What is Civilization’s Impact on Manliness?

Stone Age nomads, workaholics, and posthuman outcasts

Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash

What has the advent of civilization done to manliness? Does social progress domesticate and infantilize us? Who now are the manliest men? And is manliness a good thing in the first place?

We can compare the average male lifestyles in three of stages of human development:

• the long prehistoric age of the hunter-gatherer
• the current age of civilizational strife and progressive technological empowerment
• the hints of an inchoate posthuman age.

What’s curious about this outline is that the first and third stages — what we can think of, respectively, as the input and the output of civilization — have comparable effects on manhood, leaving men’s role in civilization as a possible outlier.

Affluence, vagrancy, and Stone Age animality

Consider, first, that the nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer likely lived in what anthropologists call the “original affluent society.” Hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than sedentary farmers because the nomads didn’t have to labour to store food and other resources for long-term future use. One study from 2019 indicates that “Hunter-gatherers in the…