Men in our society, especially young men, are in the position of not knowing who they are, what they want, or how they are supposed to live, and of being, in an anthropological sense, exampleless. The cliché of American masculinity, widely disseminated in the academy, is that masculinity is in a crisis. This is the exact inverse of the truth. Masculinity is desperate for a crisis. It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent. The proto-crisis exists in the first place because tradition has been replaced by representation. Instead of learning from fathers and grandfathers and brothers, from coaches and teachers and priests and pastors, the American male learns from watching images on screens: films and television have been playing the role of surrogate father for a long time now, but at least those media tended to have forms, arcs, and archetypes. Today’s privileged mediatic forms—five-second clips, parasocial personality brands, algorithmically constructed collective identities—do not have even that…

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As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll…

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