The Sibling Society, Part 2

Poet and social critic
Robert Bly

I like Robert Bly's 1996 book The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood because it is a sweeping indictment of our culture for having lost sight of what human spirituality is really all about. I dislike the book for the very same reason.

I dislike that Bly aims his book at intellects as grand as his own; most of us are well below that mark. And his very premise confirms it: we in our culture have been actively divested of our ability to interpret poetry, scripture, myth, timeless folktales, and traditional fairy stories, an ancient ability that our great-great-great grandparents took for granted.

This divestiture has come at the hands of several groups of people who have imposed their alternate views of reality on us — secularists, all of them, first and foremost. They object to enshrining the "vertical dimension" of mythology, as Bly calls it, because it leads us away from pursuing the rational and the scientific.

Some of those who have stood in the way of Bly's call for revitalizing a cultural "verticality" have been feminists who, Bly maintains, entirely misunderstood Bly's earlier book, Iron John: A Book About Men (right), which its author says was not about resurrecting patriarchal values and such like.

Religious fundamentalists who interpret scripture with absolute literalness are likewise anti-Bly, for the simple reason that Bly is resolutely anti-fundamentalist. To interpret, say, the first chapter of Genesis literally is to miss what it really has to say to us about divinity and power.

In the realm of high-falutin' literary theory the proponents of "deconstruction," the notion that no written text possesses any iota of external authority, come in for Bly's scorn. In fact, Bly's very prose style is intrinsically authoritative, and his premise can be summarized as that human children, both male and female, need exposure to fatherly authority if they are to grow up properly.

Such things, admittedly, make me cringe. Why couldn't Bly have chosen a topic less radically opposed to the way our society has been moving in my lifetime?

But they also make me cheer, because deep down I agree with Bly in these matters.