Driven by the contempt and ignorance of their surrounding culture, men gravitate towards the activity of providing, writes John Waters
WHEN WE talk about culture, we assume it the sum of its parts, rather than something grown into an organism with a life of its own. But cultures have minds independent of their creators: they think, believe, dictate, censor, oppress. The statement of a collective voice from within a culture must therefore be read with a health warning: rather than a spontaneous snapshot of opinion, it may be more like the videoed statement of a hostage with a knife to his Adam's apple.
An opinion poll is the modern culture's way of ensuring that everything is as it should be, a kind of rear-view-mirror perspective to check that the wagon is still on the road. This week's Irish Times poll about men, however, by asking the kind of questions that probe beneath the shell of culture, tells us a surprising amount about the kind of society we have arrived at after several decades of trying to beat it into a different shape.
Except, of course, that there is no such entity as "men", at least not in the sense that there is nowadays an entity called "women", or perhaps "wimmin". Women are the only gender. Men do not campaign for themselves, nor take the side of other men. They are hardwired not to represent their own rational self-interests but, first of all, to care for their dependants. The idea that men once ran the world in the interests of an entity called "men" was a projection of feminists who desired to run the world on behalf of themselves. Men do not recognise themselves as having collective interests and are embarrassed by men-as-an-entity, except perhaps on a sportsfield, where they kick the lard out of other male entities, mainly to impress women.
This week's rear-view glimpse of the male psyche in Ireland tells us that men are interested in the same things they always were: work, money, lovers, families. In spite of everything, men remain wedded to traditional ideas: they still tend to see themselves as hunter-gatherers and place a high value on independence and supporting their dependants.
Their anxieties, too, tend to gravitate around providing. This is emphasised in ostensibly conflicting responses to questions about personal health and the health service: three-quarters of men are not particularly interested in their own health, but more than half worry about the health service, suggesting concerns about whether the State can be relied on to safeguard their families' welfare. They worry also, probably for related reasons, about crime and interest rates.
In the face of the contempt and ignorance of the culture, they want to be with their children and to share the responsibility of hands-on childrearing. A significant group of men seem especially worried about their actual or putative sons. Most men believe single fathers are abused by our society.
An aspect of the complex way men think is illustrated by questions about the family court system. In the overall survey, 40 per cent felt that men are treated unfairly by family courts, compared to 14 per cent who felt men are treated fairly (that'd be the lawyers).
But the proportion who felt men are treated unfairly went to 60 per cent when the focus was narrowed to men who said they, or their friends/relatives, had direct experience of family courts. This sample would, of course, have embraced men with female friends/relatives who had been embroiled in family proceedings as well as men with male friends/relatives who had been before the family courts.
Men do not automatically empathise with other men, and many men would not regard as unjust anything that favoured a female they approved of. This may explain how, apparently, a small but unspecified proportion of men with certain knowledge of family courts do not regard them as discriminating against men. Their loyalty to specific females possibly trumps loyalty to other men or men in general.
The differences between the aspirations and attitudes of younger as against older men are broadly predictable. Crudely, younger men think selfishly, older men about their responsibilities. Younger men emphasise leisure, male friends and issues like fitness and personal appearance; older men mention career and family and are more interested in politics, though most men want to be breadwinners and fathers.
Older men claim to be several times more interested in religion than younger men, but you would need to define "religion" to conclude anything from this. You might, tentatively, say that younger men find meaning in the physical and material, whereas older men sublimate their own needs in responsibility to others and find meaning on a higher level.
The difference between younger and older men might reflect the changing priorities of the male life-cycle or, on the other hand, it might denote a fundamental change in the Irish male personality over recent decades. The poll doesn't go deep enough to say which and, of course, also tells us what the culture proposes to men, as much as revealing how men necessarily are.
It confirms that men in our culture only gradually discover their purpose; that they worry a lot, at first about themselves and later on about those they love; that they compete in a world that scares them, but rarely collude; and, when they think of the State, think of something unreliable or malign.