What is the origin of left and right in politics? This book is a study of the two opposing ideologies that have shaped the modern age-- Darwinism and Marxism, which battled for power in the Second World War, the Cold War, and the “culture wars” of recent years. Both are ideologies of aggression and violence, and drove forward the colossal mass murder and total war that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in history. Darwinism was the underpinning of dog-eat-dog capitalism, ruthless colonial expansion, and the Nazi doctrines of race war and the extermination of the weak. Marxism preached the eternal division of mankind into oppressor and oppressed, with violent revolution as the only salvation. Despite their total bankruptcy, these ideologies have meshed together in the “centrist” political consensus of the last decades, to give us a laissez-faire Darwinian economy and a neo-Marxist social system. The leftist causes of feminism and high immigration have become the tools of corporate power, the means of holding down wages by flooding labor markets. This led consumption to be fueled by debt, which triggered the recent financial crash. But this fatal rendezvous of Marx and Darwin threatens the future of our civilization even more definitively ....

Now that the Twentieth Century is behind us . what made it what it was? 200 million human beings killed by war, totalitarianism, and extermination programs. What made the twentieth century the most murderous age in human history, as well as the age that made the greatest advances ever in science and technology, while art and serious music declined into abstraction, non-communication, and grotesque hoaxes-blank canvases, old urinals, cans of excrement, and concertos consisting of four minutes of silence? This book argues that the century was marked by an over-masculinization of the Western mind, leading to autism and psychopathic aggression, and the eclipse of the feminine, expressive, emotional, empathetic side of human nature. Hence the unprecedented culture of total war and genocide, and the totalitarian projects to raze the human past and start again-which Modernism carried out in the arts. Hence also the masculinization of sexual behavior (as romance gave way to pornography, and marriage to promiscuity), the adoption by women of a male work role, the decline of motherhood and family, and the collapse of Western birthrates. This is all traced back to the rise of two aggressive, ultra-masculine ideologies in the nineteenth century, Darwinism and Marxism (which gave birth to Fascism and Feminism.) These ideologies put violence, conflict and aggression at the heart of life, and changed human mentalities. This book examines these developments through the literature and art of the past hundred and fifty years, and discusses their implications for the future of Western Civilization.

“Once again, Jack Myers has his fingers on the pulse of the very latest. Myers has clearly done his homework, and the result is this superb book.” —Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker of The Roosevelts and The Civil War After being told all their lives to “be a man” and “man up,” men are now rejecting the macho stereotype and instead developing empathy, getting in touch with their emotions, and becoming more sensitive in their relationships. Women are gaining ground in business, culture, education, relationships, and politics as traditional male and female roles disappear. The Future of Men: Masculinity in the Twenty-First Century prepares men and women for this shift in gender norms. As the definition of a “real man” evolves, understanding the future of men in business, politics, sports, education, relationships, and parenting will be essential for men to maintain psychological well-being, strengthen their self-esteem and sexual self-confidence, and rewire their emotional lives. The Future of Men provides tools to help men, and especially younger men, recognize and embrace new behaviors that are required for health and happiness at work, at home, and in their relationships.

The Grand Tour, a customary trip of Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. 0Examining testimony as written by Grand Tourists, tutors and their families, Goldsmith demonstrates that the Grand Tour educated elite young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues and masculine behaviours that extended well beyond polite society. She argues that dangerous experiences were far more central to the Tour as a means of constructing Britain's next generation of leaders than has previously been examined. Influenced by aristocratic concepts of honour and inspired by military leadership, elites viewed experiences of danger and hardship as powerfully transformative and therefore as central to the process of constructing masculinity.0Far from viewing danger as a disruptive force, Grand Tourists willingly tackled a variety of social, geographical and physical perils, gambling their way through treacherous landscapes; scaling mountains, volcanoes and glaciers; and encountering war and disease. Through the study of danger, Goldsmith offers a revision of eighteenth-century elite masculine culture and the critical role the Grand Tour played within this.

David G. Pugh examines the evolution and shape of the cult of masculinity in nineteenth-century America. The author contends that the men of the time had been cut loose from their traditional cultural moorings and required a leader with strength, endurance, and bravado. They sought these mythical Jacksonian qualities as a defense against aimless drifting and the anonymity and real dangers of the frontier. Attitudes of nineteenth-century men toward women and heterosexuality are revealed as a web of sexual anxieties, repression, and sublimation that fostered the conviction that manliness could best be achieved through independence from women. Pugh then assesses the impact of the Jacksonian legacy on the latter half of the century, and demonstrates that our modern conceptions of manliness and masculinity are deeply rooted in nineteenth-century prototypes.

Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man's identity and a man's right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.