Do liberals lack masculine instincts or pervert them?

Perhaps the core masculine instinct is to form the outer wall behind which a family or a community can flourish in security and prosperity.

Liberal men don't follow this instinct. They leave communities and families without any such protective wall. So what happened to the masculine instincts of these men?

No doubt some of the more radical of liberal men are too alienated from family and community life to want to take up a protective role; they are rancorous and want to tear things down in the belief that something better will then fill the space.

And no doubt too there are left-liberal men who explain inequality as being a result of patriarchy or whiteness and who therefore believe that families and white communities are too morally stained to deserve protection.

But I think as well that there might be another reason, which is that the protective instinct is channelled to different ends. It's still there, but it's not directed toward the same objects. I'm speculating, but it's possible that some liberal men believe that the important thing in life is not the community or the family but the unfettered individual in pursuit of personal ambitions (especially career or lifestyle aims).

If that is your mental horizon, then perhaps you'll believe that you are serving people (protecting their interests) by focusing on removing impediments (whatever is thought to impede "opportunity" - discrimination, inequality, traditional social roles etc) to the pursuit of individual ambitions.

The problem is that career and lifestyle aims are only one part of what goes to make up a human life. Going out to work, shopping and entertainments can't be all of what matters to us. After all, these are not goods which touch deeply on issues of identity, or which create a sense of connectedness, or which form objects of love and affection, or which create a sense of what is spiritually meaningful in life.

The liberal mental horizon is too narrowly focused: it sees the individual man and woman in his or her daily routine, but not the man and woman deriving identity within a family and a tradition of their own, or the typical loves and attachments which sustain a life, or the sense of meaning that is found from being connected to something that exists outside of our own selves.

Better for us to return to that traditional understanding of the core masculine instinct, in which men work together to protect the larger structures - the families and communities - within which our individual lives are most fully expressed.