Masculinity, toxic and otherwise

This post compares two thinkers on the topic of masculinity and whether it is, to coin a phrase, toxic or not. They are Will Storr and Richard Wrangham.

The Status Game is a 2021 book by Will Storr, wherein he quotes the proverb: 

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Storr describes the humiliated male as “the [status] game’s most lethal player”. He gives an example at the individual level: Elliot Rodger, the incel who did a spree killing in Santa Barbara County, USA. And he gives an example at the national level: Hitler who channelled German (note Ger Man!) humiliation after WWI into genocide of the European Jews. Here is one of many reviews of The Status Game: vox-conversations-the-status-game-will-storr

Richard Wrangham is a primatologist who once studied chimps in the wild with Jane Goodall. Here on Jordan B Peterson’s YouTube channel Wrangham “Explains the 1% Difference Between Humans & Apes”.

He has a theory about proactive versus reactive aggression, which is explained in his books, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution and Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

Basically, proactive aggression is the kind practised by groups acting together, whether it be bands of chimps raiding a neighbouring band’s territory and killing them; or a group of Stone Age hunters who work as a team to drive the woolly mammoth over the cliff edge to provide the tribe with meat; or whether it be armies slaughtering each other in war.

Reactive aggression on the other hand is the ‘red mist’ of the individual human (usually male) who goes berserk when provoked beyond his limit, injuring or killing another creature, even his own partner.

Wrangham argues that humans are high in proactive aggression compared to other primates and low in reactive aggression. That is why it is too simplistic to say, as many people have done down the years, that humans are or aren’t innately violent.

Rather, his theory casts a new light on the old chestnut as to whether Hobbes or Rousseau was right about human nature.

The tradition of Hobbes suggests that man is essentially an evil barbarian and it is only the civilising force of the state that keeps him in check and under control. The Rousseau tradition on the other hand suggests that the noble savage is essentially good and it is only the corrupting force of so-called civilisation that has turned him into a species that is uniquely destructive of his environment and the people around him, whether by acts of genocide or preparation for nuclear war.

In other words, Wrangham’s answer to the question as to whether man is innately peaceful and compassionate or innately violent and selfish is that it is a bit of both. 

19feb2023. PS. Interesting feedback from a friend, who said:

Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves (published 2022) is a broader take on masculinity than the toxic masculinity discourse which can end up being too focussed on aggression and violence. Not that these are not important. But if we are posing a question about what being a man is or could be, to focus on that aspect (are we or aren’t we aggressive) is of limited value … it all depends what question one is trying to answer.

That set me off wondering more about why the question of male violence is so important to me. The question as to whether men are violent or nonviolent, and how much, has been an important one in at least two of my walks of life, which are the Quaker faith and the nonviolent communication (NVC) faith, if I can call it that!

NVC’s founder, Marshall Rosenberg, grew up in Detroit and, aged nine, witnessed violent race riots in 1943. This set him on a lifelong path to answer the question: why do some people seem to enjoy and feel happy to inflict violence and pain on other people, whereas other people seem to enjoy and feel happy when they give love and compassion and care and support to others?

Wrangham’s book provided me with an answer to this: the race rioters would be the proactive-aggressive ones, whereas Rosenberg’s uncle who devoted himself to caring for Rosenberg’s disabled grandmother, seems to me to be an example of low reactive aggression.

Thus, there is a potential new explanation here for the different ways in which people are violent or nonviolent, and it has to do with more than Rosenberg’s theory that everything we do is in the service of our needs, whether our strategy to do so is a tragic (that is, violent) expression or a compassionate (that is, nonviolent) expression of doing so.  In other words, Wrangham's idea that there are two very different types of aggression, seems to me to be an improvement on NVC theory that violence is just one undifferentiated Bad Thing.