Men: Finding Their Way Home to Their Full Humanity

Source: Beth MacDonald / Unsplash

I see the Industrial Revolution as tearing men away from home. It literally forced men off their farms. It also served to disconnect men from their bodies. Their bodies no longer related to livestock, caring for animals, planting, and harvesting what would feed them and their families. They built machines, worked with them, repaired them, and eventually began identifying with them. Even when they worked with the land, there was a shift from a relationship with it to power over it with excavators, bulldozers, and backhoes.

The Mechanistic Identity

As men spent more and more time in factories with machines, their identities became more machine-like. Put energy in (eating), turn it on (punching the timecard), and a product is the outcome (I am what I produce). Any mystery identified with the nature of manhood is now demystified. The ambiguity of a man’s manhood is replaced by the formula of being machine-like, with the manly motto being, “I provide for my family.” Providing meant using the money generated by being a machine to support my family’s needs.

Let’s look at some characteristics of the male mechanistic identity:

• The loss of a body doing more than working with a machine: The male body was no longer a resource for deep emotion, intuition, imagination, and the ability to create depth in relationships, allowing suffering to inform.
• No need for health care: Like a machine, men were encouraged to attend to their wellness only when something broke. There is a lack of preventive health care.
• “I work, and I produce,” leaving men out of touch with basic life considerations: It meant that the ambiguity surrounding life’s essential dynamics was no longer an issue. A man’s capacity to love, create rapport, grieve losses, empower others, attend to his own emotional development, and have a spiritual life was either allocated to women or left on the floor behind a machine.
• Compulsive self-reliance: Like a machine, men tend to believe they possess everything they need. Support or help is only necessary during a crisis. Even then, men need as little as possible. Men often live in emotional isolation and don’t understand the price they pay for being there.
• “How much I produce” getting translated into “How much I can control and dominate?": A mechanistic identity prevents males from fully expressing the depth and breadth of their identities. The mechanistic mandate is to deny feelings of hurt, loneliness, and loss. Suppression of their fragility has men rushing to compensate with expressions of boldness and bravado.
• Identity deprivation: With the loss of the fullness of their humanity, males are condemned to being obsessed with proving they are OK. However, there is no amount of producing, acquiring, winning, and achieving that will bring a man to the richness of his personal worth.

Coming Home

The good news is we can shed our mechanistic identity. It’s not something I advise trying alone. It’s a counter-cultural move for a man to honor the fullness of his humanity. Here are some suggested steps.

• Pause: Allow yourself to get honest about how much you may have reduced yourself to working and producing. It may be easier to do if you’re at some crossroads in your life. It may be a divorce, a job change, the loss of a loved one, or a child going off to college. It may be your time.
• Be gentle: There’s no need to condemn how you’ve been living. It got you to this point of reconsideration. It may be time to prove less and “be” more.
• Deconstruct the mechanistic identity: The process is not about analysis or following some dogmatic guideline to manhood. Initial steps might include a dental appointment or one with your primary physician. It can also be helpful to consider diet and the quality of your exercise. Machines don’t take responsibility for their own care; men do. It’s also about getting honest regarding your strengths and areas needing development, your losses, and your dreams. Machines don’t grow. Men do.
• Get curious: Explore where men are coming together to explore how to come home to the fullness of their humanity. I have been privileged to be part of a gathering that serves that very purpose. COMEGA, the Connecticut Men’s Gathering, is a biannual retreat where men of different races, sexual orientations, and religious backgrounds come together to support one another in the quest to come home to ourselves. The Mankind Project is an international organization that has a similar purpose. There may be a chapter near your home. Let yourself be drawn to a gathering that generously holds the meaning of manhood. It doesn’t serve us to be lectured to about the appropriate prescriptions of mature masculinity.