Week 29: Guiding Men's Swagger
Week 29: Guiding Men's Swagger
The TV series Swagger is less about youth basketball than it is about how we raise young men.
Recently I’ve been watching a show called Swagger. It is currently in its second season. The show is set in the youth basketball leagues around Washington D.C, and its central character is loosely based on the life and trajectory of NBA player Kevin Durant.
While the show is ostensibly about basketball, more broadly the show is about the raising of young men. It is about how we can give young men a positive purpose, and how often ingrained cultures and institutions – especially in the case of African-Americans in this case – work against allowing teens to flourish into healthy behaviours.
Watching the show has been something of a challenge to my own thinking in my work on domestic abuse. My instinctive perspective has been that it is incredibly easy to be a decent human being and those who refuse to meet this very low bar don’t deserve much empathy. However, I’m starting to realise that it may be more complex than this. Individuals do need to be responsible for their own behaviour, but often social structures funnel men into anti-social behaviour.
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean having anything other than zero tolerance for men’s violence, but it does mean recognising that there are social pathways towards men’s maturity that need to be improved. And that is the responsibility of all of us to help construct these pathways.
For my day job with Asia Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue we have recently been engaging with experts in post-conflict peace-building and the subject of men and masculinities has been a prominent feature of these discussions. In these cases the objective is to transition men from warlords to men who use their social stature for positive endeavours. But the same ideas are present in all our societies – the need to provide constructive purpose for men, and shepherd them away from destructive behaviours.
However, this doesn’t mean placating men’s lust for power and control over women. A mature masculinity is one that doesn’t feel threatened by female advancement. It is one that doesn’t see domination as an essential form of masculine expression. Or at least domination over others in their daily lives, the sporting field, however, may be the best way for men to transmit these impulses in productive way.
This Week’s Reading and Listening
Humane Liberalism Begins With Autonomy
Emily Chamlee-Wright - Persuasion
This article is a thoughtful response to David Brooks’s recent essay in The Atlantic titled The Outer Limits Of Liberalism. In it Brooks makes the distinction between what he calls “autonomy-based liberalism” – the prioritising of the self at the core of public engagement, and “gifts-based liberalism” – a recognition of the gift of life and an understanding of the self as part of an ecosystem of humanity that has duties and responsibilities. The latter being the idea that Brooks seeks to promote, but it is one Chamlee-Wright – who comes more from the tradition of “negative liberty” in the framing of Isaiah Berlin – seeks to challenge.
Both essays, thankfully, use the term “liberalism” in an accurate manor, rather than the popular American usage of the term (which is, unfortunately, creeping into some lazy writing outside the U.S). It may be worth reading Brooks’s piece first, but Chamlee-Wright does provide a sympathetic summary in her essay prior to making her own argument in response.
There are subtle distinctions here, these are not polar opposite arguments. I personally don’t arrive in either camp, but see these as important ideas to contemplate in order to better understand how our societies function and how best to improve them.
The Power Of Prigozhin (audio)
Alistair Campbell & Rory Stewart - The Rest Is Politics
This is a unique episode of The Rest Is Politics where Campbell and Stewart are joined by Richard Engel from NBC News for a deep dive into Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. The episode looks at Russia as a mafia state and how someone who was a petty street thug managed to amass an extraordinary amount of power as the head of a mercenary organisation with major reach both inside and outside Russia. An organisation that has become far more than just a group of guns for hire, but has managed to develop other sources of revenue by capturing mining interests throughout Africa as well as a range of other grey business activities.
Calder Walton – Foreign Affairs
“Since Xi came to power, China’s intelligence offence against the West and the United States, in particular, has grown exponentially. The mission of Chinese intelligence is to execute Xi’s grand strategy: to make China into the number one military and economic power in the world and invert the existing technological landscape, making other countries dependent on Chinese technology instead of American technology. Chinese spy services employ a “whole of society” approach to collecting intelligence: they hoover up human, cyber, and signals intelligence (using balloons and apparently an eavesdropping base in Cuba) while also exploiting publicly available sources, including social media. Through a series of draconian national security laws passed under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party also compels Chinese businesses to cooperate with intelligence agencies whenever requested, thus fusing spying and buying. The result is a Chinese mercantilist authoritarian model without parallel in the West. The CCP uses talent programs and cultural exchanges for espionage by another name. Beijing also exploits Chinese communities in Western countries, pressuring them to pass on intelligence, often by blackmailing them or threatening family members in China.
Under Xi, China has become the world’s principal cyberthief, stealing more personal and business data from Americans than every other country combined, according to the FBI. In 2021, the FBI reported that it was opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours. And in July 2023, the United Kingdom’s parliamentary intelligence and security committee reported that the Chinese government has penetrated every sector of the British economy.
Phrases such as “U.S.-Chinese competition” do not do justice to the ugly reality. Like Russian intelligence agencies, Chinese intelligence services compete according to fundamentally different rules from those followed by their Western counterparts. Unlike U.S. or European spy agencies, the MSS is not subject to the rule of law or to independent political oversight. Nor is the MSS publicly accountable to Chinese citizens or scrutinised by a free press. These differences mean that statements such as “all states spy,” often used to discount Chinese espionage, are dangerously misleading. Just because all armies have guns does not mean they are the same. Unlike Western services, there are few meaningful restraints on Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies. In fact, Chinese and Russian services are limited only by operational effectiveness—what they can get away with. Western governments and publics need to wake up to this threat.”
China’s Border Talks With Bhutan Are Aimed at India
Marcus Andreopoulos – Foreign Policy
“China’s increased urgency toward border talks with Bhutan should not be seen in isolation. Resolving the dispute over Doklam is inextricably linked to the conflict on China and India’s shared border, and specifically to the status of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as an extension of South Tibet. With Doklam under its control, China could exert more pressure on India; Chinese forces could easily sever India’s connection to the eastern part of their disputed border. Such a resolution would also almost certainly precede more ambitious moves from China in Arunachal Pradesh, which could draw in the United States. (U.S. intelligence has already assisted the Indian military in previous border skirmishes.)
The outcome of negotiations between China and Bhutan will loom heavily over the future of peace along the China-India border, as well as broader geopolitical tensions. Although the discussions are speeding up, China and Bhutan have not yet set a date for the all-important 25th round of boundary talks, where a significant breakthrough would be most likely. Looking west, the United States and India are actively deepening their ties; it appears inevitable that the Quad will have to bring military cooperation within its framework. With such high stakes, New Delhi should urge Thimphu to maintain the status quo in Doklam in the face of continued pressure from Beijing.”
“Security”: The Inside Story Of Labour’s New Buzzword
Anoosh Chakelian - The New Statesman
“Where security once sounded more like a conservative term, bound up with defence, borders and law and order, it now encompasses more traditionally left preoccupations such as economic and social security. It appears to have overtaken both the David Cameron-era desire for streamlined budgets and the Blairite lodestars of opportunity and aspiration. It’s also beginning to supplant talk of “poverty”, “inequality” and “fairness” among the Labour leadership and some charities in this policy area. Security, I hear from sources within both, resonates because it’s considered less condescending, and gives individuals greater agency. Although freedom, too, feels secondary to this new rhetoric.
From conversations I’ve had, security on the left means strengthening the state, protecting the country from geopolitical shocks, enhancing social bonds, and sheltering individuals and places from market forces.
“It’s not camped in one part of the ideological spectrum, but it can speak positively to different parts of it,” said Graeme Cooke, director of insight and policy at JRF. “If you’re a liberal, it focuses on people’s individual agency and freedom. If you’re a social democrat, it challenges markets generating insecurities and shows the important role of the state. If you’re a conservative, it foregrounds the role of family and community and the ways in which untrammelled free markets can undermine that.”
Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump
David French - New York Times
“American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?
Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.
We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both.”
Colin Woodard on America’s Many Nations
Yasha Mounk – Persuasion
Colin Woodard released a book in 2012 titled American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Although it much has changed in the United States over the past decade with the introduction of radical new actors and ideas into the country’s politics, in this interview Woodard explains how these 11 distinct cultural regions continue to inform U.S political culture.