An elegy is not formation

23 Feb, 2026

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I.

I wasn't expecting to feel anything in particular when I sat down to watch the season finale of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I'd enjoyed the show—genuinely enjoyed it, the way you enjoy something that is doing its job well and not asking too much of you. Good characters. Beautiful to look at. A story I already knew in outline. I was ready to be satisfied and move on.

What I wasn't ready for was to find myself, somewhere in the middle of it, trying to explain to myself why I was moved. Not just entertained. Moved. Something in me was responding to something in the show that I didn't immediately have words for, and I've learned to pay attention when that happens—especially when the feeling is accompanied by a faint discomfort, the sense that the thing you're responding to is pointing back at you.

The show follows Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight of no particular lineage, no castle, no claim to anything except the code he lives by and the enormous body through which he lives it. He has a squire named Egg, who is secretly a prince and openly a nuisance, and the two of them wander a Westeros that is already beginning to fray at the edges, a kingdom a hundred years before its eventual collapse. It's a show about small things against a large background: one man, one boy, a horse, a question about what it means to do right when the world doesn't particularly reward it.

What stopped me was something harder to name than plot or character. It was the quality of Dunk's attention. When someone weaker than him is being wronged, he doesn't calculate. He doesn't weigh his options or consider his positioning. He simply moves—and then lives with the consequences, which are often significant and sometimes terrible. His code isn't a performance for an audience. It appears to be constitutive, which is a theological word for something simple: it's what he's actually made of.

I kept thinking: when did I last see this? Not the hero with darkness in his past who is learning to be better. Not the man performing emotional vulnerability as a kind of new masculinity. Not the anti-hero whose moral ambiguity is the point. Just a man with a strong sense of what is right and wrong, who acts on it, who fails sometimes, who carries the failure honestly, and who gets back up. Played straight. Without irony.

And then, uncomfortably, I thought: this is what I'm trying to give my son. And I'm not sure I know how.

II.

We are, by almost any measure, in the middle of an extended cultural conversation about men. It shows up in op-eds and podcasts and think-tank reports with titles like "Men Are Lost" and "Of Boys and Men" and "The State of American Men." It shows up in the viewing figures for Jordan Peterson's lectures and Andrew Tate's videos—different in almost every respect except the hunger they're feeding. It shows up in Joe Rogan's persistent popularity and in Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and podcaster, who is not reactionary and not a manosphere prophet, and who has nonetheless been making an increasingly urgent case that we have abandoned boys and young men, that the data is damning, and that nobody on the respectable left wants to say so out loud. It shows up in the 2024 election results, which produced enough commentary about young men drifting toward authoritarianism to fill several libraries. We are, apparently, aware that something has gone wrong.

What's harder to find is any agreement about what should replace it.

The conversation tends to split in ways that feel less like genuine disagreement than like people answering different questions. On one side, a necessary and largely correct project of deconstruction: name what's toxic, strip it away, make space for men to be vulnerable, emotional, relational. This work is real. The stoicism-as-suppression, the dominance hierarchies, the jock machismo of a thousand locker rooms—these have done genuine damage, to women first and most severely, but also to the men who performed them, who learned to inhabit a version of themselves with no room for the full range of being human. The deconstruction was overdue.

But deconstruction is not formation. You cannot raise a son on "not that." And the therapeutic alternative—be vulnerable, go to therapy, let yourself feel things—while genuinely valuable, tends to be reactive, still defined against what it's replacing rather than oriented toward something. It answers the question of what we're against without quite answering the question of what we're for. Christine Emba, in a Washington Post essay that generated more than ten thousand responses and clearly touched something raw, named this gap honestly: the dismantling of bad models has created a vacuum, and the vacuum is dangerous because it doesn't stay empty. She called for a fresh start. The fresh start has been slower in coming.¹

On the other side, voices that have identified the same hunger and are feeding it differently. Peterson's mythology of masculine archetypes. Galloway's insistence that men need purpose and competition and the particular dignity that comes from being needed—which is not wrong, exactly, but stops well short of any account of what they'd be competing for or needed by. And then further out, the various manosphere prophets who have found enormous audiences among boys who are genuinely lost and are being handed a map that leads somewhere worse. What these voices share, beneath their significant differences, is that they have correctly diagnosed the hunger for formation, for a code, for something that tells you what you're for—and have answered it with frameworks that are ultimately about the self: self-improvement, self-sufficiency, dominance as its own justification.²

Here is the problem underneath the problem, and it requires a short detour into a kind of thinking that has largely dropped out of our cultural conversation about men, even though it is precisely the thinking we need.

In After Virtue, published in 1981 and more unsettling to me now than ever, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre made an argument that I find myself returning to constantly. He proposed that Western moral culture had suffered a catastrophe—not a dramatic one, not a single moment of collapse, but a slow fragmentation that left us speaking the language of virtue while having lost the tradition that made the language meaningful. We use words like courage, integrity, honor, justice—but we use them, MacIntyre argued, the way someone might use the instruments of a science they no longer understand: going through the motions of a practice whose rationale has been lost. The words float free of the stories, communities, and practices that once gave them their content and their direction.³

The diagnosis lands hardest, I think, when you apply it to the conversation about men. We are extraordinarily fluent in the vocabulary of masculine virtue—strength, courage, discipline, protection, responsibility—and extraordinarily confused about what any of it is for. The words are everywhere. A sense of the purpose or the end that the virtues are in service of has largely vanished. And without that vision of purpose, the virtues don't cohere. They become a list of admirable traits rather than the shape of a life oriented toward something worth orienting toward.⁴

MacIntyre's own word for what's missing is telos—from the Greek, meaning "end" or "purpose." Aristotle's moral philosophy, which MacIntyre is largely recovering, insisted that you cannot understand what a virtue is without understanding the kind of being that exercises it and the kind of life that counts as its flourishing. Courage is not courage in the abstract. It is courage in the context of a particular kind of life, ordered toward particular goods, practiced within a particular community that sustains and judges and transmits it. Strip away the community, the narrative, the account of human flourishing, and what you have left is not virtue. It is performance.

This is where MacIntyre's diagnosis is more useful than his prescription—and being honest about that distinction is part of what it means to take him seriously rather than simply invoke him.⁵ His prescription, roughly, is a recovery of local communities of practice—something like the Benedictine option, small enclaves of people who share a tradition and practice it together against the grain of the surrounding culture. This is not nothing. But it risks a kind of withdrawal that the tradition at its best was never about—the knight's code was never about protecting the enclave. It was about moving outward, toward the vulnerable, into the mess. The diagnosis is essential. The prescription is incomplete.

What MacIntyre does not quite supply—and this is where Stanley Hauerwas becomes indispensable for me, too—is an account of the specific community and specific narrative that could do the work of formation in our moment. Hauerwas, drawing on MacIntyre but pressing further, argues that the church is precisely this community and not as an institution to be defended or a tradition to be conserved, but as a people formed by a particular story about what human life is for and what it looks like when it goes well.⁶ The virtues are not private achievements. They are the fruit of belonging to something, of being held by a story large enough to give your strength somewhere worthy to go.

I am aware that invoking the church in an essay about masculinity risks a particular kind of misreading, given what a certain strand of American Christianity has done with masculine formation—the muscular Christianity of the men's movement, the providential nationalism that has made the warrior-protector into an idol rather than a vocation. Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne is the recently definitive account of that distortion, and it is not a small thing.⁷ But the distortion of a tradition is not the tradition. The church I am pointing toward is not the one that baptized the Western hero's violence or told men that dominance was discipleship. It is the one that insists, against every surrounding culture and even against itself, that strength is for the weak, that the last will be first, that the code derives its authority not from the warrior's honor but from the one who laid his down.

Which is why I found myself arrested by a hedge knight in a medieval fantasy, wondering why he felt more legible to me than almost anything the culture had actually produced on the subject.

III.

I grew up on Westerns. Not in any particularly self-conscious way—they were just there, on the television on Saturday afternoons, in the movies my father liked, in the ambient cultural air of a certain kind of American boyhood. John Wayne. Clint Eastwood. Kevin Costner, who has spent essentially his entire career as a kind of Western true believer, returning again and again to the genre with a sincerity that Hollywood has never quite known what to do with. Tombstone, which I watched probably a dozen times before I was old enough to fully understand why Doc Holliday moved me more than Wyatt Earp did. And Lonesome Dove, which is something else entirely — Larry McMurtry's great loving demolition of the Western myth, where Gus McCrae managed to be funny and tender and lethal and melancholy all at once, and where the code the men lived by was shown to be both genuinely noble and genuinely insufficient for the world as it actually was.⁸ The man who rides into town, restores order, and rides back out. The code of the frontier: don't draw first, keep your word, protect the weak, die with your boots on. It was a moral vocabulary delivered through squinting and silence and the particular eloquence of a man who doesn't say much because he doesn't need to.

There is something genuinely there. I want to say that before I say anything more complicated, because the complicated things are true but they don't cancel out what's genuinely there. The Western hero at his best—Shane, Will Kane in High Noon, even the Man with No Name at his most inexplicably decent—embodies something real about the relationship between strength and restraint, between capacity for violence and the discipline that directs it. He is not violent because he enjoys it. He is capable of violence because the world requires someone to be, and he has accepted that burden so that others don't have to. There's a moral seriousness in that, underneath the mythology.

But the Western genre has a founding sin it has never quite escaped, which is that it ultimately grounds all of this virtue in redemptive violence. The good man is finally good because of what he's willing to do with a gun. The code resolves, always, in the showdown—and the showdown is the moment when the hero's willingness to kill proves that he means it. Virtue is underwritten by lethality. Which means, underneath the squinting and the silence, the message to boys watching on Saturday afternoons was: the thing that makes a man trustworthy is his capacity for destruction kept on a very short leash. Character is essentially threat management.

James Baldwin saw this essence of character more clearly than anyone. In Nobody Knows My Name—his 1961 essay collection, and specifically in his account of his complicated friendship with Norman Mailer—Baldwin identified something that I have never been able to unsee since reading it. He opens by saying he knows something about American masculinity that most men of his generation don't, "because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been." That sentence does a great deal of work. Baldwin's clarity about the American mythology of toughness, danger, and frontier strength comes precisely from having been given no choice but to see it clearly—the white American man could romanticize danger because he was not finally required to inhabit it on the terms that Black men were.⁹ The Western hero's code of violence-as-virtue was not a neutral inheritance. It was constructed against a backdrop of racial terror that the mythology simultaneously depended on and erased, a mythology of a frontier that needed taming was already inhabited, of a strength being celebrated was partly the strength to dispossess.

This is not an argument for abandoning the tradition. It is an argument for knowing what you are actually inheriting when you inherit it, for being honest about the compound of genuine virtue and profound distortion that the Western moral imagination contains. Baldwin was not interested in simple condemnation. He was interested in truth telling as the precondition for anything better. And Baldwin's critique has a companion that goes further: the frontier the Western hero was taming was already someone's home, which means the mythology doesn't only distort the experience of those it conscripted—it requires the erasure of the people whose dispossession the whole story is built on.¹⁰ You cannot recover what is genuinely valuable in a tradition by pretending the damage was never done. You can only recover it by going through the damage honestly, which is a harder and longer route than either uncritical celebration or wholesale rejection.

Taylor Sheridan—the increasingly omnipotent showrunner behind Yellowstone, Landman, and Hell or High Water—has been the most serious recent custodian of this tradition, and his work is genuinely good partly because he's honest about the cost. His men are not triumphant. They are elegiac. They know the world their code was built for is gone or going, and they inhabit their virtue like a set of clothes that no longer quite fits the occasion. There's tragedy in it, and Sheridan earns the tragedy. But his answer to the tragedy is essentially to double down—to insist that the code still matters even in a world that has moved on, to find dignity in the last man standing. It is a beautiful dead end. The world the code was built for is not coming back, and Sheridan knows it, and his men know it, and the knowing is what gives the work its particular ache. But an elegy is not a formation. You cannot hand an elegy to your son and tell him this is what you're for.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is drawing from the same visual and moral well—the lone warrior, the wandering protector, the man defined by his code rather than his credentials—but its roots go back behind the Western to the tradition the Western was always, half-consciously, imitating. The chivalric ideal. The knight.

This matters more than it might seem, because the chivalric tradition was not originally about the warrior's personal honor. It was about the direction of his strength. The historical emergence of knighthood as a moral category—shaped substantially by the church's attempts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to direct warrior culture toward something other than plunder—was precisely an argument about telos. What is all this capacity for violence for? The answer the tradition worked out, imperfectly and against significant resistance, was: it's for the widow, the orphan, the pilgrim, the weak. The knight's strength is not his own. It belongs to those who have none.¹¹

C.S. Lewis, in a short essay called "The Necessity of Chivalry," put it with characteristic precision. The chivalric ideal was a "double demand"—that the same man be ferocious and meek, a terror to evildoers and a gentleness to the vulnerable. This is not a natural combination. It doesn't happen without formation. And that's exactly the point: the tradition was an argument that the warrior needed to be shaped by something beyond his own code of honor, needed to be ordered toward a good outside himself, or his ferocity would simply become another form of predation.¹² Stanley Hauerwas, working in a very different key than Lewis would have been comfortable with, makes an adjacent argument about the church as the community that forms people capable of a particular kind of life—that virtue is not a private achievement but a communal practice, that you cannot become the person the tradition calls you to be without a community that sustains that calling and holds you to it.¹³ Lewis identifies the ideal. Hauerwas insists on the community required to produce it. Both are necessary, and the Western genre has conspicuously lacked both. It holds the ideal floating free of any community that could make it real, which is precisely why it keeps producing elegies instead of formations.

Dunk lives inside this older tradition, not the Western revision of it. His violence is not redemptive. It costs him enormously, implicates him in deaths he didn't intend, leaves him carrying weight that doesn't resolve. But his orientation is clear: he moves toward the vulnerable. He doesn't calculate. He doesn't wonder whether the small girl with the dragon egg is worth the trouble she will certainly cause him. He simply moves. And it's that direction—strength ordered outward and downward rather than upward toward glory—that makes him feel different from almost everything else presently on television.

Which is not to say he's uncomplicated. He isn't. And we'll get to that.

IV.

There is a moment near the end of David Lowery's The Green Knight—the 2021 A24 film starring Dev Patel as Gawain—that I have thought about more than almost any other scene in recent cinema. Gawain has spent the entire film running. Running from his oath, from the test, from the Green Knight's axe that waits for him at the Green Chapel. He has lied, stolen, abandoned a woman who loved him, grasped at every possible exit from the commitment he made in a moment of reckless bravado at Arthur's Christmas court. And in the film's extraordinary final sequence, we are given a vision—whether dream or prophecy is deliberately unclear—of what his life becomes if he continues running. He gets the kingdom. He gets the crown. He gets everything the ambitious young man wanted. And he loses everything that would have made any of it worth having. His honor. His relationships. Eventually his head, taken not by the Green Knight in a ritual of mutual respect but by enemies who simply want what he has.

And then he wakes up. Still at the Green Chapel. Still facing the axe. And he removes his own protection—the magic girdle he'd been clutching like a talisman—and he bows his head.

That's it. That's the film's answer. Not triumph. Not even survival, necessarily. Just the willingness, finally, to keep the oath. To be the person who showed up when it cost something.

I've heard the film described as a deconstruction of the chivalric ideal, and it is, but only in the way that surgery is a deconstruction of a body. The point is not destruction. The point is to find out what's actually there. Lowery takes Gawain apart to see whether there's anything inside worth saving, and the answer the film gives—tentatively, at the last possible moment—is yes. There is. It just took everything else being stripped away first.

This is a different kind of moral imagination than we usually get. The dominant mode of prestige television and literary fiction right now is what you might call the Sophisticated No: the work that demonstrates, with great intelligence and craft, that the heroic codes are illusions, that the men who claim to live by them are hypocrites or fools, that honor is a story the powerful tell to keep the powerless in line. This is sometimes true. It's also, at a certain point, a way of avoiding the harder question, which is: what then? If the code is a lie, what do you put in its place? Deconstruction as a permanent posture is its own kind of evasion.

The Green Knight earns the right to its reconstruction because it doesn't skip the deconstruction. Gawain is genuinely hollow at the film's opening—a young man who wants the reputation of virtue without the cost of it, who sits at the edges of Arthur's court hungering for a story to tell about himself. The Green Knight's challenge is almost a gift: here is your chance. Here is the test. And Gawain spends most of the film refusing it, which is to say he spends most of the film being entirely recognizable. Most of us, if we are honest, spend a significant portion of our lives refusing our tests. Choosing the comfortable version of ourselves over the true one. Keeping the girdle on.

What redeems the film—and what makes it more than a beautiful exercise in medieval aesthetics —is that it refuses to let Gawain's failure be the final word. The vision of what he becomes if he keeps running is not presented as freedom. It's presented as a kind of death in life, a self that accumulates everything and loses everything that matters. And in the moment of his choosing, when he finally removes the girdle and bows his head, the film suggests something the Sophisticated No cannot quite access: that the code was real. That it was waiting for him the whole time. That it is possible, even after significant failure and evasion, to finally consent to who you are supposed to be.

This is, it occurs to me, a very old story. It is in fact the story of every saint who took the long way around.¹⁴

But here's what The Green Knight cannot quite give us, for all its beauty: a model of formation. Gawain arrives at virtue through catastrophe and near-total self-failure. He has to see the complete vision of who he becomes without it before he can choose it. The code reaches him, finally, but it reaches him from the outside—as judgment, as consequence, as the axe he can no longer avoid. There is no one who formed him. No community that sustained the tradition. No relationship in which the virtues were practiced and habituated and slowly made his own. He is, at the end, a man who has finally said yes. But a yes wrested from despair is different from a yes that has been growing in you for years, tended by someone who believed you were capable of it.

That difference is what A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is interested in. And it is, I think, the difference between conversion and formation. Between the moment of crisis and the long slow work that either precedes it or—if we're lucky, if someone helped us—makes the crisis unnecessary.

V.

So let me be honest about Dunk.

The first half of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is largely about a man trying to justify entering a tournament he has no business entering. He wants the glory and the prize money and, underneath both of those, the confirmation that he is what he believes himself to be: a true knight, worthy of the name. The hunger is understandable. It is also, the show is clear-eyed enough to show us, not entirely clean. There is vanity in it. There is a need to be seen that sits in some tension with the code he claims to live by.

And then there is the lie. In a significant departure from George R.R. Martin's novellas, the television show reveals that Dunk was never formally knighted. His mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree, taught him decency and how to wield a sword—gave him everything that knighthood is supposed to mean—but died before completing the ceremony. Dunk has been calling himself Ser Duncan the Tall on the strength of a knighthood that never technically happened. He is, as the show puts it with characteristic precision, a knight in name only.

This is not a minor detail. It is the fault line the entire season runs along. And it refuses to resolve cleanly, which is exactly what makes it so interesting. Because the question the show keeps asking is not whether Dunk deserves the name, but what the name actually means. The chivalric virtues shaped Dunk as he grew beyond Flea Bottom. He remains committed to those vows, whether he said them before the gods or not. Aerion Targaryen, who was formally and correctly knighted, has forgotten every vow he ever made. Dunk, who said no vows at all, lives as though he said them all. It's why Baelor sided with him over his own blood, why Lyonel rallied to his cause: Aerion forgot these vows, but Ser Duncan never did.

The showrunner Ira Parker frames this through Baelor Breakspear's choice to stand with Dunk in "the Trial of Seven," a seven-on-seven trial by combat that hadn't been invoked in over a century. Baelor didn't have to do it. He chose it. And Parker's gloss on that choice is worth sitting with: "virtue untested is no virtue at all." Baelor's past reputation, his victory at Redgrass Field, his standing as the realm's greatest knight—none of it counted as virtue until he chose, in a specific moment, to act on it when it cost him everything. Which it does. He dies. The heir to the Iron Throne dies for a hedge knight who was never technically knighted, and the show presents this not as tragedy exactly but as the system working as it should—as proof that the code is real, that it has weight, that it makes claims on those who profess it.¹⁵

And yet. Dunk carries Baelor's death as a wound that doesn't close. The finale—titled "The Morrow" — is substantially about a man sitting with the wreckage of his choices, trying to understand whether the right thing done badly is still the right thing. "What is a lie if it produces virtue? Where does necessity end and rot begin?" The show doesn't answer those questions. It just makes sure Dunk can't stop asking them. Which is, I would argue, precisely what genuine moral formation looks like from the inside.

This is what separates Dunk from the Western hero and from Gawain alike. The Western hero doesn't carry his choices that way—he rides out of town, and the camera doesn't follow him home to see what the killing cost him. Gawain carries his choices, but as a man who has been ambushed by their weight—the cost arrives all at once in the form of a catastrophic vision. Dunk accumulates. Each choice adds to a ledger he can't stop reading. He is being formed in real time, and the formation is inseparable from the failure.

But he is not being formed alone. And this is where the essay has to turn toward Egg.

Aegon Targaryen—fifth of his name, future king, currently a bald and brilliant boy who has shaved his head to disguise his identity and attached himself to a hedge knight who has no idea what he's gotten into—is not simply Dunk's squire. He is Dunk's conscience and his corrective and his reason to keep going, all at once. When Dunk is tempted toward the easier version of himself, it is frequently Egg's presence that makes the easier version unavailable. Not through lecturing or moralizing but through the simple fact of being watched by someone who believes you are better than you're currently acting.

This is an Aristotelian point about friendship that tends to get lost in contemporary discourse about men, which frames friendship primarily in terms of emotional support and vulnerability. Those things matter. But the deeper account of friendship in the virtue ethics tradition is that a true friend is someone who calls you toward your own excellence—not your comfort, not your self-esteem, but the best version of what you are actually capable of being. The friend holds up a mirror that shows you not who you are but who you could be, and the relationship creates the conditions in which becoming that person is actually possible.¹⁶

Egg does this for Dunk. And here is what makes it complicated and true: Dunk does it for Egg in return. The highborn boy who has lived inside privilege so total he cannot quite see it needs a man with no privilege at all to show him what the world actually looks like from the ground. Egg's moral clarity—his refusal to accept the comfortable lies of his station, his insistence on seeing people as they are rather than as their rank requires—is partly native to him. But it is also being formed by what he sees in Dunk. They are making each other. The formation is mutual.

This is, I think, what I have been trying to find language for since my son walked away crying from his sisters, and I stood in the kitchen not knowing what to say.

VI.

I am about my son's age when I remember this most clearly.

Saturday morning. A school soccer field, the grass still wet. My father and another dad, both of them former athletes, have brought us out to practice—to run drills, to scrimmage, to get better at a thing I was not naturally good at and did not feel naturally good doing. The other boy was quite good. The dads were good. I was not, and I knew I was not, and the knowing was its own particular weight on top of the physical effort.

My father would push. Not harshly—I want to be precise about this, because the story is easy to flatten in a direction that isn't quite true. He wasn't cruel. He wasn't a screamer. He pushed the way men of his generation and formation pushed: steadily, with a kind of cheerful relentlessness that left no obvious handhold for objection. The scrimmages would go long. He would goad me, lightly, in the way that was supposed to fire something up. And many times—more times than I want to remember, out there on that turf grass in front of the other boy and the other dad—I ended up upset and crying, saying I didn't want to do this anymore.

And my father would say: quitting isn't an option. We (which I think even then I took as a gendered identifier as much as anything) don't quit.

I have spent a long time with those words. Long enough to know that they were not simply wrong—that there is something real in them, something I have in fact lived out in ways I'm grateful for. I have finished hard things. I have stayed when staying cost me. Some of that is his. I know it is his, and I don't want to take that away from him or from myself.

But I also know what it felt like to be a crying boy on a wet soccer field being told that what he was doing—crying, wanting to stop—was not something men did. The message underneath the words was not quite "you can do hard things." It was closer to "the version of you that is currently visible is not acceptable." The tears were the problem. The wanting-to-quit was the problem. The solution was to become someone who didn't have those responses, or who had them privately, or who had learned to perform their absence convincingly.

This is what I mean when I say the virtue was real and the delivery mechanism was shame.

My father believed—I understand this now in a way I couldn't then—that the world was fundamentally indifferent. That it would not make accommodations for your feelings or your limitations. That you had to be able to care for yourself because no one else reliably would. The pushing was love filtered through that vision: I am preparing you for a world that will not be gentle with you, and the kindest thing I can do is make you ready. The armor was not cruelty. It was provision. He was giving me what he had been given and what he believed had kept him standing.

He was not entirely wrong about the world. The world often doesn't care. Perseverance is real. Doing hard things matters. I have needed the things he gave me.

But here is the fault line, the place where the transmission carried something it didn't know it was carrying: the world my father was preparing me for was a world without grace. The stoic armor makes complete sense if you are finally alone—if there is no safety net, no community, no one who will catch you when the ground gives way. Men don't quit is the code of a man who cannot afford to quit, who has learned not to rely on anything beyond his own capacity to endure. It is, in the deepest sense, a formation for a world in which you are the only load-bearing wall.¹⁷

What I want to give my son is formation for a different story. Not a naive story, not a world without suffering or failure or genuine danger, because that world doesn't exist and preparing him for it would be its own form of negligence. But a world in which strength can be oriented outward because you are not finally alone. Where the code is not a survival mechanism but a vocation. Where you don't have to armor yourself against everything because you belong to something and someone that will not abandon you when the armor fails—and the armor always fails, eventually, for everyone.

This is the difference, I think, between the Western hero and the knight in the older sense. The Western hero is finally alone. That's the genre's founding image: the lone rider, the man who came from nowhere and will return to nowhere, whose virtue is authenticated precisely by its independence from any community or tradition that could compromise it. He doesn't need anyone. That's what makes him trustworthy.

Dunk needs Egg. The needing is not a weakness in the story. It is the story. And Egg needs Dunk. The code they are building together is not the property of either one of them individually. It lives in the relationship, in the specific weight of what each one expects from the other, in the particular shame of falling short in front of someone whose opinion of you matters more than your own comfort. This is formation as the tradition always understood it: not a solo project of self-improvement but a communal practice, embedded in specific relationships, sustained by specific people who know your name and will not let you become less than you are.¹⁸

My father gave me the virtue stripped of the community that could have sustained it. I don't say that as an accusation. He gave me what he had. What I am trying to figure out—standing in the kitchen after my son has walked away crying, trying to find words that are honest—is how to give my son the virtue and the community together. How to say: yes, you have to do hard things, and you are not alone in doing them. How to say: your anger is real and it matters and it is not the problem. The question is what it loves, what it's for, who it's protecting.

How to say, without quite having the words yet: there is a code, and it is worth living by, and I will help you learn it, and neither of us will be perfect at it, and that is not the end of the story.

VII.

My son is nine years old and he has a rage in him that I recognize.

Not because it frightens me—though it does, a little, in the way that anything powerful and not yet directed frightens you. But because I remember it. The heat of it. The way it rises faster than thought, faster than any decision about whether to let it rise, and then it's just there, filling the room, and you're on the other side of it looking back at the person you were a moment ago wondering what happened.

He had been playing with his sisters. Something went wrong. It doesn't matter what, it never quite matters what, it's always something small that isn't really about the small thing. Suddenly he was shouting, almost screaming, and then he was walking away and crying, the anger and the grief arriving together the way they do when you are nine and have not yet learned to separate them or suppress one in favor of the other.

I followed him. And I stood there trying to find words that were honest.

Here is what I knew I couldn't say: calm down. The instruction to calm down is an instruction to disappear—to take the thing that is happening inside you and make it not visible, which is not the same as helping it become something else. I have spent too much of my own life calming down in that sense, swallowing things that needed to be said or felt or worked through, and I know what it costs.

Here is what I also knew I couldn't say, or couldn't say simply: men's anger is dangerous. It's true. The statistics are not ambiguous, the history is not ambiguous, and I am a pastor who has sat with enough wreckage to know exactly how true it is. But to put that on a nine-year-old boy in the middle of his grief about something that happened with his sisters is to hand him a weight that will bend him wrong. To make him ashamed of the anger rather than responsible for it. To repeat, in a different key, the same move that was made to me on the soccer field.

So I stood there. And I said something inadequate. I said something about how the anger was okay and the shouting wasn't, which is true but incomplete, which got us through the moment without quite getting us through the question.

I have been thinking, in the weeks since, about James Baldwin's letter to his nephew—the letter that opens The Fire Next Time, written on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, addressed to a boy of fifteen who was inheriting a world Baldwin wanted to tell him the truth about. What strikes me most about that letter, returning to it now as a father rather than as a student, is its refusal of false comfort alongside its absolute insistence on love. Baldwin does not tell his nephew that everything will be fine. He tells him something harder and more sustaining: that he comes from people who have endured, that what the world has tried to make of Black men is not what Black men are, and that the task—the vocation, really—is to know the difference and to refuse, with everything he has, to accept the diminished version.¹⁹

What Baldwin is doing in that letter is what I am trying to do in the kitchen, clumsily and with far less eloquence: telling the truth about what my son is up against while insisting on who he actually is. The world will make claims on him. Some of those claims will be about what men are and what men do and what men don't do. Some of them will come from good people who love him. Some of them will be the jock machismo of a thousand locker rooms, updated for whatever form it takes in his generation. And underneath all of it will be the same basic offer: become this smaller, harder, less fully human version of yourself, and we will accept you.

Baldwin's answer to that offer is that the refusal has to be grounded in something stronger than defiance. Defiance is reactive, still defined by what it's refusing. The ground Baldwin is pointing toward is love: a love fierce enough to tell the truth, capacious enough to hold the full complexity of what a person actually is, demanding enough to refuse the easy versions.²⁰

This is where bell hooks becomes indispensable. In The Will to Change, hooks makes an argument that I think most of the cultural conversation about men has not yet caught up with: that men are not simply the perpetrators of a system that damages women. They are also its casualties. The emotional shutdown that patriarchal culture requires of boys—the early and brutal instruction to perform a selfhood that has no room for tenderness, grief, vulnerability, need—is not a neutral fact about male psychology. It is a most dolorous stroke. And the recovery hooks calls for is not the therapeutic project of getting men to express their feelings, though that's part of it. It is something older and more demanding: the recovery of love as a masculine capacity. Not sentiment. Not softness as the mirror image of hardness. But love as a practice, a discipline, a form of attention to the world and the people in it that requires more strength than any armor.²¹

hooks writes about her own father with a complexity that I recognize: a man formed by damage, who passed damage on, who also passed on something genuine, who was doing the best he could with what he had been given and what he had been told he was. The tenderness she extends to him without excusing him is the model I am trying to find for writing about my own father in this essay and for talking to my son about what it means to be a man. You can honor what was given while being honest about what it cost. You can refuse the diminished version while loving the person who handed it to you.

The question is what it means to hand something better on.

I don't fully know how to do this. I want to say that plainly, without false modesty and without despair. I am a pastor and a theologian and a father and I am working it out in real time, which is to say I am doing what every parent has always done: trying to hand on something true while being honest about my own incomplete grasp of it. The tradition I'm drawing from knew this. It never promised that formation was clean or finished or fully understood by the one doing the forming. It promised that the practice was worth continuing, that the failures were not the end of the story, that the code was real even when the people who professed it were not yet equal to it.

The question I keep returning to—the one that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms surfaced for me in a way I wasn't expecting—is not how to protect my son from his anger or manage it into socially acceptable channels. It is how to help him understand what his strength loves. Because the anger is not the problem. The anger is the signal—the indicator that something he cares about has been violated, that something matters enough to him to produce this heat. The formation question is not how to turn the signal off but how to help him understand what it's pointing at, and then how to build the habits and the relationships and the practices that give that caring somewhere good to go.²²

Dunk doesn't not get angry. He gets furious: when the weak are being harmed, when the code is being violated, when someone with power uses it to crush someone without. But his anger has a direction. It moves him toward something rather than simply out of the room. The formation that Ser Arlan gave him—imperfect, incomplete, ending in an unfinished knighthood ceremony on the side of a road—was formation of the anger's direction. Not suppression. Not management. Orientation. Ser Arlan was a good man, the show tells us in its final movement. Dunk might be a great one. The difference between good and great, in this telling, is not talent or strength or even courage. It is the depth of the formation. It is a matter of how far down the code goes, how completely it has become constitutive rather than performed, how thoroughly the direction of the strength has been made his own.

This is what I want to give my son. Not the armor. Not the performance. Not the code as survival mechanism or status symbol or shield against a world that doesn't care. But the code as vocation—as the shape that love takes when it has been formed by something worth being formed by, when it knows what it's for and who it's protecting and what story it belongs to.

And I want to give him the community that makes the vocation possible. Not just the ideal floating free, the way the Western hero's code floats free of any community that could sustain it. But the actual people—the church, the friendships, the family, the specific relationships in which he is known and held and called toward the best version of himself. Hauerwas is right that the virtues require a community, that you cannot become what the tradition calls you to be in isolation, that formation is always embedded in specific practices and specific people who mean it alongside you.²³ I cannot give my son a tradition by explaining it. I have to inhabit it in front of him and invite him in.

I don't fully know how to do this. I am still learning what the code is for. I am still finding out, in specific moments. Discovering it in kitchens, on soccer fields, in the particular weight of a boy's trust, in what it means to have a strength that loves something outside itself.

But I know that it matters. I know that the practice is worth continuing. I know that failure is not the end of the story—that Gawain gets to remove the girdle at the last possible moment, that Dunk gets to keep riding with Egg even after the Trial costs more than he meant to pay, that my father kept showing up on the wet grass because he believed I was worth the pushing even when I couldn't believe it myself.

And someday—I hope, I believe, I am trying to make it possible—my son will be standing in a kitchen of his own, looking at a child of his own, trying to find words that are honest. And maybe he will remember something. Not a lesson delivered, not a speech made, but a presence sustained. A father who was also figuring it out, who didn't pretend otherwise, who kept showing up anyway.

Who had a code. And meant it. And was not yet finished learning what it was for.

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Footnotes

#A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms #Christian theology #James Baldwin #cultural criticism #masculine formation #masculinity #virtue ethics