Masculine Care

How to positively challenge ourselves

I recently listened to the audio book “The Passion of the Western Mind” by Richard Tarnas. In it, he describes in broad strokes the development of Western thought. One such major development was how one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, realized the importance of embracing the concrete — the individual person and circumstances we engage — when attempting to make virtuous decisions.

A little while later, I listened to a conversation between John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, and Daniel Schmachtenberger. In it, they share their conviction that what is needed at the present moment in history is for Western cultures to become aware of a central issue: the scientific progress humans have made, driven by the Enlightenment’s rapid success, has created a vague but hard-to-shake belief in the correctness of a view that — as Friedrich Nietzsche put it — “God is dead.”

The three men do not advocate for a return to the traditional religious belief of a personal God, which would be seen as someone vindictive and full of wrath. Instead, they clearly state that whatever needs to come back into our collective and shared understanding of the world is an orientation towards the sacred. For me personally, this means finding a set of transcendental ideals, and shifting my attention as much as possible towards other people — importantly, concrete other individuals — as the most important aspect of humanity flourishing as a whole.

I thought a lot about the philosophical difficulties I started out with in life, and why I often felt unfulfilled, until I came to a recognition of my own: I really had wanted to be a father. Using a form of past tense here is somewhat provocative (if not shocking), even to me. The reason for that is simple: I am gay, I am in my late 40s, and my husband and I are still not in a particularly good position to absorb the impact of just how much our lives would be thrown out of their current, and relatively stable, orbits.

I will come back to what I believe society might be able to offer in a later post. For now, I want to focus on two aspects: first, I want to describe why fatherhood has always seemed attractive and important. The value it offers most prominently to me is that of realizing and manifesting masculine care in its most concrete form. As a father, I would be primarily responsible for providing the counterpart to feminine care for a small number of human beings, people who grow from infancy to adulthood. It does not get any more real than that.

This essay would be incomplete without giving a brief outline of what I consider to be the critical difference between feminine (or archetypically maternal) and masculine (paternal) forms of care. Both are vitally important for the infant to grow, and — so I believe — for other people who we have the opportunity to support throughout their lives. Feminine care starts from a premise of “what can I do that satisfies the needs of this individual?” This form of care places the emphasis on paying attention to the cared-for person, to their signals of discomfort, distress, and pain. It is willing to make sacrifices in order to lift a person, without their need to contribute, out of misery. And it does not make any demands, recognizing that there are moments in life when unconditional love and support are the only way to make things better.

And having experienced this form of care from my mother, and from many other people — including also from my father, by the way — I can attest to its power. Feminine care creates, like being placed into a solution shock full of nutrients, the opportunity for “sucking up” energy. What it does not create, however, is a proper orientation towards any specific aim. That is where the masculine form of care comes in.

This form of care asks a different question: “what can I do to support this person in growing into someone who can look into the mirror and see the reflection of someone they can and will respect for their achievements?” It is a much more complicated and difficult to get right form of care. It requires the person providing it to actively engage with the cared-for person. It requires a deep and accurate understanding of the world outside of the relationship of carer and cared-for. It requires constant vigilance, like that of a gardener growing incredibly difficult to grow crops: is the other person still pursuing a virtuous course? If not, how can I communicate my observations in a way that maximally support them in becoming the best version of themselves, to live up to their potential?

One reason we people in the West are struggling at the moment, as a collection of societies that seem to have lost our way, is that we have forgotten a simple truth: without appropriately challenging one another to be this best version of ourselves, we are rewarded to become a much, much worse version. Borderline sociopathic behaviors — online and more and more also in their physical manifestations — become accepted with a shrug: “oh, well, this person had such a difficult and traumatic life, we surely cannot ask any more of them.” In short, one way to describe this is that we have tilted our care towards the feminine. And I have asked myself, why is that?

The answer leads me to my second point: care, both the feminine and the masculine, do not properly scale. That was the mistake Aristotle wanted to point out over 2,500 years ago now. No matter how good your ideals are, if you do not apply them to people as individuals, you likely will not have the impact you desire. Over the past millennia, we have seen what scaling masculine care produced: a meritocratic society, in which a market as the ultimate arbiter decides which occupations are “worth while,” and which are to be considered useless. And, importantly, in the realm of that one particular decision, that of which occupation one might pursue, this is likely to be the proper answer. We now understand that this impersonal market is the result of the collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowds, helping us to answer the question, “what is wanted from (and ideally needed of) other people?” in the most accurate and impersonal way. What it cannot offer is genuine masculine care, however.

For that, the experience of challenge and support in decision making must be received from a personal carer, not an impersonal tyrant — even if the tyrant is much more accurate in its ability to predict which skill is needed, and which one is unlikely to provide income. People need fathers, they need teachers and mentors, as they need to feel that the direction they are asked to take is of personal value to others, not merely a choice imposed by some opaque and impenetrable circumstances.

As a counter movement to the ever less present masculine care in the home — the result of the nuclear family being given less and less importance, and more and more people growing up without fathers — our societies have attempted an ill-fated experiment of doing to feminine care that which, with respect to occupational choice at least, worked for masculine care: scaling it up. Recognizing that people are struggling with finding their way, we have created social welfare programs, which are supposed to give people a leg-up.

There are two mistakes I perceive in this decision: the first is that it is not the kind of care needed. If people are struggling because of a proper engagement on the level of being optimally challenged, it does not help to simply make them passive recipients of nutrients. All this does is create the experience of injustice for those who still are adopting a more responsible stance towards the overall, systemic challenge. And this injustice then creates incentives for ever more people to adopt a rather passive stance themselves, expecting equal support of the feminine-care kind…

The second mistake is that, ultimately, care as an experience can never be properly scaled up. People need to feel that it is others they have a personal relationship with who do that caring. If all I ever get is a welfare check whenever I am incapable of implementing the meritocratic principles inherent in a labor market, I will never feel cared for, no matter the intent behind the welfare check or the market.

Providing care is a “people business.” It requires that people meet one another close up, looking each other in the eye, and assessing — individually and context dependent — does this person actually need a leg-up right now? Are they already so incapable of adopting any responsibility, like an infant, that the only form of care needed and helpful to provide is feminine? No? Then it will always be more optimal to mix in at least some masculine care. And the more responsibility a person is willing to take and capable of taking for themselves, the less feminine care is probably optimal in that mix. At all times in life, there will be moments when a person simply cannot perform a task that is asked of them. It is in those then rarer and rarer moments when, as in a fairy tale, the motherly and unconditional love of feminine care remains of the essence.

I am closing this year, 2023, out with deep gratitude. Over the past 12 months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to meet people who I experienced in a way such that I was able to care for them — with both forms. At times, I picked them up, emotionally at least, when they were down. At other times, I helped them look into the future of their own lives and come to decisions about how to best adopt responsibility, and how to become versions of themselves that they will enjoy paying attention to.