Of boys and men

I recently read Richard V. Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. The book and its many proposals have been discussed endlessly over the last year (some good essays and responses here), so I want to make just four comments.

1. The book is superb. I almost didn’t read it because I assumed the public conversation, along with the excerpts and Reeves’ own Substack, made the book itself redundant. I was wrong. It’s a model of public policy analysis and prescription made accessible to the general public. And Reeves’ willingness to step out and say things he knows he will be censured for is admirable. There’s also a quiet moral engine humming beneath the book’s hood that propels the more wonkish bits along, forming a single continuous analytical argument that’s equal parts lucid, provocative, and commonsensical.

2. Reeves constantly adverts to the old nostrum that “we can’t turn back the clock.” He trots out this maxim whenever he turns to his right (he’s constantly turning to his metaphorical right and left in order to stake out ground in the center), from which direction he hears the suggestion that if only we went back in time—say, to the 1950s—then the challenges facing the family today would be resolved. The first thing to say here is that there just aren’t that many people seriously suggesting this. The second thing to say is what Chesterton and Lewis said almost a century ago. And the third thing to say is this. It is a very odd thing, in a book about one of the most rapid, comprehensive, and unexpected social and political transformations in human history—namely, the entrance of women “out” of the home and “into” the workforce, as well as the various ways that men, once dominant, are now sliding into isolated, lonely, meandering, and unproductive lives—to insist that another transformation along those lines is quite literally impossible. Wouldn’t the same sort of author have said that in 1780 or 1870 or 1960? But then the impossible happened, and retrospectively it’s seen to have been possible all along. What one needs, instead of declarations of metaphysical impossibility, is a moral case for why “turning back the clock” ought not to occur, even if it were feasible. There are no laws of nature here. It’s not at all hard to conceive of conditions in the near, middle, or distant future that would conduce to a sort of revival of the Leave It To Beaver household. Reeves and others need to stop relying on the crutch of its supposed inconceivability and make the case instead for its undesirability (and not exclusively from their political vantage point, I might add).

3. On one hand, Reeves allows that, given real differences between the sexes, there will inevitably be reflections of those differences in the real world, for example in choice of professions, and that these differences are morally neutral. On the other hand, Reeves argues quite forcefully for public policy that would funnel boys and men into professions in which girls and women predominate, such as preschool daycare, early elementary teaching, nursing, and so on. My question here is not about his policy preferences or whether it would be good, say, for boys’ flourishing to have more Kindergarten teachers be men. My question is second-order. By what principle or criterion does Reeves decide which highly sex-differentiated professions ought to be leveled out by government and which ought not to be? How does one know, that is, when gender parity is desirable and when it is not? I’m stipulating that, given a particular profession, we have ruled out any injustice or coercion. Again, Reeves admits this; I’m not arguing against him here. My worry is that his honest answer is this: “just those professions that I, Reeves, believe should approximate greater gender parity (as opposed to those that I do not).” But what about people—women, men, or both—who don’t share Reeves’ view? It seems to me that he needs additional reasons to justify his interventions beyond the ones he gives (at most, that soft pressure to get men into “HEAL” professions would provide jobs for jobless men and/or benefit young boys without thereby disadvantaging young girls). If he doesn’t have such reasons, or a more general and widely shared principle of discrimination, then it becomes little more than personal preference, or perhaps a sort of intuitive Goldilocks rule.

4. This point leads to me to my last comment. Reading Reeves’ book solidified for me the truth of postliberal critiques of liberalism as a political philosophy. Namely, there is always a vision of the good operative in a given society, including liberal ones. What’s more, this liberal vision of the good takes precedence over democratic preferences. As evidence, consider that Reeves simply takes for granted that the vision of gender he is promoting is one that the liberal state exists to protect, promote, and advance via law and public policy. He does not believe this vision requires consent or advocacy on the part of voters; their views are quite beside the point. The government ought right now to be enacting policy that will lead to the world envisioned by Reeves’ book, which is to say, will employ both the soft and the hard power of the state to nudge society’s common life ever closer toward a particular normative vision of the common good. This is just what any state and its government exists to do, after all. It is not and could never be neutral, or feign to be. Yet the question never arises for Reeves whether the populace as a whole wants to live in his world. His argument doesn’t take democratic citizens into account. What he does is argue, morally and concretely, for what counts as the objective common good, and proposes what policy levers would create conditions for achieving it. In this he’s acting like every statesman, politician, minister, president, and monarch who has ever lived, at least those who took their duties seriously. In doing so, however, he gives the lie both to liberalism’s neutrality and to liberalism’s deference to democracy. That’s quite a thing. I don’t fault him for it. I appreciate his honesty. I wish everyone were so forthright. But I wish, too, that we could stop having conversations in which we pretend this isn’t the case—for everyone, for every society, of every kind, always, everywhere, and without exception.