In “Meditations: Book X:16,” the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

For several decades now, our culture has served as a battleground over the meaning of manhood. Some attack males for displaying “toxic masculinity,” or advocate that men become more like women, expressing their feelings or shedding tears more openly. An old adage of mockery, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” is only one of many comments where men are the butt of chauvinistic jokes. TV ads have long featured husbands too stupid to change a lightbulb, and dumb dad movies and television shows go back 30 years or more.

Countering these detractors are writers who expend a good bit of time and effort touting the strengths and virtues that make up a good man. You can’t visit a bookshop without finding titles like Josh Hawley’s “Manhood” or Anthony Esolen’s “No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men.” Two or three times a week, I come across an article on manhood, usually one lamenting its loss, or one praising or mocking the manliness of some celebrity in the news.

Rereading the emperor’s statement above, we notice the confidence and serenity he injected into his command, “Be one.” Though Aurelius wrote much about the character traits and classic virtues that make up manhood, he clearly assumed that any man reading his words would know what it means to be a man.

Issue that same command – “Be one” – to young males today, and many of them will just as quickly comprehend the meaning of manhood.

I hear older men grousing about the faults and weaknesses of the young today, a complaint that was doubtless heard around campfires thousands of years ago. Yet many of these grumbling curmudgeons take their impressions of the young from what they read or hear in the news, not from real life. You could wake me from a deep sleep, and I could still rattle off the names of a dozen males I know in their 20s and early 30s who live and behave like men.

The common trait among these young men who know how to be men is that they learned earlier in life the meaning of manhood from mentors of all sorts: their dads and grandfathers, their coaches and teachers, the books they read about King Arthur’s Round Table, Davy Crockett at the Alamo, and Atticus Finch making his gallant courtroom defense of Tom Robinson. They’ve watched John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima,” Russell Crowe in “Gladiator,” and Morgan Freeman in “The Shawshank Redemption.” Many of them attended church, where they heard biblical words explaining again and again how a good man behaves and treats others.

They know, and we who are older know, what a good man is, whether or not we ourselves qualify as good.

Oddly enough, young boys know the same thing. My six-year-old grandsons wave plastic or wooden swords pretending to be knights, or fire off cap pistols while riding across the Western plains in their imaginations. Ask these boys what they’re doing, and their answer is always the same, “I’m fighting the bad guys.”

These kids are copycatting the heroes from the books read to them by their parents or from the movies they’ve watched. They’ll do the same as they take lessons from the good guys in life: the fathers who daily love and direct them, teaching them how to treat others; the mothers who do the same; the other male adults in their lives – uncles, coaches, teachers – who by word and deed are exemplars of virtue and strength.

The smallest of these deeds can speak volumes. The boy who sees his father opening a door for an elderly woman at the library, the teenager who watches his grandfather overcome his addiction to alcohol, the lineman who pushes himself on the football field to do his best when the coach is pushing him: stack up hundreds of such moments, and you build a good man.

In our age, when young males so often grow up without fathers or strong male role models, or who spend their teenage years addicted to their phones and games, books and articles about the true meaning of manhood help mentors inculcate masculine virtues in those in need of them. Yet these guides are dust in the wind unless their words become the nerves, muscles, and bones of character.

The old emperor had it right. Want to be a good man? Be one.

That’s a sentiment that runs against the American grain in this century. In 2023, for instance, some 60 million Americans sought treatment for their mental and emotional health, a figure double the size of that in 2006. In 2022, approximately 1 in 10 prescriptions in 43 states were for treatment of anxiety or depression. Clearly, an army of therapists and psychologists, reinforced by medications like Zoloft and Lexapro, stand at the ready to alleviate mental and emotional pain, mechanics and repair shops for broken hearts and strained nerves.

But to return to that question: How can we possibly be indebted to suffering? If so, what benefits can it possibly deliver?

First of all, suffering can act as a wakeup call. “We can rest contentedly in our sins and our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure,” C. S. Lewis writes in “The Problem of Pain.” “But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world….”

Many of us who have experienced the death of a loved one – parent, spouse, child, friend – find ourselves barraged with memories but also charged with a new apprehension for what we have lost. This same phenomenon occurred on a national stage, when the Covid lockdowns shook people awake to the dangers of big government and inept experts. The stupidities of that pandemic – the relatives forced to die alone in hospitals and nursing homes, the businesses closed never to reopen, the incalculable numbers of children damaged by school closures – shattered our complacency.

In Richard Attenborough’s film “Shadowlands,” a fictional C. S. Lewis delivers a lecture in which he hits on another major good that may come from suffering:

I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy. I think He wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. We think our childish toys bring us all the happiness there is and our nursery is the whole wide world. But something must drive us out of the nursery to the world of others. And that something is suffering.

Here suffering not only wakens us, it calls us to “grow up,” to become adults, to face tribulation and to extract from it wisdom and a compassion for others. Of course, trials and tribulation don’t always have this effect. They can leave the afflicted stunted, bitter and angry, or uncaring, afraid to trust or love again, blaming God, circumstance, or others for their misery.

Here the Covid analogy again works well. Many Americans emerged from those long months of misery with a healthy mistrust of government and more aware of the manipulative propaganda that drove the Covid agenda. Like our country’s founders, we acquired a healthy skepticism of government and its heavy-handed attempts at control. “I am more and more convinced, of the propensity in human nature to tyrannize over their fellow men,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams in 1775. Having witnessed firsthand this propensity, many of us today share that same conviction.

Suffering can deepen and expand our powers of appreciation. Post-Covid, and especially after the defeat of big government in the 2024 elections, many of my family and friends have come to a deeper respect and love for liberty.

In my own case, personal trials and age have brought me an unexpected greater sense of beauty. Everything from a sunset to a grandchild lost in a book on the sofa sparks an aesthetic appreciation I’ve never before known. Author Mark Helprin sums up this experience in his novel, “A Soldier of the Great War,” writing:

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.

Therapists and drugs may bandage and even heal our wounds, but the scars remain. If we bear them rightly, those marks remind us of who we are and where we have traveled, and we can then bring the understanding and need for kindness taught to us by suffering to a world very much in need of both.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Freerange Stock