In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster, Lady Glossip, mother of an eligible daughter, asks Bertie Wooster how he would support a wife. His answer: “Well, I suppose it depends on whose wife it was. A little gentle pressure beneath the elbow while crossing a busy street usually fits the bill.”
Misguided youth is nothing new, as Wodehouse knew well in 1923. His Aunt Agatha’s reproach rings true about many men today: “Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures.”
Bertie Wooster and men like him emerged in the post-French Revolutionary world that left men adrift, bereft of purpose and authority. The godless egalitarianism that sparked the transformation in 1789 France hasn’t slowed throughout the centuries. It has beheaded every structure of authority in its path, particularly those scented with patriarchy, starting with La Révolution and The Terror.
It’s no small coincidence that as the heedless Jacobins, who were cutting off the Church’s authority at the head in favor of their (allegedly) more rational heads, they were also decapitating tens of thousands of French citizens.
A century later, James Cardinal Gibbons (1834–1921), Archbishop of Baltimore, watched closely as the Revolution gave way to toxic offspring: socialism, communism, and feminism. These all rejected moral authority and hierarchy in favor of egalitarianism.
“There is a tendency,” wrote America’s second Cardinal, “in our nature to chafe under authority. Thomas Paine published a well-known work on ‘The Rights of Man.’ He had nothing to say on the rights of God and the duties of man.”
Cardinal Gibbons cited a similar theme by a clergyman who “wrote a volume some years ago on ‘The Rights of the Clergy.’ From the beginning to the end of the work he said nothing on the duties and obligation of clergy. The majority of mankind are so intent on their rights that they have no consideration for their responsibilities.” The antidote to the growing list of rights, the Cardinal explained, is “a deep sense of our sacred duties.” With these, “we should not fail to come by our rights.”
The problem, of course, as we have recently witnessed in the “woke” movement, is that it’s impossible to make everything and everybody equal. This impulse, the Cardinal explains, is fueled by envy, not by God:
[F]rom the order of nature to the order of grace, we know there is not only variety, but that there are also grades of distinction among the angels in Heaven. The angelic Hierarchy is composed of nine distinct choirs. . . .One order of angels excels in sublimity of intelligence, or in intensity of love, or in the dignity of the mission signed to them.
This ordering, arranged by God, may not always seem too fair to us, but, as the Cardinal notes, “If you complain of God’s discrimination, Christ, will answer: ‘My friend, I do thee no wrong. . . .What claim have you on my justice? Is not all that you possess of nature or of grace the gratuitous gift of my bounty?”
In my book, Something Wicked, which is appearing this week, I explain how Cardinal Gibbons also saw the Church’s undermined authority to be dramatically affecting women. In 1902, in Ladies Home Journal, he wrote an article entitled “The Restless Woman,” saying:
I regard. . .the leaders in the new school of female progress as the worst enemies of the female sex. They teach that which robs women of all that is amiable and gentle, tender and attractive, and which gives her nothing in return but masculine boldness and brazen effrontery. They are habitually preaching about women’s rights and prerogatives, but have not a word to say about her duties and responsibilities. They withdraw her from those sacred obligations which properly belong to her sex.
Feminism’s shibboleth, the Cardinal concluded, is that “masculinity is greater than motherhood.”
After decades of belief that women are better off mimicking the morally corrupt traits of men while expecting men to behave more like women or remain silent, many are coming to realizations like those. Ordered motherhood and fatherhood have been derided and denigrated so deeply that we finally see the fruits of the effort: the wolf is no longer at the door, but deep inside the home. The door was left wide open by the very men and women tasked to protect and cherish the vulnerable.
What’s been missing is “the head” of civilizational order – not the head of modern rationalism or Enlightenment dogmas, but “the head” of Christ and ordered male authority. It’s now so eroded that we can scarcely say the word “patriarchy” without screeching by those who believe that male authority entails female slavery, instead of healthy complementarity.
Many young men today are rebelling against what they see as passivity in their fathers and grandfathers. The culture rarely tells them that they’re good and needed. The recent development of the “manosphere” reveals men yearning for masculinity, but not in an ordered way, because they lack healthy formation and mentors.
The manosphere mirrors the contempt feminism has had for men for decades. Both groups run high on anger, pride, and denigration, while finding entitlement for bad behavior in victimhood status. Like the banishment from the Garden of Eden, Eve and Adam stand naked, ashamed, and blaming each other.
What neither group realizes is the impotency of their efforts. The restoration they seek, as Cardinal Gibbon acknowledged over a century ago, will only happen with the recovery of our responsibilities and sacred duties; things like protecting, providing, raising children, and sacrificing for them. From these come identity, purpose, development of character, and deep and abiding loyalty and love.
Although young men are not always looking in the right places, they are looking. What they want, wittingly or not, is order, tradition, and authentic authority. What they want is the head back on the body. Let’s pray – and maybe even help them – find it.
