The Manosphere as a Populist ad Fontes Movement

Why a return to the sources of Western civilization may be the most promising trend among young men today

Conservative. Traditionalist. Orthodox.

Misogynistic. Reactionary. Grievance-based.

In the roughly 1.2 billion think pieces published on the modern men’s movement in the age of Trump, the men who are flocking to online spaces, voting Republican, and (supposedly) returning to church have been called many things.

The explanations for these shifts and realignments are, of course, many and complex. But I sometimes notice that those outside of these spaces or in ideological disagreement with their members struggle to find positive or even value-neutral ways of talking about what is happening with young men.

I confess to being frustrated by the lack of imagination folks have for describing this men’s movement except in terms of Trump or of conservative politics or of misogyny. Lots of guys I know who are caught up in segments of the manosphere––and are even deeply helped by what they find there––have no love for conservative policies or Trump. To give an anecdotal example, I live in an extremely liberal suburb of Chicago. I still find plenty of dudes here who are talking about and reading the stoics, getting together with other men to do outdoor workouts, listening to Joe Rogan, and expressing interest in traditional religious practices. And my sense from talking to them is that just about all these guys voted for Harris.

So what’s the common denominator between them and the louder, more controversial, more conservative men that mainstream outlets can’t stop writing about?

Here’s my proposal: The modern manosphere, broadly construed, can be seen as a populist ad fontes movement.

Let me explain what I mean.

Populist

As best I can tell, there are virtually no establishment media, educational institutions, or centers of cultural power that are widely trusted and affirmed by the men in this movement. (Possible exceptions may be the Catholic Church or Greek Orthodox Church.) Think of Jordan Peterson, who became an early darling of the men’s movement in the late 2010s and was fairly quickly squeezed out of his tenured role at the University of Toronto.

Ryan Holiday is a college dropout. As was Charlie Kirk. Joe Rogan too. The manosphere discourse takes in the less-well-lit spaces of the internet, not in the opinion section of the New York Times or the lecture halls of the Ivy League––those places are where discourse about the manosphere takes place.

There’s a strong anti-establishment, grassroots edge to the contemporary men’s movement.

Ad fontes

The Latin phrase ad fontes translates as “to the sources,” and it was the rallying cry of the humanist renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. It signified a return to the written sources, the primary texts, at the fount (cf. fontes) of Western civilization. This includes the great histories and philosophies of the Greek and Roman tradition, as well as a renewed interest in reading the Christian scriptures in their original languages.

This is an oversimplification, but there was a sense during that time that the literary resources that gave shape to the best parts of the West had been lost, or at least that the West had lost touch with them. A retrieval of these ideas and texts led to a time of renewal (i.e. Renaissance, ‘rebirth’) and Reformation.

For the modern men’s movement, we see a similar itch for return and retrieval, a sense that something has been lost or that some wrong turn has been taken in the “progress” of the 20th/21st century world. Yes, this impulse could be read as simply reactionary, and in many ways it is. It can also be seen as traditionalist in the not so helpful sense of an uncritical bias towards the old and assumed skepticism towards the new.

But an ad fontes impulse is different than mere conservatism or traditionalism––although it certainly has significant overlaps with both. It’s less about trying to protect a way of life that you see as being under threat (i.e. to conserve something). An ad fontes impulse comes from a sense of being lost, a realization that you’re off the path of flourishing and that you need to turn back and look at the map that was posted at the beginning of the hike.

The ad fontes move seeks to reclaim something from the past that has been lost. It may include a rejection of modern progress, but not necessarily so. The renaissance humanists and the Protestant Reformers could certainly be seen as the “progressives” of their day.

But I don’t want this post to descend into finger pointing about who is actually conservative or who is actually liberal/progressive.

Why Return to the Sources?

Let’s stick with the image of being lost––because this is, I think, a promising angle for a sympathetic read of the modern men’s movement.

The past 150 or so years have been profoundly disruptive for traditional sources of meaning for men and boys. The industrial revolution devalued the unique contributions of male embodiment and temperament to human work. The sexual revolution severed the connection between male sexuality and fatherhood. The industrial revolution has left men whose biological adaptations favor physical activity confined to typing away at computers.

Add to all this the complicated dynamics of various waves of feminism, the anti-male edge of the #MeToo movement in particular, and the defensive #notallmen reaction against it.

And, to cap it all off, men and boys are in a bad way. Their academic achievement is slipping (badly). Fatherlessness is a scourge (downstream from the sexual revolution), particularly in poorer and minority communities. Deaths of despair among men––from drugs, alcohol, and suicide––are way up. It’s simply more complicated and confusing and even dangerous to be male in the modern world than at many other times and places in human history.

Why are some men returning to the sources? Because men are lost. They’re looking for a map out of the woods. Many have a deep, even visceral sense that something about the modern world has gone badly wrong, and that this wrongness is borne in an especially pronounced and unique way by men.

The modern “establishment” has swung so far away from taking the suffering of men seriously, that men no longer trust in that establishment. But this raises the question, who can men trust? Who sees them and believes in them and wants better for them? Surely, their surprisingly vulnerable position has made many men susceptible to populist and authoritarian political figures and influencers like Tate, Fuentes, or Bronze Age Pervert. But there is also a more inquisitive, thoughtful, open-hearted, open-minded wing of the manosphere.

And this is not to say that there’s nothing––as the kids say––“problematic” about the Church Fathers, the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, or the histories of Bronze Age warlords. Whether it’s Aristotle or Augustine, you can find plenty to object to as a post-enlightenment modernist (or feminist, or abolitionist, or anti-racist) if you’re looking for it. But it’s undeniably true that the map provided by these ancient traditions has stood the test of time and served generations of men––yes, men in particular––well. For literal millennia, these traditions have given men ideals of virtue to strive towards, a sense of meaning and vocation, a call to responsibility and conviction.

For all of its misreadings and misappropriations of the sources themselves, the ad fontes wing of the men’s movement has offered something to the lost men of the modern world: hope that maybe there’s something that might get them, and the world that they live in, to a better future.

The promise of viewing the manosphere (or at least part of it) as an ad fontes movement is that it is invitational. In a world of superficial learning and speed scrolling and AI slop and media bias and all the rest––do we dare to be upset that there are a bunch of dudes reading Seneca? SENECA? I say, let their tribe increase.

Let’s “take up and read” together the words of scripture, the words of the ancients, and meet together on the contested battlegrounds of ancient ideas––not deciding ahead of time that the only things to be found there are rank misogyny and racism. You may find some (even a lot) of that. But you will also find much more.

One of the main differences between the OG ad fontes movement of the Renaissance and the modern men’s movement is that, as I’ve already said, the contemporary one is populist. The former was top down, the latter is bottom up. As best I can tell, it’s not as if young men are showing up on college campuses for their freshman year and declaring a major in Classics to be taught by male sages and conservative philosophy professors (again, note Jordan Peterson as the counter example). But maybe they should! One of the things that Donna Zuckerberg and others have noted about the use of classical texts and philosophy within the manosphere is that it is often a superficial misunderstanding or a cherry-picking surface reading of those texts. Fair enough.

And again, there’s a lot in ancient sources of wisdom that are contestable and controversial. This is of course also true of modern critical accounts from Nietzsche to Marx to Butler to Derrida.

Instead of simply criticizing these men and boys for their “trad” impulses, we would do well to better understand the context in which these impulses grow––a context that extends far beyond the simplistic narrative of politicized outrage. Maybe the path to dialogue and engagement with young men involves joining them among those sources and “reasoning together” towards a better future that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past.

Some recommended reading:

Tom Holland. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Carole Hooven. T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us.

C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Richard Reeves. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

Donna Zuckerberg. Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.