Rod Dreher: What child-men need is some tradition
What these men need is some authoritative tradition, says ROD DREHER
12:00 AM CST on Sunday, January 27, 2008
Some years ago, a young painter about to complete art school complained bitterly to me about his education.
"They told us all that we were geniuses the first day we showed up," he said. "They never taught us the basics. Whatever we wanted to do, our teachers thought was brilliant. Now I'm about to graduate, and I don't know much more about being an artist now than when I started."
The young artist's point was actually more profound than I realized then and helps explain the pathetic phenomenon of child-men those woebegone males who seem stuck in perpetual adolescence.
This unhappy student rightly recognized that the preceding generation the baby boomers had failed in its responsibility to pass on to him a tradition. Had his art teachers only drilled him in tradition, they likely would have bludgeoned his creativity with mannerism. Instead, they declared tradition irrelevant and made each student's individual desire the only necessary standard. Without a tradition against which to measure oneself as an artist, there is nothing to learn, no impetus to learn it and no penalty for not learning it.
The student asked a question What is an artist? for which his culture no longer provided an authoritative answer. But if you ask a far more important question What is a man? the culture comes up equally short, and for the same reason.
To be sure, the definition of manhood is culture-bound and has been talked about since time immemorial. The first-century Roman teacher Quintillian warned against spoiling boys. "If the child crawls on purple," the tutor wrote, referencing the imperial color, "what will he not desire when he comes to manhood?"
"We have no right to be surprised," he continued, speaking of boys who don't know how to be men. "It was we that taught them: They hear us use such words, they see our mistresses and minions; every dinner party is loud with foul songs, and things are presented to their eyes of which we should blush to speak. Hence springs habit, and habit in time becomes second nature."
Today's child-men have been formed by a culture that has lost or, rather, thrown away a relatively fixed standard of manhood. It used to be that virtue was the measure of a man. Was a man just? Was he brave (and not necessarily in terms of physical courage)? Was he honorable in his dealings with those weaker than he? Did he respect women? Did he believe in something higher than himself? Did he submit to the concepts of duty and respect?
It's not that all men, or even most, lived by this general code. It's that they recognized that they would be judged by it, and judged themselves by it.
That's mostly gone, replaced by a therapeutic model in which the autonomous self is its own judge, and personal satisfaction is the measure of a life well lived. For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority. As social critic Philip Rieff foresaw at the dawn of this revolution, the loosening of traditional constraints would make man free, but it would be a liberty fraught with anxiety, even psychological paralysis.
Which brings us to our latter-day child-men, the wayward sons of a generation that crawled on purple and never got over the experience. Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct which is to say, some sort of higher authority. In this sense, the self could only be understood and realized in relation to one's community and its values.
The culture warriors of the previous generation were not wrong to question conformity, but they went too far. They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state. Much in our dominant culture conspires to keep young men in a permanent state of adolescence: conscious only of their desires and the impulse to fulfill them. This dependency is tailor-made for a consumerist economy built on creating and exploiting wants. Making the world safe for big business, no doubt, wasn't what the '60s generation had in mind, but it's a little late for do-overs.
The fathers of today's child-men gave to their sons the freedom to choose their own paths through life. But how to choose and what to choose? On that, the gray ponytails must remain silent. All they have is the hope that, having turned their sons loose in the world without a map, habituated to the idea that their maps are useless, that the young men find their way out of the wilderness.
Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallas news.com.
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