From Servants of Mechanization to Guardians of Beauty
A Manifesto on Masculine Liberation and the Future Men's Movement
This past Saturday night, I traveled to Philadelphia for a special date night with my wife. As a Christmas gift, she booked us an Airbnb for the night in the Fishtown neighborhood and copped two tickets to see a soul band I love, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, at the Fillmore. Being the extrovert my wife is, she dragged me to the second row of the standing-room-only crowd. I looked around and saw predominantly middle-aged Caucasian men. Paul Janeway, the relatively unattractive, overweight leadman SP&TBB, belted out a few earth-shattering notes, and the men in the crowd went wild – yelping for more (me included). As the band finished their set list, it was mostly the men screaming for an encore. They were screaming for more from a lead singer who, on a dime, could switch from loud, boisterous, soulful notes to the most extremely tender, vulnerable, and quiet falsetto. As Paul Janeway emerged from behind the stage for an encore with the rest of the group, he donned a silver robe covered in colorful glitter. Again, mostly, the men went wild in the crowd. He was glistening, sweating, and singing like nothing I’ve ever seen. The men were in awe – floored in excitement.
A few days later I’m still riding that high. Paul Janeway got me – but his performance also posed a profound question for me: what exactly in his performance and/or presence were all the middle-aged men in the crowd so damn wild about?
A thought, in the form of an inner whisper, hit me today. When a man in our culture is unabashedly fervent in his individually passionate display of beauty and emotional truth, it stirs up a primal remembrance in other men of a deep masculine melancholy for the beauty and wonder embedded in the forgotten chambers of their hearts.
Each man and boy alive has a unique vision of beauty divinely embedded in him – and it feels like in each succeeding generation, that imprint of beautific longing in each man gets further and further dislocated from conscious awareness. It’s like a horrific wound of immense pain and proportional possibility that is getting harder and harder to recover – let alone articulate and express.
I mean, my God, didn’t men used to take incalculable pride in the beauty of their work? Didn’t they feel this was a responsibility to their fellow humans? Go visit the Cathedrals in Florence, Italy. Listen to Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. Read some poetry by William Stafford. Men, collectively used to take pride in beautifying their cultures. In architecture, in woodworking, in literature, in lovemaking. Men may have been slowly conditioned to display less emotion, but their spirit showed up in their care and ornate expressiveness in their professional craft and bodily ways. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of men still expressing their souls, but overall, if you ask most men in 2024 about their relationship with beauty and soul – you’ll get a blank stare at best – perhaps a punch in the face.
This masculine relationship to beauty had a pulse before the cult of Utilitarianism took the reigns, and profit became the deity of choice. When curved lines in buildings and hallways were replaced with ninety-degree angles and flat overhead fluorescent lights – an inarticulable demise began. Men gave into the heart of the machines surrounding them as Industrialization took over. As they were surrounded by unnatural and uninspired cacophonies of whizzing belts, steam exhausts, and pounding jackhammers, their souls and longing for beauty in their hearts went quiet - to an unknown darkness. Men protested their loss of spiritually infused expression in the world – yet their protests and irruptions from the darkness looked a lot like alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, murder, atheism, nihilism, suicide, and most importantly – denial – a refusal to face their tragically suffering natural selves.
As well-known Jungian analyst and author James Hollis once said, “What happens when your cultural ethics are in violation of your soul? Does your psyche demand an ethic as well? Men suffer from this dilemma so tragically and quietly, it’s almost painful for me to write this. At least the last few hundred centuries in America have taught men that their souls are worth absolute shit – and the cultural ethics of ambition, competition, achievement, and progress are gods to be obeyed at all costs.
When men collectively gave up the effort to beautify their cultures, it wasn’t just men who suffered – it was everyone – women, children, and communities. It should go without saying that women of course helped beautify culture and still do. However, it is not too much of a stretch to state that the rise of feminism urged women to pursue a more economically practical route. While this has transformed culture in many positive ways, it has not necessarily been for the betterment of Western culture’s collective soul. If mens’ souls as a general whole were thwarted by the beatings of the Great Machine, and women’s souls longed for economic freedom, power, authority, and agency – who was to care for the beauty of the culture? Who was to carry the torch of the cultural soul that cannot live without eros and soulful expression?
“A world without beauty would be unbearable. Indeed the subtle touches of beauty are what enable most people to survive. Yet beauty is so quietly woven through our ordinary days that we hardly notice it. Everywhere there is tenderness, care and kindness, there is beauty.” – John O’Donohue
Currently, one of the books I’m reading is Empath, by Judy Dyer. In the first few chapters of the book, Dyer mentions the story of Dr. Hew Len, a Medical Doctor who a few decades ago was brought in to be the staff M.D. at the Hawaii State Hospital for the criminally insane. In those walls were the most horrific criminals – killers, murders, rapists, and psychopaths. The hospital was hard to staff because of the torrid conditions. The lead M.D. would change every few months because it seemed like an impossible environment to work in. When Dr. Hew Len came in, he started by having the walls of the hospital re-painted, the shrubbery and greens pruned and trimmed, the tennis courts repaired, and soon inmates who were never allowed to go outside, were outside playing tennis with staff members. Some prisoners were soon moving around without shackles, and many were slowly being weaned off psychotropic medication. The prison became such a high demand place to work, even though many inmates were being released. Dr. Hew Len had found a way to re-animate the soul inside the prison in an astonishing way.
“It appeared that Dr. Hew Len didn’t apply any specific technique or give the prisoners any medication. All he seemed to do was look at their files, but what he did do was heal himself with a traditional Hawaiian spiritual remedy referred to as Ho’oponopono. In Dr. Len’s own words, “I was healing the part of me that created them.” While he sat in his office looking at each individual patient file, he would feel pain and empathy towards them. Dr. Len would then use what he was feeling to heal himself, taking on full responsibility for what each patient appeared to be going through. The prisoners were healed because their doctor took on their pain and healed them through himself. Ho’oponopono is based on the belief that we create our own environment. The bottom line is that the world belongs to you and it is your responsibility to care of it.” – Judy Dyer, Empath
Dr. Len’s re-beautification of the Hospital was so all-encompassing that by the time he left his role, there were only a few inmates left.
It begs each of us as men, including me, to ask the question: How exactly am I to take responsibility for this world? How exactly are we men supposed to take loving care of our cultures? What on Earth does beauty or the soul have to do with my own responsibilities for others?
Yesterday, as any typical Monday morning, I dropped my four year-old son at daycare, and as I drove away I saw he and his classmates being escorted onto the small playground. My son looked a bit sad – I knew he would probably prefer to spend the day with me. Looking at his daycare center, and the surrounding industrial landscape –I began to cry. “Are we surrounding him with enough beauty?” I kept driving. I pulled into the parking lot of my favorite gas station coffee shop and and I thought to myself: “If I can do anything as a father for my sons, it should be to expose them to beauty.” I bought my coffee and hopped back in the car. More tears came to me, and an even deeper revelation. I spend many waking hours of my life contemplating the future of masculinity, fatherhood, and the existential basis of maleness. Here in America, men overall are suffering – and consequently boys are too. There’s some excellent empirical work being done on men and boys by Richard Reeves – and with the launch of his new organization, The American Institute for Boys and Men – I’m optimistic. Yes, men are doing worse in the workplace, worse in school, and many other verifiable areas of social and economic life. That’s a fact. However, this isn’t the revelation that came to me yesterday.
If women are going to continue their meteoric rise in the world of business, education, and institutional life, what is the future masculine task?
The current and future collective masculine task is to re-animate and re-beautify Western culture. Men must become the Guardians and cultural missionaries of soul.
Men, we must first embrace our collective masculine grief – the centuries and generations of being unable to express our own longing for beauty – our emotional selves – our true personhood. We must feel into the depths of our own souls that have gone into hiding – and listen to what the chambers of our hardened hearts have to say – what they cannot live without. Then, we must liberate our suffering by joining shoulder to shoulder and refusing the de-animation and over-mechanization of our modern world. This is our damn responsibility. Our muscles, our intellect, our capacity to build marvelous things should be in the service of transcendent beauty! Long live the feral masculine soul. We must wake from our anesthetized slumber!
“A man’s task is nothing but the slow trek, to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three images in whose presence his heart first opened.” – Albert Camus
We must make the soul of our cultures our immediate priority – first by grieving the loss of our own.
Don’t our children deserve more color – more art, more gardens, more storytelling by firelight, more clean streets, more men who are unafraid to passionately express their souls’ delights? If women seek power, status, and agency – that’s totally fine. Women deserve the collective opportunity to to run the institutional side of things. Let’s let our manhood be defined by how hard we’ve worked to bring more soulful wildness into the waterways and structures of our cities and towns. Our masculine potency and potential should be in complete and utter service to guardianship of the soul.
This liberating force and movement of masculine servant leadership can only begin when men open up to the irrational realm of their inner depths – a place they have no control.
It’s excruciatingly difficult, but it’s the only road. My own search for the daimonic personal image of beauty within me has never led me astray. Has it caused problems? Sure – but the core integrity of the search and expression has always led me to a larger and grander feeling of profound aliveness. In 2012, I was a few years out of college, still living with my parents, and in a dark cloud of depression and worsening alcoholism. This was around the time of Spotify’s infancy, and I would spend the days searching for music to keep my soul alive. I came across this soul singer named Brian Owens, based in St. Louis. I found his Facebook fan page and reached out. He told me he’d be in Philadelphia soon and we should meet up. Upon meeting him, he introduced me to a Japanese soul artist, Nao Yoshioka, and her manager/record label owner, Naoki Yamanouchi. They happened to sell Brian’s music in Tokyo and be performing in Philadelphia alongside Brian. A few months later, Naoki invited me to Tokyo to direct a music video with Nao, and that Brian would be joining. I remember getting to Tokyo and sitting in a penthouse studio overlooking the city at night. Brian and his fellow musicians from St. Louis began a jam session with Nao’s Japanese band. Here I was, a Caucasian kid from Lancaster, Pennsylvania – sitting in a record label penthouse in Japan, watching some of the world’s best musicians from totally different lands jamming with each other. My cells were on fire – my soul was healing.
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” – C.S. Lewis
Upon returning home from Tokyo, I chopped up some of the footage I shot into a commercial for a competition that AT&T was running. A month later, I found out I won the competition and would be heading to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France. Because of that trip, I ultimately was introduced to my incredible wife, and life partner, Rasha Clark. My souls longing for the beauty in music led me – and helped establish a career and more importantly, a marriage – a union with the woman who is the mother of our two wonderful sons.
To those of you reading this: what do you really long for? What would haunt your existence if you could never encounter it again?
For men, this longing for beauty can show up in as many ways as there are men. It can show up in the obsessive love for communication through a CB Radio, or the camaraderie of a Gettysburg Civil War re-enactment actor. This longing starts when we are boys, and often we lose this – because our schools and cultures teach us that this silly little connection to beauty doesn’t have an economically viable endgame. FUCK THAT. As we grow older, this longing starts to feel shameful. It is something we are individually as men so intrinsically and soulfully tied to, yet the messaging from our culture is so strong, this longing is thwarted – and the meaning of our lives is lost – in this unforgiving dark mist that surrounds us.
“Beauty is the only medicine.” – James Hillman
The most troubling cause of the decline of men and boys is not going to be found in socioeconomic circumstances – but in the realm of the spirit. This is the most crucial masculine matter of our time. We must revivify and reanimate culture as men, first by encountering our own suffering – then recovering the beautific vision in each of us, and finally by bringing the longing and depths of that vision into the fibers of the culture itself.
I’m fucking all in. ALL IN.
Men repeat after me:
I can no longer live without meaning in my life.
I will no longer refuse my longing for beauty.
I will do the immensely challenging work to rediscover what my soul yearns for, and grieve the loss of it.
I understand that I may have to break down what doesn’t serve beauty, in order to build anew.
I will join hands with my fellow men and help them bring their longing for beauty into the fabric of our community.
This is my masculine task. This is why I am here.
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.” – James Hillman
I will leave you with one final thought. The deep shame you feel at the core of your being – this feeling of disgusting-ness – this leaden shame holds the seeds of the boyish longing for beauty that you’ve been systematically and intentionally deprogrammed away from. Listen to this pain, this voice of suffering, and let it pull you in the depths. In this horrifying despair and unknown you will find the energy, compassion, joy, and meaning-filled responsibility that your family, your culture, and you deserve.
As famed mythologist Michael Meade likes to say: “What the heart longs for is the cure.”
Men – I’m here to descend inwardly with you. Let’s watch just how much beauty and healing we can bring to the world.
–David B. Godin
DURDEN is a Jungian coaching consultancy for influential midlife men, launching in late 2024. For more information, please subscribe below.
References:
James Hillman
James Hollis
Judy Dyer
C.S. Lewis
Michael Meade
Albert Camus
The deep shame of disgust is a perfect contrast to the longing for beauty you describe. Nietzsche asserted that "Without music, life would be a mistake." - this is our forgotten essence, beauty is divine.
Thanks for sharing your stories.