The Code of Man: Love Courage Pride Family Country"In many ways," Waller R. Newell writes, "young men today are in deep spiritual trouble. But they are also yearning for a way back to the noblest ideals of American manhood." The Code of Man represents a deep and thought-provoking effort to help guide contemporary men back to those ideals, as embodied in what Newell calls the five paths to manliness: love, courage, pride, family, and country. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he argues, we have grown so concerned about the roles of sex and violence in our society that we have forgotten the older virtues: romance and eros, courage and patriotism, the blend of love and bravery it takes to raise a family. In The Code of Man, he exhorts us to look to the traditional virtues of the past for inspiration. Contrasting the time-honored lessons of traditional voices -- Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen and Teddy Roosevelt -- with the chaotic signals emanating from sources like Eminem, video games like Thrill Kill, and Goth culture, Newell illustrates how we have come to associate courage with violence, "transgression" with wisdom. Most disturbing, he argues, the essential triumph of Western culture may have left us with a building reserve of untapped aggressive energy, and no consensus about how to channel it -- a situation that threatens to weaken us at the core. Seamlessly weaving together literary references from a diverse body of sources, Waller Newell offers an open-eyed look at what it means to be a man in America today, and a clarion call to recapture our traditions if we are to preserve our character as a society ... and avoid catastrophe. |
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... manly virtue is also reflected in movies of the last decade or so . From Fatal Attraction to American Beauty , we've seen a return to the " bourgeois " values of as- suming responsibility for your actions , keeping the family together ...
... manly virtue is somewhat less clear in other spheres of contemporary living . One could argue , for instance , that nobility in war is no longer possible because advanced military technology ( including nuclear weapons ) has both made ...
... manly refinement , The Book of the Courtier . As Castiglione portrays the perfect gentleman , he must possess all the virtues praised by the ancients - prudence , justice , liberality , mag- nificence , honor , gentleness , pleasantness ...
... manly self- perfection is as high as before . But the reward can be enjoyed in the here and now , not postponed to the afterlife . Ultimately , a man should love a woman for her virtues of mind and character , using them as a stan- dard ...
... manly fulfillment , and that its emphasis on bourgeois eco- nomic competition and prosperity stultifies the human spirit . Voltaire had famously argued that men should give up their old- fashioned duels and vendettas and their obsession ...
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