For example, you won’t find anything that improves on Aristotle’s definition of courage as the mean between cowardice and mad daring. We can certainly learn a great deal about these virtues, and much else besides, in the great books. This is an exercise in retrieval: We must seek the five manly virtues of love, courage, pride, family and country in the past, through the writings of great-souled men such as Homer, Aristotle and Montaigne. What we need now is a positive account of what it means to be a man. The villain here is the counterculture movement that began in the 1960s and which initiated a 30 year project to eradicate the traditional teachings about manliness. Men are now waffling in a society that can’t decide if it wants them to be unprincipled wimps or wildmen… According to Carleton University professor Waller Newell in his new book THE CODE OF MAN, the problem stems from a cultural amnesia that began when we turned our backs on 3,000 years of accumulated wisdom. A portable, semester-long course on Western norms of masculinity. Few contemporary writers can write with such verve on such diverse topics as Machiavelli and Teddy Roosevelt, Rousseau and Erasmus.
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