The Code of Man
Love – Courage – Pride – Family – Country

By Waller R. Newell

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The Code of Man examines and answers a little understood yet pivotal conundrum facing Americans today: why, after winning the Cold War and defeating the evil empire, American men began to wage a war on themselves. “Thirty years of stereotyping have taught us to equate manliness with macho, piggish, violent behavior, and courage with violence. But according to the entire preceding tradition of the West (and for that matter, the non-Western world), macho behavior was considered unmanly, the very opposite of manliness,” Newell says. It is that error, he believes, that is the source of the current crisis of manliness.

In The Code of Man, Newell uses scores of fascinating sources to explore the variations of how the manly heart has been understood throughout recorded history. This engaging and accessible pursuit exposes some vivid villains, sinners, scoundrels, cheats and liars in addition to heroes, soldiers, statesmen, citizens, and saints. It treks from Homer through the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Bible and the Stoics, tales of medieval chivalry, the code of the Renaissance gentleman, the stormy temperament of the Romantic man of feeling, down to the fragmentation of manhood in the protest of the Beats, rock and rap.

By looking at such a wide array of sources, Newell actually discovers a fundamental consistency to how, until quite recently, our ancestors understood manly honor and pride. “In some ways, Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill have more in common with Homer and Shakespeare than they do with us,” Newell asserts. “During the last thirty years, we turned our backs – disastrously and inexplicably – on this incredibly resilient heritage.”

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Reviews

“Waller Newell has written a Straussian self-help book – which is to say that Newell’s lessons on manliness derive from close readings of the Western canon... Few contemporary writers can write with verve on such diverse topics as Machiavelli and Teddy Roosevelt, Rousseau and Erasmus... (He) writes in an easy, laconic style. When he’s not contributing to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Newell teaches at Carleton University in Ottawa – and there are plenty of moments when THE CODE OF MAN rises above self-help literature to become a portable, semester-long course on Western norms of masculinity.”

The Weekly Standard

“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. 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.’ What we need now is a positive account of what it means to be a man. 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. We can certainly learn a great deal about these virtues, and much else besides, in the great books. For example, you won’t find anything that improves on Aristotle’s definition of courage as the mean between cowardice and mad daring. When it comes to erotic relations between men and women, Newell is surely right to say that the wisdom of the ages can be captured by the maxim ‘love perfects.’ We love someone because they have characteristics that we long to possess, and a loving relationship is a partnership in which each is complimented by the other. This is good stuff...”

The National Post

“Provides an erudite and often very witty exegesis of 5,000 years of Great Books and recent popular culture...”

The Globe and Mail

“Newell's work is an unapologetic attempt to reeducate Americans about the nature of manliness, as it addresses not the question ‘What is a man?’ but ‘What is a good man?’ Newell openly calls for a return to the pre-1950s tradition of academics writing for popular appeal. He combines a critique of modern immorality with praise of ‘the five paths to manliness,’ around which the chapters are constructed: love, courage, pride, family, and country. Violent events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine tragedy, and 9/11 are a ‘wake-up call’ for society to recognize that we have strayed so far from the values-based foundation of the past that sociopathic repercussions are the result. Newell makes suggestions for correcting the degradation of the five virtues... Appropriate for large public and academic libraries.”

Library Journal

“THE CODE OF MAN is a timely reflection on those virtues and qualities that attach to genuine masculinity. In pellucid and jargon-free prose, Newell weaves his way through western philosophy, literature, history and even pop culture to rediscover a ‘reliable compass for the recovery of the true meaning of manhood.’ Drawing on Plato and Augustine, Seneca and Shakespeare, John Kennedy and John Lennon, Eminem and Homer Simpson, Newell offers the not-so-secret ingredients required for a man to claim a ‘satisfying life:’ love, courage, pride, family, country.... (T)he book should be on the must-read list of teachers, clergy and parents. Certainly, fathers should give their sons a copy for Christmas. But they should also give one to their daughters.”

The Ottawa Citizen

“Building on his 2000 anthology What Is A Man?, Newell's latest book on “how to be a man” challenges the stereotypes about uncaring and belligerent bearers of XY chromosomes. Tracing ideas of manliness through the work of such Western writers as Aristotle, Homer, Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway, among many others, Newell argues for a return to traditional ideas of manhood to inspire young men “to treat others–and themselves–with respect.” He reminds readers that men need “the five main ingredients of a satisfying life”: love, courage, pride, family and country. Through the ages, Newell writes, love meant sensitivity and nobility, while courage and pride were about “the struggle to defend and extend justice and to overcome our own baser instincts.” Somewhere along the way, though, the image of the traditional “manly heart” was lost, and men turned to misogynistic machismo and senselessly violent behavior to prove their manhood. Newell insists that a balance among the five manly virtues is the key to reversing the contemporary man's detachment from loving-kindness and his tendency toward “brutal spasms of reactive violence” (such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine high school massacre and the 9-11 attacks). Those resistant to reducing men–and women–to a set of “natural” character traits take note, for this book certainly considers the Mars/Venus school of thought a flawed accomplice in undermining all that is positive about men and their potential contributions to a just and happy society.”

Publishers Weekly