About men series: What is the value of a man?

The blood, sweat and toils of brave men laid the foundations of human development, but the world we live in seems intent on rendering men redundant. They have contributed so much to history and the modern world owes them such a debt of gratitude, yet the same world seems to have fotgotten all that went before. It seems that society has lost its sense of the value of a man. Is it just my perception? What do you think?

In times before time, men fought wild beasts and rival tribes to preserve the gene-pool that became the stepping off point for modern civilization. They also crafted primitive tools and then developed those into ever more sophisticated instruments that became the key building-blocks of human advancement. Later they applied their sweat, power and specialist skills to tame the accursed soil and extract its abundant riches.

Through the middle ages, masons devoted their brief life-times to the building of churches, castles, battlements and villages, many of which still stand to this day thanks to profound craftsmanship, unstinting commitment and a willingness to defend their heritage to the last man. From the dawn of the industrial age, men hunked heavy objects and drove dangerous machines in appalling conditions, to provide the new world with its vital infrastructure. Then through the 20th century tens of millions of young men laid down their lives to protect the free world from dark, oppressive forces. Thanks to them the modern world is not led by mad-men, but by reasonable people who have preserved the order that others fought so hard to establish.

I am not discounted the value of women, I merely make a case for the value of men. They are still vital. Just because the world has changed, does not mean that men are now expendable.

There is not a boy or girl in the world that did not yearn for the arms of a father. Dads are vital to the establishment of gender identity, discipline, authority, sexual identity and a child’s concept of God. They are also vital to the protection of the family. They also play a vital role in balancing modern business and society. They are still so vital, despite how the modern world tends to neutralise or emasculate them.

Men still outperform women in sports and in physical activities. They possess a natural strength that sets the average man apart from the average woman. Oh sure, women have their own unique predispositions and I will never discount their value, but it is a foolish society that chooses to marginalize or emasculate its men.

I am actually not surprised that violent crime and rape is on the increase, because our world is driving men to resort to their primal instincts in a desperate quest for meaning and self-preservation. Such crimes are never going to be right, but if we don’t restore the balances, a violent reprisal is inevitable and in such a stand-off men will prevail, but the result will be a loss of civilization as we know it.

I once saw a Giles cartoon of a bunch of female nuclear non-proliferation activists protesting against US weaponry. They were encamped outside the Greenham Common Airbase in England. The cartoonist depicted an ordered female society with one luckless man tied to a post at the outskirts of the camp. When asked what he was for, they replied, “Oh we just keep him for reproductive purposes”.

It was a cynical stab at modern feminism, but it vividly symbolizes the tragedy of such thinking: truly a world that does not value its men, will face inevitable decline and regress until it is so weakened that stronger and meaner men will then take over and assert oppressive control.

I abhor the oppression of women, but casting men onto the scrapheap is not the right response to past injustices. We were made to coexist. To overcome life and its many struggles we need the physical strength of men and the loving care of women, just as God made it to be.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net