Confident Competence https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1095-masculinity-as-confident-competence/ Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:47:49 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191775 There’s a lot of debate these days about what it means to be a man. But maybe the answer is simpler than we think, and a lot of masculinity just comes down to confident competence. A broad set of know-how. The ability to get stuff done. The capacity to move through the world with purpose […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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There’s a lot of debate these days about what it means to be a man. But maybe the answer is simpler than we think, and a lot of masculinity just comes down to confident competence. A broad set of know-how. The ability to get stuff done. The capacity to move through the world with purpose and skill.

As someone who’s lived several lives in one, Elliot Ackerman certainly embodies that ethos. He’s a decorated Marine, a former CIA paramilitary officer, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, and now the writer of A Man Should Know, a column at The Free Press that explores the small but significant skills that shape a man’s life.

Today on the show, Elliot and I talk about why young men are struggling, how intention, discipline, and competence can change the way a man carries himself, and a few of the specific skills a man should know — from how to wear a watch to how to give a eulogy.

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Connect With Elliot Ackerman

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,094: How the World Wars Shaped J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1094-how-the-world-wars-shaped-j-r-r-tolkien-and-c-s-lewis/ Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:38:45 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191603 When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers — they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism, and sacrifice.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle Earth. We explore how both world wars shaped the perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis, found their way into works like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infused their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, and timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the Inklings, and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling.

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Connect With Joseph Loconte

Book cover for "The War for Middle-Earth" by Joseph Loconte, inspired by podcast episode 1094, featuring WWII planes flying over London’s Tower Bridge with a cloudy sky backdrop.

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Apple Podcast.

Overcast.

Spotify.

Listen on Castro button.

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people think of JR Tolkien and CS Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from the bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside, it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers, they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism and sacrifice. 

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle-earth. We explore how both world wars shaped perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis found their way into works like The Lord in the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infuse their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the inklings and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth.

All right, Joseph Loconte, welcome back to the show.

Joseph Loconte:

Brett, it’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called The War for Middle-earth, and this is where you explore how both World War I and World War II shaped the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Why did you decide to do a deep dive into how these wars affected these guys?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think particularly the Second World War, as I began reading more and researching more, it became obvious, Brett, that the real action is the Second World War. Both men were affected profoundly by World War I — impossible not to be affected if you fought it, if both those men did and they survived. It was a traumatic experience for both, and I think it helped to shape their imaginations. But the Second World War is where the action is because now they are living through a cataclysmic event. It’s an existential crisis for Great Britain from 1939 to about 1945 really. And that’s when they’re writing their most important works, the works that we associate with these men. The Lord of the Rings, The Screw Tape Letters, The Great Divorce, and then the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. All that is going on in those nightmare years between 1939 and 1945.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so to understand these works, you have to understand World War II.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s exactly right. And you have to understand, I think Brett is also from the British perspective, not the American perspective, because as my British friends like to remind me, we showed up late to that war.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, they saw it firsthand during the Blitz as getting bombed day in and day out. It was brutal.

Joseph Loconte:

Think about it, Brett. Let’s just take the London Blitz for a second. 76 consecutive nights save one of aerial bombardment on the city of London, and within a few days it’s millions, literally millions of people, women and children mostly evacuated from London into the countryside. And this is the way that CS Lewis gets the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. Think about how it starts about children sent away because of the air raids into an old house with an old professor out in the countryside. He writes in the opening lines to The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939. So the war becomes a spark for their imagination.

Brett McKay:

Well, you mentioned World War I had a big impact on them and their experience in World War I carried over to their experience of World War II. Both of these men fought in World War I. What were the respective experiences like?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, both of them served as a second lieutenant in the British expeditionary force. They served in France. Tolkien was sent to the SOM in 1916 and the opening day, the Battle of July 1st, 1916, is still the single bloodiest day in British military history. Nearly 20,000 soldiers killed on the opening day. Tolkien will arrive a few days later, but the battle of the P song will rage on for months. And he lost most of his closest friends in that war, as did CS Lewis who arrives on the western front in France on his 19th birthday, happy Birthday, CS Lewis. And here you are with bullets flying a mortar shell will go off close to Lewis. It obliterates his sergeant and fragments of it strike him in the chest, the hand he thinks he’s going to die. And so it’s a profoundly difficult grief stricken moment for both of these men. And there’s no question in my mind that you carry not just the physical wounds of physical scars, but the emotional scars of that into your adult life.

Brett McKay:

Are there any instances in their later writings where you can see the influence of their experience in World War I show up?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think, and other authors have looked into this. John Garth, for example, who’s written a wonderful book on Tolkien and the Great War, lemme read you a few lines just from The Hobbit here, Brett, which Tolkien published in 1937. He wrote The Hobbit in 33, publishes it in 37. Here’s a few lines. He’s describing the goblins. “The goblins are cruel, wicked, bad hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones hammers and swords, daggers, pick-axes, tongs they make very well. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once for wheels and engines and explosions, always delighted them.”Now what does that sound like? It sounds like the diary of a guy who served in the mechanized slaughter of the First World War, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also see the influence of World War I and Tolkien’s writing. The way he describes Mordor. Mordor is just sort of this desolate hot, gray, ugly place. And during World War I, that’s what a lot of Europe looked like.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And he says explicitly in a couple of places in his letters that the advanced to Mordor with Frodo and Sam when they go into the dead marshes and the line from Sam is there are dead things, dead things in the water. And Martin Gilbert, who wrote one of the definitive books on the Battle of the Somme, says Tolkien is describing exactly what a soldier would’ve experienced in with these craters created by the mortars filling up with water, men, soldiers would slip into them die, and they’d be there for days or weeks on end. So it’s a vivid, explicit memory from the First World War.

Brett McKay:

And what about Lewis? Because he’s known for his Christian apologetics, but it seems like World War I kind of entrenched his atheism that he had then.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, think about the poetry he’s writing in 1917 to 1919 his book of poems. This is an atheist raging against what seems to be an unjust universe. And if there is a God, he’s a sadist. Let us curse our master air, we die, the good is dead. I mean, it’s pretty grim stuff. I think it does deepen his atheism. But at the same time, I think it helps to launch him on a spiritual quest because he’ll begin to figure out that his materialism is unsatisfying. Because Lewis can’t get away from the fact that he has these profound experiences of joy and experience of beauty. And he can’t, at the end of the day conclude that it means nothing, that there’s nothing behind it. And so that’s part of his spiritual question. Tolkien, of course, will play a huge role in his conversion to Christianity.

Brett McKay:

You spent a lot of time in the book discussing the cultural mood that overtook the West after World War I. We typically think of it as an age of cynicism and disillusionment, the lost generation. And you do that because you argue, and a lot of other historians argue the aftermath of World War I planted the seeds for World War II. Tell us more about the cultural mood of that time period and how did CS Lewis and Tolkien respond to that?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, it’s a big question, Brett. Lemme take a stab at it. Barbara Tuchman, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Guns of August, she describes the mood by the end of the First World War. She puts it in one word, disillusionment. Disillusionment. And what are people disillusioned with? They’re disillusioned with the ideals of Western civilization, the political and religious ideals. So democracy, liberal democracy, capitalism, the ethics and the principles of religion, the idea that individuals matter and have dignity. I mean, it was hard to maintain this concept of the heroic individual men and women making individual decisions that matter. The whole concept of virtue. All of that seemed to just vanish into the killing fields of 1914 to 1918. So disillusionment. And of course that just creates a vacuum. People still have a yearning to believe, a yearning for the transcendent. And instead of reaching for the old faiths, the great historic faiths, they’re reaching for what you might call political religions. So it’s no coincidence, Brett, that what do you see being launched in the 1920s and thirties in terms of political and social movements? Well, eugenics, think about that. The movement of eugenics, the pseudo pseudoscientific idea of eugenics takes hold in Europe and in the United States as well. Fascism, Naziism and communism, they all take flight in the light of the carnage of that first world war. And Lewis and Tolkien have a ringside seat to that in Great Britain.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also talk about psycho-analysis really rose to prominence during this period too, because people were looking for meaning because they didn’t see any. And they said, well, maybe the best we can do is lay on a couch and talk about our childhoods.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And Freud of course, really comes into his own in the 1920s, is booked the future of an illusion. He goes after religion as a psychosis, and that becomes a dominant view. And that influenced CS Lewis when he was an atheist in a profound way because he thought, well, religions are just wish fulfillments, wish fulfillments. That’s Freud. And Lewis has to shake himself loose of that thinking. And he does in his first kind of spiritual autobiography, the Pilgrim’s Regress, which he published in 1933, a couple of years after he became a Christian, he goes after Sigmund Freud with an ax, rhetorically speaking. He realizes this is all kind of begging the question with Freud, what is it that we truly wish for? So yeah, there’s a real influence of psychoanalysis. Think about the ideologies, the forces that are pressing on these guys as they’re starting to write their epic work spread. And this is what’s so deeply encouraging to me. I think that they are deliberately pushing back against these ideologies, the totalitarian state, the idea that the individual doesn’t matter, religion as a psychosis, the idea that there is nothing heroic about human life and think about what they’re writing, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, the Space trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia. They are deliberately pushing back against the cultural literary establishment of the day.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you talk about Tolkien started this pushback even before he wrote The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings as a professor at Oxford. What people often forget about Tolkien was that besides being a fantastic fantasy writer, he was a first rate scholar and one of his expertise was in Beowulf.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes, that’s exactly right. I think that was probably the most important work for him professionally and personally, this Scandinavian hero from the sixth century who takes on grendel these monsters, Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. And he translated that work. He taught on it for decades, and it clearly influenced his imagination about the idea of the heroic, the individual who goes out to meet danger and doesn’t flinch. And he’s doing it not for his own personal glory, but he’s doing it because there’s a deep need to protect the innocent from great harm. And you see how Beowulf just works its way through his great imaginative works. You’re absolutely right. And that’s a deliberate pushback though. He’s trying to retrieve. I think Brett Tolkien and Lewis both are trying to retrieve the concept of the epic hero, but they’re reinventing him for the modern mind in the 20th century, and that’s part of their great achievement.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You talk about Tolkien got that idea from Norse mythology besides Beowulf, he devoured, he loved the myths of the North, but this idea of the tragic hero, like you stand up for something because it’s right, even though you know there’s a good chance you’re going to fail.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. There’s something about the idea of your back is to the wall, but you’re not going to back down. You’re going to die on your feet. And that appeals to both these men. The thing about Lewis, he said himself, outside of the Bible, the most important work on his professional life piece of literature would’ve been Virgil’s aad. And what’s the aad? Anas is this heroic figure who takes on this great calling, this great task, the founding of Rome. It’s the founding myth of ancient Rome. He’s kind of a reluctant hero and he has to face all kinds of dangers. So both these men were drawn to these epic stories of the heroic quest, and that’s what drew them together in friendship. One of the huge threads in their friendship.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about how they met because that was really interesting. But yeah, so Tolkien, he was a devout Catholic. He was using Beowulf professionally, but also personally on this mission. I’m going to push back against all this stuff I’m seeing during this time in the interwar period, CS Lewis, as you said, he was an atheist, but you describe how his love of classics and of myths, that’s the thing that eventually led him to his conversion to Christianity.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think one person we have to mention in this journey is George McDonald, the Scottish author, 19th century Scottish author who in his fiction, he imbues fiction with a sense of, I don’t know how else to say it except a transcendent. There’s something enchanting about McDonald and what Lewis said about McDonald. He first picked him up, fantastic, his fictional work in 1916 in the middle of the first World War. And Lewis said, when he read that book, he said, I knew after a few hours that I had crossed a great frontier. And that when McDonald had done was he had helped to baptize his imagination. Lewis’s phrase. Now, I’m not sure I know exactly what that means, Brett, the baptize your imagination. But Lewis went on further to say it helped him to learn to love goodness, this skeptical atheist, learning to love goodness through this author of imaginative fantasy. So that was a template in some ways, I think for Lewis, profound influence on his literary life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean he talks later on about the role of myth, like Nor Smith Greek myths and his conversion. So the McDonald work helped him become a theist, but then he talks about his conversion to Christianity with that famous Addison’s walk with Tolkien where he had this conversation. He’s like, yeah, I can actually say I’m a Christian now. But Lewis talks about this idea of the true myth.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. What does he mean by the true myth?

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And this is the conversation in Addison’s walk with Hugo Dyson, a JRO, Tolkien and CS Lewis After dinner, they’re walking and Lewis’s great hangup. And this kind of went back to Freud was Christianity. It’s just like all the other pagan myths. That’s what he’s thinking more or less up until that moment. It doesn’t have any truth value. It’s a nice story. It’s an inspiring story. Tolkien challenges him because Tolkien’s understanding of myth was, there’s the great story, the Christian story. God becomes a man. The God man dies for our sin rises from the dead. The person of Jesus. That’s the great myth. Myth meaning, not that it’s not true, but it has this sort of epic feel, heroic feel. It expresses our deepest aspirations and longings in that sense, it’s mythic. But what Tolkien helps Lewis to see is Christianity. It’s a myth that became fact. And the reason CS Lewis was so drawn to these other pagan myths is because they were derivative of the great myth. They were splintered fragments of the true light as Tolkien put it. And that’s the intellectual breakthrough Brett, for CS Lewis on Addison’s walk when he begins to grasp for the first time, wait a minute, Christianity has the ring of truth, the myth that became fact, that’s the breakthrough. And within a matter of days, he becomes a Christian.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about 1926, because that’s the year Lewis and Tolkien met.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What was that initial meeting like and how did they meet?

Joseph Loconte:

It didn’t go well. I’ve served the different colleges and faculties faculty meetings. They’re in a faculty meeting and they’re arguing over the curriculum. And we won’t get into the weeds here, but they’re just debating what should be taught, what should be emphasized. The older languages, the older literature or more medieval literature, they’re on different sides of this debate. And so they are circling each other like tigers in the wild. But that initial tension and opposition, it turns into friendship. I think a huge step was when Tolkien invites CS Lewis, this probably within a matter of months, I think, to join a reading club. And Brett, the reading club was Icelandic sagas. Only Oxford Dawns would do this, right? They get together to read Icelandic sagas in their original Icelandic and Tolkien invites Louis, and they discover this common love of these epic stories and also a love of language. And that’s the beginning I think, of the friendship in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So they started off being part of this book club, this book group. When did they start critiquing and workshopping each other’s writing?

Joseph Loconte:

That’s a great question. There’s another turning point in the friendship, and I think this was in around 1931, I think it was just before this Lewis’s conversion, that Tolkien shares with CS Lewis, the story of Baron and Lutheran, the Elvis Princess and the Mortal Man. And he wrote this really during the first World War, modeled on his relationship with his wife Edith. It was the story that Tolkien said was closest to his heart, and he’s got a draft of it and he sends it to CS Lewis to get his feedback. Now you think about that. This is a deeply personal kind of story. Emotionally Tolkien is really invested in it. He sends it to Lewis to see what he’s going to do with it. Does he have any advice? And what he does is so crucial to the relationship. He writes Tolkien back, he says, I’ve never had such a pleasant evening reading a story like this.

I’m paraphrasing now, and I’m going to send you pages of critique. Quibbles will follow. He sends off I think about 10 pages of critique of the story to improve it. And Tolkien will incorporate many of Lewis’s suggestions. But the point here, Brett, is that that’s a moment of vulnerability because authors, being an author myself, I don’t like sending manuscripts that are not done really completed to anybody to read. This is an uncompleted manuscript. He sends it to his friend, it’s close to his heart, and his friend responds beautifully. And if he had not, I think the relationship would’ve collapsed. But instead, it’s a window into both their hearts, and it’s the beginning of what’s going to become a really profoundly important and transformative friendship for both of them.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s a good lesson on friendship. If you want friends, you have to be vulnerable sometimes. Yes. And what made their friendship so unique was that they could both give and receive criticism. And that’s hard to do. And they could talk about everything too, like their writing, their spiritual stuff, intellectual stuff. And as you said, it became a transformative friendship for both of them. Tolkien, he wrote this in his diary talking about Lewis. He said, this friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good. And something else that brought them together that you talk about in the book was that they started what you call a conspiracy of Don’s at Oxford. What do you mean by that?

Joseph Loconte:

The conspiracy of Dons? Well, there were different things they were doing. They had this little club of they’re going to push back against bad trends in the curriculum. So they have these Dons like-minded Dons who are trying to hold on really to the classical medieval Christian tradition and making sure that that is upfront and center in the curriculum. So that’s part of the conspiracy. But then what that kind of evolves into with Tolkien and Lewis as the anchor is of course the inklings. And these are like-minded Christian authors who decide, look, we’ve got to be engaged in this cultural fight against the modernist movement in literature, which is so dehumanizing, the disintegration of human personality, anti heroic. We’re going to push back against that. So the inklings come together right around in an early 1930s after Lewis’s conversion, and they’re meeting in Lewis’s rooms at Malin College every Thursday night. They move to Friday later on. But every week for something like, I don’t know, 15 years almost without fail, Brett, these ink links with Lewis and Tolkien as the anchor will meet every week to share their latest literary creations, a portion of it, read it out loud, and then to be critiqued by these other authors in the room. Pretty scary stuff if you’re an author.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you talk about CS Lewis in a letter to Tolkien, he even wrote, he says, look, the world, they’re not writing the kind of books we like to read, like the inspiring Noble books. And so he says, we’re going to have to write them ourselves.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. That’s exactly right. In 1936, this conversation tos, we’re going to have to write them ourselves. So what happens? They have a pact. You could argue this is part of the conspiracy of the Dons to push back against the establishment. They make a pact. Tolkien is supposed to write a time travel story. Lewis is supposed to write a space travel story. Tolkien doesn’t ever finish his time travel story. He starts and doesn’t finish it. But then he’ll publish The Hobbit in 1937 and almost immediately starts writing the Lord of the Rings. Lewis publishes out of the Silent Planet, the first of the Space trilogy. And what that story, what trilogy does, Brett, we can get into it more, is it’s retelling really the story of the fall, the biblical story of the fall. And it’s using this mythic literature and the genre of science fiction to do it. It’s a profound reflection on the nature of evil and the tragedy of the human condition.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about The Hobbit. So Tolken finished that first draft in 1933, world War ii. You could start seeing, something’s going to happen here soon with The Hobbit. We typically think of it as a children’s story. Did he write it primarily as a child story or was he trying to do something bigger with it?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, he writes it primarily as a child story because he was telling it to his children. He just loved to read stories to his kids and make up stories and share them with his children. So that really was aimed at children. But because of Tolkiens, just sensitivity, his maturity, his depth as an adult, you read that story and it’s speaking to adults as much as it’s speaking to children. So he had high expectations, let’s put it this way, high expectations for what his children could and should learn. And Lewis is the same way. Even as they’re writing for children, they want to expose them to the realities of this life, the tragedy, the darkness of evil, but also the capacity for individuals to fight against the darkness. They want to introduce him to the problem of dragons, the problem of evil, but also to heroes who know how to slay dragons. So it’s speaking to two audiences at the same time. I think Brett is safe to say.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And Tolkien said that this idea of battling dragons, battling evil, that can be done by regular people. And I think he even said that he patterned the hobbits after the ordinary working class people he fought with during World War I.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. He literally says in one of his letters that his Sam Gaji is indeed based on the English soldier with whom I served in the first World War and considered so far superior to myself. That’s how he describes it. So one of the most beloved characters in all of modern fiction, the Hobbit is based on the English soldier in a trench.

That’s fascinating, isn’t it? That’s fascinating. But dragons, both these men really saw the dragon as the embodiment of radical evil. There’s a wonderful speech, an address that Tolkien gave in January of 1938 as the storm clouds are gathering in Europe. Brett, the Gathering storm, the totalitarian states, Italian fascism, German Nazism, and of course the Soviet Union. He delivers this talk in 1938. It’s supposed to be a talk to children, young children about dragons. And he gets into some pretty serious stuff about the nature of the dragon, the embodiment of evil. And there’s a line there that I love in this speech. He says, dragons are the final test of heroes, the final test of heroes. We are called to engage against the darkness. And he’s delivering this message to kids. Amazing.

Brett McKay:

So he started the Lord of the Rings in 1937. Then he worked on it sporadically throughout World War ii. Can you see instances in that book you can point to and say, yeah, this was definitely influenced by World War II right here?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, that is a fabulous question, and I’ve dealt with it some in my book and more dissertations need to be written about this. If you think about the Battle of ER fields, for example, I think what’s going on there, this defiance, let me read you a few lines from the Battle of Peller fields, and I’m going to connect it to the war moment. Stern now is ER’s mood and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come hither for he thought to make a great shield wall at the last and stand and fight there on foot till all fell and do deeds of song on the fields of Lenor. If you think about what Britain is doing from 1939, particularly up until about 1942, Britain is alone. Britain is hanging by a thread, an existential thread.

The Battle of Britain, the Blitz on London, all of Europe, Western and central Europe is occupied by the Nazi. The United States is nowhere near to joining this war. The Soviet Union is up to its mischief. France has fallen. They’re alone. And what Winston Churchill does as the Prime Minister is he delivers speeches like that. I have nothing to offer for blood toil, tears and sweat. We will fight them on the beaches. And that rhetoric, that oratory is in the air and justice Churchill is helping to inspire the British people to stand against the darkness of fascism. You have to imagine that that British spirit is also working its way on Tolkien’s imagination as he’s writing out some of these passages in the Lord of the Rings.

Brett McKay:

I don’t know if you came across, I don’t remember reading this in the book, but did you come across any instances where Tolkien or Churchill cross paths, or where Churchill commented on Tolkiens work at all? Cause it seemed like they were kind of like Tolkien and CS Lewis. They were romantics like Churchill.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, yeah. An appreciation for the great epic hero. They’re all in that place. I have not yet found any example of where the two of them ever met. The closest thing I can think of is when and around 1939 or so, the British government reaches out to Tolkien because they want to give him training to be a codebreaker, a code breaker for the foreign service and to work at Bletchley Park. And he gets several days of training and code breaking because he’s a language guy and they think, Hey, this guy could probably help us. And the end of the day, they won’t need his services. But if he had become a codebreaker, he may well have met Churchill in that context.

Brett McKay:

Well, that’s a good thing to point out about both these men during the war, they write these big epic books, particularly Tolkien, but CS Lewis is very prolific during this time. But this wasn’t their full-time job. They were professors and they had really heavy schedules with that. And then they were also contributing to the war cause Tolkien did that code breaking training, and Lewis did civil defense stuff. He was an air raid warden for the Home Guard.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons. This is such an encouraging story to me, Brett, and challenging story, because with all these responsibilities and having served as a professor myself, knowing what’s involved in that, if you care about your students, you’re grading papers, you’re going to faculty meetings, you’re doing academic research, you’re doing extra war work as well. So when exactly are they writing these great epic stories that at least initially they’re not getting paid for? Well, they’re stealing away time from other things. They’re writing in the evenings, they’re writing on weekends. And what does that tell us, Brett? It tells us they have to write. There’s something in them. It’s part of their sense of calling. I think as Christian scholars and writers, they can’t not write. It’s part of what they have to do. And I think also their sense that their own culture, their civilization needs these stories Right now at this moment of cultural crisis, the language that Winston Churchill used in one of his speeches after the disastrous Munich Pact, giving Hitler Czechoslovakia, effectively, Churchill talks about the need to recover Marshall Vigor moral strength and Marshall vigor. Well, there’s a political element to that, but there’s a cultural element, and I think these guys sensed Britain. It needs stories of heroism, of valor, of sacrifice for a noble cause at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the inklings, the stated purpose was, okay, we’re going to get together, critique each other’s work writing. But it sounds like a lot of the meetings, it started off like that, but then it would just kind of wander or they’d just start discussing other stuff. When did they start going beyond their stated purpose? What kind of things did they discuss there?

Joseph Loconte:

We don’t really have any transcribed notes from this. We can only speculate a little bit from the letters from Tolkien and Lewis. There’s one letter from Lewis describing the inklings to a friend. He says, we gather the talk about literature, but always we talk about something better. I love that phrase, Brett, and you just wonder what it was these guys were talking about, I suspect, because most of them, members of the inklings had served in the First World War, their combat veterans. And I think there was some of that discussion about the Great War and what came out of that. So I think that’s some of it. They also had just a wonderful sense of humor. I spoke to various people, interviewed here for the book, and Owen Barfield was one of the members of the inklings and his grandson also named Owen Barfield, who’s done a lot of thinking about the inklings shared with me. These guys just, yeah, they loved a good pint of beer and they had a great sense of humor. So who knows what they were talking about in some of those sessions, but boy, do have been a fly on the wall.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Lewis even said about that idea of laughter and humor. He said, there’s no sound I like better than adult male. Laughter.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yes. The chapter in his wonderful book, the Four Loves the chapter on Friendship, which I think is one of the most magnificent pieces of writings, reflections on male friendship that you’re ever going to find. It is drawn from his experience with the inklings and the idea that we find ourselves amongst our betters. We don’t deserve to be in this amazing circle of people and with our drinks on our elbows and the fire is blazing and something opens up in our minds, something even beyond the walls of this world. And he goes on to just talk about what an amazing gift it is. Who could have deserved this kind of fellowship that’s coming out of the inklings that’s in the chapter in the Four Loves. But of course, the theme of Friendship, Brett, it is central if you think about it to the Lord of the Rings and to the Chronicles and Narnia. And that is not accidental, the intense camaraderie that these men felt when they fought in the First World War with their comrades. I think they wanted to recapture something like that. And so they were always forming these reading groups. And then the inklings became the great haven of sanity, a beachhead of resistance, I like to call it, against the cultural darkness and madness and rage of the day.

Brett McKay:

And I was impressed. They kept it up even during the darkest moments of World War ii. I mean, they could have said, look, there’s some bigger more important things going on. London’s getting bombed every night. Do we really need to get together in a writing group and drink beer? But they’re like, no, we have to do that.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s like they felt that it was essential probably for them in their own emotional, intellectual, spiritual lives, but I think they thought there’s something necessary here in the writing that we’re going to do. They couldn’t have possibly imagined the impact that their writing was going to have. But let me read you a few lines from one of the students. It speaks to your point here, Brett, one of the students of Tolkien and Louis describing the impact that these men had on her generation as they’re teaching in the classroom, as they’re going back to these great classic works, a Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, the need to reintroduce these concepts in the modern era for the modern mind. Here’s a few lines from Helen Wheeler. She says this, what this meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduates was what happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in life.

Indeed, they were the same. Now, think about that. What a profound thing to say from this young woman. What happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in real life. In other words, the Great books are great books because they embody the human condition. They teach us great truths about human life and human experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and those ideals, the highest ideals that are expressed in those great books. They were needed at that moment of crisis. That’s what I think Helen Wheeler is understanding. We needed to be reminded of these incredible struggles and virtues at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

Another quote that stands out to me from CS Lewis talking about why you should just keep doing normal things when everything else around you just seems like it’s going crazy. This is shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, and everyone’s kind of freaking out about nuclear apocalypse. CS Lewis said this, if we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Wow, that’s a beautiful line. And it was so consistent in his life, Brett, and he lived that way. And the only way we can understand his incredible productivity, particularly during the Second World War, which I’m trying to emphasize in the book, is the sense of urgency. It’s not fatalism, but it is a sense of urgency. They’ve got to get on with their callings in the worst possible circumstances. And you’re probably familiar, Brett, with that incredible sermon that he delivered learning in wartime. This is within a few weeks after Germany invades Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, and they’re expecting a German invasion at any moment. And he speaks to these very anxious undergraduates in church. And learning in wartime has a very similar theme that if we wait for the conditions to be ideal before we get down to our work, we’ll never get to it. Conditions are never ideal. We got to do our best and leave the results to God. It’s a profound reflection on calling on Christian calling echoed in the passage you read as well, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s good advice for us now, because a lot of people are anxious these days. They kind of put their life on hold because they feel stymied by uncertainty. But you can’t let that defeat you. You have to keep getting on with life. You have to keep doing those human things. You have to keep doing those things you feel called to.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And also think about this for Lewis, he’s had this profound sense of the need to communicate the truths of Christianity to as broad an audience as possible. So when he’s approached by the religious programming director at the BBC, and they ask him, look, give us an explanation and a defense of Christianity in a series of radio broadcasts. We’ll give you 15 minutes at a time. Lewis doesn’t even listen to the radio. He’s completely out of his comfort zone. He’s an academic, right? He’s an egghead. He has no necessary skill writing for radio, but he agrees. And so he travels down from Oxford by train into London, and that was not without risk. The city still being bombed, the BBC had been bombed. And he starts delivering these incredible addresses, unpacking the meaning and significance of the Christian faith. And do you know the first line in the first broadcast, which became the first line in mere Christianity, the broadcast became the book Mere Christianity, but the opening line, you know what it was, Brett?

What was it? Everyone has heard people quarreling. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Now, why does he start there In Anglican, England in 1941, when people quarrel Brett, they’re arguing over a standard of behavior that the other guy has violated. You took something that didn’t belong to you, you cut me off in line. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right. We’re always appealing to a standard outside of ourselves, and we violate those standards ourselves. Lewis’s point is that is the clue to the meaning of the universe. This is the moral law that we all know, a moral law that presses down upon us that we can’t escape, that we know we ought to obey, and yet we violate it. That’s the clue to the meaning of the universe. So what is he doing? He’s reintroducing moral truth and a moral law at a time when moral absolutes and the moral disintegration of Western civilization, it’s all up in the air. It’s all up for grabs right now, it seems, Brett. But he is pushing back as best he can. So he starts there with the moral law. He will take the audience ultimately to Jesus as the great Savior, but he doesn’t start there. He starts with the universal moral law.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, he called it the Dao. The Dao. Yes. Yeah. Well, so you mentioned speaking of CS Lewis and how the war influenced these guys works that we wouldn’t have the line, the witch and the wardrobe if it weren’t for the London Blitz. So tell us about that. What was Lewis’s connection to the evacuees during the London Blitz?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, within days of the evacuation, four girls show up in his house. He lives there with his brother Warney and Mrs. Moore that he’s taking care of. And these four girls come into the home and immediately his life is turned upside down. And he writes to his friend’s sister Penelope and says, I never paid much attention to children, don’t really even like them. But now the war has brought them to me. And not only do they have a profound influence on Lewis, I mean, think about it. He will then go on to write one of the most beloved series of children’s books that has ever been produced. A confirmed bachelor who doesn’t like the company of children, learns to somehow get into their world and to empathize with them and to help them to understand here’s what it means to be a good and decent and virtuous person, even a person of faith. That’s a transformation in Lewis’ life. And that ability to communicate to children about children, to get into their emotional worlds. That would not have happened without the Blitz because children are not just showing up in the first weeks. They’re staying with them for weeks at a time, and then another batch of children would come in when the first batch is ready to go. It’s amazing.

Brett McKay:

So that people talk about the difference between Tolkien and Lewis and how they approach using myth fantasy stories to teach virtue. Lewis is a little bit on the nose about it. You can read the Chronicles and Narnia and like, okay, Aslan, that’s Jesus obviously. Tolkien was a little bit more subtle about his symbolism in his work.

Joseph Loconte:

Much more. Brett, and I think I can speculate a bit at the reasons for this. Part of it I think was Tolkien had been a Catholic for really all of his adult life. There wasn’t a dramatic conversion to Catholicism for him. And he was a profoundly serious believing Catholic. And it just shaped him in so many ways, his outlook, it’s embedded in his outlook. CS Lewis has a dramatic conversion from atheism into Christianity. So there’s more of the apologist, maybe not so much the evangelist, or you could use that word, but certainly the defender of the faith, the man who wants to communicate this truth because he knows what it’s like to be in the darkness. It’s very vivid to him passing from that darkness into the light of the gospel. And so I think Lewis was more willing and ready to use imagery that would more clearly suggest a Christian truths.

Christian symbolism and Tolkien didn’t feel the need to do that, but Lewis did, I think, because of his conversion experience. That’s a little bit of speculation there, but I think it’s probably right now, I will say this Tolkien, when he published the Lord of the Rings, it comes out in the 1950s finally. And as the atomic bomb is out and about, as we say, and a lot of people assume that the ring is just an allegory. The whole thing is an allegory for a warning against the atomic bomb, and Tolkien sets them right. He says, of course, my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power, exerted for domination. Power exerted for domination. That is one of the central themes, of course, in the Lord of the Rings, if you go to the Council of Elron, it is a morally complex, rich, thick discussion about the nature of power and the corrupting influence of the temptation to power. And that is deeply embedded, I would argue, in Tolkien’s Catholic Christian faith.

Brett McKay:

So another thing that Tolkien worked on during World War II besides the Lord of the Rings, this was for his family, for his children, is these Father Christmas stories. And you could see World War II pop up in these Father Christmas stories. Tell us about that. And I think these are available, these are published now. I think you can buy these now and read these stories.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yeah. There’s an entire collection. I think his granddaughter, one of his granddaughters, had pulled this together. It’s a lovely collection illustrated Tolkien would early on when he had his children, he wrote these Christmas letters, father Christmas and illustrated them, put them in the mailbox, and the kids are thinking they’re getting a letter from Father Christmas, and they’re very whimsical throughout the 1920s, these whimsical stories of Father Christmas and the polar bear and their mischievous adventures and all this. And then they take a turn, even as early as 1933, the year that Hitler comes to power, they take a turn where the appearance of goblins and the goblins, of course, these are wicked creatures. They’ll have a role to play in the Lord of the Rings, but they’re these dark, wicked creatures now entering the scene of Father Christmas. And so by the time you get to the letters, I think from 1941, Christmas 1941, Tolkien writes to his daughter, Priscilla, the youngest father, Christmas again. And he’s talking about how there’s been incredible battle and many people have been killed, and half the world is no longer in the right place because so many people have been displaced. And Father Christmas can’t deliver presents the way he used to because half the world is in the wrong place. Well, he’s describing exactly what has been happening, of course, in Europe with the mass evacuations, the evacuees by the millions. So he can’t escape the war, even in a Father Christmas letter to his daughter, Priscilla. Wow.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And so we’ve talked about some examples of how World War II was influencing Tolkiens and Lewis’ work. So Tolkien, he wrote a lot of the Lord of the Rings during the war. I mean, he was influenced by this epic clash of good and evil and the heroism that was called upon during the war. And then the first in that Lord of the Rings series would be published in the 1950s.

And then you got CS Lewis, he’s doing his apologetics, his lectures, his broadcast, the B BBC asked him to do for morale. He’s doing that during the war. And those lectures and those broadcasts would eventually become mere Christianity. And that was published in the 1950s. And then during this time, Lewis is also writing the Chronicles of Narnia, and he was inspired by the kids who came to live with him during the Blitz. So these works that both men were famous for in the post-war period, the foundations for them were really laid during World War II. And what I think is interesting about these guys, when you talk about them, they both have firsthand experience with war, and they were influenced by it in their creative work, but they were also really appalled by it.

Tolkien talks about not just the human destruction, but the environmental destruction. I think that’s something that Tolkien really focuses on and is overlooked in his work. He’s really appalled by the destruction that war does to our natural environment.

Joseph Loconte:

Exactly right.

Brett McKay:

So they saw war firsthand, but they still thought that violence was sometimes necessary to defend the good and the true. How do they walk that tension in their work?

Joseph Loconte:

Boy, that is a fabulous question, Brett, because they are not holy warriors. There’s no triumphalism in their works. Their heroes are reluctant heroes quite often, and they’re filled with anxiety and self-doubt. Bilbo Baggins is a modern hero, isn’t he? In some ways? Does he help the company or does he find a way of escape? And again, it’s not an accident that Lewis chooses children as the protagonist and includes a mouse named Rey Cheap. So the whole concept of the heroic, they are reinventing as well. It’s, boy, what can we say there, Brett? It’s so counter-cultural what they’re doing that they want to hang on to this concept of the heroic, but they know that triumphalism is just, it’s not tenable. No one’s going to buy this. And in their own experience, they can’t either from their own experience in the First World War, and I think from their religious perspective.

So there’s a realism about human frailty, but there’s also a realism about the nature of evil and the existence of radical evil and the idea of a just war. Even though though Will’s words are not used in their writings, they really are representing the just war tradition. In other words, the use of lethal force to protect the innocent from great harm. That is one of the key themes, isn’t it, in both their works. And I think having a ringside seat, as they did in Great Britain from 1939 to 1945, pacifism and neutrality was simply not an option because they could see what was happening to those nations that supposedly claim neutrality and then were overrun by the Nazis within a matter of months.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a tough tension to walk, to find war appalling, but also feel that sometimes it’s necessary.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think it really is expressed in the characters, in their reluctance to engage in this great battle. But then the conscience, they can’t escape their conscience and the need of the hour. And so Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, he’s got these children, he calls these children, summons them into a battle. He doesn’t leave them on their own, but he summons them into this battle. And as you read the text, this is what’s so profoundly striking about the Chronicles and Arnie, the battle scenes, they’re vivid. They’re not inappropriate for young people necessarily, but they’re vivid. It’s what it would’ve been like to be in a hand to hand kind of combat. And Lewis wants to give that realism and the anxiety and the struggle and the fear, all of that is mixed in their writings. Tolkien and Lewis, both. They don’t shy away from the horror of combat one bit, and yet they want to insist that wait a minute, evil has to be challenged. We see that in Beowulf. We see it in the Aeneid. We see it in the great works of the classical Christian tradition.

Brett McKay:

So both these men, Tolkien and CS Lewis, they basically laid the groundwork for fantasy novels in the 20th and 21st century.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

But how did their wartime experiences, both World War I and World War ii, how did that make their fantasy stories different from the modern fantasy novels that kids might be reading today?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that is a fabulous question. I mean, one of the criticisms that you sometimes hear about these guys is that they were writing escapist literature. If it’s fantasy, it must be escapist, escape, the difficult problems and challenges of life. And what Tolkien, and Lewis both said in different ways, both in their writings and even in some of their letters, this isn’t escapism. This is the opposite of escapism. Because what these stories do is they expose the darkness of the human condition, and they point us toward the virtues, the values and ideals that are required to meet the darkness that we encounter in life. And that is not escapism. I’ll give you a personal example of this, Brett. I didn’t start reading the Lord of the Rings until I was in my forties. I was working on my doctoral dissertation on John Locke studying in the UK there in London, reading Locke during the day, and then reading Tolkien at night.

And in English Pub, it doesn’t get any better than that, right? So here I am in my mid forties and I’m reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I’m finding myself morally invigorated, invigorated, wanting to take on the challenges of the day of my life with a new kind of courage and strength and resilience. If you’re thinking about the ideas of virtue and honesty and sacrifice for a noble cause. Well, this is not escapism. This is what makes life meaningful. This speaks to our deepest aspirations as men and women, as people with a soul. And so it’s the opposite of escapism, and I think that’s part of what they’re doing in an amazing time. When on the one hand there might’ve been a kind of militarism, utopianism on one side or just defeatism, we can’t face this horror, and they’re saying, no, there’s this middle way. There’s this middle way. It’s a kind of Christian realism about life and how to meet it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think one thing you wrote in the book, a lot of modern fantasy novels today, they’re about self-discovery, but the novels that Tolkien and Lewis wrote, they’re more about you have to just rise up to the occasion so you can protect others and lift up others.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. That’s where, again, Brett, I want to emphasize this. They’re combining the best of the classical world, those ancient myths, a Greek Roman mythology, the medieval world, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf, they’re building on that foundation, but then they are very deliberately giving it a Christian emphasis, imbuing it with Christian values, so that what these heroes want is not personal glory. They are willing to sacrifice for this greater cause. So think about the whole story of the ring itself. The hobbits are not on a quest to gain something of great value, some great treasure chest. The whole point of the quest is to destroy it, to destroy the ring of power. In other words, renunciation. And if you think about the time period, the 1940s, the second World War, when the combatants on both sides are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, that’s the mood of the hour. And here’s Tolkien writing a story about renunciation sacrifice for others, humility. Now that’s that’s going against the establishment in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So these books were written in a time that’s pretty different from ours in 2025, but their stories still resonate with audiences today. Why do you think that is?

Joseph Loconte:

That is a wonderful question. I’m still mulling that in my head because here we are talking about them 80 plus years later. I think there’s several reasons. There’s not a single answer to this, Brett, but I think there’s several reasons. Let me quote you from a line that Lewis wrote. I think it helps to give an answer maybe after Tolkien completed the Lord of the Rings, Lewis has it now in manuscript form, and he writes to Tolkien and he tells him how delighted he is to have it. He’ll be going to read it and reread it, and then he says this to Tolkien in the letter about the Lord of the Rings, the impact of it. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away without a trace into the past is now in a sort made permanent.

I think what Lewis is saying that somehow what Tolkien has done in the Lord of the Rings, he’s captured their common journey through life with all of its struggles and its joys. He’s captured some of that. He’s captured the war experience, and it’s hidden in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. So it’s a profoundly human story, profoundly human. It’s so accessible. And at the same time, it also speaks to these universal transcendent themes, and that’s what they do in the best of their works. They’re accessible. Their characters are like us. They’re not the superheroes that we create now in Marvel comics. They’re hobbits. It’s a mouse named Repe Cheap. It’s children in a Wardrobe. They’re utterly accessible, but they’re engaged in a real struggle in the forces of light, the forces of darkness, and there’s something profoundly moving and transcendent about their works. It just speaks across cultures, across generations, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Well, Joseph, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Joseph Loconte:

Well go to my website. That’d be the best place to go. www.josephloconte.com. You’ll see where you can buy the book. You’ll see also my YouTube history channel history, and the Human Story, and we’re releasing some videos on Tolkien and Lewis and other things that we’re working on. So love to have you check out the site.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joseph Loconte, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joseph Loconte:

Thank you, Brett. So good being with you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joseph Loconte. He’s the author of the book, The War for Middle-earth. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, josephloconte.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our free Art of Manliness newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at Art of Manliness. 

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a rating on your favorite podcast player. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think with something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> 50 Powerful and Thought-Provoking Quotes About Death https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/quotes-about-death/ Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:08:40 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191304 Halloween is the one time of year when death takes center stage in the West. Skeletons hang from porches, skulls grin from mantelpieces, and giant grim reapers show up in the seasonal aisle at Home Depot. For a few weeks, the thing we spend the rest of the year avoiding becomes incredibly visible. It’s a […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A human hand writing with a quill next to a skull, with the text "50 Thought-Provoking Quotes About Death" in bold letters.

Halloween is the one time of year when death takes center stage in the West. Skeletons hang from porches, skulls grin from mantelpieces, and giant grim reapers show up in the seasonal aisle at Home Depot. For a few weeks, the thing we spend the rest of the year avoiding becomes incredibly visible.

It’s a good time to practice a little memento mori — to remember that we’re all going to die someday.

To help you do that, we’ve put together a collection of quotes on death from writers and philosophers throughout the ages. Some are sobering and some are comforting.

So read on and take a few minutes to contemplate the fear, the hope, and the mystery that surrounds death. 

And after you’ve reflected on these quotes, make sure to check out our recent podcast interview with Joanna Ebenstein that’s all about how meditating on death can help us live fuller lives (many of the quotes below come from her fantastic book). 



“It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.”
Montaigne


“Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.”
William Mitford


“We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.”
Germaine de Staël


“One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die a man. The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations—the relation between the creature and his Creator.”
Daniel Webster


“Death is the crown of life. Were death denied, poor man would live in vain; to live would not be life; even fools would wish to die.”
Owen D. Young


“To neglect, at any time, preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.”
Samuel Johnson


“There is but this difference between the death of old men and young men; old men go to death, and death comes to young men.”
Francis Bacon


“He who should teach men to die would at the same time, teach them to live.”
Montaigne


“A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution.”
William Jay


“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne


“It is as natural to man to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps the one is as painful as the other.”
Francis Bacon


“When the sun goes below the horizon, he is not set; the heavens glow for a full hour after his departure. And when a great and good man sets, the sky of this world is luminous long after he is out of sight. Such a man cannot die out of this world. When he goes he leaves behind much of himself. Being dead he speaks.”
Henry Ward Beecher


“I know of but one remedy against the fear of death that is effectual and that will stand the test either of a sick-bed, or of a sound mind—that is, a good life, a clear conscience, an honest heart, and a well-ordered conversation; to carry the thoughts of dying men about us, and so to live before we die as we shall wish we had when we come to it.”
John Norris


“Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.”
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross


“Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.”
Sogyal Rinpoche


“Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says. 'I am coming.'”
Virgil


“Perhaps this knowledge of death, as a force that impinges on the individual, the community, and the cosmos, is what marks our species as, potentially, wise.”
Dr. Carol Zaleski


“In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.”
Henry Miller


“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka


“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”
Emily Dickinson


“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
Kahlil Gibran


“Death is just infinity closing in.”
Jorge Luis Borges


“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
Vladimir Nabokov


“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”
Hermann Hesse


“Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death…. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.”
Carl Jung


“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
Walt Whitman


“Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.”
Friedrich Nietzsche


“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.”
Rainer Maria Rilke


“Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne


“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
Edgar Allan Poe


“There is no death. Only a change of worlds.”
Chief Seattle


“Of all the gods only death does not desire gifts.”
Aeschylus


“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Thornton Wilder


“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”
George Eliot


“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
Mitch Albom


“Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.”
Federico García Lorca


“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
Ernest Hemmingway


“Death is seen as an enemy only by those who set themselves in opposition to nature.”
June Singer


“Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
Epicurus


“All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.”
David Mamet


“Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a man to rehearse his freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
Seneca


“Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.”
Hannah Arendt


“They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.”
William Penn


“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”
Martin Heidegger


“No art is possible without a dance with death.”
Kurt Vonnegut


“Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.”
Wallace Stevens


“He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.”
Seneca


“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”
Albert Camus


“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which know me not, I am frightened and astonished.”
Blaise Pascal


“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
C. S. Lewis

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,088: The Classical Code of Manhood https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1088-the-classical-code-of-manhood/ Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:55:10 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191140   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 […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was virtus — the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence.

Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book The Code of Man, first published twenty years ago and now released in a new edition. Today on the show, Waller, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that, in his view, form the classical code of manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today.

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Book cover of "The Code of Man" by Waller R. Newell, featuring a black and white photo of a seated, shirtless man with arms crossed, evoking the classical code of manliness in front of a building.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence. Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book, The Code of Man. First published 20 years ago and now released in the new edition. Newell, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that in his view form the classical code of Manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman. 

Waller Newell, welcome back to the show. 

Waller Newell: 

Good to be with you. 

Brett McKay: 

So you published the book, The Code of Man 20 years ago. We had you on the show to discuss it a decade back. It’s been 10 years. You’ve recently released an updated version of the book. What first prompted you to write this book 20 years ago? And then what do you think has changed in the cultural conversation about manhood in the 20 years since it’s been published that you thought it warranted an update?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think the minor reason in a way to republish it was simply that it had been out of print, and I had dozens and dozens of people asking me how can I get hold of it? So for that reason alone, I thought it was worth relaunching. But the more important thing is that in the intervening years, the whole debate over the meaning of masculinity and the distinction between true manliness and toxic masculinity as it’s called, has grown ever more intense. In the last election, for example, it was a very hot topic, and so I thought, well, this really is a good time to revisit what I think the true meaning of manliness is in contrast with toxic masculinity.

Brett McKay:

And you’re coming at this, you’re a political philosophy professor, political scientist. That’s what you do. So you’re coming at it through that angle, looking at classical culture and how it can give us insights about masculinity and manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. In fact, I really began my interest in this topic because my scholarship had been very much concerned with the notion of honor seeking what it means to pursue honor. And a journalist friend of mine actually said, a lot of people out there are interested in these sorts of topics, not just academics or scholars. Why don’t you try and branch out and reach a general audience? And so that’s what I did.

Brett McKay:

So let’s start off with a Socratic question. We’re going to do definitions. Socrates always said you got to start with definitions. How do you define manliness?

Waller Newell:

Would you mind me if I quote myself from the book? 

Brett McKay:

Go right ahead.

Waller Newell:

I think I can sum it up in a few lines. My view of this debate is that what is now called toxic masculinity is a perverse and destructive force that is in fact the direct opposite of the traditional western classical and biblical understanding of true manliness, which is premised on the need for virtuous behavior that could never violate anyone’s rights of freedom, least of all that of women, and instead defined manly virtue as the moderate gentlemanly and gallant treatment of others. That’s about the best I can do. That’s sort of my whole argument really is there in that few sentences.

Brett McKay:

And why do you go back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans and even the Bible for your idea of manliness?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think we have to begin with those moorings in tradition, however shaky they may have become. To the extent that we can fashion a new way of approaching manliness in the present, I think it’s got to at least begin in those older roots. It might not rest content with those older roots, but I think that’s your starting point. And I think we should also bear in mind that these classical teachings, although there are thousands of years old, have really been widespread in their influence in the West, I would say certainly up until the 19th century, even into the 20th century, I was thinking for example of Winston Churchill, he never went to a university, which I think by the way was one of the key ingredients to his success as a statesman, that he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but he was interested in the classics and he read them in translation.

So he too had that appetite for the older way of looking at things. As for the biblical approach, I think again, that those roots are so deep in us still even today, that we really have to explore what the biblical understanding of manliness is. And of course, the extent to which it isn’t simply harmonious with the classical philosophical understanding. That’s why I treated the issue of revelation in the section on pride, because in a way, the difference between the biblical approach and the classical approach can be summed up in the fact that for the classics, pride was one of the supreme human manly virtues. Whereas in the biblical tradition, of course, that’s very much called into question. Christianity, I think would argue that compassion is really, the chief virtue should be the chief virtue of a true man. And pride is actually something to be avoided. And I think out of that tension, something creative can emerge. I’m not sure that those alternatives can ultimately even be reconciled, but we have to sort of face them even to the extent to which they conflict with one another.

Brett McKay:

Something I’ve noticed in my own readings of the classics and also the biblical tradition, is that there’s a lot of insights there on what to do about what we call toxic masculinity. You see a lot of people talking about what can we do about this issue of these young men who are just unmoored and acting in incredibly inappropriate ways? And I’m like, just read the Iliad. I mean, you can make a case. It’s about toxic masculinity. You’re dealing with hubris and rage and unbridled ambition. If you look at the life of Alcibiades, there’s a case study in what unbridled ambition can do. The Bible is constantly talking about what can we do to harness or bridle those masculine passions and use them in a productive way instead of them becoming destructive.

Waller Newell:

That’s right. A lot of my other scholarship has been on the theme of tyranny and the history of tyranny, ancient and modern as a theme in political thought. And the way that goes together with manliness is that for the classics and for later traditions as well, tyranny in a way is the deepest perversion of manliness. It’s a distortion of what true manliness should be, and its derailment into a kind of lust for power and domination over others. Whereas I think the whole point of the traditional approach to manliness would be that those potentially tyrannical energies should be sublimated and redirected toward the honorable service of the common good. So you want to nip people like Alcibiades in the bud and turn them in a more constructive direction. And yes, I think I agree with you completely about Homer. If you look at the contrast between Achilles and Odysseus as they’re presented by Homer, in a way, Achilles is everything that you should not emulate because he is terribly narcissistic.

He’s totally self-absorbed, even though he in fact has a family back home, a wife and children. I think Homer deliberately presents him in the Iliad as if he is always by himself. He’s always isolated from others and angry at them. Odysseus by contrast, is very much enveloped in his love of family life. His whole voyage is the desire to get back home to his wife and son. And I think in Homer’s view, Odysseus is meant to be the more admirable character. He isn’t simply ambitious. He doesn’t simply use brute force. Homer says that he is the ultimate prudent man, the Fran Moss, and that he uses his mind whenever he can rather than brute strength. And so I think of the two models, Homer himself is pointing us toward Odysseus and really not so much toward Achilles. As you know, the very first word of the Iliad is rage, and it’s the rage of Achilles that sets the whole Iliad in motion.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned for the Greeks and the Romans, manliness seemed to be about the development of certain virtues. What were some of those virtues that they thought a man had to develop to become a manly man?

Waller Newell:

Well, in a way, I was trying to suggest that with my own five headings of love, courage, pride, family, country, I think those comprehend a lot of the virtues that were important to the classical thinkers for living a kind of integrated life. The notion of virtue that the classics had was very much one of integrity, meaning a sort of unity of strength devoted to living a good life, serving the common good.

Brett McKay:

How has the biblical tradition, what was their idea? What were the virtues that they thought you needed to develop in order to become this integrated man you’re talking about?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, to me, that really all comes down to the difference between say Aristotle and Saint Augustine. On the question of pride versus humility. It’s a very striking contrast because for Aristotle, humility is actually a vice in the sense that a man who does not lay claim to honors to which he’s entitled, actually has a flawed character For Augustine, I think it’s the exact opposite, that he would say that humility is necessary to live a happy life, meaning to live a godly life. So there is a real divergence there. And I think that with a lot of these problems with time and age, I’ve come to realize that they just might not be ultimately harmonious, if you know what I mean. We might just have to live with the possibility that they can’t be reconciled with one another.

Brett McKay:

We will talk more about that tension between the biblical tradition and the classical tradition when we go more into detail about pride. But yeah, I agree with you. For the Art of manliness, one of the guiding principles is to bring back this classical idea of manliness, where it meant becoming a man of virtue in the development of these different positive virtues. And one thing people often push back against, and I understand the pushback is, okay, well if manliness is about the development of virtue, what does that mean for women who also develop these virtues? Yeah, these virtues that we’re talking about, courage, pride, family, humility, these are universal. So what does that mean for women who develop these virtues? Is that womanliness, is that what you’d call it?

Waller Newell:

I agree with you completely that men and women share the same aims and that my suggestion of what those should be would apply both to men and women. That said, though, I think that although men and women are pursuing the same aims, they do so along somewhat different paths. We know from, I think pretty solidly established empirical research that men and women tend to lean towards certain occupations more than others. And so I think we can combine the universalism of those goals with a recognition of the fact that temperamentally and psychologically men and women may be pursuing different roots to that same outcome.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d agree with you. We all have the same aims, but we’ll get through different ways based on our temperaments or natural proclivities. I’ve always thought of it as in terms of music, so like a tuba and a flute can play the same notes of music, but they make different sounds. So men and women both pursue virtue, but the result makes different kinds of music and we need both.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

One thing you write in this book, and it struck me when I first read it 10 plus years ago, and I was really hit by it when I read it again, is that Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, men who lived a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, they had more in common with Homer than they do with us. What do you mean by that?

Waller Newell:

I think what I mainly meant was simply that their life had a kind of grandeur of scope that we would associate with ancient heroism. They really were truly towering figures. And so in that sense, I think it’s apt to compare them to heroic heroes out of the pages of Homer.

Brett McKay:

And also too, I think you mentioned earlier Churchill, even though he didn’t go to college, he was steeped in this classical education that gave him this notion of classical manhood that you’re talking about in this book. Same with Theodore Roosevelt, and same with the founding fathers. And today that education doesn’t really exist in our schools or even our universities.

Waller Newell:

No, that’s very true. I mean, in the case of Churchill, as I said, he sort of came to this on his own. His comment about reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, was that this simply described the people that he knew in his own social circle. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt had a superb formal education, which included reading Latin and Greek in the original. And so he drew directly upon the wellspring of these classical teachings about the virtues. And as you know from his writings, he is a superb interpreter of those virtues and how they should contribute to democratic manhood in the present. Think two of the American founders, by the way, the American founders who attended university like Jefferson, they were deeply steeped in the classics. They read all of the great ancient thinkers, historians, poets, and they also read important modern thinkers like Montesquieu and Locke. So even though they were in a way servants of an egalitarian society, they believed, if anything, that the ruling class of that society must be made up of liberally educated gentlemen.

Brett McKay:

Something I’m struck by when I read books or letters from the founding era, particularly when they’re describing George Washington, they always talk about the manliness of George Washington. And if you were to read that in the 21st century in 2025, not knowing about this classical notion of masculinity or manhood, you think manliness of George. What did that mean? Was he big and burly and did he just tear stuff up? And he was a great fighter, but for those individuals who lived during that time, when they said the manliness of George Washington, they knew that actually had some deeper, broader significance. It meant that this was a man who was, as you said, integrated. He developed the whole man.

Waller Newell:

Yes, that’s right. He had the refinement of a gentleman, and yet he was also courageous without limit, really, and self-reliant and encouraged those same qualities in others. One of my favorite references to Washington was by the great English wig leader, Charles James Fox, who wrote a wonderful encomium to Washington saying that this is a man who seems to have den right out of the pages of Plutarch. I think we all know that the American founding was very much caught up in a kind of Roman spirit, that in a way they thought they were reviving a new order of the ages that previously it had been Rome, now it was going to be America and the United States. Another anecdote that I think is very revealing about Washington is that when his troops were camping at Valley Forge under very difficult conditions, Washington actually had a troop stage, a very famous play about the life of Cato and how Cato committed suicide rather than give into the offer of clemency by Julius Caesar. In other words, even under the terrible conditions of Valley Forge, Washington in effect staged the civics lesson for his own troops.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned in your book you focus on five particular virtues, and each of these virtues have sub virtues that you might need to develop to develop that virtue, and you picked love, courage, pride, family and country or patriotism. We’re going to talk more about these virtues in detail here in a moment, but one thing I want to talk about in the beginning of the book, you make the case that another part of manliness in this classical notion is that it’s the balance of reason and passion, and you use Plato’s allegory of the chariot to describe that balance. For those who aren’t familiar with the allegory, can you walk us through it?

Waller Newell:

Yes. Basically, it’s an image based on a chariot with a charioteer and two powerful horses. And in the analogy, the chariot here represents the mind or the intellect, which has to guide the chariot in its celestial ride through the heavens. The horses represent the power of human passion, both erotic and ambitious, vicious. And if the horses get out of the control of the charioteer, they’re going to plunge the chariot downward into the world of chaos below. So that’s why the mind has to govern the passions, but by the same token, without the energy and power of those horses, the chariot isn’t going anywhere. The chariot here by himself is not enough. The mind is not enough. There has to be a symbiotic interaction between the mind and the passions in which the passions are sublimated and placed at the service of reason. So that’s what I was trying to convey there. There has to be this harmony of the mind and the passions, even though the mind in a certain way has to be in the driver’s seat.

Brett McKay:

How do you think we’ve lost sight of that balance in our discourse about manhood today?

Waller Newell:

Well, this takes me to one of my favorite comparisons, which is Fight Club, the novel and the movie. Because I think what you see there is the tension between what I call the wimp and the beast, which sums up the modern dilemma of masculinity. On the one hand, you’ve got the character played by Ed Norton, who is a kind of pouch carrying IKEA furniture, buying self-help group, attending mail. He wants to be the new male that he thinks is required of him by feminism, but then he takes all of the energies that he thereby represses natural masculine energies, and they get shifted to his alter ego, the character played by Brad Pitt, who is a kind of macho fascist. And I think that I’ve observed, and others have confirmed this to me, teachers I know young men today when faced between the choice between the wimp and the beast, believe that in order to be manly, they have to act out the Brad Pitt side of the coin, meaning that they identify manliness with macho aggressiveness. And I think that really sums up the dilemma because rather than a harmony between the mind of the passions, you’ve got a complete contradiction between the mind, which has now been turned into something wan and weak. On the other hand, the passions have been left to become monstrous.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s interesting in 2025 with digital technology, I’m talking social media, YouTube, video games, I think you see instances of those passions of unbridled masculine passion. You see it in the real world in the terms of violence and sexual violence, but you also see it online as well, like some of the discourse you see in some of these internet subcultures that are populated by young men. It can be very pornographic, very violent, it’s very aggressive, but not in a healthy way. And so you’re seeing different outlets for that unbridled beast type you’re talking about.

Waller Newell:

Yes. And some video games, of course, are incredibly violent and simply blood drenched in violence. And I think that people are coming to think that living online is just an unhealthy experience for people in general, and particularly young men, because in a way it isolates them from any kind of wider human context. They think they’re in touch with other people, but they’re really just shouting into a void, and that tempts them to simply abandon all self-restraint and prudence and indulge themselves in really the most wicked of sentiments.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think there’s something about embodying those passions. Those passions are part of the body, and if you don’t keep them there, they’re going and you kind of let ’em out in the digital ether. It’s like almost they get distorted somehow. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors and now back to the show. So let’s dig into the virtues that you highlight in the Code of Man. So again, those are love, courage, pride, family and country. And you started with love first. Why start with love?

Waller Newell:

I began with love because it’s the most deeply personal of the virtues and getting to know my students, my male students, their quandaries about manliness, things like ancient virtue were rather distant from them, but love was something that touched them right now immediately in the present. And so I felt that beginning with the theme of love was a way that young men could be drawn in at a level that they could already relate to, whereas as I said, notions about civic virtue and civic freedom, citizenship, those were rather more remote concerns. But I thought that starting with the personal one could then branch out into these more public other regarding virtues.

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting is your approach of using love as an entry point into manliness or philosophy or virtue. This isn’t new. Plato did the same thing, or Socrates did the same thing in the symposium.

Waller Newell:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

So what can Plato’s Symposium teach us about how love can lead us to true manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think two things. First of all, the symposium teaches that when we love another person, it isn’t simply a bodily love. What we’re truly in love with is the nobility in their character. And that means that we have a motivation to perfect ourselves. We want to earn the admiration of the beloved by displaying our own capacity to strive for nobility. I think that’s the core of Plato’s teaching there. You can find a similar version of this in Castile, the courtier. He makes essentially the same argument that love is a matter of longing for the nobility in the beloved and wishing to win the beloveds affection in return by showing that your are capable of striving for that nobility yourself.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve always really liked Plato’s idea of love as a ladder. So your love for a particular person can lead to a love of beauty overall, and then to loving knowledge and then to loving truth so it can point your perspective higher. So yeah, so loving a particular person can lead to loving virtue. How do you think our idea of love has changed in the modern West, and then how do you think that change has made it harder for love to be an on-ramp into noble manhood?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think as has frequently been observed that the divorce culture in a way whose duration is considerable at this point, made love about what was immediately satisfying for me and encouraged the notion of no fault divorce, meaning that if you as an individual were somehow not satisfied for whatever reason, then you should move on. And I think that this really undermined the notion that previous generations had, like my parents, for example, that even if you are not entirely happy in your married life, that you had a duty to your children to keep things together. Hopefully in the long run, you might reach some kind of better accommodation with your partner. So I think that’s had a big effect on why we can no longer make these appeals to duty when it comes to marital life. Although we’re told that the divorce rate is slowly but surely beginning to decline, and it appears as if people have taken a second look at the institution of marriage and thought maybe it is worth persevering and not expecting every single one of our own demands or desires to be satisfied.

Brett McKay:

The Greek word for love is eros or eros, however you want to pronounce it. And there’s different types of eros. There’s a carnal eros, like the bodily pleasures. You’re attracted to the person physically, but then as you said, there’s an eros that’s more noble you care about and love the person the other that inspires you to live up to a nobility. And I think you make the case that our version of eros in the 21st century has shifted more towards that more carnal eros. And again, the Greeks say carnal eros is fine. You need that. It’s a part of being human, but you don’t want to make it the soul thing in your erotic arsenal. And also, I think something that’s happened too in the 20th and 21st century is that we’ve kind of turned eros on ourselves. It’s a self-love. What can I do for myself? How can I make myself good. And instead of it being directed towards the other.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s right. And it’s interesting that in colloquial Greek aeros isn’t necessarily even restricted to love between two people. For instance, Dima in the symposium says that the most distinctive human trait is the aeros for honor. This is what sets human beings apart. And for instance, there is an ancient Greek statue of aeros, which depicts it as a warrior. So it’s a word that’s almost untranslatable because it has all of these nuances, and you just have to consider what context you’re in to try and fill that with content.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like part of helping young men use love as a step into noble manhood. It seems like we have to kind of educate the moral sense of love, I think, is it Augustine that talked about getting your loves in order? You have to know what are the good things to love?

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s certainly true. And I think you could look at Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice, where it’s fair to say that Mr. Darcy comes to believe that he must perfect himself in order to deserve the love of Elizabeth. And that’s a lesson that he doesn’t take too readily. But he does realize that he does have to, in a way, make himself admirable in her eyes, that it’s not just automatic that everyone admires him. And so I think that literature can be another way in which people are educated to understand love as something more than physical desire.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I love reading Jane Austen. We did a podcast a long time ago, with a Jane Austen scholar about why men should read Jane Austen, and that’s one of the reasons. It’s to educate your moral sense and how you can learn to balance the passion of love, but also learning to love with reason as well. You don’t want to go too far into passion, but you also don’t want to be too heady about it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. Like the novel Sense and Sensibility. Sensibility means the romantic kind of love inspired by Rousseau and Sir Walter Scott as opposed to a more old fashioned levelheaded approach to love and marriage. Like many men, I used to dismiss Jane Austen as just a woman’s writer, but my wife convinced me to read her, and I just love her novels. For one thing, she is just uproariously funny. She is such a comical genius, right? Every page, there’s a laugh.

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. And I think she is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, if you read closely enough.

Waller Newell:

Oh, very much so. Yes. Leo Strauss, the great political theory scholar, once remarked that if you wanted a taste for the classics, you’d be fortunate to be born with a taste for Jane Austin, because that would open the door for you back to ancient writers like Aristotle and Xenophon.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s love. Love is the step into noble manhood. It can inspire us to develop these more public facing virtues. The virtue you talk about next is courage. How did the ancients define courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, they defined it in many different ways. Of course, the baseline definition would be physical courage in combat. Aristotle, for example. Interestingly remarks that in order to be courageous, you must possess fear. If you are not full of fear at the prospect of bodily harm in battle, then you’re never going to be able to rise above that and experience the virtue of courage. But then of course, there’s courage for the sake of the common good, the courage of the citizen. If you think of a classical work like the dream of Skipio by Cicero, he very much makes the point that yes, physical courage is the important baseline meaning of courage. Battlefield courage is very important too. But higher than that is public service and the life of the mind.

Brett McKay:

One thing you talk about that the ancients believed in order to develop courage, one of these sub virtues you had to develop or maybe a characteristic is thumos. What is thumos and how does it relate to the cultivation of courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, Plato is really the most illuminating here about Thumos. Thumos is really the seat in the soul of all aggressive, belligerent passions. And it can therefore be very destructive. It can culminate in the desire to exploit other people. That’s why as republic is it’s almost, its central theme, is the need to educate thumos and shape it, draw it away from those temptations, and turn it into a vigorous pursuit of serving the common good, whose reward is the honor you receive from your fellow citizens.

Brett McKay:

So thumos is this sort of aggression that can be used for good or bad. It depends on how you harness it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. Anger is a facet of thumos.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something that I’ve noticed with the young men that I’ve worked with for the past over 10 years, there are some young men who are very thematic. They play sports, and they’re kind of directing it towards a positive end. They’re very active in their academics. They’re using that drive to do well in school. And then you see these extremes where you have these young men who are very thematic, but they’re not directing it towards anything, and it becomes chaotic. But then I see a lot of young men who just, they lack thumos. They just seem listless and just almost anesthetized. Have you noticed that as well?

Waller Newell:

I certainly have noticed it.

Brett McKay:

So how do you think we can help nurture healthy thumos and young men, and even men who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, I think that we should not attempt to extend to boys the same kind of learning that is extended to women and girls. In other words, frequently now in education, girls are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish. And that’s good. They should be encouraged to do that. But boys are often encouraged to not express themselves in the ways that come naturally to them. Girls, for example, there’s evidence that shows this are better team players. They work more harmoniously in groups than boys do. So I think that we ought to encourage boys to express that natural energy, that natural competitive energy, even a degree of aggressiveness in competition. And that would mean we have to really rethink the way that education is being done.

Brett McKay:

And I also think it’s helpful to give young men books, films where you see healthy thumos in play, and a lot of young men, they’re not getting that in schools. Like I said, that sort of classical education is not there anymore. They’re not reading the Odyssey, they’re not reading The Count of Monte Cristo. They’re not reading these books where you see this thumos and how it can play out in both positive and negative ways.

Waller Newell:

I think so too. And one way in which I’ve changed my approach to teaching over the years is that I now encourage not only the best books or the great books, but what I call the next best books, meaning to say history, biography, literature, art, dealing with the themes of civic virtue, honor, ambition, that people need to know something about the history of statesmanship, the history of honor seeking. So as I said, I think the more that young people can be steeped in the biographies of great statesmen in narrative history about great conflicts, that this is all to the good, but as to how this is going to be institutionalized in the formal education system, in a way I’m at a loss. I think some of it’s got to come through informal educational circles, reading groups, online discussions, programs like the Tocqueville Project in the United States that deliberately do not offer courses for university credit, but simply give students an away year in which they can steep themselves in the classics and in these books about history, biography, culture, and so on. The hope is that when they then return to the university to resume their formal education, they will somehow choose courses that are most likely to give this kind of education or encourage their own professors to teach these kinds of subjects.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a parent of a young man, encourage them to read those classics that you’re talking about. Biographies and things like that. I mean, I’m doing that with my own son. He just finished the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he’s moving on to the count of Monte Cristo, and he loves it. And I think young men, they’re hungry for it. And if you just present it to them in a way that’s palatable, they’ll just eat it up.

Waller Newell:

I find that when I teach these books that the average young person almost take to it spontaneously. I mean, all you have to do is facilitate. They’re being able to read those books. They kind of sell themselves. You don’t really have to sell them. They sell themselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright. So is that drive, that aggression that allows you to be courageous. So whenever you’re feeling fear, you can call upon your thumos to overcome that fear, but then you’re going to want to balance that with reason, because you don’t want to be reckless with your courage. How do courage and love work together as virtues?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think at the most fundamental level, that if you love another person, then you are going to be courageous on their behalf. You’re going to want to protect them and to help them bring about their own self-fulfillment.

Brett McKay:

Right? And so then I think the argument that you make is that using that courage because you love someone else, like your family that’s close to you, you can then extend that in your social circle to family, to community, to state to country.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. I think that was one of Aristotle’s great teachings in the Nicomachean ethics, that people have to begin feeling affection for their fellow family members. This was his criticism of Plato’s Republic for abolishing the family for Aristotle. All of us learn to feel affection first for our fellow family members. Then we can extend that feeling of friendliness outward to our fellow citizens. So the family in a way, is an incubator for the wider political and civic virtues.

Brett McKay:

It’s a school of virtue.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned that these virtues can be perverted, love can be perverted. How have you seen courage be perverted in the modern day?

Waller Newell:

Well, I mean, again, to refer to Aristotle, courage is a mean between cowardice and mad daring and all of those virtues, it’s closer to one extreme than the other. Courage is actually closer to mad daring than it is to coward us. So one always has to be aware or on guard against the fact that your own virtue could actually be taken too far and become something harmful to others and to yourself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s move on to pride. We mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of tension between the classical view and the biblical view. In the chapter on pride, you say that pride is the central issue in the search for a code of man. Why is that?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a way, as Aristotle says, it’s the ornament of all the virtues that in a certain sense, being able to exercise the virtues of love and courage and family life would be a kind of as scent to the position that he describes as greatness of soul. Megalopsychia often gets translated as pride that for him is the crown of all the moral virtues. They all sort of come together and reach that pinnacle.

Brett McKay:

So what does a classical, virtuous, prideful man look like? How do they carry themselves? What do they think of themselves?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, they never deed to treat inferiors cruelly because that would be beneath them. It would show that they needed the recognition of people not on their own level. And so they would not dene to do that. They reserved their sense of outrage to people on their own level who offend them. The other thing that he says is characteristic of pride is that people who serve in public life who possess this virtue only want to deal with truly great affairs matters of life and death for a country, national emergencies. That’s why I think you could say someone like Winston Churchill was really the embodiment of what the classical thinkers meant by pride. Because without World War II, Churchill’s political career would’ve been rather spotty. I’m not sure that absent the great challenge of the war that he would be remembered as a particularly outstanding politician. The same is true of Abraham Lincoln. His record before the Civil War in the minds of many people, was somewhat open to question, open to accusations of dishonor or being a kind of for sale type politician for sale to others. It was only the grand struggle of the Civil War in which he was able to find himself and operate on a scale that brought out everything that was best in him.

Brett McKay:

One thing too, that you notice with these prideful men in the classical sense, they’re also extremely ambitious. I think Abraham Lincoln even said, I’m very ambitious. He said, I want public office. Same with Churchill. He wanted to be the guy in charge of World War II, and he believed he was destined to be in that role. George Patton, same sort of thing. I think he actually thought he was reincarnated. He lived another life where he was a Greek general. But yeah, he was incredibly ambitious as well. Yeah.

Waller Newell:

Again, I mean they really only flower when placed in a position to be in charge of the greatest affairs of state during times of national app peril. There’s a great passage in Churchill’s memoirs of World War II where he talks about the day he was appointed Prime Minister to succeed Chamberlain. And he basically said that that night I slept soundly for the first time in years because I knew the situation pretty well, and I was pretty sure that I was up to dealing with it.

Brett McKay:

So not all of us are going to be Lincoln’s or Washington’s or Churchills. So what does a manly, virtuous pride look like for just a regular guy?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, I think in everyday life, not to treat other people with disdain, particularly people who are in a less advantageous situation than oneself, that one should avoid at all costs. Any display of cruelty or sort of cheap hottiness toward others, gloating over oneself in the eyes of others. Pride has a lot to do with self-restraint, not boasting, not demanding that other people praise you. Just let your works and thoughts speak for themselves.

Brett McKay:

Another part of healthy pride for Aristotle was striving for excellence in accordance with virtue. So healthy pride was only justified if it rested on real achievements. So if you wanted to be a great sold man, you had to continually be aiming at noble deeds worthy of honor. But in the modern world, and particularly the modern West, we’re pretty ambivalent about pride. It’s like do aim for great things, but don’t get too big for your britches. Why are we so conflicted about pride?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think again, it really is a fundamental conflict of values between religious revelation and a kind of secular approach to secular, political and civic psychology. That anyone who has been raised with a religious background, which is certainly true of me, it’s drilled into you from very early on, that pride is a vice that should be avoided. I think somewhat unreasonably, theologians like Saint Augustine immediately equate pride with vainglory and oppressive treatment of others. I don’t think that’s warranted, but it’s also a very, very strong content in all three of the major monotheistic faiths and not merely them that pride is something to be avoided. Humility is to be preferred.

Brett McKay:

So I think you mentioned earlier that we’re probably not going to be able to square this, but do you think there is a way we can live with that tension

Waller Newell:

Only just by living with it? I mean, I’m happy to let the contradiction reign within me. I don’t think there’s a synthesis whereby we can say we’ve got the best of both worlds. It’s just a tension. And I think a lot of psychological depth comes from recognizing those tensions and accepting the fact that there may not be a magic solution.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the family as a path to manhood. Why do you think family is a path to manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a certain way, family life draws on the other virtues that I discussed previously, that to have a successful family life, you need those qualities of love, courage, and a sense of honor. So the family in a way, draws upon all of those virtues of character, I think.

Brett McKay:

And then you can practice them. As we said, the family’s a school of virtue. 

Waller Newell:

That’s right. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

And then you gave examples and counter examples from the classical tradition of what a good family man can look like. You did. The contrast between Achilles and Odysseus. Odysseus is that family man who he’s just trying to get back to his family. And then Hector and Achilles is another one. You also talk about insights that Aristotle has about being a husband and a father. What does he tell us about those roles?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, it’s often a kind of veiled or open critique of Plato, but he does say that the relationship between a husband and a wife should never be one of simply commanding obedience from the wife that a marriage should be a partnership between the husband and the wife, one in which they cooperate to raise their children to be virtuous. So I think this notion of marriage as friendship was very much shaped by Aristotle. And so by the time you get to say the Roman Republic, you find famous couples like Brutus and his wife Porsche, who embodied this kind of friendship. It’s not simply her serving him, he philosophizes, but so does she. They’re both stoic philosophers. When he embarks upon his perilous journey against Julius Caesar, she wants to join him. She wants to share his dangers. So I think that Aristotle did a great deal toward humanizing the concept of marriage and family life, making the marriage a kind of equal partnership.

Brett McKay:

And you see that a bit in the Odyssey with Penelope. Odysseus. Homer describes them as being of one mind. They think the same. They see the world as the same. They’re both sneaky Odysseus with his different tricks, and Penelope with the trick of weaving the funeral cloak, they’re of one mind. They had that really close friendship.

Waller Newell:

Well, and I find it interesting too, that on his way home, Odysseus is accompanied by Athena, who is not only the goddess of wisdom, but a woman. I think part of what Homer is implying there is that there’s a way in which a man’s character has to tap into some female traits. The fact that Odysseus is characterized more by his mental prudence, by his reliance on rhetoric and craft, trying to avoid open physical conflict when he can. I think that’s why there’s a sort of partnership from the very beginning between him and Athena. And then as you said, when he gets back and in the course of his journey home, we also find that his wife back in Ithaca has a number of the same traits that he does.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the last path to manliness is country. And this is where you talk about patriotism. Patriotism gets a bad rap these days, but I think it’s because our idea of patriotism has been bastardized. It’s been perverted. So let’s talk about what the ancients thought about patriotism. How did they define it?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think they define it, and this I think would be something we would still recognize immediately, that patriotism is not uncritical and unswerving loyalty to your country. No matter what it does, there has to be a built in capacity for dissent and freedom of expression. So I think that would be the first thing that citizenship has to be responsible. It can’t just be blind patriotism or conformity.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you love your country, but you love it enough where you’ll push back and criticize it when it’s warranted. What’s interesting too, for the classical thinkers to be a man, Aristotle talks about this, to be a man, you had to be active in public life. You couldn’t just retreat to your home. You had to take part in political life. And that might not mean you run for office necessarily, but you’re aware of what’s going on. You’re active in your community, you’re voting, and also you have to think about politics. I mean, not just in terms of partisan politics, but political life embraces the volunteer groups. You belong to your church, those sorts of things too. So you need to be active in that as well.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, and I just want to add, if I may, that I think that any version of globalization, whether of the left or the right, the globalization of the right, which sees the world as one single economy or the globalization of the left, which sees a kind of postmodernist society perhaps without private property. To me, this is really the death of patriotism in any constructive sense. I think that patriotism requires the nation state, and the nation states differ from one another. In many ways. You can say that modern nation states have the same general institutional frameworks, the same kinds of constitution, independent judiciary rights, division of powers. But on another level, each nation state is pursuing its own historical pathway. Americans, Frenchmen, British Italians, including newcomers in their midst, they are pursuing their own distinct pathway. And I think that patriotism has to be grounded in the context of the particular nation state in which you have grown up or in which you live. So I’m totally against the notion that there’s something unethical about borders. I think there have to be borders.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So some people will say, well, borders are arbitrary. This idea of a nation state, it’s a 17th century creation, and we’re beyond that now because we’re all connected via the internet. So maybe we don’t need that anymore. It sounds like in order for you to have a patriotism and really love your fellow countrymen or the people around you, it sounds like you need a nation state.

Waller Newell:

I think so. Again, not in a narrow, totally inward looking way. I think at its best, the nation state should be a window on the whole world, especially through its educational institutions. But I still think at the end of the day, you can’t be loyal to the globe. I think that you have to be loyal to a particular society with its own traditions.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned Tocqueville in this section on patriotism or love of country as providing some insights, maybe particularly for Americans on what healthy patriotism looks like. What can we learn from Tocqueville?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think Tocqueville shared the concern that Rousseau had originally expressed that the problem with modern democratization and the spread of modern economic prosperity would be that it might undermine the individual’s feeling of obligation to participate in civic life and just fall back on endless material pleasures. So I think Tocqueville was trying to find tendencies in America as he experienced it, that would somehow slow down or halt that process of total economic homogenization. And so he praised local self-government, the different states, the local townships that these were, in a way, incubators of citizenship in the more old fashioned sense, where your citizenship is primarily about a local community.

Brett McKay:

So anything that men can do to develop a virtuous patriotism today,

Waller Newell:

Again, I think it’s a matter of somehow being exposed or finding a way of being exposed to this pedigree of writings about the virtues and about the manly virtues, the traditional meaning of manly virtue. There are books available on this as to how one finds that in one’s own formal educational experience. While there are of course, places like the University of Austin, the University of Texas at Austin, where they are attempting to create institutes that combine liberal education with civics education. And so I think there is hope for the future here. Clemson College is another, Mercer Colleges another. These programs are beginning to spring up where you combine an interest in the canon of the great books with an interest in what you might call applied citizenship, the history of civics, and the need to know something about the founding principles of your regime. So I guess the most promising thing on the horizon would be that those institutions continue to proliferate and offer an alternative to the more conventional educational approach.

Brett McKay:

And I think another thing too is to just start practicing noble patriotism. Like I said earlier, just get involved in your community. Start small. Tocqueville talked about this. Just get involved with your kids’ school. Get involved with the booster club of your kids’ sports teams, because it’s where you learn how to work with other people. You learn how to deal with the frustrations of dealing with other people. They’re like these sort of little laboratories of democracy, and maybe that leads to getting involved in higher levels of governance, but you got to start small. You got to start somewhere.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s especially true of education. I mean, I know a lot of teachers, and I think sometimes we tend to put everything on them or expect them to do everything as far as educating their children, but they can’t assume sole responsibility for that. Most of them are very conscientious in my experience. But the parents really do need to be in the driver’s seat about guiding their children in cooperation with their teachers through school.

Brett McKay:

So after decades of studying and writing about manliness and thinking about it, is there one particular lesson from that tradition that has most shaped your life?

Waller Newell:

I would say that I’m not pessimistic about the future of manliness, if that’s an answer, because in my view, human nature does not change. And the yearning of young men for a satisfying way of living does not go away. If anything, I think it’s possibly intensifying at the present time. So I guess what I’ve learned is to be hopeful and to be persevering because I don’t think there are grounds for despair.

Brett McKay:

I love that how you’re not pessimistic, because there’s a lot of pessimism today about masculinity, and I think what we need more of is some thumotic optimism about masculinity or manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yes, I do too. I mean, Theo certainly has a rule in civic spiritedness, and we shouldn’t be afraid to display that.

Brett McKay:

Well, Waller, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Waller Newell:

I’ve had a great time as far as your question goes. The best place would be my website, which is www.wallernewell.com, all lowercase. That’s basically got links to all of my books, reviews of my books, my own publications, my whole cv. So if anyone wants to know more about me and what I do, that would be the place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Waller Newell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Waller Newell:

Thanks very much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Waller Newell, he’s the author of the book, The Code of Man. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, wallernewell.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> The Rough and Tumble: The Brutal Way Men Fought for Honor in 19th-Century America https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/rough-and-tumble/ Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:06:07 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190664 When we think about affairs of honor in 19th-century America, our minds typically bring up images of well-dressed gentlemen facing each other at dawn, pistols gleaming in the morning light. The duel — with its elaborate codes, precise choreography, and aristocratic flourishes — has captured our collective imagination as the quintessential way men settled disputes of honor […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When we think about affairs of honor in 19th-century America, our minds typically bring up images of well-dressed gentlemen facing each other at dawn, pistols gleaming in the morning light. The duel — with its elaborate codes, precise choreography, and aristocratic flourishes — has captured our collective imagination as the quintessential way men settled disputes of honor in the past.

But there was another tradition of honor running parallel to the gentleman’s duel — one that was far more brutal, common, and chaotic: the rough and tumble.

You’ll often hear biologists talk about how mammals — including humans — engage in “rough and tumble play.” Rough and tumble play is cute. It’s roughhousing.

But the rough and tumble in 19th-century America was the opposite of cute.

It was a no-holds-barred style of fighting where pretty much anything went. The goal was to disfigure your opponent permanently. We’re talking about gouging out eyes, biting off ears and noses, and fish hooking someone until their cheek tore.

I first came across the practice of rough and tumble fighting way back when we wrote our series about male honor. Ever since I learned about it, I’ve been fascinated by it. The idea that men would regularly try to gouge each other’s eyes out over perceived slights seems almost incomprehensibly savage from our modern perspective. Yet for thousands of working-class American men in the 19th century, this brutal form of combat was as normal and socially acceptable as settling disputes through lawyers is today.

Below, we take a look at this forgotten, but important, practice of American honor culture.

The Scotch-Irish and the Birth of American Brutality

The rough and tumble traces its roots back to the fighting traditions of the Scotch-Irish immigrants who flooded into America during the 18th century. They were a pastoral people who came from the borderlands between England and Scotland — a region where life was hard, government was weak, and personal honor was often the only thing standing between a man and his livelihood.

In a pastoral culture, such as was practiced by many Scotch-Irish, your livestock was your livelihood. The problem with animals is that bandits or a rival family could easily steal them. As a consequence, shepherds not only kept a constant eye on their flocks and herds, but they also developed and maintained a reputation for violence to deter would-be thieves. If someone messed with you or your family, an 18th-century Scotch-Irish man was expected to respond with brutal force. Killing someone over a slight wasn’t off the table.

When these immigrants settled in the backcountry regions of the American South, they carried this violent notion of honor with them. How that violent honor manifested itself began to splinter across class lines. Southern aristocrats, wanting to distinguish themselves from black slaves and lower-class whites, looked to European aristocrats as a model of settling disputes of honor. From European nobles, the Southern gentleman borrowed the code duello — an elaborate code of conduct governing duels that emphasized decorum and restraint. The goal of the code duello seemed to have been to curtail brutality, while still allowing for a man’s sense of offended honor to be restored.

Meanwhile, the poorer class of Scotch-Irish continued to use the raw violence of their ancestors to settle scores. Scratching, biting, hair pulling, and eye gouging were all fair game. The goal of this style of fighting wasn’t just to defeat your opponent; it was to mark him permanently, to leave visible, lasting proof of his humiliation. This style of honor fighting among the working-class in the South became known as the rough and tumble.

Rules? What Rules?

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Unlike dueling, which required knowledge of complex codes of conduct, expensive weapons, and social connections to arrange the affair properly, anyone could engage in a rough and tumble. It was democratic. All you needed was a grievance and a willingness to endure unspeakable pain.

That’s not to say there were no conventions at all. Rough and tumble fights typically began with a ritualized challenge. One man would announce his readiness to fight by issuing a specific throwdown to his opponent. A man of honor had no choice but to accept. The challenger could ask, “Rules?” His opponent could then respond with something like, “Queensbury rules.” But he was apt to just say: “rough and tumble.” And when he did, the violent melee would begin right there and then. 

There’s an episode of Disney’s old Davy Crockett show that shows this back and forth before a rough and tumble (hat tip to Dying Breed reader Mark McGrath for sharing this with me):

Before the actual fighting started, the combatants would usually strip to the waist. This served a practical purpose as clothes could be grabbed. But it also served as a symbolic gesture indicating that this was a serious business; there was real skin in the game.

Once the fight began, conventional rules of fair play went out the window. Gouging out eyes was not only acceptable but expected. In fact, eye gouging was so common in rough and tumbles that this style of fighting was often called “gouging.” Some men even grew their fingernails out to increase their gouging efficiency.  

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Grabbing a man by the hair and bashing his head into the ground or a nearby tree was par for the course. Biting off ears and noses was considered good technique. Fish hooking was a go-to tactic in rough and tumbles. A fighter would jam his finger (or fingers) into his opponent’s mouth and hook it into the corner of the cheek, then pull violently in an attempt to tear the flesh. The goal was to rip the corner of the mouth open. Some fighters would even attempt to twist and tear their opponent’s testicles.

A rough and tumble ended when one man either couldn’t continue or acknowledged defeat.

The Rough and Tumble Spreads

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In the 19th century, the rough and tumble gained wider notoriety through “Crockett almanacs.” These cheaply produced pamphlets portrayed Davy Crockett and other Southern-born frontiersmen taking part in rough and tumbles and boasting of their gouging skills. The tales cemented the image of the American frontiersman as a man who solved problems with raw violence. It also helped spread the rough and tumble across the country.

It even cropped up among Northern men. Historian Lorianne Foote notes that working-class Union soldiers often settled disputes with rough and tumbles, while middle and upper-class officers stuck with aristocratic dueling conventions. Once again, class shaped the form honor disputes took.

If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s epic film Gangs of New York, you’ve actually seen a Yankee version of the rough and tumble. It’s the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Amsterdam Vallon, squares off with Bill the Butcher’s heavy, McGloin (played by Gary Lewis). The fight begins like a boxing match but quickly devolves into a rough and tumble, ending with a near fish hook before Bill the Butcher calls it off. Besides capturing the spontaneous brutality of the rough and tumble, the film also gets the cultural context right. Such fights weren’t fought between gentlemen. Both Vallon and McGloin were Irish immigrants, and they duked it out in the working-class slums of the Five Boroughs.

The Death of a Violent Tradition (Mostly)

So what led to the decline of the rough and tumble? Two main factors converged to hasten its demise. First, the rise of professional law enforcement, which shifted dispute-settling to the state, and second, evolving ideas of masculinity, which increasingly frowned on extreme violence as a way to adjudicate honor.

Yet the tradition never vanished completely. Variations still surface in isolated communities today. During a podcast I did with Stayton Bonner about bare-knuckle boxer Bobby Gunn, we discussed the Irish Traveller community Bonner grew up in. In that culture, men still settle disputes of honor by stripping to the waist and fighting with bare hands until an opponent is maimed and gives up. Like their historical predecessors, when a Traveller engages in a rough and tumble, there’s eye gouging, fish hooking, and testicle twisting. It’s a brutal echo of honor’s violent past.

For more on how the idea of male honor has changed over the centuries, check out our series on the subject.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,082: The Code They Killed For — Honor, Manhood, and the American Gunfighter https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1082-the-code-they-killed-for-honor-manhood-and-the-american-gunfighter/ Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:41:56 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190500   When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy — spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town. But gunfighters weren’t just products of Hollywood. They were real men who lived and died by a code: one rooted in a particular sense of […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy — spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town. But gunfighters weren’t just products of Hollywood. They were real men who lived and died by a code: one rooted in a particular sense of honor.

My guest today is Bryan Burrough, author of The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. We dig into the true story behind America’s gunfighting era — how it grew out of the South’s dueling culture, was intensified by the violence of post–Civil War Texas, and spread across the frontier via the cattle drive. We explore why so many gunfights had less to do with crime and more to do with reputation, why the Colt revolver transformed personal conflict into deadly spectacle, and how young men came to see violence as a rite of manhood. Along the way, Bryan also explores how gunfighters went from frontier figures to pop culture icons — and which films, in his view, captured their essence best.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Book cover featuring a 19th-century American gunfighter holding a revolver inside an outline of Texas; text reads "The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild" by Bryan Burrough, exploring themes of honor and manhood.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy. Spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town. But gunfighters weren’t just products of Hollywood. They were real men who lived and died by a code, one rooted in a particular sense of honor. My guest today is Bryan Burrough, author of The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. We dig into the true story behind America’s gunfighting era, how it grew out of the South’s dueling culture, was intensified by the violence of post-Civil War Texas, and spread across the frontier via the cattle drive. We explore why so many gunfights had less to do with crime and more to do with reputation, why the Colt Revolver transformed personal conflict into deadly spectacle, and how young men came to see violence as a right of manhood. Along the way, Brian also explores how gunfighters went from frontier figures to pop culture icons, and which films, in his view, captured their essence best. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/gunfighters. All right, Bryan Burrough, welcome to the show.

Bryan Burrough: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you recently published a book called The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild, and this is all about the Old West gunfighter that you see in Old Westerns and TV shows. I’m curious, why did you do a deep dive into the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Because I felt like the time was right. This was a field of study, if you want to call it that, that was probably at its high-water mark 50, 60 years ago in the ’60s and ’70s. And while there had been books on individual gunfighters, in fact, there’s a new Jesse James book pretty much every year, a new Billy the Kid every two or three years, I kind of felt like it had been quite a while since anyone had come in and really taken a fresh look at the entire subject, the entire field, and tried to tell the whole story of this gunfighter era that took place in America on the frontier after the Civil War. And I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say new, but I just felt like it was time to freshen up the canon and that I could take a big… I thought I could swing for the fences on this one, and so I kind of did. It kind of went out over my skis a little bit to badly mix my metaphors. And the reception, as you know, has been very generous and very surprising.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think what you do in this book, I really appreciated this, is you provide the context of why there was this period in American history where you had guys shooting at each other. Let’s talk about this. What makes a gunfight a gunfight? And what makes a gunfighter a gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, typically the way you would differentiate is a gunfighter is anyone, I think, widely defined, as anyone who had an exchange of gunfire on the American frontier that did not involve the military, so not a soldier or Native Americans. So this is exclusively civilian gun violence. It could be a sheriff versus a bad guy. It could be two feudists. It could be two drunken cattlemen. It was civilian gun violence. But having said that, it comes in every way, shape, and form. I guess the one thing that makes a gunfight a gunfight is if there is an exchange of gunfire as opposed to, you know, for instance, Jesse James, most of the people he killed he just executed. So there is a difference between a murderer and a gunfighter, and I think generally that’s pretty clear. If you think about the classic gunfight, what most of us know about this from movies, and the classic one that came up in Westerns in the middle of the last century was, you know, two men standing alone in the middle of a sandy street in a small town, and then they draw and they shoot. And while that’s not unknown, I can maybe point to 10 or 15 actually like that.

In fact, Old West gunfights are not typically different in style from any gunfight today. I can point to you gunfights on horseback, gunfights where one guy was laying down and the other was standing up. I got one where one guy shot another while he was down in a well. I mean, it just happened in every way, shape, or form. But the rarest was probably that classic two men squaring off, although ironically, the one that I opened the book with and the first nationally recognized gunfight, what really began to make the gunfighter a thing, was very much that type of classic cliche gunfight, two men in the street. In this case, it involved the famous gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok in his first nationally recognized gunfight in July of ’65 in Springfield, Missouri. And it was very much in the style of an old duel like from the Old South, where they came together in the middle of the square in Springfield, Missouri. The fight was over a gambling dispute with townspeople lined up on both sides, and then they draw simultaneously. And of course, Hickok is the victor. 

And shortly thereafter, an Eastern rider for a big magazine found out about this, wrote about it, and it was really the first moment where Americans became aware, oh, not only are there people shooting each other out on the frontier, but that this is, it somehow struck a chord, something in the American character that really, you know, at a time where people were shooting each other on the streets of Boston and Baltimore every night, nobody cared other than it being a crime. This seemed to be something different. And the gunfight, the frontier gunfight, has fascinated Americans really for 160 years ever since. I mean, we’re still talking about this stuff 160 years later.

Brett McKay: How do you demarcate the gunfighter era? When did it begin and when did it end?

Bryan Burrough: Well, one big challenge for me going into this, of course, is that how do you write a book about gunfighters when they’re all over the place? This goes on for, you know, decades. And most of these, you know, Jesse James has nothing to do with Billy the Kid, who has nothing to do with John Wesley Hardin. And so the first thing I did was demarcate my time. So I grandly called what I dubbed the gunfighter era from July of 1865 until 1901 when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid famously got on that freighter for South America. The ending of the last brand name outlaw seemed like an appropriate place to end it. And so then the question became, how do you tell that all as a single story? And I think I found a way that I could actually hold it all together as one story.

Brett McKay: And how many gunfights were there during that era, you think?

Bryan Burrough: It would all depend on how you define gunfights. I honestly have no idea. Clearly, it’s in the hundreds. I know Bill O’Neill, a well-known Texas historian. In fact, I believe he was the state historian for a while. I want to say he came up with like 580 what he called significant gunfights. And again, very difficult to explain to you what significant is, but in large part, they’re the ones that made the newspapers and thus the history books, and typically more than one newspaper suggesting some public interest. So certainly things like the gunfight beside the O.K. Corral starring Wyatt Earp, certainly anything involving Billy the Kid, John Winsley Hardin. In general, the notable gunfights, what I call marquee gunfights, are those that made more than one newspaper at the time.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so you mentioned that all these gunfights, they happened all over the place. They seemed like they weren’t connected. So your challenge was trying to figure out, okay, what is the connection? And your connection that you found was Texas, where you live, your home state. And what I took away from the book, Texas contributed several factors that gave rise to the gunfighter. And a big part of that is cultural. So tell me about this cultural component of the gunfighter. You talk about how they’re developed after the Civil War, or even before the Civil War, this idea of Texan honor that developed out of Southern honor. So tell us about that. Tell us about the Southern honor code, and then how did that develop into the Texan honor code? And then we can talk about how that led to the gunfighter.

Bryan Burrough: Sure. When you’re looking at a way to explain why all this happened, the only thing that I could figure out to do was to understand why it happened, why it happened there, and what were the factors that caused all these gunfights. And I remember one of the first times it really hit me was in reading accounts of that first Hickok gunfight in 1865. And they were ostensibly fighting over the other guy took Bill Hickok’s watch as a gambling debt, and Hickok wanted his watch back. And later somebody said, why on earth would you kill a man over a watch? And he said, I’m not killing a man over a watch. This was about my honor. This was a challenge to my honor. I’d read stuff like that before in Western literature. And I happened to be from the South and happened to be from Texas. And that struck a real chord to me. And just immediately I realized, well, when was the only time in American history before the gunfighters after the Civil War that a group of civilian men were famous for shooting each other? And it was in the dueling culture in the antebellum South from the 1790s or so into the 1840s. Duels were a very big thing in the South.

And what mattered to me was less the formal structure of the duel, because obviously we didn’t have a ton of duels in the Old West, but rather the factors that caused it. There’s this thing that historians write an awful lot about in the antebellum South, and it’s the male honor culture. And that is, you know, it calls for things that you might expect, you know, to be brave and kind to women and kind to horses and such. But the part that matters for our story is that any time that a Southern male in that time period was challenged, if he was told that he was ugly or his wife was ugly or his horse was ugly, you know, he had an opportunity and in many cases an obligation to respond with force, even deadly force. And that’s what led to these duels. And what you find as you follow that culture as it moves west with the South into Texas, Texas became another Southern state, but Texas was different. It was the only Southern state that had not one but two violent frontiers, the Mexican border, of course, but also we forget the Native American, the Comanche frontier, which split the state in half on a diagonal into the 1870s.

It made the Texan particularly adept. It was a martial culture. They were adept from the beginning with guns. It was the Texans, the Texas Rangers, to be sure, who initially discovered and popularized the first Colt revolvers. You know, it was Texans who made it a thing, but it really wasn’t until the 10 years after the Civil War, when Texas was engulfed with rebellion against the federal government, that that type of hyper-violent ethos really rose to the fore, where it was just Texas was, during Reconstruction, I think just about every academic study puts it this way, by far the most violent of the Southern states. You can find academic analyses that will say that the decade of civilian violence in Texas after the war may have been the bloodiest period of civilian violence in American history. And what I posit is that it made the Texan a little bit of a different animal. If you go and look at the marquee gunfights out there, Brett, I’m saying 60, 70% of them involve a Texan in some way. And what I had not understood, what confused me initially is, well, what were Texans doing having gunfights in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Wyoming, in Nebraska?

And that’s when I discovered the thing that spread Texas culture and this Texas kind of hyper-violence across the frontier was the open ranged cattle industry. It was a business that began in Texas and that thrived in Texas after the war. Texans pretty much had a monopoly on beef cattle for a few years. And what began to spread Texas cattle and Texas cattlemen, Texas cowboys across the frontier, of course, was the need to get to Northern markets when they began driving these cattle up the cattle trails, up the Chisholm Trail, most famously, into Kansas, which really became kind of the beginning of this gunfighter era when gunfighters began to get national attention.

Brett McKay: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there, but honing in on this honor idea, I think this is very foreign for a lot of modern listeners because, I mean, this idea of honor that these guys had in the South, and you see it somewhat in the North, not as much, but it really took hold in the South. It was all about protecting your reputation. I mean, that’s what it was. It was all about your reputation as a man. And if your reputation was somehow called into question, you had to defend it with violence. And there’s a theory that the reason why the South has a particularly strong notion of honor, I think, was it Richard Nisbet, his book, The Culture of Honor?

Bryan Burrough: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Talked about how a lot of people in the South, they came from these shepherding cultures in Scotland. 

Bryan Burrough: Scotland and Ireland, especially. 

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Bryan Burrough: Those who work around livestock, it’s always been violent cultures, in part, the need to dissuade thieves. And for whatever reasons, much of it becomes wrapped up in honor. You can read so many explanations of why Southerners became obsessed with honor. A lot of historians seem to believe it has to have something with slavery. You can read people that say it has something to do with the heat. I come down with the feeling that it basically arose from the planters’ class, the wealthiest class in the South, where we had something in the South that we never had in America, which was the idle rich, an entire class of idle rich for whom Black people, slaves, did most, if not all, of their work. And so in a need to kind of differentiate themselves from those below them who worked, they modeled themselves after the aristocrats of Europe, for whom honor had been sacrosanct for hundreds of years. And that’s kind of my feeling on how Southerners became obsessed with honor. And it filtered down through the classes. If you wanted to move up, you needed to have honor.

And this happened in a world where not a lot of people had college degrees or educations that they could talk about or financial statements. And in a world where everybody kind of looked the same, honor became the way you measured people, the way you measured men. And as silly as it may sound to our ears today, if someone went up to you in New Orleans in 1844 and pinched your nose or called you ugly or made a remark about your children, you were expected to lash back in some way, shape, or form. And I think it was the development of that culture that migrated into something different, something even more violent via Texas on the old West frontier.

Brett McKay: Yeah, my take on it was the honor code in the South. And again, you saw it somewhat in the North, but it was really pronounced in the South. The way you protected your honor differed amongst classes. So amongst the upper class in the South, you would follow the codice duello, like the dueling code.

And it was designed basically to prevent violence. Like there’s all these different protocols you went through. You had a second, you try to do some negotiation. And then oftentimes you just show up and like shoot your pistol in the air. And you called it good. The lower class, they tended to just like, they didn’t use weapons. They didn’t follow the formal dueling code. They would just oftentimes engage in like, they called it the rough and tumble.

Bryan Burrough: I mean, I’m telling you, fist fighting and wrestling back in those days was a different thing. I mean, you’re talking about gouging out eyes and ripping people’s mouths. I mean, several states had to pass laws against eye gouging, if you can imagine. Anyway, this whole honor thing seems to have come out of the Revolutionary War when American officers kind of got close and personal with their British and French counterparts for whom honor was a very big deal. But it stopped in the North, as you point out, and most people believe that was about the Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton duel in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1803. After that, duels all but disappear from the North. And yet, they not only don’t disappear in the South, they’re all but embraced. I mean, you can point to any number of known people, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Abraham Lincoln, who all either involved in duels, you know, shot people in duels, or in Lincoln’s case, he managed to talk himself out of one. Duels were not, like, I think we look back now and think, oh, that’s kind of a lunatic fringe type of deal.

But if you look at the people who are engaged in duels, who, you know, put out public notices, they were often politicians and people involved in public life for whom an assault on their honor was kind of widely known. If you were an up-and-coming congressman in St. Louis, and somebody, you know, talked bad about you, I mean, you were challenging them to duel. Missouri was, Missouri and St. Louis was kind of the northern boundary of all this.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for our listeners, if you want to see an example of like a lower-class notion of honor, like the rough and tumble that we were talking about, that wrestling, like no-holds-barred wrestling, there’s a great scene in the Gangs of New York where the DiCaprio character, who’s from Ireland, he first meets Bill the Butcher, and there’s like some other, one of Bill the Butcher’s heavies is there, and there’s some sort of insult or slight, and then they just immediately take off their coats and they start punching each other, but then there’s some like fish hooking and things like that. I’m like, that’s an old-school Civil War notion of honor amongst the working class.

Bryan Burrough: Yeah, I had forgotten about that. That was a very good example of it, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, so, and then this notion of honor, it moved to Texas, and I think what happened in Texas, in the sort of notion of Texan honor, it got democratized, I think, significantly. It wasn’t just like the aristocrats who were protecting their honor, it was these guys who had herds who felt like they needed to maintain their reputation for violence so people would just not mess with them. And then you see this introduction of, you mentioned earlier, the Colt revolver. So there’s a technological component to the gunfighter. Tell us about that. How did the Colt revolver change the game in the Old West? 

Bryan Burrough: There is no gunfighter. There is no gunfighter age without a revolver. If you think of it, back in Antebellum days, when they would have duels, typically it would be with single-shot pistols. So bang, the other guy goes bang, and then everybody takes 15 seconds to reload. You can’t exactly kill a lot of people in that way, but when you had a six-shot revolver, you could do an awful lot of damage. We sometimes forget that when Colt was kind of a nobody, a rich kid out of Massachusetts who was fascinated with tinkering and thought he could make a revolving gun. But when it was introduced for the first time in, I want to say 1837, it was a complete flop. In fact, five years later, Colt is out of business and no one’s using revolvers. And then out of nowhere, a young officer named Jack Hayes in the Texas Rangers, who spends much of his time on the Comanche frontier fighting Native Americans, stumbles on a shipment of them that was basically sitting in a warehouse. It had initially been sent, I love this, to the Texas Navy back when Texas had a Navy as an independent nation.

Jack Hayes took these revolvers, showed his men how to use them, and famously in 1844 at the Battle of Waller Creek, northwest of San Antonio, he was engaged with his crew of, I want to say 23, 24 guys against a group of Comanche that was said to number around 100. And for the first time, the Rangers charged into the Comanche firing the revolvers. And in the ensuing fight, 23, 24 Comanche were killed and only one Ranger. And the great takeaway quote afterwards, years later, the chief who had been involved there said, I shall never fight Jack Hayes again, for he has a bullet for every finger on his hand.

Brett McKay: And then how did the Colt change the game for gunfighters?

Bryan Burrough: Well, first off, you don’t notice a huge difference immediately countrywide until the years after the Civil War when you can talk about how the war influenced gunfighters and these people doing this violence to each other out on the frontier. And common sense tells you the war must have had something to do with it. It’s often been speculated that many of these gunfighters must have been suffering from something like PTSD, which is compelling and probably correct, but it still has to remain speculative because we don’t have anybody at the time, you know, blaming, I’m sorry I killed those four guys, I had a bad day at Gettysburg. But what you can point to about the war influencing violence is that in 1865, 1866, something on the order of 1.3 million handguns were auctioned or given away by the federal government after the war. And so for the first time, what we call today as open carry, while not unheard of before the war, you can find memoirs in which people say, oh, I saw a man wearing a gun on his hip in Georgia in 1815. It happened. But what becomes clear is that after the war in the 1860s, it becomes commonplace, such that people are just kind of stunned that men across the South, across the frontier, are wearing pistols with no more thought than the way they used to wear a necktie or their glasses.

And one of my favorite memoirists out of Missouri, in a reference to that rough and tumble type of style, says that type of problem resolution is gone now. People here handle such things with a pistol in a much quicker and more efficient fashion. And that’s really the dawn of the gunfighter era.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so you had this notion of honor instead of a duel with these elaborate procedures and rituals. You just had guys who were like, let’s just take care of it now. And they were all heavily armed. They’re all carrying pistols. Some guys had two pistols on them. It’s just everyone was armed in Texas and in the frontier. Pretty much. Another aspect or another way technology contributed to the rise of the gunfighter was the telegraph and mass media. Tell us about that.

Bryan Burrough: It’s funny. I think most people that look at this think that gunfighting and gunfighters were somehow a creation of the media, a creation of dime novels and pulp fiction. In fact, the gunfighters type violence that I’m writing about here and that we see in movies was very real. I think what telegraphs and the media allowed is for the fascination with this phenomena, which, by the way, did not begin in the East. It begins in the communities where these things happen. You can read it in the local newspapers. All the pulp fiction and dime novel writers did was pick up on something that was initially very popular in the West. You can read one of my favorite stories about this is from very early in the game when Mark Twain, as a young writer, went out to Nevada during the Civil War to become a journalist. And on the way on these stagecoaches, all anybody ever wanted to talk about was a certain gunfighter, a guy named Jack Slade, who was a local legend.

And that was months, if not years, before anybody uttered his name back East. So I think that the media, and we see this especially with Hickok’s creation, you know, the media broadcast this legend, but they don’t create it. I think that’s where a lot of cynics want to say they created it. And I would argue, no, this was a genuine organic phenomena that they picked up because it fascinated Americans. For some reason, and we can speculate why, you know, this type of behavior really struck a chord with Americans. So there would still have been gunfighters, but I’m not sure they would have become the American archetypes they did if not for media.

Brett McKay: Why do you think it struck a chord with Americans at the time?

Bryan Burrough: I think it has to do with the fact that the American West really became the American origin story. You know, we can tell all the tales we want about George Washington and men in powdered wigs beating the British, and that’s clearly the actual origin story. But stylistically and in terms of values and behaviors that we might want to emulate, I’m not sure there was that many that people look to the the Revolutionary War to find. Instead, I think when people think about American values, when they think about the American dream, the American dream, as I define it, would be the idea that any person, certainly any man in America, can rise from humble beginnings and chart his own way. And nowhere was that more evident than on the frontier, where thousands of Americans went out, you know, and pitched a dent on a patch of dirt and tried to make something of themselves. 

And it made the frontier, I think, kind of a cradle for the American worship of individualism, the idea that anyone can do it. And there’s something about the gunfighter who’s kind of the ultimate individual, isn’t he? You know, what’s more, what is more of an equalizer than a gun, where a man who’s 4’11 could kill a man who’s 7′ tall and a wrestler? The gunfighter became kind of a symbol, one of many probably, but a symbol, an abiding symbol of American individualism and of the American dream. That’s my theory, at least.

Brett McKay: So these gunfights are happening organically. Back East, they picked up on it, started writing about them in the paperbacks and the dime novels and the National Police Gazette was a big place where all these stories were published. I’m curious, I’ve heard that, kind of fast-forwarding and looking at another area of American history related to crime and violence, The Godfather, the movie The Godfather, I’m going a completely different stream here, but I’m going somewhere with this.

Bryan Burrough: I’m with you.

Brett McKay: Some people speculate that the movie The Godfather influenced the mob, the actual mob. Like these mobsters, they watched The Godfather, and they’re like, well, we got to act this way because that’s what it says in The Godfather. Did you come across anything like that where you see that with the gunfighter? Like there’s young men who are reading these dime novels, and they’re like, well, I got to carry my gun this way, or I got to do this so I can be like the gunfighters that I read about on the National Police Gazette.

Bryan Burrough: I know way too much about The Godfather, and you’re exactly right. I mean, the woods are so full of mafia guys, you know, back in the ’80s, ’90s, who talked about how, yeah, they needed to live that way. And you see exactly the same thing in the Old West. I can think of individual moments. For instance, Butch Cassidy in his second robbery in Utah, and I want to say 1896, which was very late in the game on the frontier. He had a partner named Elzy Lay. And I can remember in the middle of this robbery when one of the guys that they were robbing tried to make a move,Elzy Lay said to him something like, don’t pick up that gun or I’ll fill your belly full of hot lead. Like, who talks like that? The fact is nobody talks like that. It’s so clear that he got that from Pulp Fiction. He got that from a dime novel. But you also see that from the very beginning with the Texas cowboys who spread across the frontier, first to Kansas, but then to New Mexico and beyond. You can find memoirs. I’m thinking of Teddy Blue Abbott’s famous cowboy memoir.

And he talks about how he was yearning to get to Kansas so he could shoot someone, so he could prove his honor, so he could prove his manhood. You know, being involved in a gunfight was not something in that time, in that place, among those people that was something to be shied away from. It was something, in fact, that a lot of young men attempting to prove who they were yearned for and sought. And it’s one way that, you know, when you look at the behavior of Texas cowboys in the 1870s especially, I mean, there’s so many things where you’re like, really? They shot him over that? They shot him because he got jostled in a bar? They shot him because somebody, you know, beat him at go fish? They’re just silly things that caused gunfights. But if you take into this the context that many young men wanted to prove their manhood with guns, some of those silly gunfights make much more sense.

Brett McKay: Well, speaking of the cowboys, that was another factor that contributed to the rise of the gunfighter. It was an economic factor. You see the rise of the Texas cowboy and the Texas longhorn, the steer. How did the cattle boom from Texas contribute to the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, the cattle boom took a southern honor culture that had been already, you know, pumped up to pretty new heights in Texas and added kind of the final block to the wall, if you will. And that is the Texas cattle business, especially as expanded into new areas in the 1860s and ’70s. So moved from South Texas into much of the rest of Texas, especially Central Texas, was legendarily violent because this was open range cattle ranching. So no barbed wire fence. The cattle range free. You put a brand on them and when it was time to go to market, you went and rounded them up. Well, obviously that made this industry especially prone to thievery, to theft of livestock. And so that’s the reason why Texas cattlemen, like generations of cattlemen before them, resorted to violence so readily. You know, often it was hanging. And this, by the way, played out in a dozen of kind of feuds across Texas in the decade after the Civil War, all of which dwarfed the body count of a feud like Hatfield and McCoy. This was probably eight of the 10 worst feuds in American history were around the cattle industry in Texas. And a lot of the violence was hanging, but much of it was also gunfights.

And especially as those behaviors spread across the West, that’s how you explain Texas cattlemen in gunfights pretty much everywhere you want to look in the West.

Brett McKay: And this is why you say, you know, Texas made the West wild. The cattle industry spread through what was an Indian territory up to Kansas, Abilene, Dodge City. And that’s why we had that famous gunfight in Arizona, the O.K. Corral. I mean, that was basically…

Bryan Burrough: I mean, Texans practically colonized New Mexico, Texas cattlemen. When you look at Arizona, I think Arizona went from, I want to say, 3,000 cattle in 1870 to 5 million in 1890, and all those were brought in by Texans. It’s funny, when you look at the outlaw gang that Wyatt Earp fought against in Tombstone that led to the famous gunfight beside the O.K. Corral, they were known as the Cowboys, usually spelled Cal hyphen boys, except from below the border where they stole many of their cattle, Mexican ranchers called them the Tejanos because so many of them were from Texas.

Brett McKay: All right, so the rise of the gunfighter, we’ve got the honor culture that morphed into Texan honor culture, the rise of the Colt Revolver, and then the cattle boom spread this violence across the American West. Something else I was struck by in your book, a lot of the gunfighters you highlight were gamblers. What was the connection? Why were so many gunfighters gamblers?

Bryan Burrough: Well, first off, almost everybody in the Old West was a gambler because there wasn’t much else to do. Keep in mind, no TV, no internet, no radio, nothing much to do but sit around and talk and drink and, oh yeah, play cards. So almost every main gunfighter I can think of, other than maybe Jesse James, who is not really a gunfighter, but that’s a story for another day, engaged in gambling as a pastime and occasionally as their profession. And there you could cite Doc Holliday, you could cite the Texan Ben Thompson and the Texan Luke Short as being kind of the three great gambler gunfighters. But you raise a question that perplexed me at the beginning, which is if you start to look at these marquee gunfights, you see a disturbing number of them involve arguments over gambling, which just didn’t make much sense to me. If you and I are sitting there playing five-card draw, Brett, and I throw out two fives and you throw out two fours, well, it’s pretty obvious I won. What is there to argue about? And then I started reading the histories on gambling, and it turns out that gambling on the frontier was a little bit different today.

And the reason it was so violent, I came to believe, is that, well, two things. One, Americans finally figured out that most gambling, certainly card-based gambling, was fixed, that people who did it professionally or did it often knew how to cheat. This was thanks to a riverboat gambler who in the 1840s came out and wrote a book about all the ways that gamblers could cheat and did. So everybody on the frontier was on the lookout for cheating, and cheating was endemic. And certainly any challenge of cheating, and that’s what an awful lot of the gambling-based arguments were about, was you cheated. Prove it. Well, here’s a gun. But if you were challenged to cheating, that was an acute challenge to your honor, and that led to a lot of gunfights, an awful lot of them. I mean, maybe, I don’t know, maybe 30%, 40% of the gunfights that I write about seem to have something to do with gambling.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think it’s called giving someone the lie. It’s like when you accuse someone of lying.

Bryan Burrough: Ooh, I wish I’d known that. That’s a good line.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk about some particular gunfighters that stood out to you. So a lot of these gunfighters, thanks to the dime novels, the pulp newspapers, they had a lot of hype around them. Like, well, this guy killed 30 men and this guy killed 50. If you look at the actual numbers, most of them maybe killed one or two guys. Some of them got up to maybe five. Out of all the gunfighters you researched and wrote about, which one actually lived up to the hype that they had?

Bryan Burrough: John Wesley Hardin of Texas, who of what I call the big five gunfighters, meaning the most famous, those would be Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the least known is John Wesley Hardin , who very much is a transition figure from kind of exclusively Texas violence to violence out on the frontier. He was just another kid in rural Texas until he killed a black man in 1868 when he was 15, an argument over a wrestling match, at which point he was obliged to become a fugitive. And Hardin , very much like Jesse James and many of the earliest gunfighters, was a diehard rebel who felt like the South was being unjustly occupied and dominated by Northern troops. And so Hardin embarked on a career for six years where he kind of wandered Texas killing people. And generally not for reasons he expected, almost always because of arguments and things that went round. Hardin was the type of guy, if you said something wrong about Texas, he would shoot you. I mean, he was literally a serial killer, and he was almost certainly, by the dictionary definition, a psychopath.

He also embodies this spread of Texas violence because after killing, and he is credited between 24 and 42 killings. By the time he was 21, most before he was 18. And of course, his most famous jaunt was the single cattle drive he took up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene in 1871, where he came face to face but did not shoot while Bill Hickok, who silkily kind of disarmed him before gunplay. But in the four months that Hardin was in the Abilene area, I think I tied it up that he killed, believably, eight men, five at once in a big gunfight out on the prairie with his cousins. And the most famous of Hardin ‘s gunfights, which really was not a gunfight, was the one where supposedly it was always said that he killed a man for snoring. And of course, for 150 years, people have kind of rolled their eyes and said, oh, that’s just a Texas myth. But the facts are he was asleep or drunk in his hotel room there in Abilene at four in the morning, and he shot a man in the next room through the wall with four gunshots. And they probably didn’t get into an argument since they were in separate rooms and couldn’t see each other.

I think, why else would you shoot somebody through a hotel room wall than if they were snoring? So I’m prepared to believe it.

Brett McKay: Who was the most overrated gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Johnny Ringo. He was very famous up until, let’s say, the last 50 years. Like, there were Johnny Ringo television series in the ’50s. There were Johnny Ringo movies during the ’60s. He was kind of a second-tier gunman in Tombstone, best known as a gunfighter who had a particular animosity for Doc Holliday. But beginning in the ’70s, a series of researchers basically realized that not only was he not a gunfighter, he had never been in a gunfight of any type. The only time we ever understand that he actually fired a gun in anything like Anger was once in a drunken argument with a miner in which I think the miner was winged. And the only other gunfight he was ever in, he was probably the one that killed him. In fact, we believe he committed suicide, found dead against a tree in the middle of nowhere. Wyatt Earp, famously years later, decades later, bragged that he did it, but he didn’t. And we now know that Johnny Ringo, and none of this was Johnny Ringo’s fault, the Old West kind of disappeared from American conscience for about 30 years, from the 1890s into the 1920s, when it was rediscovered, famously by a magazine article in which the writer’s lead was, who remembers Billy the Kid, which ignited this interest in gunfighters and all manner of Western things.

And that was really the beginning and in some ways the peak of Ringo’s fame. I mean, there were people that wrote in books that he was not only the greatest of American gunfighters, but that he was a college man known for spouting stories in Latin, all of which is purely made up by modern writers or writers from the 1920s. Poor Johnny Ringo was not responsible for any of it. The runner up though was probably Wild Bill Hickok, who, while he became a gunfighter of note, when he first got all the attention as a result of that opening gunfight there in Springfield, Missouri in 1869, the writer wrote with a straight face in Harper’s Weekly, you know, a notable magazine that he had no doubt that Hickok had killed over 100 white men. And by my count, the exact number at that point would appear to be two, although two men that he wounded in one of them died, but they were killed by other people, so technicality. But even that is a long way from 100. So that type of thing, you know, you see in three or four of these careers.

On the other hand, Brett, there’s any number of gunfighters whose stories are even better than we remember. You know, Hardin is probably underappreciated solely as a source of, you know, gunfighter mayhem.

Brett McKay: This is probably a morbid question, but after all your research, which gunfight was the most impressive, for lack of a better word?

Bryan Burrough: Well, you know, I mean, I hate to go to the one everybody knows, but O.K. Corral is amazing. Eight men, which was initially 10, and several of them backed away. And so it was four Earps versus three bad guys. So seven guys shooting from ranges from five to 15 feet. And a gunfight that lasts 30 seconds. Three guys end up getting killed. That was pretty impressed. The other two crazy ones were one from California, of all places, during the gold rush, before the actual gunfighter era, but in kind of a manic prelude, in which one guy on a mountain trail with his sack of gold powder was ambushed by a bunch of bandits. And he killed 11 of them by himself with a gun and then with a knife. But hands down, the craziest gunfight of all, I think, and I got to give you the short version of this because the long is too great, was a group, a young Hispanic deputy in New Mexico in 1884, in what’s today the town of Reserve, way out on the Arizona border up at altitude, had the temerity to arrest a drunken Texan for shooting his gun in the air.

The next morning, after he processed him through the courthouse, he came out and there was a crowd of 80, eight zero Texas cowboys who worked at the ranches outside town, who chased him down. He took refuge in an adobe hut and they kept him under gunfire under siege for the next 36 hours. He ended up killing four of them. He walked out unhurt in part because everyone only learned afterwards that this little adobe hut had a false bottom and he was able to lay flat about 18 inch below ground level. And these cowboys just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and every single shot went over his head. And the young man’s name was El Fago Baca and he went on to be tried and found innocent twice of murder and went on to a long career in New Mexico as a politician and a sheriff of note.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about the gunfighter era. When did it start drawing to a close?

Bryan Burrough: You know, after the early 1880s, that’s pretty much the peak of the gunfighter era. You certainly see gun violence for another 20 years, but a lot of the craziest stuff from the early days begins to pass and gunfights in the 1880s and 1890s tend to be much more about something, typically about fights over the division of resources, whether it’s cattlemen, you know, fighting farmers or fighting sheep farmers. It more often becomes about something in those later years.

Brett McKay: It’s not about honor anymore. 

Bryan Burrough: Not as much. I mean, you can certainly find gunfights that seem to be taking part for a man’s honor, but what you see much more often is, you know, big feuds over land. And, you know, after 1901, there were certainly gunfights. I can name some, but what you find there is that in terms of newsworthiness and cultural importance, frontier violence kind of gives way to a fascination with frontier entertainment. So Western movies first, but also Western literature. I’m thinking of the Virginia Owen Wester’s 1901 book, certainly the rise of Remington and his sculpture. So I argue that it’s in that decade, in those years, in the early part of the 20th century, where Western violence begins to move from headlines to history. And so I think that’s a fair place to end the story.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, as you said, the gunfighter kind of got forgotten a little bit, but then there was this revival in the ’20s. And it just seemed like for the next 30 years, through the 1950s, I mean, it just provided fodder for Hollywood for these stories where they’re pumping out TV shows, radio shows, comic books, movies. What do you think was going on there? Like, why this sudden uptick in the interest in the Old West and particularly the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, it’s funny because the gunfighter really wasn’t a thing in the Old West. I mean, you could read stories about gunfighters, but in terms of like dime novels and popular entertainment, Indian fighters, even detectives, soldiers were much more popular stock figures than gunfighters.

Brett McKay: Yeah, like Kit Carson was a popular dime novel character.

Bryan Burrough: Much bigger deal than Hickok. You know, Billy the Kid became a household name, but he was the rare gunfighter that at the time achieved true national fame. And much of that was just because he had a stellar nickname. But it really wasn’t until the 1920s that the gunfighter was introduced in a serious way into American entertainment. But what took it to the next level was the introduction of television around 1950, which suddenly out of nowhere had, you know, three or four networks and a real need for what we call today original content for original programming. And frankly, a gunfighter show was stunningly cheap to make. You just needed a back lot with some Old West buildings. And then it’s what, you know, 10 white guys and some guns. I mean, this is not expensive television to be made. And something like a third or 40% of every TV show on in during the ’50s, during the first 10 years of modern television, was a Western and most of those featured a gunfighter. But, you know, what really got good though, for those of us who are aficionados, was in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the introduction of Butch Casting the Sundance Kid in ’69, it really introduced something like more realistic Westerns to Hollywood cinema.

If you look at the Westerns that came out from Hollywood from ’69 for the next decade, I’m thinking about the, you know, Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with, wasn’t that Warren Beatty? I mean, suddenly, you know, we lost kind of the glamour and the glitz and the, you know, singing to damsels in the moonlight and got something that was gritty and dirty and nasty and bloody. And those are the movies I think that have fueled, to the extent that gunfighters have continued to be a thing, I think much of it was because of those movies more even than 50s era television. Having said all that, and with apologies to Taylor Sheridan and Yellowstone and all that, you know, the gunfighter is just not what it used to be. A lot of the adventures, a lot of the narratives that used to star gunfighters now are set not in the Old West, but in outer space. And, you know, it’s a shame. There’s still a Hickok or a Billy the Kid movie every five or 10 years, and sadly, they no longer really attract the best and brightest. A lot of them just go kind of what we used to call straight to video.

Brett McKay: What do you think is the best movie that depicts an Old West gunfight?

Bryan Burrough: Ooh, you’re killing me here. There’s so many. I mean, I like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a lot. It’s closer to reality than a lot of people want to believe. The Wild Bunch has to stand out because it was not only the most violent, but people forget it was the first most violent, you know, it was the first over the top violent Western. I think today, you know, just thinking about movies made in the last 40 years, it’s hard not to nod toward the Kurt Russell Tombstone from 93, which people just seem to love. And with the passing of Val Kilmer earlier this year has kind of been rediscovered for a lot of people. I watched that again the other day. And some of the performances in that movie from Powers Booth as Curly Bill Brocious to Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo are just really wonderful. But even though Val Kilmer, of course, steals it, are just really wonderful. And yesterday I just watched the movie that it went up against, which was the Kevin Costner Wyatt Earp movie, which put me to sleep then and pretty much put me to sleep again the other day.

How do you make a boring Wyatt Earp movie? Well, they pretty much did.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I remember when I saw Wyatt Earp when it first came out in the movie, I fell asleep in the movie theater.

Bryan Burrough: There you go.

Brett McKay: One movie, and I remember you mentioned it, and it’s not very good. But I remember when I watched this when I was, I don’t know why I was watching this rated R, I was like 9 or 10. But back then my dad didn’t care. He was like, well, you know, he just watched HBO. And if you decide to watch with him, he’d just let you watch rated R movie. Young Guns, I for some reason, I watched that movie and I became fascinated with Billy the Kid after I watched Young Guns, but it’s pretty cheesy. 

Bryan Burrough: You know, but it’s not cartoonish. Yeah, the facts don’t really jive. I mean, it’s what the best thing you could say about it is it’s two or three cuts above Young Guns 2. And the one thing that I appreciate about it, watching it is that Emilio Estevez’s portrayal of Billy is someone who’s not totally stable. And that is the sense that you get about Billy, that he was not entirely stable. And I thought more than a lot of Billy the Kid movies, he brought that out.

Brett McKay: Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bryan Burrough: Oh, golly, you know, this is my eighth book. It’s called The Gunfighters. It’s available on Amazon and in pretty much all bookstores now. It’s the first one I’ve written about the Old West. It’s the third I’ve written about Texas. I wrote it for people who don’t know much about the Old West, but were looking for one book that would kind of not only introduce them to a lot of these characters, but would really fill in in footnotes and elsewhere with other books where you can go to read, you know, if you want the best books about Billy the Kid, the best books about Wyatt Earp and such. You know, I made a point to point to other people’s work here, too.

Brett McKay: That is it. Well, Brian Burrow, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. 

Bryan Burrough: Brett, fabulous. Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Bryan Burrough. He’s the author of the book, The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/gunfighters, where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for our new sub stack newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,003: Books, Routines, and Habits — The Founders’ Guide to Self-Improvement https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1003-books-routines-and-habits-the-founders-guide-to-self-improvement/ Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:22:10 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=182967   Note: This is a rebroadcast. A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty. And there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them. That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]>  

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty. And there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them.

That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue — a state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good. The Founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit in satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole; they believed that political self-government required personal self-government.

Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law, the president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, shares the book the Founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness as virtue and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the Founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws, believing that, while moral perfection was ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, it was still something worth striving for.

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty, and there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them. That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue. A state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good.

The founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit and satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law, president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, shares the book the founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness, of virtue, and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws. Believing that, while moral perfection is ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, was still something worth striving for. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/pursuitofhappiness.

All right, Jeffrey Rosen, welcome to the show.

Jeffrey Rosen: Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. And this is a really fantastic book. I really loved reading it. It was great getting into the minds of the founding fathers. And what you do is you take readers on a journey through the books that the founding fathers read that shaped their thinking as they were trying to figure out what is this new government gonna be in the United States. And specifically, you wanted to figure out what Thomas Jefferson meant by the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. What led you to take this exploration?

Jeffrey Rosen: It was a series of synchronicities during COVID that led to this project. First, I was rereading Ben Franklin’s attempt to achieve moral perfection in his 20s. He made a list of 13 virtues that he tried to live up to and practice every day. Classical virtues, industry, temperance, prudence. He saves the ones he finds hardest for last, which is humility, and puts X marks next to the virtues where he fell short. He tried it for a while. He found it was depressing ’cause there were so many X marks, but he was a better person for having tried. I noticed during COVID that he chose as his motto, a book by Cicero that I’d never heard of called The Tusculan Disputations. And he said, without virtue, happiness cannot be. A few weeks later, I was at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is on the UVA campus. And on the wall, I noticed this list of 12 virtues that Thomas Jefferson had made for his daughters.

 They looked a lot like Franklin’s silence, resolution, industry, and so forth. Jefferson leaves off one that’s on Franklin’s list, which is chastity. But Jefferson chooses as his motto also this Cicero book, The Tusculan Disputations. So basically during COVID, I thought I’ve got to read Cicero ’cause it’s so important to Hamilton, or rather to Franklin and to Jefferson, but what else to read? And then I found this amazing reading list that Jefferson would send to anyone who asked him when he was old how to be educated. And it’s very comprehensive. It has literature and political philosophy and science and history and a very rigorous schedule about when you read which books at what time.

It’s kind of 12 hours of reading starting before sunrise and going until evening. But what caught my eye was the section called moral philosophy or natural religion or ethics. And there was Cicero, The Tusculan Disputations, along with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, other stoic and classical philosophers, as well as Enlightenment philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, and Bolingbroke, and David Hume. So basically, I thought, I’ve got to read these books. I’ve had this wonderful liberal arts education. I’ve studied history, and politics, and English literature, and American literature, and law with great teachers in wonderful universities.

I missed these books ’cause they’d just fallen out of the curriculum by the time I was in college. During COVID, I resolved to read the books. I followed Jefferson’s schedule, got up before sunrise, read for an hour or two, watched the sunrise. And what I learned transformed my understanding of the pursuit of happiness, how to be a good person and how to be a good citizen. And all of these books confirmed what Cicero said that for the classical philosophers, happiness meant not feeling good, but being good, not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. And they defined virtue as self-mastery, self-improvement, character improvement, being your best self, and mastering your unreasonable passions or emotions so you could achieve the calm tranquility that for them defined happiness. So that was a wonderful experience in rediscovering Jefferson’s understanding of the pursuit of happiness.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, I hope we can dig into some of these books and their schedules. It was really fascinating to get a peek at how these guys thought about self-improvement, how they scheduled their days in order to fulfill those goals. But let’s talk about the intellectual environment these guys were growing up in that caused them to turn to classical writers in order to figure out what it means to live a good life. So they were products of the Enlightenment. How did the Enlightenment shape the founders’ reading habits?

Jeffrey Rosen: It shaped it completely. All of their reading habits, their whole worldview, their political and their moral philosophy is based in this shining faith in the power of reason and the ability of individuals thinking for themselves to discover the truth and align their lives with divine reason, which they thought was a synonym for the divine. And there’s just such a inspiring faith in the power of reason, the ability of reason to be reconciled with faith, and the ability of reason to achieve self-mastery. This antithesis that you find constantly in the Enlightenment literature between reason and passion comes from Pythagoras, of all people, in addition to reading the triangle and inventing the harmonic system of triads and fifths.

It was Pythagoras who drew this antithesis between reason in the head and passion in the heart and desire in the stomach. And he said the goal of life is to use our powers of reason to moderate or temper our unreasonable passions and desires so that we can achieve calm tranquility, self-mastery, and live according to reason, which is not only a right but a divine duty. And the Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Hutcheson and The Whig critics of the English tyranny all pick up this antithesis between reason and passion. Sometimes they disagree about whether or not reason is strong enough to overcome passion in particular circumstances. But it’s all in the service of moderation, the Aristotelian mean. They’re not saying that we should avoid passion or emotion, but just that we should moderate our unproductive passions or emotions, in particular, anger and jealousy and fear, so that we can achieve productive emotions like tranquility, prudence, justice, and fortitude.

Those are the classical virtues that were so important to all the founders. So just this wonderful consonance between the classical and the Enlightenment faith in reason, and a tremendous belief that the individual applying his or her powers of reason is able to achieve calm self-mastery.

Brett McKay: And another theme you see in the Enlightenment, they pick this up from the ancient writers from Rome and ancient Greece, was that you had to… I don’t wanna say, maybe, yeah, you had a duty to improve yourself because you wanted to live a flourishing life yourself. But the idea is that as individuals pursued this idea of excellence or Arete, eudaimonia, of flourishing, that will allow for a flourishing society.

Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly. You’re so right to phrase it as a duty to improve yourself. And arete, as you say, is the core of Aristotle’s famous definition of happiness. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he defines happiness as an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue. And because the phrase excellence arete is not self-defining and nor is virtue, it can be confusing to us. But it really means an excellence of the soul, a moderation of the soul, a self-control, so that, as you say, we can achieve our potential. And we have not only a right to achieve our potential, but a duty to use our gifts and talents as best we can so that we can be our best selves to use the modern formulation of it, and to serve others. And in so doing, we’re living a life according to reason, aligning ourselves with the divine harmonies of the universe and fulfilling our highest purpose.

Brett McKay: And going back to the social element of this, I think the founders were thinking, we’re gonna try this Republican form of government where there’s more direct participation by individuals in their government. In order for that to work, we need everyone to be like, I think Jefferson called this, like you had to be kind of an aristocrat of virtue and an aristocracy of virtue and talent. You couldn’t just be this sort of dolt who just like passively lived life. If you’re going to participate in government, you yourself had to have sort of this aristocracy of the soul.

Jeffrey Rosen: Absolutely. Very well put. And it’s this deep connection between personal self-government and political self-government. I really hadn’t understood this before reading the moral philosophy. But the founders think that unless we can achieve a harmony of soul in the constitution of our own minds, we won’t be able to achieve similar harmony in the constitution of the state. And more specifically, unless we can restrain ourselves from being our angriest selves and tweeting and attacking and retreating into our tribal factions, we won’t be able to deliberate in common and pursue the common good. The founders are not at all sure that the experiment will work. Never before in human history have, as a nation, tried to test the experiment of whether we can be governed by reason and conviction, not force or violence, as Hamilton says. But that’s the whole purpose of the experiment. And it’s all based on Republican virtue.

Brett McKay: Okay. So the founders believed this idea that you could develop yourself, you can improve yourself through reason, and they called it faculty psychology, where you try to use reason to temper your passions. You don’t kill your passions. You use reason to direct your passions to the good. Let’s talk about some of these books that influenced their thinking. Let’s talk about that first one you mentioned, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. All the founders read this book. A lot of them quoted from it in their commonplace books or in letters. Tell us about this book. Who was Cicero and why did he write Tusculan Disputations?

Jeffrey Rosen: Cicero, the great orator and political philosopher and moral philosopher of the Roman era, writes the Tusculan Disputations to console himself after the death of his daughter, Tullia. He’s also out of political favor and he retreats to his villa in Tusculan and sets out to write a manual. Amazingly, it’s on grief and on the management of grief. And it’s really striking that the central source for the founder’s understanding of The Pursuit of Happiness was a book about grief management. And it is divided into chapters about how to focus on controlling the only thing we can control, which is our own thoughts and emotions and not the activities or fate that befalls others.

This is the famous Stoic dichotomy of control. And Cicero is applying it to try to console himself after the death of his daughter. In its most rigorous form, the Stoic advice about death was even grief over the loss of a loved one is not reasonable because if you look at things reasonably, you want to accept whatever is as it ought to be and be grateful for the happy times you had with your daughter and recognize that things cannot be in any other way. This is unrealistic for most people. Abigail Adams thought that the Stoic advice of completely overcoming grief was too rigorous. But Jefferson finds it very consoling when his dad dies. And he’s about 14 years old, and his beloved father, Peter Jefferson, has just died. And Jefferson copies out in his commonplace book passages from Cicero to console himself. And it’s just remarkable to watch his mind work as he copies out these passages, including the famous passage about how happiness is virtue, which is tranquility of soul, which is an old man in his 70s. He would send out to young kids who wrote to him asking about the secret of happiness.

Brett McKay: How did you think this book influenced Thomas Jefferson when he was developing the declaration of independence?

Jeffrey Rosen: Well, when Jefferson was developing the Declaration, he said he wasn’t doing anything original, but was just channeling the philosophy of the American mind by distilling ideas that were commonplace from public writers such as, and he cited in particular, Cicero, Aristotle, John Locke, and Algernon Sidney. What I did is set out to read all the sources that Jefferson relied on by looking first with the moral philosophy on his reading list and doing word searches for the pursuit of happiness. And what just really was striking is that almost all of those sources, the Stoic and the Enlightenment sources, actually contained the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. And defined it as virtue rather than pleasure-seeking.

And then I set out to read the other documents that Jefferson had in front of him when he wrote the Declaration that talked about happiness, including George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and James Wilson’s Reflections on the Extent of Legislative Authority in Britain. And they also contain the phrase pursuing happiness or pursuit of happiness and defined it in this sense of virtuous self-mastery. So what’s so striking is Cicero is just one example, and really the most frequently-cited example, ’cause so many of the Enlightenment sources themselves cite Cicero. But one example of overwhelming consensus about the understanding of happiness as virtue, shared by the classical sources, the Christian Enlightenment sources, Whig revolutionary sources, and civic Republican sources, and Blackstone, the legal commentator. In other words, this is everywhere. It’s completely a ubiquitous, universally-shared understanding of happiness, but Jefferson roots it in Cicero.

Brett McKay: Okay, so Cicero had a very stoic idea of virtue. And I think it’s interesting that he used in these other classical philosophers as well as Enlightenment philosophers and later Thomas Jefferson, they said the pursuit. It wasn’t achieving happiness. It’s the pursuit. There’s a virtue in just trying to be virtuous. And if you think of virtue or having a flourishing life as a practice instead of an acquisition, that’s what we’re going for.

Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly. And Cicero himself says that the goal, the quest is in the pursuit, not in the obtaining. ‘Cause by definition, perfect virtue is unattainable. Jesus enjoins us to attempt to be perfect, but only Jesus can be perfect. Or Socrates, or Pythagoras, a handful of sages throughout history can approach perfection. But for ordinary humans, it’s just the quest. And every day you’re gonna fall short and fail, but you can attempt to be more perfect as Franklin so memorably said when he imagined life like a series of printer’s errors that he hoped could be corrected in a future edition by the author. It’s a very humane, but also demanding philosophy. We have a duty, as you said, to try to become more perfect, not only every day, but every hour of the day to try to use your talents, your time to stay focused, live in the present so you can achieve your potential all the time, recognizing that we’re gonna fall short and that the quest itself is the pursuit of happiness.

Brett McKay: So one of the things that most of the founding fathers did in this pursuit of happiness, in this pursuit of using reason to temper their passions, is they did self-examinations, daily self-examinations. You mentioned Ben Franklin’s, we can get into this a little bit more, but the guy that inspired these daily self-examinations was Pythagoras. Tell us about the Pythagorean self-examination and what the founding fathers took from that.

Jeffrey Rosen: Pythagoras is so inspiring. And I hope listeners will check out his 76 golden verses, ’cause they were really well-read in the founding era. They’re really accessible and just good practical advice about how you can try to be more perfect. And the core of the Pythagoras system is daily self-examination. Every night before bed, Pythagoras says, make a list of how well you’ve done and how well you’ve fallen short of trying to achieve the virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice, and try to do better the next time. Pythagoras I thought of him as the triangle guy, but he lives on the Isle of Croton as a guru, as a divine figure.

He’s surrounded by disciples who emulate his rigorous asceticism in drink and eating. He’s a very committed vegetarian, as Ovid describes in his great account of Pythagoras in the Metamorphosis. He has this weird exception for beans. You’re not allowed to touch beans, and his disciples rather die than touch beans, which he thinks resemble fetuses and have the spirit of life in them. But it’s all about trying to achieve perfection as a human being. Pythagoras tells his disciples to first be good and then live like gods. And the way that you live like gods is by reverencing yourself. That’s Pythagoras’s motto. And you do that through extraordinary mindfulness and self-discipline and moderation. And that was his contribution and his central distinction between reason and passion, as I said, ends up being the core of classical moral philosophy.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show.

Well, tell us about some of the founding fathers, Pythagorean self-examinations they did. So Ben Franklin famously had his 13 virtues and even developed this chart to track how he was doing. We did a whole series. When I first started AOM back in 2008, we did a whole series about Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues. I even made a Ben Franklin’s virtue journal that people could buy. But tell us more about this for those who aren’t familiar.

Jeffrey Rosen: That’s so great that you did that. I first encountered the virtues a few years ago in the Hebrew version. It turns out there was a Hasidic rabbi in 1808 who really admired Franklin and translated the virtues into Hebrew and offered them up for Jewish Seekers of Character Improvement, or Mussar, which is the Hebrew word. And a local rabbi in Washington, DC recommended it to a friend and I, and we tried it for a bit making a list every night of how we’ve fallen short with the various virtues of temperance and prudence and so forth. Like Franklin, we found it really depressing ’cause you’re always losing your temper and falling short every day. But it was helpful in creating mindfulness about how to live.

And Franklin got it not only from Pythagoras, but also from John Locke, whose book on education recommends a kind of self-examination and virtue. This led Franklin to form his famous club or junto to join of men who were devoted to self-improvement in the hope of creating a united party of virtue of fellow self-improvement seekers around the world. And the basis of it is they’re kind of support groups. You’re supposed to do it with friends and look closely at yourself and share what you find with others and try together to engage in self-improvement. Franklin, although he gave up the Virtues Project in his 20s ’cause he found it so rigorous, never abandoned his hope of writing a book called The Art of Virtue. And to the end of his days, he hoped that he would bring all of his wisdom into one place. He never quite did, but the Virtues Project is the most enduring legacy that he could give us ’cause it tells us in a practical way how to practice the art of virtue.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So he had these 13 virtues that he focused on and he developed a chart for himself where he would put a black dot if he didn’t live up to that virtue. And the idea was to have the chart as blank as possible. The more dots on it, the more bespeckled his character was. And so, yeah, the 13 virtues, for those who aren’t familiar, we had temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity. Then he added humility at the end. And as you said, Thomas Jefferson had a similar set of virtues he tried to live in his own life. And the other thing that Franklin did in addition to developing this virtue chart and kind of being very rational about his moral development, he had a schedule that he set for himself and as part of his daily examination in the morning, he would ask himself, what good shall I do this day? And then at the end of the day, he would ask the question to himself, what good have I done today? And he was just, he’s trying to do that Pythagorean thing. It’s like, how have I gotten better throughout this day? And again, Thomas Jefferson did a similar thing as well.

Jeffrey Rosen: So true. And it’s all about the schedule. That’s the most striking practical takeaway from the way all of these founders lived. They were very mindful of time and would make lists of their schedule and would stick to the schedule. They develop habits starting in youth about waking up early. Franklin famously, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. He kind of condenses that from a more lugubrious version in an English virtue source. And Jefferson’s reading list has a really demanding schedule associated with it. And all of the founders keep up this mindful schedule of rigorous reading and writing until the end of their days. And there’s something so moving about seeing Jefferson and Adams as old men still getting up early, doing their reading, trading ideas about the latest books that they’ve read, keeping up their correspondence. They fell short on so many levels in the pursuit of virtue as we all did. But the one virtue that many of them practiced until the end was industry just ’cause they developed the habits ever since they were kids.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I found that the most inspiring thing from this book is how these guys really believe they can improve themselves and they set their time, their schedule to make that happen. A lot of times we have these sort of vague ideas like, oh, I wanna become better. And it doesn’t go anywhere ’cause we don’t make it concrete. All these guys set a very strict schedule for themselves. Yeah, Ben Franklin, he had a schedule. He was up at 5:00. He says, rise, wash, and address powerful goodness. Contrive business and take the resolution of the day. That’s when he asked himself, what good shall I do this day? That was from 5:00 until 7:00. 8:00 till 11:00, he worked. From 12:00 to 1:00, he read and overlooked his accounts, did some lunch, had a working lunch. 2:00 to 5:00, did some more work. And then 6:00 to 9:00, he was kind of putting things in their place, supper, music or diversion or conversation, and then do his examination of the day. And then from 10:00 to 5:00, he slept. And then Thomas Jefferson, like you said, he had this schedule that he started when he was a kid. He was up early. And not only was he doing the reading that he set for himself, he also scheduled physical exercise.

Jeffrey Rosen: Absolutely. That’s the most inspiring thing for me too. It’s so remarkable to see how much these guys accomplished by mindfulness about time and keeping up their youthful schedules. And it changed my life. I followed the Jefferson schedule, got up, did my reading, watched the sunrise. I found myself writing these weird sonnets to kind of sum up the wisdom that I’d learned just ’cause I wanted to kind of encapsulate it in some form and found that lots of people in the founding era wrote sonnets or poems about this literature. And since finishing the book, I’ve tried to keep up a version of the Jefferson schedule.

And the simple rule that I’m carrying forward is I’m not allowed to browse in the morning until I’ve done reading or some other creative work. And there’s a difference between reading books and browsing blogs and just being not allowed to check email or do anything else until I’ve read a real book. It’s changed my life ’cause I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading for stuff that was outside of my immediate deadlines. And now reading books just to learn is transformative. And this is what so inspired me about the founders. I mean, just Adams and Jefferson, just think of it in their 70s and 80s, still excitedly learning about Pythagorean moral philosophy and Adams exploring the connections between Pythagoras and the Hindu Vedas. And they never stopped learning and growing. And that for them was the definition of the pursuit of happiness, being lifelong learners.

And if they could find time with all the depredations of 18th century living and the freezing cold and the disease and just the sheer difficulty of life and the difficulty of having access to books, which they just had to yearn for to get imported, and then I contrast that with the fact that I was able to write this whole book sitting on my couch because all the books in the world are free and online. And all I need is the self-discipline to actually read them and to swipe left to the Kindle and not right to the blog or to email. So it’s very inspiring. The founder’s schedules in their own lifetime inspired others. And I’m so grateful to have encountered their mindfulness about time.

Brett McKay: So yeah, I think the big takeaway from the founders that I got is like, yeah, if you have a goal of self-improvement, you got to put it on the calendar. If it’s not on the calendar, it’s not gonna happen. What I thought was interesting too, and you do this in the book, is you focus on a founder in each chapter. And it seems like each founder had their own personal issues that they were trying to sort out and master with their reading. Let’s talk about John Adams. What was John Adams’ biggest flaw that he worked on during his entire life? And then we’ll talk about how his reading helped him conquer that or master it.

Jeffrey Rosen: His biggest flaw was vanity. Anyone who’s a fan of the old musical 1776 remembers, I’m obnoxious and disliked, that cannot be denied. And he’s constantly ridiculed for his self-importance. He wants the president to be called his elective majesty and people mocked Adams as his rotundity. And he’s losing his temper all the time and storming that he’s not getting enough credit for the revolution. He says Adams was the actual author of the Declaration of Independence. He speaks of himself in the third person. And it’s not fair that Jefferson and the Grand Franklin are getting all the credit. And his wife Abigail recognizes this as his flaw. When they’re courting, they decide to make a list of each other’s faults, which is a dangerous dating strategy, but they, in the Pythagorean spirit, do that.

And the flaws that Abigail notes for John are that people think that he’s intellectually intimidating and haughty ’cause he’s so brilliant. You know, she puts it in a generous way. And then he counters, well, your flaws are you’re not practicing the piano or reading enough and you’re pigeon-toed. And she says, “Well, a gentleman shouldn’t comment on a lady’s posture.” But Adams recognizes his own vanity and self-importance and is constantly trying to subjugate it ever since he was a student, a young student in college and copying passage from the classics into his diary.

And the most endearing thing about Adams is that he wears his heart on his sleeve and he, in the end, does conquer this ruling passion of vanity. He has terrible blowouts with two close friends, Mercy Otis Warren, the anti-federalist, and Jefferson, who he fights with in the famous election of 1800. But the most significant thing is that he reconciles with both of them. And after falling out over politics, he gets back together with Mercy Otis Warren and certifies to her poetical genius in writing the plays that sparked the revolution. And with Jefferson, it’s just incredibly moving that he’s able to set aside all the partisanship that divided them in that election and to have this spectacular correspondence as old men where they confess, Jefferson says, “I love you.” It’s really very striking and beautiful. So that’s Adams. And he is quite relatable, to use our phrase, in both his struggles with his own vanity and ultimately his success in overcoming it.

Brett McKay: In his diary he talks about this. He says, “Vanity, I am sensible is my cardinal sin and cardinal folly.” And then he says this, “Oh that I could conquer my natural pride and self-conceit acquire that meekness and humility which are the sure marks and characters of a great and generous soul and subdue every unworthy passion.” Yeah, he was very self-aware and I think that’s the big key with all the founding fathers, they were self-aware of their flaws. They might not have been successful all the time in conquering them, but they kept working at it. And I wanna talk more about Abigail Adams ’cause I thought it was really interesting. Their marriage is… We have all their letters so we could see their correspondences. And a lot of the times they were talking about moral philosophy and how we can become better people so that we can form this new country that we’re trying to do here. The takeaway I got from there is the importance of another person in your own personal development. You can’t do it on your own. You can’t do it in a vacuum.

Jeffrey Rosen: That’s a great way to put it. Yeah, it’s so moving to see John and Abigail engaged in this mutual quest for self-improvement. They have a romantic partnership and intellectual partnership and a joint commitment to self-improvement. And Abigail gets it from the same classical moral philosophy and the same Enlightenment novels and poems that John does. And she’s not allowed to go to Harvard the way the guys are but she educates herself by reading books of the classics recommended by John and by his friend, Richard Cratch. And she takes from her reading of Alexander Pope and Lawrence Sterne, one of her favorite novelists and others, the central importance of using your powers of reason to subjugate your passions. And she’s always exhorting John and their son, John Quincy, and their other kids to be perfect. And I thought that having a Jewish mom was tough. Having a Puritan mom was even tougher for John Quincy Adams ’cause she’s constantly telling him, “Subjugate your passions.” She loves to quote the proverb, “He who’s slow to anger is greater than he who’s conquered a village,” and endlessly telling her kids, her husband and herself to be better all the while rooted in this great moral philosophy.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Abigail and John’s marriage is very inspiring and again that idea of bringing in another person into your personal development, you see that with Ben Franklin, you mentioned he started the the Junto or the Junto. It’s like a mutual self-improvement club where everyone got together and they shared, here’s what I’m working on, how can I get better? So I think we’re coming up with a great formula here for like the founder’s guide to self-improvement. One, read great books. Two, practice daily self-examinations. And then three, make sure you have another person. You’re doing this with other people ’cause you can’t do it on your own.

Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly, that’s just it, and read every day and read deeply and rediscover the radically-empowering practice of deep reading.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about George Washington so we think of George Washington, we see pictures of them or statues and he’s very regal, stoic-looking, unflappable but this guy, he’s a redhead.

Jeffrey Rosen: Sure.

Brett McKay: We see him in his white wig but he was a redhead. He had a fire, he was passionate. Tell us about how the classics helped Washington get a handle on his temper.

Jeffrey Rosen: Washington loves Seneca, whose essay on time is so inspiring. Time is a gift repaid by industry by squandering it. What fools these mortals be, says Seneca in the famous phrase quoted by Shakespeare. And Washington is obsessed with time. He’s got clocks everywhere at Mount Vernon. He keeps up a rigorous daily schedule, always eating and exercising and doing his work at the same times and he struggles ever since he was a kid to control his temper. He’s got a very critical mother, and Ron Chernow, his great biographer, thinks it may have been Washington’s effort to control himself in the face of his mother’s nagging that led to his devotion to self-mastery.

He’s observed to lose his temper in public on very few occasions. It’s so notable ’cause it’s so rare, both on the battlefield and in the White House or in the presidency and his power comes from his self-mastery, and the moments when he’s viewed as greatest are these moments where he’s mastering himself. At Newburgh, when the soldiers are rebelling, he exhorts them to achieve patience in not mutinying, but waiting for Congress to make them whole and give them their back pay. And he mounts the temple of virtue and makes an appeal for self-mastery and the soldiers weep because they’ve never seen him confess weakness before as he does when putting on his reading glasses. And really, it’s just the force of Washington’s towering character that makes him the greatest American of his age by all accounts. He presides over the Constitutional Convention. He doesn’t say much. He practices silence and self-control, but it’s the self-mastered presence of his towering authority that allows the whole convention to create a strong presidency ’cause they know he’s gonna be the president, and they trust him and they revere him. So Washington really appears almost greater, the closer you look at him, and his greatness comes from his self-mastery.

Brett McKay: So one character that I found incredibly relatable was John Quincy Adams. This is John Adam’s son. Tell us about John Quincy’s personality and disposition.

Jeffrey Rosen: I think he’s my favorite of the bunch because he’s both so relatable and so transparent about his own struggles to master his passions and to achieve his potential. As we said, he’s got his mom just on his case from the very beginning, telling him to master his passions. And this creates this lifelong sense that he’s not doing enough. There’s that amazing moment when he’s in his early 30s. He’s just turned down a Supreme Court appointment. He’s ministered to St. Petersburg and he writes in his diary, “I’m 30 something years old. I haven’t achieved anything. I’m not working hard enough, I’m spending too much time at the theater and I’m drinking too much. If only I could have more self-discipline, I might have ended war and slavery.” He puts a very high bar for himself.

But then he has this incredible challenge as these knights of the soul. He’s in the White House, and his oldest son, George Washington Adams, commits suicide. The boy can’t take the pressure of the name George Washington Adams and also being Adams’s oldest son. And he descends into alcoholism and jumps off a steamship. And Adams is crushed by the extraordinary sorrow of this loss. And he doesn’t know if he can continue. What does he do? He spends a year re-reading Cicero in the original, in particular, his favorite book, The Tusculan Disputations. He writes sonnets in the morning based on his reading. And he emerges from this after losing the presidency and determines to reinvent himself as the greatest abolitionist of his age. And he denounces slavery on the floor of Congress. He introduces a constitutional amendment to end slavery. And he dies on the floor of Congress after voting against the Mexican War, he collapses of a stroke. And while he’s on a couch, his last words, which he murmurs are, “I am composed.” And he gets this from Cicero, from the Tusculan Disputations, that the perfectly composed man is he who’s achieved the tranquility of soul that defines virtue and happiness. It’s this incredibly mindful, brave. And virtuous life and death, all within the framework of classical moral philosophy.

Brett McKay: I think John Quincy, he probably had depression. He seemed like he was a depressive. He was focused on the negative a lot. You can see that in his diary entries. He did a lot of rumination. He’s like, “Oh, I’m a total screw-up. I wasn’t a Supreme Court justice. What’s going on?” And I think that’s relatable. That’s another thing about John Quincy is he used his diary or his journal as another tool in his self-improvement. All the other founders did this as well. They used their diary as almost like a therapist. They used their writing as a way to use reason to temper their passions.

Jeffrey Rosen: Completely. I completely agree about how relatable he is. And it’s perhaps the greatest diary of any American president ’cause it’s so candid and so transparent. And so he’s really hard on himself, but he is always trying to do better. He did struggle with depression. And as you said, he does use the diary as an antidote to it. And he also uses Cicero as an antidote to depression ’cause the whole point of the philosophy, of course, is to view things realistically, to focus on controlling your own thoughts and emotions, which is all that you can control. He’s the Boylston professor of rhetoric at Harvard and gives lectures on how to control the passions to be an effective advocate as well as to be a happy person.

He uses those lectures and those tips in arguing the great Supreme Court Amistad case, freeing the Amistad captives, which folks may remember from a recent movie. And he hadn’t been a abolitionist before his reflection, but he becomes convinced that slavery violates the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. And he reads the Bible very closely and chooses a passage where Jesus promises liberty to all the captives and says that that’s a prophecy of the end of slavery.

There’s also this amazing speech that Adams gave on the Jubilee of the Constitution in 1839 about the urgent importance of studying the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to save the Republic. And he says, he quotes the book of Deuteronomy and says, “Take these principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and put them as frontlets between your eyes, whisper them to your children before you sleep and while you wake and make them the very keystone of the arc of your salvation.” It’s done with such messianic fervor. And he really believes that these principles are key to ending slavery and preserving the republic…

Brett McKay: Okay. So, the founders we’ve talked about, it’s all about developing your own personal virtue. But the idea is that as individuals pursue this idea of excellence or flourishing, that will allow for a flourishing society. So like we said, take away, read great books, never stop reading, reread them, set a schedule for yourself for your own virtue development, have friends who can help you in that process. And I think from John Quincy, we can learn keep a diary, use your diary as a way to work through this stuff. I wanna go back. I just saw, I just came across this. You mentioned that Jefferson had this list of books that he would recommend over and over again. And here they are. We’ll put a link to this in the show notes as well. But you have a selected list here. There’s 10 books.

You have Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth, Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher. Marcus Aurelius, another Stoic philosopher. Seneca, another Stoic philosopher. Cicero’s Offices, another Stoic. Cicero’s Tusculan Questions or Disputations. Number eight, Lord Bolingbroke. I like that name. Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works. Hume’s Essays and Lord Kames’s Natural Religion. Those are those 10 books those who wanna check that out. Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeffrey Rosen: Constitutioncenter.org. It’s the most amazing platform that the National Constitution Center offers. The core of it is an interactive constitution that’s now gotten 70 million hits since we launched in 2015 and is among the most Googled constitutions in the world. You can click on any clause of the constitution and find the greatest liberal and conservative scholars, judges, and thought leaders in America exploring areas of agreement and disagreement about every aspect of the constitution. There’s the weekly podcast I host, We the People, which brings together liberals and conservatives to talk about constitutional issues in the news and throughout history, Constitution 101 classes for learners of all ages, and primary source documents, which are so crucial in learning and spreading light. So it’s just so meaningful to work at the Constitution Center and to offer up all these great free resources. And it’s great to meet your listeners and to be part of their quest for self-improvement.

Brett McKay: Well, Jeffrey Rosen, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Jeffrey Rosen. He’s the author of the book, The Pursuit of Happiness. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, constitutioncenter.org. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/pursuitofhappiness, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give this review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Suburban Manhood: Its History, Contradictions, and Potential https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/suburban-manhood/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:46:29 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190074 I’m a suburban man. Born and raised. I grew up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. I now live in the suburbs of Tulsa. Suburban manhood has its own meaning and archetype — one that’s a weird and complex mixture of other archetypes of American manhood. Homeownership gives suburban men a chance to harness a […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A family of four enjoys a backyard barbecue by a pool, capturing the essence of suburban life; the father showcases suburban manhood as he grills, while the mother and children stand nearby with patio furniture and an umbrella in the background.

I’m a suburban man. Born and raised.

I grew up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. I now live in the suburbs of Tulsa.

Suburban manhood has its own meaning and archetype — one that’s a weird and complex mixture of other archetypes of American manhood.

Homeownership gives suburban men a chance to harness a bit of the genteel farmer archetype of American manliness. Like the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, you’ve got a little plot of land that’s yours, and you can do what you want with it. But unlike the republican yeoman farm or the ancient Greek oikos, where property produced food and raiment, suburban homeownership is mostly consumptive. Suburban men spend money to maintain their homes instead of their homes maintaining them. In many ways, suburban manhood is a simulation of the ideal of the country homesteader.

Suburban manhood also mixes in the archetype of the urban man. Urban manhood is characterized by ambition, professional success, style-consciousness, adaptability, and social sophistication. The urban man excels in commerce, culture, or professional fields, embracing dynamism, networking, cosmopolitanism, and competition. The suburban man embraces these energies, too, but to a lesser and more ambivalent extent; living in a less densely populated area, and perhaps even working from home, he has fewer opportunities to rub shoulders with others, attend cultural events, demonstrate wit, knowledge, and style, and exercise interpersonal skills.

The archetype of the heroic artisan is present in the ethos of suburban manhood as well. While few suburban men earn their living crafting tangible goods, there’s still an expectation for manual competence. A suburban man might handle household repairs or engage in DIY hobbies, though often at a basic level.

In addition to this mixture of ideals in the suburban manhood archetype, there’s also a general tension between public achievement and private investment. There’s this idea that your primary job is to go out into the world of work so you can bring home the bacon. You’ve got to be high agency and competitive and willing to bump elbows in the ladder-climbing world of work. But there’s also an expectation that a suburban man should be domestic — in a manly way. He’s the involved dad who fixes up the house so it looks nice and grills burgers on the patio on the weekend.

The other day, while tackling some chores around the house, I was pondering these tensions and what it means to be a man in the suburbs. I felt a sense of masculine competence by getting things done, but at the same time, couldn’t shake a nagging thought: “What exactly am I accomplishing by puttering around the house? What kind of life am I up to here?”

Wanting to make better sense of the contradictions of suburban manhood, I went digging through history. Below I’ll unpack how suburban manhood came to be a strange hybrid of public navigator and domestic homesteader — and what it means for suburban men today.

A Brief History of the Rise of the American Suburbs and Their Influence on Our Ideas of Manhood

In his book Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson outlined four defining features of the American suburb: low-density housing, high homeownership, separation of work and home via commuting, and middle-class affluence. Over the last two centuries, these features of the suburb have waxed, waned, and influenced our ideas of modern manhood along the way.

The 19th Century: The Birth of Suburban Manhood

American suburbs first emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Unlike European cities, where the wealthy stayed in the urban core, America’s elites moved to the outskirts of cities to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life. Advances in transportation made this possible. Rail lines and later street cars allowed men to live in the pastoral charms of the suburbs and then commute to the city for work.

This marked a profound shift: for the first time, work and home became physically separated for most men. Before this period, men’s working lives and domestic lives were closely intertwined. Farmers worked their land at home, and craftsmen operated workshops adjoining their residences.

With the rise of white-collar and factory work in cities, work and home life were severed. Work outside the home began to be seen as the exclusive domain of men, while the home was seen as women’s sphere. This shift was reinforced culturally by what historians call the “cult of domesticity.” Under this ideal, women were seen as the moral and spiritual caretakers of the home, while men participated in the workplace and in civic and cultural organizations. After toiling in the “dirty” urban world of public and professional life, men could return home to the renewing and refining oasis cultivated by their wives.

Yet toward the end of the 19th century, there was a movement among suburban men to reclaim the home as part of their masculine identity. They began to get more involved in home life when they were off the clock. They started gardens in their backyards and wood shops in their garages. They were doing things that allowed them to exercise masculine competency — but in a domestic way. Instead of spending time with the fellows at the pub or at the fraternal lodge, many suburban men started spending more time with their families. Scholars call this social movement “masculine domesticity.”

The 1950s and 1960s: The Golden Age of Suburban Manhood

The Great Depression put the brakes on the spread of the suburbs in America, but after World War II, they boomed. The interstate system and the rise of the automobile allowed homes to be built further away from cities while still enabling men to commute downtown relatively quickly. The GI Bill provided low-cost mortgages to returning vets, opening homeownership to millions of men. After years of actively participating in the carnage of war, many American men welcomed the tranquility of the suburbs.

Masculine domesticity went into hyperdrive in the 1950s. There’s a reason why, when we think “suburban man,” we typically picture some mid-century illustration of a 1950s guy in his backyard, grilling burgers while wearing a “Kiss the Chef” apron. Do-it-yourself-ism exploded. Magazines like Popular Mechanics became staples in suburban homes. Cooking, once the near-exclusive domain of wives, became a manly pastime — so long as it involved meat and fire. Dads volunteered to coach Pee Wee baseball and lead Boy Scout troops.

The rise of mass consumerism in the 1950s shifted the meaning of being a provider for suburban men. Instead of fulfilling that role by providing food grown or raised through their own labor, suburban men provided for their families by bringing home a paycheck to purchase the bacon at the grocery store. What’s more, the scope of providing expanded. It wasn’t enough just to provide the basic necessities for living; suburban men needed to provide middle-class luxuries for their families, like nice cars, clothes, and vacations.

Television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showcased the ideal of domestically masculine suburban manhood. Life magazine labeled 1954 as the year of the “domestication of the American Man.” It seemed like suburban men had it all in terms of masculine identity: a sense of being a capable producer and provider at work and of being a competent, creative DIY-er at home.

The 1970s-1990s: Cracks Start to Form

Things began to shift in the 1970s. Economic stagnation put a strain on many American suburban families. Job growth moved away from central cities and traditional manufacturing hubs, undermining the older “commute-to-the-city” suburban model. Suburban office parks began appearing, allowing men to work closer to home. The rise of urban decay also led men to spend less leisure time in the city.

It wasn’t just urban areas that experienced decline; suburbs that grew rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s began encountering problems traditionally associated with cities: congestion, strained infrastructure, and rising crime. Consequently, people started moving even further out from traditional suburbs into areas now known as exurbs.

With more women entering the workforce, men began to play a larger role in childcare and other domestic responsibilities, and both sexes had less time for hobbies, household maintenance, and general domestic investment. The stress of juggling multiple roles increased. Cultural portrayals of suburban life during this period began to highlight these emerging cracks in suburban manhood, exposing tensions between traditional expectations and modern realities.

The 2000s to Today: A Return to Oikos Manhood?

Advances in technology and an uncertain economic landscape have eroded two of Jackson’s defining features of the American suburb: separation of home and work via commuting, and widespread home ownership.

Digital technologies have allowed many men to work from home, and they’re having to figure out how to blend family life and work life. One minute, they can be on a Zoom call with their boss; the next, they’re driving a kid to baseball practice. In some ways, this is a return to the Greek idea of oikos manhood, where the home functioned as a place of production.

Opportunities have arisen with this shift: men can invest commuting time back into their families, communities, and hobbies. But there’s a downside, too: without clear boundaries between work and home, everything tends to bleed together. Suburban men may feel stuck in a cycle of half-working and half-fathering, never feeling fully present in either.

Homeownership has long been central to suburban manhood. But rising home prices, stagnant wages, and investor-owned subdivisions are changing that. Renting in the suburbs is becoming more common for younger men. This has shifted the old suburban script of being the master of your domain. Property stewardship becomes negotiated. Men can still DIY in their rented homes, but they have to talk to their landlord first. Perhaps they can’t remodel their kitchen, but they can build raised garden beds in the yard or create a makerspace in a spare bedroom.

​​Even when modern men do own their own homes, they were less likely to learn DIY and handyman skills growing up and are thus more likely to outsource maintenance tasks to professionals. And rather than hands-on hobbies, today’s men are apt to spend their leisure time in digital pursuits — playing video games, scrolling their phones, and watching television. As their professional jobs often involve manipulating digital modalities too, this further blurs the line between work and home, giving men a feeling of lopsided development and lending life an ethereal, unreal quality.

A New Old Ideal

The reason I — and I would imagine other men — feel ambivalent about being a man in the suburbs is that there’s an inherent tension in suburban masculinity. It incorporates various archetypes of manhood but doesn’t fully embody any of them.

The suburbanite archetype still retains something of the self-reliant homesteader — the man who fully provides for himself and his family — but only as a faint echo of that ideal. Sure, you can raise backyard chickens and grow vegetables, but you’re far from self-sufficient. You’re kind of playing at being a self-sustaining farmer.

The suburban man has professional ambitions, often strives for some cultural sophistication, and maintains a network of colleagues and friends, but doesn’t have the cosmopolitan sophistication of a city dweller. He’s more isolated and has fewer chances to dress up and make conversation with different kinds of folks; when he does socialize it tends to be with his family and in the context of youth sports leagues and church functions.

The suburban man is still expected to have a little of the heroic artisan in him, but typically doesn’t possess all that much manual competence and only engages in a nominal amount of concrete hands-on tasks — either in terms of home maintenance or his hobbies.

Despite these tensions, there’s value in embracing the contradictions of suburban manhood. Living in the suburbs has a lot of perks. You don’t have to worry about drought killing your crops. You don’t have to wake up at 4 am to milk the cows. You have ample free time (more free time than ever before) to pursue hobbies and be involved with your community.

You just have to embrace the idea that it’s worthwhile to dabble in the various archetypes of manhood, even if you’re not all-in on any of them. You don’t have to be a genuine farmer or cosmopolitan or artisan to get satisfaction from gardening, being well-read, or staining your deck.

Embracing the tensions of suburban manhood also requires investing in domestic life without losing your edge. Avoid succumbing to soft suburban dad syndrome. Stay ambitious about your work. Keep fit. Get out into the wild every now and then. You can live in the suburbs without being entirely of the suburbs.

Perhaps suburban manhood today is less about mastering a specific role and more about navigating an amalgamation of responsibilities with resilience and purpose. At least that’s what I tell myself as I shoot off emails from my home office, check on the brisket cooking in my wood pellet smoker, and finish up a workout in my garage gym.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,064: From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1064-from-public-citizens-to-therapeutic-selves-the-hidden-history-of-modern-identity/ Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:14:53 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189504   When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean.

The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences.

Today on the show, Carl Trueman unpacks this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers — Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre — who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we’ve lost something essential in moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self.

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Book cover of "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" by Carl R. Trueman, showcasing abstract geometric shapes and a black-and-white photo of a man in profile, capturing the essence of our therapeutic self in a design worthy of a podcast spotlight.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about living your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today in the show, Carl Trueman impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian and the author of the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles Taylor, Philip Brief, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discussed how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moved you from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at a aom.is/modernself. Alright, Carl Trueman, welcome to the show.

Carl Trueman: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on Brett.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self, and you explore how our concept of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with this change. First one was Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age, Philip Rieff, sociologist, we’ll discuss him. And then Alasdair MacIntyre, he’s popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I’ve read these three guys and I’ve always wondered like, why hasn’t anyone written a book where they’ve synthesized these three thinkers? ‘Cause they’re all hitting on the same idea, and they’re trying to figure out like, what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But before we get to these thinkers, we’ll start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, good question. I think what I’m trying to get at there is, is how we imagine ourselves as sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find ourselves. What is it that makes us us? So for example, if we would go back to the middle ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, who are you or what are you, you’re likely to get an answer to the effect of, well, I’m the son of so and so, or I’m the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated with this particular area. You’ll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you’re unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.

You’re probably going to get an answer that touches on things that relate to inner feelings. I’m a spiritual person, for example, or to go down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book. You might get somebody saying, well, I’m a gay person, or something like that. And the shift there has been towards this inner space, we’re not so much marked. We don’t so much understand ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings as we understand ourselves as a collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I’m really trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are and what we are relative to the world around us?

Brett McKay: And you talk about in the book Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of defining ourself to the inner, he calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that what makes me really me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera I have inside. And this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we’re all familiar, but which would’ve been meaningless back in the iddyl ages. What makes me authentic is my ability to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that fundamentally I’m an individual. I define myself, I’m defined by my individual desires, passions, feelings. And I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’ll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity ’cause yeah, it’s something I think we take for granted ’cause you hear it so much these days. But something you do in the book is you do a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define ourselves by our inner feelings? And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, this goes back hundreds of years. I mean, you’d go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch how do we go from a point where we define ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession, to whatever we feel inside of ourselves?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer in a sort of short way without indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level the last 400 or 500 years have witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquifaction of the world in which we live. What do I mean by that? We’re typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a lot more. I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was. And that’s a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. The one side of the story is the old traditional markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial.

On the other hand what moves in to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes. Descartes is wrestling with a difficult question in the 17th century when everything around seems to be changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere? Is there a an archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that? Because that is the one place that is certain. And he finds the certainty, of course, in his own mind. I think therefore I am and Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that’s taking place in the 17th century where that inner space, the one constant we all feel in our lives these days is our self-consciousness. Our psychological lives seem to be the one thing that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it’s that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards I think that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested in the world today.

Brett McKay: And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the development of Romanticism. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that?

Carl Trueman: Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, an artist such as JMW Turner, Casper David Friedrich, music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Choppa would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say the music of a Choppa to the music of a Bark, you don’t have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bark you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to, I know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to Chopin’s Nocturnes that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It’s not chaos, but it’s really pulling on the heartstrings. It’s attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bark is not. And that’s reflective of romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is really wanting to explore, stimulate and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

Brett McKay: And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting ’cause I think a lot of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means to be a self. I’m gonna create, I’m the creator of myself. I’m the artist of my life. And I’m thinking, you don’t realize this, but like that’s Frederick Nietzsche. You don’t know it. So tell us about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is a remarkable 19th century philosopher. Has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there’s one lecture given on Nietzsche’s philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche is the man who caused the bluff on the enlightenment. If we would take Jean Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space. And he wants to ground morality very much in sort of spontaneous sympathetic reactions. Rousseau essentially says, as soon as you’ve got laws, you know something’s gone wrong. If you see an injustice taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There’s a human instinct for justice. Rousseau in other words, he’s rightly pointing to the role I think of feelings in ethical reasoning. If you see somebody being beaten up and you feel nothing emotional, you’re a psychopath.

We understand the need for feelings in our ethical decisions, but Rousseau grounds that really in an understanding of human beings as having a human nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute, you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn’t play any positive constructive role in your thinking, but you’ve smuggled something in that plays the role of God. You’ve got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you’ve substituted him with human nature. You still think there’s such a thing as human nature. And human nature has an authoritative moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you can’t do that. If you’ve killed God, if you’ve got rid of God, if you’ve killed God, you’ve really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a con trick pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where the features in the sort of the psychological story is, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. But he’s detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

Brett McKay: And this will have consequences later on. We’ll see that. And Alasdair MacIntyre, we’ll get to him, he grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas ’cause they’re significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity in Charles Taylor’s thinking on that. By authenticity you meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that’s kind of a sort of a given. That’s how you wanna live your life today. And if you don’t do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor think authenticity became a moral ideal?

Carl Trueman: I think it’s really in the 18th and early 19th century, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. William Wordsworth writes this poem, it’s not one of his greatest poems, this poem, the Idiot Boy, which is this, a poem about a child. We would say today a child with serious learning difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this. Why are you writing a poem that appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his students and friends, he says, basically, I’m not mocking him. I’m using him as an example. We would now say I’m using the Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you have when you go to somebody like that, so we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, et cetera.

What you’ve got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It’s not being corrupted by the conventions of society. With the idiot boy what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would say, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It’s alienated us from that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that’s where you get the emerging notion of authenticity. This idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions to those untamed, untrammeled truly human feelings inside and live according to them, then that’s what it means to be truly human or that’s what it means to be an authentic human.

Brett McKay: And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

Carl Trueman: That’s the idea. The romantic idea is a sort of a return to a rural idyll, if you like, where you don’t have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village, I can guarantee you that the rural Italy is not as idyllic as the Romantics thought it was.

Brett McKay: And Nietzsche called them on their blood and was like, yeah, you think that’s what it’s gonna happen. But actually probably not what’s gonna happen if everyone’s living by their inner desires.

Carl Trueman: Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very naive view. We could somewhat simplify, we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is it’s society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche you know you’ve got the idea that actually what makes us great of the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here is what Charles Taylor sets up for us, is that there’s this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external, where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy, as we progressed through the enlightenment and things like technology allowed you to travel. You’re no longer tied to the family farm. Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions and political life. The church started losing authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had philosophers like Nietzsche just adding fuel to the fire. So there’s an inward turn. Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self is a sociologist named Philip Rieff. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Rieff lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there’s four ages. What are those four ages of the self?

Carl Trueman: Well, Societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, it’s say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age I think one of the models is dominant. The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public square. So the great example of this might be fourth century BC Athens where being involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing, the polis, it’s the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. It’s the idea that…

Brett McKay: I was gonna say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you’re an idiot. Like you’re a private person, you’re looked down upon, you weren’t even a person basically.

Carl Trueman: No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, man is a political animal. He’s meaning man is a man of the polis. He’s a man of public life. And as you rightly point out the opposite of politicos is idioticos, the private man. So that’s the first arrangement. And Rieff sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is, that’s an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious rituals. We might think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature that a society where religious man was the ideal. That’s kind of literally, which would be produced in that sort of culture. Where you have the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this rag bagg bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, if you may have Muslim friends, and they go on the Hoge to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be human. This is replaced for Rieff what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, Charles Dickens’s books are full of economic man. He’s writing about industrial revolution, England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Grad Grind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society. And Rieff sees all three of these as having something in common.

They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this, it is the role of society in shaping you to be a political, religious or economic man to direct you outwards. So education is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role. Rieff sees the present age, and he’s writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It’s one of those books, triumphal Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says that what we have at the end of this is what he call psychological man. And Psychological man is the man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the first three.

And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a member of society. And a psychological manner reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society’s role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So one could draw a contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boys school in England. Team sports was central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That’s not child-centered learning that sort of dominates the airwaves today where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man, it’s a very, very different culture to the first three.

Brett McKay: And it seems like it’s similar to Taylor’s idea of expressive individualism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s Taylor’s expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. The romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century. It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human to permeate the whole of society and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And something Rieff talks about, one of the defining characteristics of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the analytical attitude?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a lit has with a lot of things in Rieff, it’s a bit opaque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He’s a hard read. He’s a very hard read.

Carl Trueman: And I think actually that’s part of the game. He’s trying to disorient the reader sometimes. But I’ll give you his definition and then I’ll try to sort of unpack it a bit. The definition that he gives in Triumph Of The Therapeutic is the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Now, he’s talking there about Freud, and I think what he’s trying to get at is this, that for Freud society makes demands upon us. And it does that, it curbs our inner desires in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms for Freud, males want to rape and pillage.

Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, but we can’t live together if we’re savages. So there’s a trade off between the desire of the individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates though, those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions. We are never happy. We struggle because we’re not allowed to be who we really are because we need to be civilized. And I think what Rieff is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It’s not that we can ever come to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two, but the goal of therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think to the analytic attitude is there is no objective moral order there, there is no divinely sanctioned moral order.

There are really just social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they’re ultimately, you’re not grounded in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you’re wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you’ve gotta analyze in order to try to engage in in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, he’s there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after Nietzsche, you had Darwin’s theory of evolution. So basically yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God’s dead. There’s no objective moral order, so what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That’s about as good as you can do.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s a sort of, it’s a therapy, to use Rieff’s term. It’s therapy. It’s helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it’s a negotiating strategy.

Brett McKay: And one thing too, Rieff talks about, even though Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the 20th and 21st century, like we’re still living under Freud’s shadow. We all are psychological men. I mean, I’m sure all of us have picked up a book on cognitive behavioral therapy or how to manage my anger. And it’s never like, well, don’t be angry because God said not to be angry. It’s like, well, if I wanna have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so, yeah, Rieff says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. I mean, it’s very much the case. I think there’s a sense in which a traditional religious man was born to be saved. Therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. As a pastor at times I’ve married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that it’s easy to love your wife on the wedding day. She’s beautiful, the sexual desire is bubbling away, you love each other’s company, you’re embarking on this lifelong adventure together.

But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raised the question, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day or is it when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an instrument? And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love and think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. Hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another. So, yeah. But you see that, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love. And I would say a very impoverishing way.

Brett McKay: So again, Philip reached describing inner turn towards defining ourself. It’s all about just what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque hard to get through, it really does capture, it helps you understand like this rise of wellness culture in the West of everyone that’s worried about their mental health, even if they don’t have like a severe mental illness. But like, everyone’s just concerned about, okay, my anxiety, or I’m feeling nervous, or I don’t have full-blown depression but I’m feeling kind of sad. What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Rieff describes, well, here’s why you have that idea.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. Because I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time, these are not unnatural things. We can’t be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you are engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition that we experience frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They’re part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders into connecting with other human beings.

Brett McKay: One argument that Rieff makes in the triumphant therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much, or western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think it wouldn’t be aligned with like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the psychological man creep into religious life?

Carl Trueman: Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It’s Joel Osteen down in Houston. I think he has 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, Your Best Life Now, every day of Friday, it’s always confused me that one ’cause I tend to think Saturday’s the best day of the week. But every day of Friday. You think about, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society but even in more Orthodox Christian circles. Think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you’re Catholic listeners, it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re a Protestant, a lot of people choose their church on the basis of, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor sermon scratch where I feel I’m itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it traditionally was a matter of, sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into their mold or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.

Brett McKay: What are your thoughts Re? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life, or are you kinda like, ah, just get it all out of there?

Carl Trueman: Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism, but one of the things that, I didn’t do this in the book. I didn’t have space, but I wouldn’t wanna say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. Having said, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we are more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We are more aware of the importance of that inner life. It’s not the psychological struggles aren’t important. They are. And I think, look back to my education that I mentioned. I’m not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team. It was necessarily the best model of education. It’s very different one to the one that applies today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are an improvement on the model that I experienced. So yeah, the rise of the therapeutic, it’s not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and has shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.

Brett McKay: You didn’t talk about this guy in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but I’d love to get your thoughts on him, Jung. ‘Cause Rieff talks about Jung a lot in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic. And I’d love to get your thoughts on this because you see him more and more in the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson who’s talking about archetypes all the time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Rieff argues is that Yung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud where all you do is you just try to figure out what’s going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy. What’s your take on Yung?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he’s a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don’t want to make a naive historical connection there, but it seems to me from what I’ve read of Jung, that he’s wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure that binds us all together. I think Rieff in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic, he refers to Jung as having a sort of a weak God. And there’s that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk in universal terms about what is good for human beings.

But I’ve never heard him make that final leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible, but he always seems to be somewhat equivocal to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I’ve not read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Rieff makes some comment somewhere that it’s almost preferable to have Freud’s non-existent, but powerful God than to have Jung’s existent but very weak God. And there’s a sense in which I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I’d almost rather be dealing with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of Jung, and we’ve had guests on the podcast who are big in the Jung and talk about archetypes. And I’ve read all the, especially since I’m in like in the manosphere, there’s a lot of mytho poletic stuff where people go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior. And I read these books and like I always think they’re interesting, but it’s like, what much to do with this? ‘Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king architect. I’m like, what does that mean? And they tell you just, well, you gotta think about Pharaohs and you’ll somehow become, like you’ll harness it. I’m like, I don’t know. And to me it just makes more sense. Okay. I’d rather just like, okay, what’s the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of this vague, weird general archetype?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question which Nietzsche would raise as well, of, are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is, you’re sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which is typically justifiable. It’s interesting you raise it in the manosphere that, it’s fascinating to me that this is the manosphere, because it’s precisely in the manosphere that I think we are seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s actually useful in organizing your life just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor, we talked about Rieff, they’ve all described this inward turn, we shape our sense of self by what’s inside of ourself. And it’s no longer external things that it’s helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alasdair MacIntyre. What does Alasdair MacIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn to defining ourself?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book After Virtues where he sort of lays this out, the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you enter this realm of we might say radical subjectivity, you end up losing he would say the great narratives or the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. One could take an example, when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb, or just part of the woman’s body? Behind your convictions on those things like two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it’s virtually impossible to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative to the other group. So for McIntyre, society’s ability to have important discussions starts to break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences.

Brett McKay: He says that since there’s no longer a common moral language, common objective, moral background, where we’re having these debates, what we had to resort to, he calls emotivism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. And essentially that is that, your moral views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral objectivity. So, debates become, you think you’re talking about principles, but you’re actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

Brett McKay: And I think what McIntyre’s idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they’d never go anywhere. ‘Cause we’re just yelling past each other, basically.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now get to go by default to the courts, because in the courts you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don’t have to persuade the populist to vote for you in some way. And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States, has been focused on Supreme Court decisions. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the debating floor of the Senate.

Brett McKay: What did MacIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?

Carl Trueman: Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher as Benedicts option, I think he published the book within 2015, 2016. Rieff’s on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you’re gonna have to return to a kind of local level.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it’s Nietzsche or Aristotle. That’s her choice.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I would say, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity. But yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it’s hard. And going back to local, that’s gonna be hard. And I think even McIntyre says he’s not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think he argued that people today they’ve forgotten like even how to do that. And so it’s gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we’re not sitting in the same room. I’m not even seeing your face. We’re just talking through a computer. So much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of real physical, geographical place where you could actually build a local community.

Brett McKay: And I think the conversation so far, what we’ve hopefully painted for our audience is that okay, reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your sense of self it’s, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we’re all kind of winging it in a way. And that’s why you have existential crises ’cause you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. And then, because we’re deciding how we look at our life, or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this debate that’s intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is the good life.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. I mean, when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some of that’s connected to the disembodied nature of social media. When I was growing up I had a group of friends, they were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real rich, strong interaction because we were actually real presences in each other’s lives. Social media insults are cheap, falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we’re engaging simply to the views they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are than would’ve been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there’s a strong, it’s not just philosophical stuff that’s going on there’s also technological stuff that is reinforcing and exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you’re online, you’re a psychological man.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Yeah. You are disembodied.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Rieff and McIntyre, I couldn’t help but think about CS Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we’ve been discussing today?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this, Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is anthropology, what it means to be human that is becoming the big question of the age. And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like the Triumph of The Therapeutic is one of those books that the author could not have known how truly he was putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was.

It’s more true today in some ways than other times. So I think first of all, Lewis is useful because yep, anthropology is the problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there is some sort of moral structure to the universe and I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that’s something worth exploring. I think we’re at a point where we’re beginning to see that yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we have, but in doing so, we’re actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point too, Lewis, he’s not offering all the answers, but he’s certainly pointing us in the direction of the right questions.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Because we’ve been talking about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel, and whatever you felt, that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order and that some things should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time, for the right reasons.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that’s where I think returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue. The old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings, but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.

Brett McKay: I think yeah. Role not only for Aquinas, but the great books like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the sentiments, looking at good art. The religious life can play a role in that, helping you order your desires.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, I mean, this is the Enlightenment thinker, Friedrich Schiller has this idea that human beings, we have two drives. You have the rational drive, and we have the Sensuous Drive. And those two, if you allow the one to run amuck, it’s a disaster. If it’s the rational drive, you end up with a French revolution. If it’s a sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have each informing the other. And for Shiller art was the answer, as you just said, contemplating great art. That’s what brought the two together. And that’s, I think, not a bad way of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It does matter what art you contemplate.

Brett McKay: Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

Carl Trueman: That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me.

Brett McKay: It did. Well, Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carl Trueman: I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners that’s every two weeks, column at firstthings.com. It actually has a print version, but it’s also an online magazine dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for World Magazine online as well, which is, that’s a more distinctively protestant thing. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess, but firstthings.com Would be the primary place to go and read me.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Carl Trueman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Carl Trueman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks For having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Carl Trueman. He’s the author of the book, the Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/modernself where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind time listening when podcast would put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,061: Are You Not Entertained? The Myths and Truths About Roman Gladiators https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1061-are-you-not-entertained-the-myths-and-truths-about-roman-gladiators/ Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:00:20 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189392   When you think about ancient gladiators, you likely have a certain vision that comes to mind: slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Romans. But much of what we think we know about gladiators is actually wrong. Today on the show, Alexander Mariotti will separate the just-as-fascinating fact from […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When you think about ancient gladiators, you likely have a certain vision that comes to mind: slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Romans.

But much of what we think we know about gladiators is actually wrong.

Today on the show, Alexander Mariotti will separate the just-as-fascinating fact from popular-culture-derived fiction when it comes to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Alexander is a historian and an expert on gladiators who’s served as a consultant for shows and films like Spartacus and Gladiator II.

In our conversation, Alexander explains how gladiatorial games evolved from funeral rites into professional sporting events featuring the greatest superstar athletes and sex symbols of the day. We discuss the different types of gladiators, their rigorous training regimens, why gladiators fought in their underwear, and whether they actually fought to the death. Alexander describes what a day at the Colosseum was really like, complete with elaborate special effects, halftime shows, souvenirs, and even concessions. And we talk about the connections between the gladiatorial games and the sports and spectacle culture of today, and why, despite the passage of two millennia, these ancient athletes continue to captivate our imagination.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art Of Manliness podcast. When you think about ancient gladiators, you likely have a certain vision that comes to mind. Slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Romans. But much of what we think we know about gladiators is actually wrong. Today on the show, Alexander Mariotti will separate the just as fascinating fact from popular culture-derived fiction when it comes to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Alexander is a historian and expert on gladiators who served as a consultant for shows and films like Spartacus and Gladiator II. In our conversation, Alexander explains how gladiatorial games evolved from funeral rites to professional sporting events featuring the greatest superstar athletes and sex symbols of the day. We discuss the different types of gladiators, their rigorous training regimens, why gladiators fought in their underwear, and whether they actually fought to the death. Alexander describes what a day at the Coliseum was really like, complete with elaborate special effects, halftime shows, souvenirs, and even concessions. And we talk about the connection between the gladiatorial games and the sports and spectacle culture of today, and why, despite the passage of two millennia, these ancient athletes continue to captivate our imagination. After show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/gladiators. All right, Alexander Mariotti, welcome to the show.

Alexander Mariotti: Brent, thank you so much for having me. What an immense pleasure.

Brett McKay: So, you are an expert on the history of gladiators and you’ve taken that expertise. You’ve done a lot of research writing about gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome and you’ve served as a history consultant for shows like Rome, Spartacus. You’re there to make sure that the scenes they depict in those historical shows are as accurate as possible. How did you make a career out of researching and consulting about the history of Roman gladiators? Because I’m sure for a lot of guys, this sounds like a dream job.

Alexander Mariotti: It certainly is a dream job. I think it starts with the most important part, which is the lonely childhood. And a lot of time spent alone, thinking about weapons and armor and gladiators and Caesars and all that kind of stuff. And I was very lucky because my parents were immensely into history and I grew up playing in the Coliseum. So the Coliseum for me was just a little place that my brother and I would go hang out and kick a football. There really wasn’t, I think, such a vested interest in the gladiatorial world as there is today. So as I went on and I studied I think it’s just a world that kept calling me back and the more I got into it the more I was fascinated by it and it’s just the complexity of the sport, of its origins, of what it meant was just so immense, that it’s just one of these topics that when you go in, you just go down the sinkhole.

Brett McKay: Well, I hope in this conversation we do today, we can let our listeners know more about ancient gladiatorial combat and dispel a lot of myths because I think we’ll talk about this thanks to popular culture movies in particular there are a lot of myths about how gladiators fought and what it was like to be a gladiator. Let’s start with this basic question. What are the origins of gladiatorial combat? How do they end up with this thing where they built a giant arena so they could watch people fight. What’s the origins of it?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, the interesting thing is that there’s sort of various stages and what’s happened is that it’s an amalgamation of different pieces of historical context put together. So you know, as far as kings and feuding warfare has existed, there’s always been the sense of when there’s a funeral to put on a sort of, or the death of some very important person, to put on a very grandiose funeral. This usually would involve combat or bloodletting or sacrifice. You can go back to the first kings of Egypt. But in the history of gladiatorial combat, it comes from ancient Greece. So the Greeks were quite prone to when great heroes or important people passed, they would have games at the funeral. And I mean, these games involved boxing and javelin throwing and wrestling, but also fighting with weapons. And then you also had sacrifice. So if you take, for example, the Iliad, which is a piece of historical fiction, but it’s got a lot of historical notes in it, Achilles actually does that for Patroclus. He puts on a funeral in Book 23, and he’s got, you know, the soldiers, the Greeks are fighting in combat, but they’re doing it in a sort of sporting way to honor the dead. And he also sacrifices these Trojans.

So that kind of culture mixed in with the Greeks, you know, starting the Olympics, so having professional combat sports, you start to see the sort of very very beginnings, the seeds of gladiatorial combat. And what happens is the Greeks conquered in the 8th century, they start moving towards the south of Italy and colonizing it. So they bring their culture with them. So by the time that the Romans start to become a force of nature, they’re really infused in Greek culture. They’re infused with the culture that when there’s a funeral, they have bloodletting, there’s combat sports that they’ve inherited. And so, slowly but surely, that’s where the sport of gladiatorial combat starts to come from.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the seeds of gladiatorial combat came from the Greek tradition of holding combat games at funerals to honor the dead. And then wealthy Romans adopt this practice. How did these funeral combatants differ and how did things then evolve into the gladiatorial games that we think of when we think of gladiators?

Alexander Mariotti: So you would have these people fight over the funeral, but these aren’t really, I wouldn’t define them gladiators because gladiators are what comes afterwards. They’re athletes, they’re sports figures. These guys are called Bestiarii, which means they come from the bustum, the fire. So they’re the sort of, you know, because obviously you cremated people back then, and these men would fight amongst the fire or alongside the fire. Think of them almost as professional grievers. They’re there to put on a show to spill blood, to honor the dead, and it’s tied into two parts of Roman religion. The first is that the Romans believed as long as someone spoke your name, as long as you’re remembered, you continue to exist. So in putting on a very lavish funeral, you will be remembered because people say, well, I had this great feast at this funeral, but I also saw these incredible examples of combat. The other thing was that they believed that when you died, you became a shadow.

So to allow you to gain enough strength to pass the underworld, you needed blood of someone living. So the spilling of blood, not necessarily death, but just the spilling of blood was enough to go forward. So that’s where it is in Rome, but it takes someone very astute by the name of P. Rutilius Rufus, Publius Rutilius Rufus, and in 105 BC, this guy just obviously has observed how much people reacted to the fights. Because what we see is that initially the funerals were a feast, there was mourning, there was the fighting. The fighting starts to become the most prominent part because they realize that anyone who comes to these events, that’s what they’re really talking about. And Rufus understands this and what he does is he puts on the first gladiator fights, which are purely for sport. And from that moment on, the gladiatorial phenomena really starts to build because it’s a sport of its own. It’s born out of its own and it’s nothing to do with funeral rights and it’s nothing to do with death necessarily. It’s to do with show, with spectacle.

Brett McKay: And when did that happen?

Alexander Mariotti: That’s one of 105 BC. So you’re talking again, 180 years before the Coliseum’s even built, just to show you how much it progressed and how quickly. But another thing about Rufus which is interesting is he tells us just how well-trained these guys are. Because about 30 years previous, Rome had just got its professional army. So before that, the Roman army was a sort of series of people that were conscripted, brought together. They would fight the war and they would disband. So Rome didn’t really have a standing army. This is changed by Julius’s uncle, a man called Gaius Marius. So at the time of Rufus, the army is only 30 years old. And he actually realizes that these guys are so well trained, these athletes, these gladiators, that he goes to gladiator school in Capua and he hires the gladiator trainers to train the army. And from that moment forth, he produces basically super soldiers because any part of the military training from that point on is actually influenced by gladiatorial training. That’s how well trained these guys were in 105 BC.

Brett McKay: Okay. So brief recap there. Gladiator game started off as a funeral rite and then it shifted to just the fight itself. They became just public spectacle. It was basically like an MMA fight today.

Alexander Mariotti: It’s exactly, well, an MMA fight today is gladiatorial combat. It just doesn’t have the weapons. We’re not there yet. I’m sure in a couple of years, someone will say, why don’t we put weapons with these guys? And what a great idea. And then we’ll have come full circle to the Romans. But I mean, the fact that MMA exists speaks to sort of just how much we are like the Romans. We shouldn’t be surprised at this. Human nature hasn’t changed profoundly in the last 2,000 years. The desires that man holds, whether to be successful, to be remembered, to be loved, to be powerful, these are sort of universal themes that repeat themselves because ultimately people repeat themselves. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that in our culture, despite how civilized we think we are, we still find that one of the biggest sports in the world involves two men in front of, you know, 80,000 people in an arena, you know, beating each other out to see who’s the most primally powerful.

Brett McKay: What role did gladiatorial games play in Roman social and political life?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, they played an immense part. Actually, that’s one of the things that fascinates me so much about the gladiatorial phenomena is that it was responsible for the Roman Empire. I don’t think you would have had the Principate the emperorship without gladiators because when you look at the Emperor and you look at the poorest in Rome, you know, most people did not live like the 1%. So what does the 1% have in common with the 99%? Well, they have nothing in common because the emperor lives in a palace. He has immense wealth. He eats what he wants. He drinks what he wants. Nothing is close to him. That’s not the reality of most people in ancient Rome. But what did they have in common? Well, what they had in common is that periodically they would meet in an arena and they would watch this sport. And that’s how the emperor won the people because he built the Coliseum. He built an immense stadium and he gives you tickets to come.

And for a brief moment of your life, that hardship that you live, you get to forget it. You get food, you get wine, you get games, you get beast hunts, you get gladiator fights, you get ship battles in the coliseum and all because of this very gracious and you know generous figure and so you love the emperor and exchange he rules. And that’s really not a relationship that’s that different from today, because, you know, if you take the NFL or any sort of sporting body, they do the same thing. They build the stadiums, they put on the shows, and in exchange, they ask you to buy a product. In ancient Rome, the product was the emperor’s power. Today it’s some sort of product placement, but it’s the same relationship we have with our sports today.

Brett McKay: And what’s interesting too, I did some reading in preparation for this, is that even the emperors who weren’t really fond of the gladiatorial games they just, they added a version to it. Like Marcus Aurelius, for example, he wasn’t keen on them. He put limits on the gladiatorial games, but he still put them on because I guess he thought it was just something he had to do to maintain his power.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh yeah, it’s part of it. You know, the power of celebrity is something that’s universal. You see it today whenever, you know, we recently had elections and you see how celebrities roll out for their candidate and they use their sway and their popularity for a cause. Well, you know, it wasn’t that different if you had the top gladiators saying that you were the best Emperor and what a kind guy and out comes a champion gladiator and the Emperor lavishes him with gifts and he says what a great Emperor we have. Well, it’s the same concept really.

Brett McKay: And it seems like there’s also, even at the peak of gladiatorial combat in the Empire, in the Roman Empire, there were a lot of criticisms of it. You could find criticisms, just as you’d find criticisms today of MMA fights.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, absolutely. There’s an interesting notion, which is that great Roman philosophers complained more, not so much about the sport. I mean, the sport was seen as a very vulgar sport by the great minds. I mean, Marcus thought it was a vulgar sport. He loved wrestling. He thought wrestling was a very noble sport. He didn’t think gladiatorial combat was. But it was more about the effect that it had on the people. That’s the interesting part because they’re more concerned that these games bring out the brutal side of man. And the Romans, just like the Greeks, had a great philosophy about man being in constant battle with his urges. So you see things like the centaur or the story of the hydro with Hercules. They’re really metaphors for man being half beast, half divine and in a constant battle to fight your urges. So you really should try and become more divine. But the games brought out the beast in you.

And that’s what Christians had a problem with gladiator games. We always think that the gladiator games stopped because the Christians were so noble and they wanted to save the lives of gladiators. Well, the truth is the gladiators weren’t dying. That’s not the problem. The problem is that Christian writers say that the games turn men into beasts. And I don’t think that’s really hard to see if you go to a UFC fight you see what it does to the crowd. If you’re in the crowd it’s not a calm intellectual crowd. It is rowdy bestial pumped up adrenaline testosterone pumped crowd fueled by the games.

Brett McKay: Yeah, Seneca, the famous Roman stoic philosopher, he’s also the the assistant to Nero. He had a lot to say about gladiatorial games. He had a lot of things that you were mentioning there about how it just sort of depraves you and makes you feel less human. He talked about how you felt like less of a man after you watched the gladiatorial games, less human. But then he also at the same time, he’d say like, but it was so hard not to watch because it is.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, but it is. And isn’t that true though? I mean, it’s funny. There’s a great story by a Christian writer about a friend of his who’s studying in Rome, and he’s dragged by some friends to the Coliseum. And, you know, he’s like, oh, no, he refuses. And then he sits there in the crowd and he covers his eyes with his hands. Then he hears a roar and then he hears a clang and then all of a sudden he pulls his hands back and he peeks a little bit and not before long he’s just there cheering with the others and he says he gets drunk on the Furies. And I think that’s very true if you watch, you know, when we watch these sports, it does bring out a side of us that’s primal, that’s sort of genetically in there. And it’s meant to, I mean, it’s meant to then the purpose of the games is whether it’s MMA or gladiatorial combat, it’s about the toughest. It’s about survival. It’s about an example. And that’s when you reach the philosophical side of gladiatorial combat, which is that they represented to the Romans this great philosophy, which I think would be perfect for a podcast called the Art Of Manliness because the manliness to the Romans was virtus.

And what virtus was was a physical and mental endurance that you basically could survive anything physically and mentally to be the toughest of the tough. And gladiators were that because they were incredibly well trained, they were physically brilliant, they were courageous because they fought in a fight that you could die from. You could die from your injuries. I mean, you weren’t joking around. But you also were a great sign of resilience mentally because in the midst of battle when the referee told you to stop you stopped. That takes great self-control. So we don’t really see the gladiators as such but they are a wonderful example of self-control because they are obedient to their trainers, to the referee, to the emperor, and not to their instinct and their adrenaline. That’s virtus. We don’t have this philosophy spoken of today, but it does exist because we see it in our MMA fighters. We see it in our first responders. That’s manliness to the Romans. That’s virtus.

Brett McKay: I love that. That’s really interesting. Let’s talk about the gladiators themselves. I think the popular idea is that the gladiators were criminals, slaves. Is that true?

Alexander Mariotti: They were, but they were also free men. They were also athletes. They were also hunters. Basically you’ve got to again, look at the period of history, right? What opportunities do you have afforded to you 2000 years ago? So, you know, there’s no public education. So if you aren’t lucky to have an education, how are you going to make your money? How are you going to survive? Well, if you’re physically, you know, in a good shape, you could become a soldier. But again, that’s only opened to the poor by Caesar’s uncle in about 130 BC. So what else could you do? And again, being a soldier, it’s not like you’re going to survive. You might die, but you get three square meals and you get taught trade, but you looking at 16 to 25 years of your life. And though of course you gonna get paid is not lucrative, you’re not gonna get rich. Gladiatorial combat offered you another avenue which is that you train to be a gladiator.

You did a two year stunt as a rookie, which was the time it took to train them. And then after that, you took a five year contract, which stipulated how many fights you did per year, but also how much you’re gonna earn. And what we know from Marcus Aurelius’ time, because he passes some laws, which effectively ended the gladiatorial combat because he took the money out of it, is that these guys were making a fortune, an absolute fortune. You’re talking about anything up to 17, 18, 19 times the annual salary of a soldier in a single fight. So you do one to three fights a year, you’re set. And you know, they didn’t have long careers. Of course they didn’t, just as MMA fighters don’t because it was physically taxing. You are still fighting, you’re still beating each other up and you’re still putting the body through immense stress.

Brett McKay: So the gladiators themselves made that money or did it go to their trainer?

Alexander Mariotti: It was a split. Of course it was a split, but you had in your contract stipulated how much you earned.

Brett McKay: That’s fair. I didn’t know that. I always thought it was just like they were just slaves.

Alexander Mariotti: Well, no, but that’s because the slave part is more interesting. You know, if you made a movie about a guy who was out of work, became a gladiator, made a fortune, bought a villa and retired. I mean, that doesn’t sound like a great movie. You want a guy who’s a general who gets his families massacred by, you know, a corrupt emperor. He’s sold into slavery and he has to fight to win his freedom. That’s a story. And those are the stories we pick, but we also create them because they sound good. But that’s not reality. Gladiators were about a split 50-50 of slaves and of free men because people were drawn to the arena. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, you know, you get to stand in front of 80,000 people cheering your name. The Emperor of Rome cheers your name. Who else can say that? And no wonder people were drawn to become gladiators.

Brett McKay: So what was the social status of a gladiator in Ancient Rome? So it sounds like they’re, I mean, the way you’re describing it sounds like they were a professional athlete today.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, They were. They were the first superstar athletes of their time. More so than, you know, any time I say that someone on the comments section starts going on about the Olympics. The Olympics did not have the reach. The athletes did not have the careers nor the money that gladiators did. When you look at sports stars today, their rich throughout the world, the wealth that they amass, the popularity they have, the only thing akin to that throughout all of human history is the gladiator. They’re the first superstar athletes. Because when you were known in Rome, you were known in the Roman Empire. 60 million people knew who you were. Your fame did not just extend to the regions, it extended to the entire empire from the north of Scotland to the north of Africa. Now socially, yes, you lost your social rights because the Romans did not see… They were very against people making a spectacle of themselves or showing off. So if you are pimp, an undertaker, an actor, you were declared an infami, so you had no political or social standing.

You’re kind of the lowest of the low. But it did really matter. I don’t think people have a great view of Conor McGregor or any of the MMA stars today socially. They rub shoulders with the bigwigs because of their popularity, but they’re not seen as intellectuals. You certainly wouldn’t imagine an MMA fighter becoming a president or a prime minister. And gladiators were the same, but they didn’t really care because they were absolutely adored. I mean, sexually no one else is more desired in the entire Roman Empire than the gladiator. He is the ultimate sex symbol of ancient times, more than the emperor.

Brett McKay: Okay, so half the gladiators were slaves and then half were freemen who volunteered to become gladiators because, I mean, they just wanted a chance at the lifestyle. They wanted fame and glory. And then with the slaves, it was a way for the owners of the slaves to gain prestige in financial gain through their slaves who were gladiators. ‘Cause if they won in the arena, they would get the fame and glory for that. And it was still a selective process cause the owners they would pick from among their slaves, the best of the best. And then they would train them and manage them. It was kind of like investing in racehorses.

Alexander Mariotti: Yeah, you know, well, the gambit of people who would become gladiators, I mean, you had to be tough, let’s be honest. You have to be physically exempt. You have to be really the sort of physical specimen of perfection because you have to have the body to do it. Not everybody became gladiators. You know this notion that poor slaves were thrown into the arena and told to fight is just utter nonsense. Because you’re talking about a war like society who knew combat, who saw war, who saw carnage. So the shows had to be better than the battlefield. And it’s true because the battlefield was scrappy. It was ugly. The battlefield was not beautiful. It was murder. We sort of sanitized combat for show, because when we watch movies, these great battles with these great moves, it wasn’t. It was people hacking each other like animals. The arena was different. It was skillful. It was elegant. It was craftsmanship. It was people studying each other the same way that, you know, boxing and MMA is not the battlefield. It’s not what war looks like and not, it’s not what a street fight looks like. It is about people who know their craft, who’ve studied. So the gladiators kind of gave people the sort of show that they wouldn’t have seen anywhere else.

Brett McKay: Something else that I’ve read, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this with the idea that some gladiators are criminals because it gets kind of confused or conflated Because criminals could be sentenced to fight in the arena as a form of capital punishment. This included Christians because Christians were considered criminals. So it was like, we’re going to pit these people against the lion. But that wasn’t gladiatorial combat, right?

Alexander Mariotti: No, no. So there’s three very specific categories, which always get sort of amalgamized into one and, you know, later writers, especially Christian writers, kind of confound things that they’d never seen. They’re, you know, it’s kind of like people studying today, studying me. If I write a book about Napoleon, like a source, like, you know, and me telling you, well, Napoleon looked like this and he did that. I mean, I can hypothesize, but you know, I’m 200 years from Napoleon. And when you’ve got writers, 2, 3, 4, sometimes 500 years after the gladiator games, talking about gladiator games, they don’t know really what they’re talking about. They’re talking about something that’s sort of a whisper that’s kind of come along. So you’ve got beast hunters which were bestiarii or venatores. So you had guys who basically were hunters, professional hunters who fought animals or people who kind of tried their luck and were forced to fight against animals. But gladiators do not fight animals for the simple reason you cannot control an animal.

So when you’ve trained a guy and you’ve spent money feeding him and clothing him and housing him and you know having a doctor on call as gladiators did. And then you put them against the lion, the lion is probably going to destroy your asset. Then you’ve got noxii and noxii are criminals. So at half time show, the half time show involved criminals being executed. Now that’s simply because logistically the Emperor has now the attention of 80,000 people who have come to see him. So here’s a little bit of an interesting part of someone fighting a lion. Excellent. Now I’ve got your attention. Here’s a bit of music, here’s some fire-eaters, and now we’re going to condemn the criminals because I want you guys to know that if you cross the lines, if you defy me and defy my rules, this is the consequences. So it’s public execution. And those people were people thrown into the arena, told to fight to the death or pitted against animals, but they are not gladiators. The gladiators come afterwards in the afternoon and they are again professional athletes who’ve spent two years or more training, who’ve been fed, clothed, skillfully trained and sort of brought up in a social way to get us a following, which is still important today, so that when they perform, you want to see them, but they are nothing to do with the other two categories.

Brett McKay: Okay. That’s interesting. I think that’s a good clarification there. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One thing I thought was interesting is that there are different types of gladiators. So you have this section of guys who fought one-on-one, but there was different types, just like there’s different positions in American football, like a linebacker or running back, the same thing with gladiators. Well, what type of gladiators existed?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, I would equate it more to the fact that they were the first mixed martial artists because they’re basically mixed martial artists. You’ve got different styles. Just as today you get the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys and they fight against, you know, people have a taekwondo background with some grappling skills. What you have is you’ve got different categories of gladiators and they have different fighting styles. And this is predominantly based off the type of armor they have. So basically you get two definitive types of gladiators. You get scutarii and parmularii, which are ones with a large shield called a scutum. It’s about a four foot shield and it’s the one that’s used by the Roman soldiers. The parma is a smaller shield, usually square, sometimes round, and depending on the type of armor, the type of category of gladiator, they’re going to have very specific helmets. And that’s going to change the way they fight. So some of the most famous are, for example, the retiarius. He’s the net man. He’s the only gladiator who didn’t have a helmet. He had only a shoulder guard, and he had a net and a trident, and sometimes a small dagger.

But he’s got no armor whatsoever, except for the shoulder guard called a Galera. So you think that’s fairly unfair because again, any strike, any sort of blow he’s going to get, is going to give him a wound. And he’s going to fight against someone like a Secutor. Secutor’s had very large helmets, looked a bit like a fish, very small eye holes, a fin on the top. He had a mannica, which was basically segmented armor, much like you see in the roman soldiers covering his sword arm he has a large shield called the Scutum and he’s got greaves called ocreas. So very well armored guy against a unarmored guy. Well that’s because the guy without the armor, without the helmet is gonna be very quick very nimble and his fighting style is gonna be sort of jabbing a lot keeping his distance with the trident, swinging the net to confuse him and eventually sort of tires his opponent out and win points. Whereas the Secutor being very heavily armored is gonna be a thicker set guy, more muscular. He’s going to be slower, but more powerful. So he really has to study his moves because he’s got to work on the expenditure of energy. And think how exciting where you do have guys with different skills, different armor, different physiques fighting it out because you, you know, you’ve got your favorites, but you also see the skill of the fighter.

Brett McKay: And something about the armor. Didn’t all gladiators fight bare chested or just had like a toga? Some of them had like they had greaves, but other than that, that was pretty much it.

Alexander Mariotti: Well, it’s an interesting thing. In 174 BC gladiators appear in underwear. Now you can see this in a place called Paestum in the south of Italy, in these beautiful fourth century BC frescoes. So they’re the first images of gladiatorial combat we have in Italy. And they look just like a Greek, I mean, again, they’re a copy of a Greek funeral. So they look just like what you see in the Iliad. But what you see is these guys are in underpants, which is called subligaculum. It was a piece of linen fabric that was sort of tied in a triangular fashion around you, basically like briefs today. And the reason why gladiators are placed in them is because they’re trying to save their lives. So it’s interesting that these guys always fought in their underwear. And the reason why is because if you were a tunic and you got a wound, The wool or the linen, if any of those scraps went into your wound, you had a very high probability of infection and dying. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago. You know that’s one of the major cause in the American Civil War was death by infection because of the wool tunics that kept going into the wounds. So the Romans to mitigate this already know this 2000 years ago and they have gladiators fight basically in their underwear for the entire time to preserve them, to save them, which tells you that the whole thing of a gladiator dying is not what we think it is. It’s nonsense.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna dig more into that myth that they fought to the death. But before we do, let’s talk about the just sort of daily life of a gladiator. So if you became a gladiator, you had to go to a school. It’s like a training camp and you basically spent your life there. What was life like in a gladiator school?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, you know, it was, let’s not joke around. The moment you went into gladiator school and you took the oath, whether you were free man, whether you’re a criminal, whatever you were outside was irrelevant. You became clay to be molded by the lanista and the doctores, the gladiator trainers. So you can expect that their lives are most like professional athletes today. Think of MMA fighters. You are taught combinations, you’re doing physical training to build yourself up, so weight training. So they had a very intense system called the Tetrad system, which was a four-day training program that was invented originally for the professional athletes of the Olympic Games. And so basically the first day you have like a preparatory day. So you do sprints, you do some light weights, you do some jumps. The second day was like the intense training day. So you would have done weights, you would have done combinations, you would have lifted like medicine balls. And I’m talking still ancient Rome, by the way, I know this sounds modern, but this is what the Romans were doing.

The third day was a rest day, which is very important. So you ate a good meal. You might have had a bath. You might have had like a sauna or a steam room, which the Romans had. And then on the fourth day, you did specialized training. So that would have been the day that you would have done weapons training, tried out your combinations, had your trainer do your one-twos against the post. All right. So if I strike you with the left and I come with a shield you’re gonna duck at this point come back with a shield hit. So that’s what would have been their sort of daily, you know, or their week to week. And when they were coming up for a fight, the intensity of the training would increase. And then when they were off season, they would bulk, they would eat, they would train lighter, and they would prepare for the next fight. Exactly like professional athletes today.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that sounds exactly like a professional athlete training. Speaking of their diet, I’ve heard that they ate so much grain that they were called barley men. Is that accurate?

Alexander Mariotti: No, I mean it’s accurate and it’s not accurate. Yes, they were called barley men. They did obviously have a… Look, you’ve got to take people and give them a diet, right? So they’re going to do a lot of weight training. They’re going to do a lot of physical exercise. People have tried to use this politically to say that, you know, gladiators are vegetarians. Nonsense. If you can find a vegetarian heavyweight box of the world, I’d love to meet them. You needed protein, of course. So they had a thing called puls, which is like a barley spelt stew, which would have been the main basis. A little bit like if you imagine for sumo wrestlers, they give them like a big sort of stew to beef them up, right? Because you’re taking someone off the street and you’re like, right, I’m going to make you into gladiator. How do I do that cost effective? But they will have, of course, eaten meat and fish and cheese and pretty much everything.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, these guys, they were professional athletes. And so they were trained like professional athletes.

Alexander Mariotti: Right.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the arena where they fought. I think the most famous gladiatorial arena is the Colosseum in Rome. But were there other places that they fought in the Roman Empire?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh yeah, I mean there was amphitheaters all around the Roman Empire. It’s why I think we are so Roman today is that, you know, if you go back 3, 400 years ago, there was no stadiums around the world. The stadiums started popping up because of the popularity of baseball in America and cricket in England in the 1800s, end of the 1700s. And so they started building stadiums. But 80,000 spectator stadiums, you know, they only started propping up about 80 years ago. So nowadays you can go anywhere in the world and there are stadiums for all sorts of sports. And that’s very much indicative of the Roman world where you could go to North Africa, you go to Spain, you go to Gaul, Germany, Scotland, and they were amphitheaters of various sizes. The oldest surviving amphitheater dates to 70 BC. It’s found in Pompeii. It’s an incredible place. It’s only a 20,000 spectator stadium, but still not bad for a small town.

But yes, the Coliseum is, you know, it’s the Super Bowl. It’s the place you want to fight at when you’ve, I mean, who wouldn’t? Again, you know, 80 to 80,000 people, some say 50, but I tend to think they were more in the higher region because we don’t have any seating, so we don’t know the exact size. But nevertheless, you know, 55,000 to 85,000 people cheering for you. I mean, what a sensation, what a feeling. Imagine coming out of those undergrounds and a tunnel and someone cheering your name and 85,000 people erupting. And it’s such an intense feeling that people chase it today, you know, and very few of us get to experience it. But imagine what it must’ve felt like 2000 years ago.

Brett McKay: Did it work like how you see in the movie Gladiator where, you know, there were gladiatorial arenas in different parts of the empire, like North Africa. Did you like work your way up until you got to the Coliseum? Is that how it worked?

Alexander Mariotti: You could do, yeah. Or you could do the reverse, which was that once you were kind of a veteran, you know, and you’re kind of a little bit past your date, you could still go fight in the lesser provinces. Just as you see sports stars today, you know, when they kind of hit their heyday, they go to different leagues and maybe a little bit lesser prestigious leagues, but still, you know, your name kind of rang true and was still a draw. So I mean, I could give you a great example, you know, Mike Tyson, you know, we recently saw Mike Tyson fight. Who’s he fighting against? Who cares? It’s Mike Tyson, you know, has he fought in a while? No. Does it matter? No, it’s Mike Tyson. His name is legendary. Imagine applying that to Gladiator. You’re the guy who won the fight in the Coliseum in 97 AD. Okay, that was 20 years ago, but still, you’re in relatively good shape. You can go to North Africa, you’re a little bit overweight, you’re not quite the guy you used to be, you’re not quite as fast, but people still know who you are. They want to see you fight.

Brett McKay: Speaking of the Colosseum, is it true that they filled up the Colosseum with water to do naval battles?

Alexander Mariotti: Yes, absolutely. And that’s in the beginning. And it’s to do with a little piece of Fortuna’s history, which was that the building of the Colosseum incredibly came out of some very bad luck for the Emperor Nero, which was the misfortune of the fire of 64 AD. So natural disaster changed the world politically, socially, and culturally, because the fire made Nero unpopular. It wasn’t his fault, but his political rivals blamed him for it. Four years later, he plunges a knife into his neck. He kills himself. And the next emperor that eventually comes after a year of civil war is a sort of down-to-earth guy called Vespasian of the Flavians. And he says, okay, so the emperorship’s in trouble, how do I win popularity? Well, I’ll tell you what, let me take this a piece of Imperial land. I’m going to build a free cinema, theater, sports stadium all into one out of my own pocket. And I’m going to give you guys free tickets and you’re going to see the greatest show on earth. But where they built it was on an artificial lake that Nero had built. So they drained the lake, but they used the drainage system for the Coliseum.

So in the beginning of the Coliseum when it was first opened there was no underground. There were no lifts, trapdoors and pulley systems, that all comes afterwards as the games get more elaborate. But they did have the drainage system so they could drain it. And they could pull the water from the aqueducts and then dump it into the river and have ships come out and do mock naval battles. But eventually the Coliseum games got so elaborate that they had to build under the sands a series of trapdoors and lifts and pulleys and they moved them to a lake called Nemi because it’s just easier to do.

Brett McKay: The guys who took part in these naval battles, were they your typical gladiator or were they another genre or breed?

Alexander Mariotti: They tend to be criminals. They tend to be criminals because it was, again, particularly dangerous. You’ve got to think of actors and stuntmen, you know? Your actor is the asset. He’s the guy that you just can’t take a risk with, so you use the stuntmen. Kind of the same way you’d use criminals. And in fact, it’s from criminals and from a naval battle that we get one of the most famous misconceptions of gladiators, which is that during the time of the Emperor Claudius, they basically organized a naval battle and these guys, these criminals knew that there was no chance they were going to survive. So at least you got to give a criminal chance and say, look, if you fight, you might win your freedom. But they knew they had no chance. So they shouted to the emperor, hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you. But they were being facetious. It was almost like saying, well, thanks very much. You know, we’re about to die. Hail to you, great Caesar. You know, what kind of a person are you?

And Claudius finds this funny and he actually retorts or not. And so they take it as a pardon. They take it that the emperor has pardon them and he has to hobble down because he had a medical condition and he has to try and convince them to keep fighting to put on show for the spectators. And that whole line, those who are about to die salute you, was never said by gladiators. It’s never recorded again and actually has nothing to do with gladiators, but it does sound cool and that’s why it’s attached.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. So that’s a myth. I think there was a famous book about gladiators that had that title. Those who are about to die salute you.

Alexander Mariotti: There’s a series I just worked on last year on Amazon and that’s the title of it. And the joke, my joke is always a terrible joke. It’s a history nerd joke, but my joke is if it’s called those who rarely die, you wouldn’t want to watch it. You’re like, that doesn’t sound particularly good. You know, you want high stakes. You want the fact that your hero might meet death and is courageous enough to go and fight.

Brett McKay: So yeah, this leads to our next myth that I want to hopefully debunk here. Gladiators, did they really fight to the death?

Alexander Mariotti: So gladiators fought very rarely on, I mean, an absolute occasion to the death. But again, it’s an absolute rarity. Death did occur and it wasn’t that the gladiators didn’t accept death. They very freely accepted death that they knew that there was a possibility. In the same way that when MMA fighters go and fight, they know there’s a huge risk of being, you know, you might end your life, you might get life ending or life altering injuries. The gladiators accepted that, but they also accepted that because by the time the gladiator sports start to flourish, you know, Greek sports were close to 900 years old. So, you know, people like boxers, pankration fighters, wrestlers, when you look at how brutal they were in the Olympics, the rules, we have recorded deaths of Olympic fighters, of boxers meeting death, of pankrationists killing each other. We also have a huge amount of severe injuries that these guys sustained. So that was kind of generally accepted in the ancient world and gladiators were no different. They accepted that if they stepped into the arena, they could die. Predominantly gladiators will have died from injuries and from infection.

But one of the greatest doctors, actually the sort of great grandfather of modern medicine, a guy called Galen of Pergamon, he became the doctor of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. And his writings, by the way, are the basis of modern medicine. We wouldn’t have modern medicine to the degree if it wasn’t for his writings, which still survive today. And he learned from working in a gladiator school. So we know the gladiator schools actually employed doctors. And because we found the gladiator cemetery in Turkey, and we can study the bones, we see that these guys have injuries that have been treated and that they’ve recovered from the injuries including medical amputations. So you see that death is not the purpose of the gladiator. Everything is being done from the way they dress, even their armor. I mean what’s the point of having a helmet that fully encases your head? You don’t see that on the battlefield. That’s really not, you know, imperative having a big can over your head with a couple of grades, sort of holes for your eyes, but it’s to protect the head of the gladiator and make him look cool at the same time. But you don’t see that in the battlefield.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the goal of these bouts wasn’t to kill each other. It was to put on a good show.

Alexander Mariotti: The purpose was absolutely not death. No, it was to put on a good show. And in fact, there’s historical evidence that they didn’t fight with sharpened weapons. We have an inscription of somebody asking special dispensation from the emperor, an emperor called Alexander Severus, to be able to use sharpened weapons because it was such a risk and because the gladiator sport was monopolized by the Emperor. The Emperor owns the schools and everything. It’s all under the emperorship. So they have to ask permission to have the gladiators fighting using weapons that are sharpened weapons because of the degree of risk. And we know that even Marcus Aurelius makes gladiators fight with wooden weapons because he didn’t like the injuries.

Brett McKay: Oh, so if these guys didn’t fight to the death, like that wasn’t the goal. How do they know when a battle was over? Like how long do these things last?

Alexander Mariotti: Same as MMA. You know, it’s interesting that we’ve worked out through how many games went on in an afternoon that your bouts were between three to five. You had rounds first of all because you had referees, you had one in the middle one in the side, the rudis and the secunda rudis. So exactly like today you had a guy in the middle of the fight, guy in the outskirts kind of giving you the opinion. They fought in rounds because again once this is the sort of interesting part of my work is when I was younger I spent a whole period, you know, I was an ex-athlete so I was very physical and I worked at the museum where we’ve rebuilt all the armor the weapons and we said, right how do these work and tried on the helmets. And I can tell you that when you’ve got one of these helmets on, and I played American football, it’s hard to have everything on. You know, you do short bursts because otherwise you’d be exhausted. So you got to take the helmet off.

So the gladiators would have been the same because your breathing is hugely restricted. Your vision is hugely restricted. They’re very uncomfortable helmets, even with padding, the weight of the armor bears down on you and you’re fighting in the Mediterranean heat. So they fought in rounds and they had points and the referee would of course then go ultimately to the crowd and say who won and people would give their opinion and then you would name the winner. So you know just the same way how does somebody win a boxing match or an MMA fight?

Brett McKay: Kind of give us an idea what the games are like. So if I were a citizen in Rome and I heard okay there’s games planned for this week, what would Rome be like? What would the Colosseum be like on that day of the games?

Alexander Mariotti:Well, I want everybody who’s listening to this to appreciate one thing. We live in a time where we can go to stadiums of 80,000 people. So we’re at a huge advantage that anyone has been throughout history to understand the gladiator games because we know what the sound of 80,000 people sounds like. We know when we go to the games that it’s an all day thing, just as it was in ancient times. And by the time you’re walking towards the arena, you can see it in your vision. You’ve got a whole bunch of very excited people. There’s that sort of energy in the air. You’re ready to go to some tailgating, some cooking and eating, which is what the Romans would have done. You’ve got your ticket in hand, which is called a tessera. It’s a coin. It has a number on it. So it doesn’t matter if you speak Latin or not. You can still today on the Coliseum, when you see the arches, it has numbers that correspond to tickets. So they had a gated ticketed system in 81 AD already. When you walk through the store, there’s a guy who checks your ticket, lets you through, you go up some stairs, and as you come out of the second set of stairs, you walk out onto the arena, onto the stands.

You find your seat, you get some food and drink, there’s somebody passing by that’s serving food, they’re serving wine. You’ve passed the souvenir stalls, you’ll probably go to that later depending how the game goes. You might have bought a flag for your team and you’re sitting there with your friends and all of a sudden the announcer starts playing music and announces the entry of the Emperor. So think how exciting you get to spend a whole day with the most powerful and important person in the world, the Emperor of Rome, there he is right there with you. And they tell you where the games are on. And as they tell you the reason for the games, the music begins and suddenly popping out of the ground are trees because underneath the sand of the arenas are 50 odd trap doors and lift and pulley systems. So they put trees on them so trees would be popping out of the sand and transforming the entire arena into a jungle. Because you are never going to visit the jungles of India, but you don’t need to because the Coliseum brings the empire to you.

Suddenly a beast hunter pops out of a trapdoor, lions pop out of another, and with an aerial view and music playing, a whole soundtrack, you’re going to watch a hunter hunt a lion. So the lion’s stalking him, you see it getting closer, the music builds and he turns around at the last minute, he starts stabbing the lion and the music builds, crescendos, he kills the lion, the games are over, the trees stop popping down the ground, sand, and it’s time for the halftime show. Acrobats, dancers, executions, and best of all, a raffle. You’ll get thrown to the stands, little wooden balls, open them up. If there’s a coin inside, there’ll be a number, keep a hold of it, and later they’ll call that number and you can win a horse, grain, even a villa. What a great guy the Emperor is. You start to see that democracy is overrated, you don’t get free stuff, But when you’ve got an emperor, you get free tickets, free food, free wine, free things. And the best part is yet to come. Because when 4 o’clock reaches and the weather gets a little bit more moderate, that’s when the gladiators start.

So music plays and out comes from the dugouts. You know, the lesser known guy build up the title fight. That’s why we’re here. This is the trilogy match between two gladiators. You know, one’s won one battle, one’s won another. This is the epic third that’s going to settle it. Who is the champion gladiator of the Coliseum? And as the music plays, a guy comes out, people cheer, music plays, another guy comes out, people cheer. And with music playing, you get to watch them fight. And then at the end, when your team wins and the crowd erupts, you get this feeling of euphoria, or you might be on the other side and get the feeling of absolute dejection. But then you leave, and for one entire day of your life, you aren’t an accountant, a lawyer, you were a champion gladiator, a beast hunter, you were somebody who got to spend time with the emperor, and then you go back to your normal life. And when we go to stadiums or we go to cinemas, we reenact all of that. That’s why we go to the cinemas to see gladiator, because we want to see these things, and we’re in a period where we can and we can experience them exactly as the Romans did.

Brett McKay: As you’re describing that, I was just thinking about the professional sports games I’ve been to. I mean, the big picture is the same thing, like the raffle, you know, if you’ve been to a sports game, you’ve done that. We don’t win villas. You might win some free Arby’s after the game.

Alexander Mariotti: You might get a t-shirt.

Brett McKay: You might get a t-shirt. Right. And then also the souvenirs. Like you always you got to pick up a souvenir. You can get a flag. Were there like souvenirs of like the specific gladiators? Could you buy like a mug with them?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there was also like retro ones, like vintage ones. So you’d go to the stalls and you’d be like, oh man, I remember this. My dad saw this one. This is a cool one. This is a collector’s piece. I’ll take this one. But you had statues and lamps and dolls of specific gladiators. You had commemorative bowls and so on of particular fights. So yeah, not, not any different, not any different at all. And of course you could buy food and people then the animals actually were butchered and then they were given to people and people, they did actually tailgate, they would cook their food while they were watching the games.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. All right. So the gladiatorial games, the gladiator games were huge. It was basically like NFL MMA for Roman and wrestling for the Roman Empire. Yeah.

Alexander Mariotti: Were put together. Like all our sports today have an element of it. Like I look at, you know, American football and it’s probably why I loved it so much and why I played it was because it kind of reminded me of being a gladiator. The helmets, the armor, the sort of clashing. But even MMA, of course, that’s ultimately the heart of what gladiatorial combat was, but wrestling’s like it because wrestling involves super humans. You look physically what the wrestlers look like. They’re not like us. I’m speaking for myself. There might be people who are 6’7″ out there and how many hundred pounds, but most of us aren’t. So, you know, when you were gladiator, you were the physical exception. You would have been six foot in a time when people were between 4’6″ to five foot, just as wrestlers today are six foot something and seven foot. You had music playing as you came out. There was an element of the fight, which wasn’t really real. You know, you weren’t aiming to kill each other. You were aiming to put on a show. I think that’s the sense of wrestling.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. So when you say wrestling, you’re talking about like professional wrestling, like WWE or WWF wrestling.

Alexander Mariotti: WWE. That’s right. Yeah. I’m talking about The Rock. Like, and again, even the names, like the names of gladiators really mimic perfectly the names of wrestlers or wrestlers mimic the names of gladiators, you know, The Rock, The Undertaker. These are fantastic names because they evoke a feeling, an image, a persona and you had it with gladiators as well. You know, you just need to say Spartacus. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s a great name. Blade. We had one called Flamma, Fiamma, the Blaze. I mean, you can imagine a wrestler called Blaze and there was a gladiator called Blaze.

Brett McKay: That’s really cool. So why did they go away?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, they went away for the same, you know, the three things that changed the world, money, politics, and religion. So basically what happened was throughout the Roman Empire, because there was so many arenas, the priests of the Imperial cult, which is imagine it from an administrative point of view, you have people out in the provinces because the emperor doesn’t actually physically go there most of the time, who represent the emperor. And to show the locals that you are lucky to be in the Roman Empire, you get all the benefits, you know, like you do the sort of Starbucks of ancient times, you get civilization you get a Starbucks, a McDonald’s. Well in Roman times you get baths and you get a library you get a senate house and you get an amphitheater. And periodically the priest will put on games in honor of the Emperor. So the locals will be, you know, fantastic. I’ve got a local amphitheater and I’ve got people fighting for me because the Emperor is so kind. But the problem is that the people had to pay for them.

So Marcus Aurelius, to stop people ruining themselves financially to do this, puts a limit on how much money you can spend on a game, how much money the gladiators can earn. He basically puts gaps on them. And by the way, I feel that our modern sports are going to hit something very soon just like that. When you look at the astronomical quantities that players are paid, games cost to put on. You know, the Super Bowl, I was looking at the numbers, I mean, gosh, the amount of money that it takes to put on a Super Bowl is going to reach a level when the amount of money it costs is going to exceed the amount of money it makes. And then that’s when you’re going to have problems. That’s what happened with gladiatorial combat is that there were limits on how much people earned, how much the games could be, how much could be spent. So all of a sudden it wasn’t lucrative like it was. So the sort of heyday started to pass after 180 AD. It still goes on to 430 AD, but it doesn’t have the prestige it used to.

And I think a good example of this is baseball, where I don’t think baseball is quite as prestigious as it was, because the money’s kind of gone out of baseball. So, you know, if I’m an athlete, do I want to be a baseball player or do I want to be a basketball or an NFL player? Well, who makes the most money? Yeah, I think I’ll be an NFL player, thanks. And religion is ultimately, yeah, socially things change because Christianity came in, but again, the Christians were not so concerned with the well-being of the gladiators, the athletes, they couldn’t care less. They were more concerned that they wanted people to be less animalistic. And they felt that the games brought out the worst in people. So it just basically just faded away. And politics is because Rome was, of course, the capital of the empire. But the Emperor Constantine moved this to Turkey to Istanbul. And when Constantinople was founded, the public really had no power in Rome anymore. So the point of putting on the games is to win people over politically, to keep them happy, you know, distract them. But when they had no political sense anymore, political power, it made no sense. And they didn’t do it for them anymore. And of course, that’s where the Coliseum was. So it faded into history.

Brett McKay: So there’s been a lot of movies made about gladiators, and you’ve consulted on shows about gladiators. Do you have your like top three favorite gladiator movies?

Alexander Mariotti: My top movie, you know, I like, I love them all. I love them all because they all have aspects that I love. Obviously like Gladiator I was amazing because it brought the Coliseum to life. I don’t think anyone really had a sense of what the games were like visually until Gladiator came along. There’s this great shot where Maximus is fighting Tigris in the middle of the arena and it’s like a wide shot and you just see the whole arena and you realize people were just concentrated on two little figures in the middle. You know, I do love the series Spartacus because I think it gives you a real sense of what the gladiator was, his life was like, you know, the sort of sex, drugs and rock-a-roll of its time or sex, wine and I guess harp music, whatever the equivalent was in antiquity, probably opium, I suppose. But it really showed the sort of life of the gladiator inside the lotus. I thought that was great. And of course the sex involved because that was a huge draw.

You became a sex symbol, you know. Sex is a major drive for anybody and being a gladiator was a sure way to be just an object. And it’s amazing how many objects we find related to gladiators and sex from antiquity. So I like different shows for different aspects. And even Gladiator II. I have to say I really loved Gladiator II as well. I did some work on Gladiator II and I thought just the views of the Coliseum. Who’s ever seen a naval battle? We just got to sit and watch a naval battle in the Coliseum, brought to life with our technology. And how fascinating that to us it’s amazing. And then you think, imagine what it was like when you saw it in real life 2000 years ago. If it amazes us who have all sorts of spectacle to blow us away in technology, and yet we can still sit and see two ships in a Coliseum and go, wow, that’s cool. Imagine when you saw it in the amphitheater 2000 years ago.

Brett McKay: Last question, why do you think people continue to find gladiators so compelling, even in the 21st century?

Alexander Mariotti: I think it’s an easy one. I think there’s a variety of reasons. The first is because we still admire virtus, because we still admire strength and courage and resilience. Just like the Romans did. You see it in our superstars and our sports stars, our superheroes. The gladiators were the first version. I think second reads because we see ourselves more as the gladiators. They’re the most relatable of all the characters of antiquity because we don’t see ourselves in emperors or nobles. Very few of us do. We don’t live that life. But the gladiator is the commoner. It’s the guy who comes from nothing and makes his way up the ranks and makes fortune and fame and success. I’m still talking about them. But I also think that especially personally, and I think most people can sort of associate with it, is that there’s a great level of psychology. The arena was a representation of life. So when you saw animals fighting people, that was the savagery of wild and how man can confront even a lion.

It’s terrifying, but you can do it. You know, you have to be brave, you have to be full of virtus. When you saw criminals getting executed, you saw this chaos, but there’s order and bring order. And when you saw the gladiator, you saw a representation of how we live. We all find ourselves in a fight at some point in our lives. Not a physical fight. It can be an emotional or a mental struggle. It’s still battle. Life is war. It’s a fight. And somebody ultimately holds our fate in their hands. So really, if you look at it, you know, it’s a sort of metaphor there. The gladiator is us, the arena is life, and the emperor is whatever we’re fighting, whether it’s health or bad luck, who’s going to hold sway of our lives. And they inspire us to fight and to succeed, to face death and overwhelming odds of courage. And who cannot be inspired by that?

Brett McKay: Well, Alexander, this has been a fascinating conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, that’s very kind of you, Brett. Thank you. You can find me on my website, alexandermariotti.com, or follow me on Instagram as thegladiatorhistorian. I usually put out all sort of my talks or appearances, or come visit me in Rome. I’m in Rome. I do some work over there. So whether Rome and London, you can come and find me at the British Museum or usually around the Coliseum somewhere.

Brett McKay: Well, Alexander Mariotti, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Alexander Mariotti: Brett, as they say, strength and honor. And thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Alexander Mariotti. He’s a gladiator historian. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexandomariotti.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/gladiators. Where you can find links to our resources we delve deeper into this topic. Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continuous support, until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you have heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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