Masculinity in the Metacrisis

what can be done to help healthier versions of masculinity to emerge

The last essay published here on Unthinkable was Andrew Boyd’s ‘Petro-masculinity’ is destroying the planet — Can ecomasculinity save it? and it kicked up a good deal of commentary. This week, we’re welcoming back Matthew Green, creator of the Resonant World Substack to build on themes from Andrew’s essay. I’m excited to have Matthew here to give us a preview of an upcoming event that will explore how the climate crisis is also a crisis of modern men – asking how we can give rise to new forms of masculinity oriented towards planetary health.

Masculinity in the Metacrisis will bring together guests including climate journalist Amy Westervelt, philosopher Cadell Last, Resonant Man co-founder Jacob Kishere and Indra Adnan, a psychosocial therapist, author and founder of The Alternative Global.

For Unthinkable, Matthew spoke to Indra about the historical roots of familiar forms of masculinity rooted in competition, dominance and accumulation that suppressed male relationality and emotions, cauterising many men’s ability to engage wholistically with both community and nature.

The advent of the fossil fuel era supercharged this dynamic. It turned men into cogs in an industrial machine, setting the stage for the climate crisis and a host of other social and environmental ills caused by excessive dependence on what Iain McGilchrist has described as ‘left brain‘ logic, which is focused on control, exploitation and endless growth.

As Indra documents in her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age, the advent of the digital era has allowed many more people, including men, to begin to interrogate what happened to them and recognize both internal and external structures of oppression, which when released, offer new capacities for collective agency.

That means the interlocking crises facing young men today could present a unique opportunity for many more people to experience the benefits of cosmolocalism. This happens when individuals connect their personal struggles to build meaningful lives with the needs of their communities and the planet.

At this febrile moment, it will be essential, Indra argues, to provide many more spaces to support men to come together to explore their emotions, relationships and vulnerability – an essential process for allowing healthier models of masculinity to emerge.

Masculinity in the Metacrisis takes place on May 28 and will offer opportunities for small group dialogue during the two-hour session. The event is a collaboration between the Centre for Climate Psychology, DeSmog, and the Resonant Man. To reserve your spot, click here.

Now, over to Matthew and Indra.

image credit: Centre for Climate Psychology

M: What is the connection between the climate crisis and masculinity?

I: For me the core connection is the loss of relationship to nature. We know that the result of that is that we became very extractive, we see nature not as a thing we are part of, but as a thing to exploit – that is the deepest disconnection you can have. Then you might say, why are we blaming men? We have to go back to our history of leaving women in the home, while men went out to build the world.

When we were living as hunter-gatherers, it was much easier for us to be connected to nature. Then came agriculture, settlement, enclosure, nation states and empire. Men wanted to protect women and children by building homes, while they went out to conquer nature and each other.

Because of their relationship to home and the task of raising children, women continued to be able to express and explore emotional relationship. Men were often sent away and became more alienated from family and community. They became more competitive and accumulative – faculties of a very left hemisphere-dominant brain, which acts upon the world rather than being in the world.

M: How did fossil fuels play into this?

I: The advent of the industrial revolution made these dynamics so much more extreme: Men were reduced to being cogs in a machine, sent out to mines, sent out to war and later, sent out to factories and offices where they served someone else’s wealth for little reward. Their bodies were sacrificed as tools for the growth of a patriarchal male culture built on dominance.

As the mother of a boy, it breaks my heart to think of these eras when men were sent out to work for 10 hours a day, depriving them of the opportunity to be in relationship with their children, with each other, and build community in an environment of care. Instead, men have mostly had to shut down their emotions, which means their whole-brain access has been narrowed.

The impact of patriarchy on women has rightfully been foregrounded in modern society. But if we are going to have a hope of change, we need to also understand the impact on men, who make up 96 percent of the prison population and have the highest rates of suicide.

M: How did this lead to differences in the way men and women approach the climate crisis?

I: It’s not entirely a male and female issue because our experience of gender has developed so much in recent years. I would call it an ontological issue – the way that the masculine is being and feeling in the world is different from the way that the feminine is being and feeling. A feminine sense of connectedness makes it much easier for us to prioritise nature or community. The wounded masculine style of thinking and being is destroying our planet and also makes it so hard for men to be happy.

M: Is something changing?

I: Yes. A lot of young men are searching for a different kind of masculinity.

Before the Internet, we only received information from the system: newspapers, academics, our bosses. The past 30 or 40 years has been an era of waking up: Groups of people waking up to injustice or seeing inequality that they hadn’t previously been able to put into words. But it’s very uneven, because we can’t reorganise ourselves within a society that is mostly built on disconnection. The true value of us waking up has yet to be realised.

We’re now in an era of backlash against feminisation. The manosphere wants to pull us back to an era of male-dominance and arrest the revolution of the past 30 years.

M: Will the backlash succeed?

I: I don’t think so, because there are so many signs of how men are beginning to fundamentally question what’s happened to them and their role. Survey data suggests that only 11 percent of Gen Z in the UK would fight for their country. There are anti-war movements led by young men anticipating conscription in Germany and Japan.

It relates to the climate crisis because once men start to open up to their own vulnerability and begin to look for new forms of relationship and meaning, they feel their environment more directly and begin to care about it more. That’s when they can start to stand for the ecocivilisation of the future.

M: How does this play into relations between the genders?

I: There has to be a conscious decision between men and women and all genders to care for each other in a wider field of relational possibility where emotions are acknowledged as vital messengers for survival. Because so many men are still in the cultural patterning of patriarchy, repeating structures of dominance rather than partnership, women and more feminine genders more broadly have to take the initiative to develop more reciprocal structures for all of us.

There’s a self-defeating aspect of patriarchy which always creates zero sum games and nobody can win. Whether you’re talking about politics or the climate crisis, you can start by stepping outside of that construct and imagine yourself in the wider field in which it would be natural to care for everything. It’s not survival of the fittest: It’s being coherent with the wholism of nature itself.

M: What’s your vision for the future of masculinity?

I: Instead of recruiting young men for the army, why not recruit them for the protection of the planet? Learning how to grow food, capture wind and wave power and sunlight – these are all things which would connect our needs for status and belonging to the needs of the community and the planet. Men could find ways to switch from control to protection – it would still give them a role for their masculinity, but it would be a more heroic role, rather than winner-takes-all.

M: How can we support this process?

I: What we’re trying to do at The Alternative Global and Spring, our initiative to build a new political system in Scotland, is to develop a narrative to help people in communities be better connected to the planet – and there’s a clear role for both men and women in partnership there.

But the waking up-ness of this moment is going to be very tricky for men in particular, because they don’t easily find spaces in which they’re allowed to open up to their vulnerability.

As a woman working in socio-politics, I think it’s an urgent task to create safe landing spaces for young men where they can shrug off the patriarchy and come back to their fuller selves.

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Britt here again. I’ll be back soon with my original writing and am looking forward to reconnecting with you.

In community,

B