The issue of initiation in modern America was a major theme yesterday in a book group to which I belong.  We had been discussing  Barry Spector’s Madness at the Gates of the City. Spector uses a Jungian polytheistic approach to understanding people and society that he explicitly describes as Pagan and polytheistic.   For me his book is a fascinating mix of stuff I really like, stuff that irritates me, and stuff that’s just wrong.  But one of Spector’s strengths is his emphasis on initiation’s importance for young men in particular, and its absence in modern America.

During our discussion yesterday some dimensions of this issue became more clear to me than they had been before, and I want to share them. To begin, initiation as such, whether in becoming a man or becoming a Witch, has three dimensions.

1. A challenge that must be met, which exposes a person to the unknown and uncertain

2. Overcoming the challenge, which requires courage and effort

3. Recognition by others for having met the challenge, which is validation of one’s new status. One is a different person after the initiation than they were before.

The women’s movement has missed something I think is very important that historically has separated men and women at a psychological level. While both women and men enter into initiations in the course of their lives, I think men need initiation into being men whereas women face a very different pattern.  Manhood is a fragile and uncertain affair in a way that being a woman is not.  In societies all over the world a young girl’s coming of age recognition (often? always?) begins with her first menarche.  This event is often celebrated as her transition into womanhood. It happens naturally for the enormous majority of women.

Boys have no similar biological marker for their becoming men.  In many societies they become men through intense and sometimes very painful or dangerous initiation ceremonies.  In our society manhood is finally recognized as a rule when someone returns from the military “the Army made a man out of me,” or marries and is able to support a family.

This distinction brings to mind another.  A girl’s transition into womanhood is a personal affair.  In many cases a boy’s transition into manhood is a community affair.  Lots of boys go through initiation together.  In America the military is similar.  Employment and family are not, and perhaps this adds to the fragility of manhood recognized that way.  I wonder whether this explains the appeal of gangs as avenues into manhood for many kids.

Years ago I was on the Crow Reservation in Montana. While there I was talking with a young man who told me he and other men danced the Sun Dance to give back to their communities through effort and pain as women did when they gave birth. Here, again, was a community event, a community recognition.

This leads to one very important difference between men and women: for men, being a man can always be taken away.  It can be lost. Recognized manhood must be earned in a way that womanhood does not. (For example, we would not have any idea what she was talking about if a woman said “The Army made a woman out of me.”)  And because it must be earned, its status is less secure. For women the closest equivalent, I think, would be the psychological trauma from a major operation such as a hysterectomy or mastectomy.

In the modern world unemployment is a serious threat to a man’s self image in a way that is not the case with a woman. (I am NOT saying that unemployment is not a threat to women – we all need income – but it does not threaten her sense of being a woman.) Because modern America has no formal recognition of manhood, the informal ways we attain it are very important, hence the debilitating impact of unemployment.  Today we have unemployment at a higher rate than any since the great depression.

I think our current political crisis is in part an expression of our society’s failure to recognize how one can become a man in a world where there are no formal means and the informal means are weaker than before.  Not only is unemployment a greater threat, the alternative route of military service is weaker with the abolition of the draft.

As we discussed these issues I understood something about today’s pathological right and its pathological sense of masculinity that I had not grasped before.

I have long been fascinated that the American right’s masculine ideals are actors, pretend heroes.  People like John Wayne (the ONLY major male actor of his generation NOT to have fought in WWII), Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson. Reagan and Schwarzenegger achieved a great deal as individuals, rising from poverty or being an immigrant to high political office, but what they were chiefly honored for was their pretend personas as the Gipper or the Terminator.

This makes sense if we think of the right’s leaders as mostly men who are uncertain of their manhood.  Nearly all major right wing male leaders never served, despite their eagerness for others to fight, kill, and be killed.  Their tough guy rhetoric was never put to personal test.  They indicate a deep antagonism towards women, coming perhaps from envy that women “have it easy” and do not honor them as the strong men that they would like to be but fear they are not.

I do not yet understand one dimension of their behavior, but suspect it is connected.  Despite their antagonism towards women and the feminine, they idealize women who play the tough boss, the Palins and Bachmanns and Coulters.  These women are singularly lacking in feminine qualities but are masters at playing the tough guy.  I wonder whether it might be connected with the often observed penchant for men who love power to be attracted to dominatrixes.  But I am still wrestling with this one.

The lack of any socially honored recognition of manhood also shed light on the strutting young and middle aged men who love to go about armed. They seem particularly to like it when among others who are not armed, as if somehow that makes them more “manly.” They are particularly visible among the Tea Party set.  Again, I would wager that they are essentially men with the character of an adolescent and a great deal of frustration and anger over it.  I think such people are potentially very dangerous.

A Cure to the Malady?

As we talked among ourselves we wondered whether there was any way a modern society such as ours might address this problem.  I came up with one that I think might be popular if genuine democrats and liberals ever hold political office, one that would address a great many issues all at once: universal service for two years followed by the equivalent of the GI Bill.

The college BA today has become the equivalent of a high school diploma on the job market, but students often get themselves deeply in debt obtaining one, and others are priced out entirely.  So I think making four years of higher education financially feasible, either in college or at a trade school of someone’s choice, would be a wonderful thing for both individuals and for our society.

It would be a lot more wonderful still if linked with two years service either in the military or in a civilian equivalent, such as a Conservation Corps or other form of organized community service.  In any event, the young person would be stationed far from home, and ideally mixed with other young people of different races, and from different parts of the country.  Here is a need for courage and effort to meet a challenge.

Maybe each would person be in a group the size of a platoon.  They would go through the two years together.  Lifelong friendships across lines otherwise often never crossed would result in many cases. An opening of minds about others would result.  And personal horizons would widen.

At the end would be recognition: they will be enabled to gain more education if they wish. But in the format they desire.  It could be college and it could be chef’s school.  They would have spent two years away from home, and so would no longer be boys.

Or maybe girls.  Women today are having smaller and sometimes no families.  The issue of initiations for women has historically not been a big one.  But perhaps as women widen their horizons beyond the family the same kind of issues might arise.  I don’t know.  At any rate by participating their horizons will also be widened, and their opportunities for education expanded.  Perhaps they would qualify for something to help their families if they chose marriage and kids after their two years.

Each of these paragraphs could be greatly expanded, but they outline an avenue of thought I think might be very important for the future of our country.