2018 Conference Talk
What Makes Men Men?
The Nature of a Man Is What He Is For
by J. Budziszewski
I am a little amused, because it may at first seem that Glenn Stanton and I disagree about everything. He argues that manhood is not natural; I argue that it is. However, this is not a real disagreement, because the term "natural" is used in different senses. Psychologists and sociologists generally use it to refer to what is spontaneous or comes easily for creatures of our nature. Ethical philosophers and theologians generally use it to refer to what reflects the flourishing or proper development of creatures of our nature, and that may come hard. I certainly don't think males become men easily or spontaneously. But for their own good, I do think they need to become men. So manhood is natural in my sense, even though not in Glenn Stanton's—and he and I agree about this.
So let us get on with our subject.
How to Know What Men Are
What is it to be a man?
And how can we know?
Some people say the best way to understand the nature of the human male is to consider the selection pressures which operated during his presumed rise from the apes. There are two problems with this strategy. The first is that, on this hypothesis, the only genes that are consistently passed on are the ones for traits that have adaptive value. But obviously this isn't so. Tell me the adaptive value in seeking to know the meaning of life, or in the ability to be awed, humbled, and transported by the music of J. S. Bach. One eminent sociobiologist claims that we have genes for believing in God, which are adaptive because belief in God unites the social group. Apparently no one told him that believing different things about God can tear the group apart. Besides, why not just have genes for social unity?
The second problem is that, even if we did develop entirely by natural selection, we don't know what selection pressures were operating. Neo-Darwinian theory cannot say how human males had to come out. All it can do is observe how they did come out, and then spin tales of how that might have happened. After all, the primates all came out differently. The chimpanzee is highly aggressive and dominated by males; the bonobo is less aggressive and dominated by females; and we are neither chimpanzees nor bonobos.
Other people say that the best way to understand the nature of the human male is simply to observe him. That's better, but there are problems with this approach, too. The first problem is simple variation, because men (and women) are not all the same. For every generalization about either sex, there are exceptions. From this, a naïve observer may conclude that there is no such thing as male and female nature. But this is a mistake. The fact that most women are more nurturing than most men is much more than an accident. It arises from a genuine difference in the underlying reality, the difference between womanhood and manhood as such.
This difference is so powerful that men and women are influenced by it even when they defy it. For example, we say women are more nurturing. Yet some young women conceal their pregnancies, give birth in secret, then do away with the babies. Nothing more opposed to nurturance could be imagined. But wait—consider the ways in which these young women do away with their babies. How often they place them in trashcans and dumpsters, still alive! Why don't they just kill them? That is what a man usually does if he wants to do away with a child. Perhaps a young woman imagines her baby resting in the dumpster, quietly and painlessly slipping into a death that is something like sleep. Or perhaps she imagines a fairy-tale ending in which some other woman finds her baby in the dumpster and brings him up as her own. No, the act is not nurturing, but even so, the inclination to nurture hasn't precisely been destroyed; under the influence of other strong motives, it has been perverted. I daresay that such data are not captured by our psychological instruments. It is not enough to count things with a survey. One must see with the eyes of the heart.
J. Budziszewski is Professor of Government, Philosophy, and Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of several books, including Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy (Creed & Culture, 2026).
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