Ask a male teenager “What is a gentleman?” and the answers will likely run on a familiar track. “It’s an old guy who wears a suit and carries a cane.” “It’s a man who opens doors for ladies.” “It’s someone with good manners.” Some may simply shrug and reply, “I have no idea.”
Meanwhile, many adults lament the death of the gentleman or, at best, regard the gentleman as an endangered species, a creature as rare as the Sumatran tiger. They offer as evidence the coarse behavior and advice of certain social media manosphere influencers, the lack of table etiquette on display in so many restaurants, and the complaints of numerous women looking for love, relationship, and marriage.
The teens reveal their ignorance. The critics lay bare the symptoms but rarely offer a cure for the ailing status of the 21st-century gentleman.
The remedy in both cases is education. No boy is born a gentleman. He must be shown what that means—it involves much more than opening the door in a coffee shop for an elderly lady—and why being a gentleman will make him a better human being and the world a better place.
Manners Maketh Man
“Courtesy is as much a mark of the gentleman as courage.”
Attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, that remark covers more territory than may be apparent. Courtesy and social behavior are the outward signs of chivalry, while below the surface of that decency are the virtues.
Let’s first look at those outward signs.
Whether we explore books such as “As a Gentleman Would Say” or websites such as The Art of Manliness, we find the same basic advice on the courtesies of everyday life. Much of this advice, in fact, is similar to that found in books a century ago.
For instance, Brett and Kate McKay of The Art of Manliness point us to a section in the 1880 “Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms” titled “The Unclassified Laws of Etiquette.” Time has erased the need for some of these laws, but many are identical to today’s ground rules for a gentleman’s conduct, such as “Never fail to offer the easiest and best seat in the room to an invalid, an elderly person, or a lady” and “Never fail to be punctual at the time appointed.”
In his online piece “What It Means to Be a Gentleman Today,” Sven Raphael Schneider lists 11 attributes of such courtliness. These include not only being well-dressed and polite but also traditional modes of behavior. A gentleman, for example, “treats people with respect” and “gives people the benefit of the doubt.”
If we read these articles and tally up the rules and recommendations, we arrive at a general definition of a gentleman as one who seeks to make those in his company as comfortable as possible, without making himself a doormat for others. This is what children learn when they acquire their manners at home and practice them in school and with friends.
But that’s only a partial definition. Just as a car with a polished exterior and gleaming windows is useless if the engine doesn’t crank, so too the gentleman. His manners mean little without character. So, let’s take a look under the hood.
The Gentleman’s Worst Enemy
In an 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Law regarding morality, President Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Self-love therefore is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”
Given today’s cultural emphasis on the individual, self-interest, and self-gratification—often to the detriment of family and community—Jefferson’s words are far more relevant now than when he wrote them. “Looking out for No. 1” is the motto of many in our time.
If extreme self-regard is “the sole antagonist of virtue,” then those who would raise boys to be gentlemen have their work cut out for them. Our society is awash in influencers—not only the ones online—who tout the ego and the individual as supreme.
To instill moral excellence in boys and young men requires effort on the part of parents, mentors, and teachers. (Rachel Li)A Deeper Civility
Tim Goeglein and Craig Osten are the creators of the recently published book “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.” In the introduction, Goeglein points to radical individualism—“you do you”—as a major destructive force in our country. Later, in the section titled “Restoring the American Male,” he includes his essay “The Gentleman Gap—What Is Wrong with America’s Sons?” Our failure to shape boys into gentlemen, he writes, “can be attributed to a lack of excellent male role models to guide and point them in the right direction.”
In speaking with The Epoch Times, Goeglein expanded on this essay, first asking: “What is the church doing to shape young gentlemen? What are schools, private and public, doing to shape young gentlemen? What are athletics and sports doing? What is popular culture doing?”
Not enough, Goeglein said.
To get serious about this transformation, he said, he believes that parents, teachers, and mentors must bring three items to the table: intentionality, a deep personal relationship between fathers and sons, and a worldview based on church and home. All three played a role in the way he and his wife raised their two sons. He particularly emphasized the father’s part in helping his sons become gentlemen.
“We use the word ‘parenting,’ which I think is a very good word, but I have begun to use the words ‘fathering’ and ‘mothering,’ because I think fathers and mothers bring something unique and different to parenthood and the time that we’re in,” he said.
Goeglein also makes an important connection between being a gentleman and being a good citizen, a connection missed by many commentators.
In “What Really Matters,” he wrote: “To fix what ails the American male requires instilling boys with a purpose. When young men find a purpose in life, they become disciplined and focused. They realize their lives are not their own. They come to model self-sacrifice and unconditional love to those around them. They become what is called a ‘good citizen.’ They become gentlemen.”
In conversation, Goeglein echoed the thoughts of Jefferson.
“The Founding Fathers and mothers believed strongly that if you wanted to have liberty and freedom in a constitutional republic, you had to nourish moral excellence and virtue,” he said. “You had to cultivate virtue in the citizens and in the leaders. And I believe that this moral excellence is the central quality that ladies and gentlemen have in common.
“The qualities that we need and want to instill in this generation are excellence, integrity, honesty, faith, humility, patience, gratitude, and courage.”
What We Can Do
To pass along these and other virtues requires effort on the part of parents and teachers, just as it did 250 years ago. It’s true that the culture then was more conducive to such instruction, but it’s also the case that we today have many more resources. Videos and articles online, books in our public libraries, and older people we may know are a gold mine of examples of men and women from the American past who understood sacrifice and responsibility, who lived and sometimes died upholding the ancient virtues that make for a good citizen and a gentleman.
Raise our sons on these stories; teach them manners, practice those manners, and live virtuous lives ourselves, and we will blend together the etiquette and morality that are the very definition of the word “gentleman.”
