There’s a time when a young man is forced to be a man. In the old hunter-gathering days, it was when years of aiding men in the hunt finally led boys to the task of killing bears, lions, and tigers, after which they were promoted to being hunters themselves. These tribal boys came home with the boon of the wild. Then they went on vision quests to receive their guardian spirits. They were given new names, tattoos, and piercings to commemorate their matured identities.
Moving to ancient Sparta in the fifth century BC, boys were taken from their families at the age of seven, to be taught how to steal food in the market without being seen, to be starved daily, to be turned against each other in fisticuffs, and to be given swords and spears so they could fight for their state and die for it if necessary. By the age of twenty, these trained Spartan men had been so stripped of most notions of comfort that they would no longer mind sleeping in the cold, blustering open.
In the 1940s during the Second World War, the average American soldier was just twenty-six years old. Among the nearly half a million who died, the majority were numbered in the infantry, where the average age was just twenty.
Each of these snippets of history reveals a forging of men by trial. Meanwhile in today’s reality, most young men don’t have urgent, inescapable, and deadly battles to fight. They can find food waiting in the fridge ten paces from the couch. They have air-conditioning when it’s hot and radiant heating when it’s cold. They work nine to five, go home, and play videogames. War is traffic at best and some collegiate sense of meaningless at worst, if not the all-too-present miseries of familial infighting.
According to some storied psychoanalysts, their rite of passage comes first in the death of their father, either symbolically or literally. It’s when, instead of living under their father’s thumb, they develop the strength to act on their own, assume their full identity, and, in the long run, become the spine of their newfound family and aged parents. Yet this is only one of many passages. The rest, I think, have dwindled behind the gratifying blur of modern society. And much to society’s detriment. For instance, marriage is in decline and fertility rates are falling. Perhaps half of the problem is that young men haven’t only lost their worthy counterparts in the form of beasts and hellfire, but also their calling to participate in something bigger than themselves.
It may seem that manhood now is a choice afforded by the absence of a literal calling. I don’t believe this is the case. Whether in good times or tough, the little dramas that play out in the life of a young man nevertheless add up to the greatest challenge of his life. If he listens hard enough to the whispers in his head and the subtle yearnings of his heart, he may begin to understand that there’s always been a call in him. That is, to grow, to mature, to reflect on his unique experience of hurt, and to train under the tutelage of suffering, which has been the maker of men since the beginning. Through his wounds, a young man can sympathize with his forefathers, who, as masculine voices, drive him to find pain’s harshest lessons fuel for transformation. As mentors, these effective men of the past encourage all uninitiate boys to seek the boon of the wild once more so they can make their communities better, so like soldiers in the throes of death, they can fight for a higher cause more meaningful than defeat.
Young men who seek this boon hie to study the men who currently occupy the positions of manhood they hope someday to be in. I believe the young and naive can always do well to quiet down so they may hear the dead, the alive, and the fictional echoing in the silence, begging for the space needed to impart lessons long forgotten. I believe that, like boys who must aid in the hunt without getting blood on their hands, young men are fated to observe men so they can become men.
What follows are some of my observations.
(To be continued)
