When Death Taps on the Window

The End of Ego-Centrism and the Birth of Eco-Centrism

It’s been quiet here at Manhood Reimagined over the past month, something that wasn’t intended but forced upon me as death tapped on my dad’s window.

It started with observations of rapid aging. Soon there were blood spots on his pillow from strange growths on his head. Before long there was a cancer diagnosis and a barrage of tests to determine just how far it had spread.

Here we received some good news, which is why death is only tapping on his window rather than standing at the door, and with some luck, immunotherapy might enable a curative surgery, although we won’t know how effective it is for another couple of months.

But even with that good news the disease became all-consuming during the holidays, both from a logistical standpoint as I drove my parents all over town, listened carefully to what doctors had to say, became the family rock amid chaos, and mapped out plans for an array of possibilities as we awaited test results. Anything I didn’t have to do during that time landed on the back burner.

Through it all, one question keeps me up at night: What do you do when the man who taught you the manhood you are reimagining is dying? After all, even if the cancer doesn’t get him, something eventually will.

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Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Visions of Manhood

We talk a great deal about “the American man,” as if there were some constant quality that remained stable over decades, or even within a single decade.

So opens Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men (affiliate). Bly goes on to break down a variety of takes on manhood:

• the Saturnian, old-man-minded farmer that dominated the early northern colonies

• the mother-bound cavalier of the South

• greedy robber barons of the Industrial Revolution

• those who dared to embrace the unknown of westward expansion

Then he arrives at the kind of manhood my dad embraces, what Bly calls, “the Fifties male.”

He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children, and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn’t see women’s souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America’s part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity.

Bly goes on to say that this “man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.” He also describes the “isolation and one-sidedness of his vision” as dangerous.

Seeing this danger, especially through the lens of the Vietnam War, men began to question in mass previous visions of manhood and started embracing what Bly considers the feminine consciousness, but I tend to see as less masculine but not more feminine. Instead these “soft men” become the human embodiment of a wet noodle or, as Robert Glover calls them (affiliate), nice guys (although nice guys are never really nice or good).

The one thing that all of these versions of men have in common, is that they are what Bill Plotkin calls ego-centric in his book, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (affiliate).

Ego-Centric vs. Eco-Centric

An ego-centric society prioritizes:

the lifelong comfort, security, and social acceptance of the early-adolescent ego. An egocentric culture has a dysfunctional notion of the self, which it sees as an isolated, competitive entity, a free and autonomous agent. An egocentric ego is ego-identified: it believes it represents only itself.

Bill goes on to write:

An egocentric culture is unavoidably anthropocentric rather than ecocentric. Such a culture is founded on human chauvinism, the belief that what is best for humans — in the narrowest imaginable sense, and often only humans of a certain race, gender, class, or nation — is what is morally right. This belief is held tightly despite its destructive results for those who hold it, other species, and the very environment that supports all life. Individual egocentrism is a type of arrested development that makes an anthropocentric society possible. Likewise, cultural anthropocentrism encourages each citizen to cultivate a use-relationship with things and other people. Thinking of oneself and others as “consumers” becomes a reasonable idea despite its profoundly deranged implications.

Of course, the ego-centric “free and autonomous agent” has been the foundation of Western Civilization since Rene Descartes first declared, “I think therefore I am,” which would explain why Bill says, “Mature humans don’t do the things that make up Western history.”

This ego-centric approach is contrasted by an eco-centric one, marked by citizens:

who are clear and passionate about life purpose, who know deep down in their bones the treasures they possess for their people, who truly know who their people are, who most every day can be found joyously engaged in their soulwork, who derive deep satisfaction from their efforts in making our world a more vital and beautiful place, and who experience deeply and abundantly their interdependent membership in the natural world.

It is hard to imagine someone less fixated on the “safety, comfort, middleworld pleasures, and enhancement of socioeconomic status” that define ego-centrism, rather eco-centrism is dangerous and uncomfortable and will often call you to risk everything as you discover what it means to truly live.

As you might have guessed by now, this shift from ego-centric to eco-centric sits at the heart of a reimagined manhood. This is why we:

• honor our biology as part of the broader ecosystem,

• heal our psyches so we can move beyond the challenges that keep us trapped in childhood and adolescence,

• discover our authentic selves so we can live within our unique purpose,

• overcome societal obstacles and 

• grow beyond the cultural expectations that keep us trapped in an ego-centric system,

all so we can use our gifts to serve the world.

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

Death at My Window

So what do you do when the man who taught you the ego-centric manhood you are reimagining is dying?

For me, it’s been a season of allowing my own ego-centrism to die. This means:

• facing the rebellious side of me that wants to do something different simply because it’s not what he does rather than embracing the revolutionary who seeks to create a better world.

• owning that part of me still longing for performance-based acceptance where I finally earn his approval based on what I’ve done rather than living from my own innate belovedness.

• not driving them all over creation because, as they put it, I’m being a “good oldest son” who is duty-bound to care for them, but because fathering my parents in their final years with more compassion, care, and advocacy than they showed me as a child is part of healing my psyche so I am better equipped to serve both them and the world.

• intentionally feeling everything, knowing that simply feeling undermines a cultural narrative about manhood.

How about you? How is life inviting you to move beyond our ego-centric society and step into an eco-centric way of being in the world?