Part 1, The Warrior and The Longhair
Hair:
The odds are, whether you realize it or not, it's likely the first thing you’ll notice when you meet a man for the first time. You’ll remember if he’s bald, has a “comb-over”, is “clean-cut”, or “un-kept” and you’ll remember if he’s bearded, has a mustache, wears sideburns, or is “clean-shaven”. Hair will be the first thing you judge when forming that first impression. And whether you like it or not, that initial judgment will almost certainly be based on societal norms dictated to you by the culture you were raised in.
In America even the very terminology we use prejudices our thoughts on the matter. If we meet a man who is clean-cut and clean-shaven do we assume he would be dirty had he not scrapped his face with a blade this morning and visited the barber last week? Is the man who visits the barber every month cleaner by default than the man who doesn’t? Of course not! But as we leave these phrases in our day-to-day lexicon we reinforce this myth of the dirty lazy hairy man, both to others and to ourselves.
I spent years working jobs where, either for safety reasons or for social reasons, I was forced to scrape all or most of the hair from my face and maintain short cranial hair. When the time came in my life that I was free of such burdens I stopped hacking at myself and allowed my head to take its natural shape. By doing so I learned a lot about American culture that I had never noticed before. People reacted to me in ways I had never experienced.
Some people are openly offended by my appearance. Some appear shocked and some actually draw back as if they may catch something from me. Others show fright, while some just seem very uncomfortable. But as is often the case, the most natural reaction comes from children and very old men. On a number of occasions while shopping with my wife, children have run up to me with big smiles as if expecting me to know them by name. Once a little girl, separated from her mother and wandering scared in a store, walked past my wife and actually came right up and took me by the hand with such trust you would think I was in a fireman’s uniform. One may be able to explain it as some kind of Santa Claus related incident, but I really don’t look much at all like Santa, more like a really big Charles Manson. But I think the reaction that surprised me the most was that of really old men. They get a child like smile and if wearing a hat, they quickly “tip” it in a friendly respectful gesture.
This dramatic difference in behavior caused me to step back and consider exactly what it was that I was observing. I came to the conclusion that the feelings the children and the old child-like men were expressing were ancient instinctual leftovers from the days when the alpha male was a large hairy man with a big graying beard and a mane of hair for a halo. In those days such a man would have been the primary protector of a village or a clan. The wise old decision maker for such a tribe may have been an elderly gray haired woman or an old bald man, but the hero, the protector would have stood out like the silverback in a troop of gorillas.
If we accept this assessment of the reaction of the children and the old men, what would explain the reaction from everyone else? On this I have two thoughts. The first is the development of Western Culture that I will speak on later, but the other thought goes back to those ancient instincts.
Our love and hate of warriors:
First let me point out that warriors of today are far different physically from the warriors that were around as our instincts were developing. Although I fit the physical pattern for a prime warrior of the Stone Age, on a modern battlefield I wouldn’t last the first day. Now that said, humans express odd contradictive feelings toward warriors. The very young and the very old idolize them, but no matter the lip service paid, middle-aged people distrust warriors. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Many middle-aged people love the military folks and will put out great effort to “support the troops”. They may give money to a cause, volunteer their time, or paste stickers on their SUV’s, but often these outward displays can only partly hide the distrust. Husbands are sexually insecure around warriors because they quietly fear the warrior may steal their wife or young daughter. The mother has a similar illogical fear for her children. She may feel the warrior could entice her daughter or she may worry her son will grow up and go off to war, never to return. But the helpless in society, those with pure open hearts and minds not cluttered with the day-to-day hustle, look up at the warrior with loving eyes and trust because it has always been the warrior who looks out for them when everything else in life fails them.
Culture:
I’ll cover this topic with more information in the upcoming sections on Quakers, and Roundheads, but for now I do need to point out a couple thoughts.
In many ancient cultures some kind of slavery, servitude, or caste system existed. Specifically, in cultures dominated by a State, male hair often played a very important part in identifying slaves and the subservient. Often times only free men were allowed to be armed and sport beards and/or uncut cranial hair. Slaves were forced to shave and be shorn so they could quickly be identified. In many early States, the public cutting of a free man’s hair was a punishment meant to publicly humiliate him for an infraction or offense against the State. Oddly enough, in many States, public hair cutting was the punishment for crimes that fell one notch short of castration. Keeping in mind that male house slaves were often castrated in those days.
Rome stands out in history as the exception to the above. Rome began as a subservient culture to their Etruscan neighbors and therefore all Roman men were shaved and shorn from their earliest days. Once Rome came to its fullness, in a very real sense all Romans were servants of the State. In a way it was the first proto-modern State. I could say a lot more about Rome and male hair but for now I have made the point I wanted to cover.
In a very real way America is the resurrected Rome. Like it or not, every man in America is the property of the State. The American today owns no possession that the State cannot take away at any time with the simple power of a slip of paper.
Deep inside this knowledge grinds at the spirit of the American male, but he submits. He keeps his eyes to the ground and he pulls his load.
On the rare occasion that something catches his eye and he looks up to see a man with a beard and/or full cranial hair, resentment quickly flairs in direct proportion to the amount of hair displayed.
How dare this barbarian, this wild warrior strut around displaying his freedom when we toil and cringe under our master’s whip!
Ben Stone
2011
Part 2, The Quaker and The Roundhead
In the first part of this series I wrote about warriors and longhairs and a possible explanation for the way some people in modern society react to a man with facial hair and/or long cranial hair. In this part I want to give a bit of background information and perhaps offer another explanation why many adults in western society are uncomfortable with the hairy man. In addition, I want to make the case that the adoption of “Puritan Values” was a near deathblow to individual liberty in western culture. And until a cultural shift away from key aspects of Puritan Values takes place individual liberty cannot develop to its maturity. To do this it will be necessary to explain some theological points as well as covering some historical information. But fear not my reader! I will make every effort to make this neither a “church meeting” nor a “history lesson” as I have little tolerance for either.
First lets look at the words Quaker and Roundhead. Both seem a bit odd to us today because they were 1640 England’s versions of insults and slurs. That’s sad if you think about it. How much street cred could a people have if the best insult they can come up with is to call someone a roundhead? It seems that would be slapped down by, “Better than you blockhead!”
The Roundheads were actually Puritans, and the reason Quakers insulted them by calling them Roundheads was because they “unnaturally rounded” their heads by cutting their hair and shaving their faces. Imagine the outline of a man’s head with full cranial hair while sporting a beard and/or a mustache. Now imagine that same outline after uniformly cutting all of the cranial hair to about a half-inch and shaving the face. The effect is a rounding of the bottom half of the head. A local judge mocked the Society of Friends and called them Quakers because “They bid us tremble at the word of God” and the Puritans quickly latched onto that insult, I suppose having none better.
The heart of the conflict had nothing to do with the Quaker’s love for traditional hairstyles or the Puritan’s rejection of Quaker reverence for God. The problem was in the fundamentally different way the two groups saw their role on Earth as Christians.
The Roundheads were compelled to spread their version of Christianity and its rules of behavior and dress, at any cost. Because of a twisted view of “Predestination” or what they called “The Elect” they saw themselves as crusaders destined to conquer the world for Christ. Anyone who was not a Puritan and refused to accept Puritanism was not loved by God and fell into an inferior classification of humans. In addition to this fanatical view of at-any-cost-evangelism, and an inflated view of themselves on the stage of history, they believed the State was the primary tool of Christian conquest. Therefore developing and expanding the State was a prime goal and anyone who stood in their way or refused to conform to their views was the enemy of God.
In contrast, the Quaker viewed all people alike. Men, women, children, Christians, and non-Christians were the children of God and equal in God’s sight. No one person had any Divine advantages. God loved the heathen slave just as much as the nobleman, the king, or the impressive clergy with his imaginative hat and robes. When you hold a view like this it becomes hard to justify the existence of a State completely dependent upon one group of people dominating another. It also eliminates the possibility of forcing anyone to conform to your doctrines. But more important, it eliminates the possibility of someone convincing you they know God’s will and that you must conform to them.
This philosophical conflict manifested itself in several dramatic ways. In England the Quakers refused to participate in Roundhead wars to capture and dominate the British Isles. In the American colonies the Quakers didn’t mind the Puritans having their churches, governors, and sheriffs but refused to pay taxes to support them and refused to obey them. The Roundheads passed laws mandating church taxes, church attendance, and the swearing of obedience oaths to the governor but the Quakers ignored them. The Roundheads reacted in a variety of ways that ended up in violence, beatings, theft, and public executions. The Quakers held peaceful protests and appealed their case through logical pamphlets and street discussions but the Puritan response was an increase in violence. More arrests, more public beatings and executions by hanging and burning became common. So much so that some of the southern colonies actually passed anti-Puritan laws to keep these violent do-gooders and busybodies in the north. Not that the southerners had any love for Quakers, with their talk of equality and rights, but at least the Quakers were peaceful. So the Puritans did stay in the north and found a kind of success Cromwell and his army of Roundheads never could have dreamed of.
Eventually American Culture shifted to accept a compromise of the two philosophies and in ways it seemed the Quakers had won the debate. The concept of equality was given lip service in the founding documents of The United States government, and an active anti-slavery movement began, reflecting the Quaker influence. Also less and less Christians identified themselves as “Puritan”, as the name became associated with dominating society and regulating every aspect of behavior. But the Roundheads did not disappear. They did what evil has always done; they changed terminology and repainted themselves to resemble their enemy. They became “Yankees” and they spread into a variety of Christian denominations. They abandoned their pro-slavery position and took over the anti-slavery movement. They invaded the women’s rights movement and shifted its focus to fight evil demon liquor. By the mid-1800’s they had changed the official story of America and rewrote themselves as the founders and heroes, and by 1900 they controlled the government, most of the media and publishing houses, and the education process in America. They literally made up the history they wanted and taught it to American children. Seemingly the Quakers lost. The founding documents of the US truly meant nothing as America charged headlong into a century of unnecessary wars, prohibitions, taxation, State dominance, and an empire beyond the imagination of Cromwell.
At that moment in time it could have been said, “Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
The faithful reader who has followed this tale should now be noticing that the story wandered away from the shape of the male head and hairstyles. Oddly, around 1900 the popular style for a man was to have hair just over the ears and long sideburns with a mustache. What we would think of as the barbershop quartet look. But in 1917 that dramatically changed. The US government used its conscription powers and every young man in America was either shaved and shorn or looked upon as a coward and an enemy of the State. The draft was here and every “good” man was a part of it. Young men looked “smart” with their shorn heads and their sharp uniforms. “Clean cut” was the only acceptable way to present yourself to your lady, and the newly formed marriage of corporation and government threw its weight into convincing a generation that the “modern” look was the only socially acceptable look. Modern meaning Roundhead!
Then, for a brief whisper in time, males in America had a memory flash and somehow connected the evils of the draft with the look of the Roundheads, but it was fleeting and didn’t last. Somehow the State convinced us that wave of independent thinking was simply a drug induced haze. But it actually indicated that deep inside we all know we weren’t designed to look alike. Deep inside we know we are not all the same and we don’t want to look the same. This scares some people who just want to be part of a herd. They don’t care about being free as long as the line at the coffee boutique doesn’t cause them to miss their nightly escape into the world they watch on their wide screen television. That magic box that tells them how to dress, how to talk, how we are to interact, and how we can trust our wise leaders. Yes, that box that teaches us the Puritan Values that the State wants us to uphold. You see, the Puritans never actually cared about any single issue, they only cared about being in total control. And if you look different, well clearly they don’t have enough control.
Ben Stone
2011
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