Lying in bed after watching Louis Theroux’s recent excursion into the manosphere, I thought of my post on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of archetypal “characters” in anchoring the ethics of a culture (Link above). MacIntyre contrasts the morally serious characters of the 19th century — the gentleman, the statesman, the professor — with their 20th-century successors. Simplifying a little, these roles, such as the manager or therapist, are focused on results — or ‘outcomes’ as they’re now called. Their lodestars are efficiency and practicality. Largely shorn of moral depth, these roles nevertheless still attract respectability.
The purpose of that essay was to suggest a third, essentially amoral set of characters was being minted in the 21st century:
But what if the expectations that once called people to virtue are replaced by expectations of failure, incompetence, or self-interest? That idea — that we are living in an age already foreshadowed by MacIntyre — jumped out at me as South Australia’s former Premier Jay Weatherill put it to me:
The jaundiced view about each of the actors in the policy world looks like this.
If you’re an expert, you’re out of touch;
If you’re a punter, then you’re ignorant and don’t understand;
If you’re a politician, you’re power-hungry, self-interested and grasping;
If you’re a bureaucrat, you’re a cardigan-wearing lazy featherbedder.
These are the caricatures each group have of the other in the system. And they’re well established. But the truth is, all of the players have a crucial role in the system, and each needs to respect the others’ role.
It occurred to me that Theroux might be showing us something further again — a fourth stage that mints what I’m tempted to call ‘anti-characters’. Not simply a continuation of the decline of character, but the emergence of something more. These figures are certainly shaped by the incentives of the systems they inhabit — perhaps more even than their forebears — but they are also staging a revolt against them. Whether successfully or not, they are seeking to forge new forms of masculine selfhood.
But here’s the problem. Like Wilde, who had nothing to declare but his genius, Theroux has nothing to declare but his bemusement. Bemusement is healthy enough, at least as the prelude to further inquiry. Here’s the philosopher RG Collingwood making my point for me, describing his own bemusement each day as he passed the Albert Memorial and marvelled at its ugliness, and using it as a spur:
Everything about it was … misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; … I could not bear to look at it… I forced myself to look, and to face … the question: a thing so obviously … bad, why had [the architect] Scott done it? … If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault?
His bemusement was the prompt for curiosity, and humble curiosity at that. It turned his attention to what he might be missing. Theroux never lets curiosity get the better of him. As he encounters his subjects, he pauses, raises an eyebrow, milks a silence. These are soft, passive-aggressive invitations for his subjects to really consider whether they’re being their best selves (the implication being that he himself is standing on firmer ground).
He asks them why they don’t do more good with their public platform. They respond defiantly that they’re only in it for themselves. But the truth is more interesting. The manosphere men in the documentary teach men that they’re at a disadvantage. As the object of desire, women already have value. Men want them. And to get them, men have to make something of themselves for their desire to be reciprocated.
None of Theroux’s awkward, unpregnant pauses probes the good these guys might do, though on one occasion, he does show us how much this has inspired some followers of one of his subjects, people who seemed not to have a lot of education - like their manosphere role-models - trying to make something of themselves.
At the same time, I watched with dread. The domain in which this self-construction occurs exerts its own gravitational force on the players and their audience. It rewards crude male fantasy and trolling. Extinction events via cancellation are an ever-present threat – whether social or algorithmic.
The question I’d have liked Theroux to be asking is not whether to approve or disapprove of these figures — I couldn’t help but do both — but whether anything of wider value might emerge from these experiments in self-formation. Alas, nothing penetrates the event horizon of Theroux’s bemusement.
Ultimately, I think Theroux’s subjects matter not because I want to endorse them, but because they force into view a question our culture would rather evade: what forms of aspiration, discipline and masculine self-command might arise sixty (!!) years after second-wave feminism started its work.
If you’re interested, the cast of characters is set out here. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-b1274057.html
I did not want to comment because I have no real intention of watching this (and the Hugos are likely to dump a lot of TV on me in a few weeks) * but it seems to be the same dynamic as with Farrakhan. Farrakhan/the Nation of Islam inspired many especially men to find pride and self-respect but had problems with antisemitism and their underlying teaching was too false and shallow to really be more than a niche thing. Malcolm X who walked out on them because there was a bigger spiritual world out there is claimed by many more types of people for many different reasons.
This is “The Feminine Mystique” specifically but after reading the excerpt that was somewhat less hopelessly dated than the rest of it I went for my appointment with the dentist whose office was in its period of playing the oldies station. I realized that this book is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, *too*. Men and women were confronting the same problems based on the same type of society but for women the problem looked like being confined to a hypergendered existence because elites were afraid that women might not choose to have a family at all if they knew that they could do otherwise. April Baskin described in an email the deeply Christian tendency to divide people into damned and saved, safe and unsafe. In our times a) Gen Zers may want to have families but have difficulty affording almost anything and are afraid to surrender to the other gender b) #MeToo took feminism in a bad direction where men are presumed to be unsafe and men’s individual egos are presumed to be the real problem with collective liberation.
* I am also a prisoner of hope that Team “Your Friends and Neighbors” was never going to listen to me because I am allergic to shows about amoral rich people but maybe getting almost completely ignored by the Emmys was enough for them to make a real effort to improve Season 2. I also cherish a sliver of hope that Jon Hamm knew the show wasn’t really that good because he said on the red carpet for Season 1 that if Jonathan Tropper was involved he knew that the show would be smart and funny. It is plausibly those things, just not good. Also in honesty Hamm could not turn that part down. It was too directly written for him.
** I backed myself into a corner of saying that I called without even having seen the show that “Feminine Mystique” is a “Mad Men” episode. It turns out that it literally is one and Matt Weiner read the book for research purposes. The “Mad Men” pilot was made from the script that Matt Wiener kept in his desk for 10 years and everyone passed on and aired as Episode One, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, which won an Emmy for writing. “Ladies Room”, the “Feminine Mystique” one, is then the second episode and the first one that aired with a script that was written when Wiener knew the show would actually get made.
This made me go back to your essay on Alasdair MacIntyre. And that made me wonder if you had written anything in response to Rutger Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures with their focus on the need for a moral revolution? I found the lectures got me thinking but left me without anywhere to go politically - which is surely what he is trying to encourage. I feel we are not talking enough about ethics and morals and watching on as key institutions reveal that they do not have resilient ethical foundations (ie Harvard and Trump) - similar things could be said about Australian universities and a kind of moral cowardice that prevails.