America’s fate depends on men rediscovering their thumos

Washington Examiner senior editor Peter Laffin recently interviewed First Things editor Rusty Reno and Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, on Christian nationalism. At one point, he said that although he agrees with Reno’s diagnoses of what has gone wrong in America and the West, he found himself asking, “What exactly are you proposing?”In other words, he is asking Reno, “How do we get from the diagnosis to recovery?” This brought to mind something Catholic author Mary Eberstadt said in a recent talk: “Diagnosis has become a substitute for treatment.”I’ve been in America for 48 years this December. And as a reader and writer, it seems to me the life of the mind has always revolved around diagnosis because for most of us, we are always asking the what, why, and how questions about ourselves and the world. These, and similar questions, seek understanding. Human life in this world needs that understanding to thrive and advance. Yet it is not enough. Years ago, I wrote that within our country’s genetic makeup is the drive to make things better. Some call this drive “spiritedness.” It is our drive to make things better, so that we may recover from whatever ails us. Sometimes things worked, and sometimes they didn’t. But the drive was there, and it was working.For the last couple of decades, probably more — one might put the moment at Sept, 11, 2001 — a sense of despair has set over this country. Sure, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, there was an uptick in religious observance, optimism, and a sense of determination. But it was surface-deep.In reality, a deep despair set in and has only metastasized since then. In my diagnosis, I believe that despair has unnerved us and driven us to an obsession with diagnosis. We are constantly diagnosing what is wrong with our culture, society, education, foreign policy, and the rest. But as a society, we can’t seem to move from diagnosis to the doing, to recovery. The despair has dampened our drive to make things better.This is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s stunning Athens speech stirred the souls of many Americans. In that speech, Rubio used the word thumos to describe this drive to make things better. “The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization,” he said. “And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.” The philosophers may disagree on this use of the word thumos, but Rubio is correct to say that without the drive to make things better, we do lose the will to strive and survive. It is this dampening of our drive to make things better that prevents us from moving from diagnosis to recovery in all of our social and cultural problems. “What is happening to America is an excruciatingly painful truth that life without father, Father, and filial piety toward country are not the socially neutral options that contemporary liberalism holds them to be,” Eberstadt wrote in a December 2020 essay titled The Fury of the Fatherless. Fatherlessness, in all its dimensions, has been diagnosed and well researched for years. But what else do we know about fathers and about men who take paternity, paternal roles, and filial piety seriously? To all these spheres, and more, they bring with them the drive to make things better, so it makes sense that the loss and weakening of this drive coincides with the social and cultural phenomenon of fatherlessness.I am not saying women do not have within them a drive to make things better — of course we do, and we do it all the time. American women from the founding of our country until now have had their share in this drive to make things better — in the home, in education, in churches and synagogues, in the medical fields, across many sectors of society.But I am a traditional woman, and I believe that what we have seen for centuries is true: that it takes both women and men. And that on a large scale within nations, it is the men who brought a certain civilizational and institutional dimension of that drive. To recover our own civilization and institutions, we need the men of this generation to bring this drive into all the spheres they enter.Researchers, including Nicholas Eberstadt, have written on the “new misery” of men. The first step for men is to come out of the malaise that has overtaken them. This will mean that men will have to stop being afraid of being men in front of the women who would criticize them for it. Too often in the last decades, our generic public framework for evaluating actions has been distinctly feminine.Whether it is in environmental policy, human resources, waging war, or the prosecution of criminals, feminine sensibilities have become the measure of what is allowed, certainly socially, and often legally. Men have become afraid to trespass these boundaries that the new “mothering” have enforced in society. These qualities have their place, but mothering should not be the organizing principle around which we govern civil society.In her talk “Cultural Restoration, Great and Small,” Mary Eberstadt tells her audience, “The time for cultural lamentation is over, and the time for creative defiance is upon us.”We can and should continue with our diagnosis, but we can’t stay in that space. We must all summon that drive to make things better and make the move from diagnosis to recovery. And men, having rediscovered their thumos, must take the lead.Luma Simms is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is a writer and a thinker on American culture, religion, politics, political theology, immigration, and immigration-adjacent issues. Her primary focus has been the critique of modern America through an immigrant lens.