The Sibling Society, Part 3

Washington Post writer
Sally Quinn

Robert Bly's 1996 book The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood: does it have any relevance to the problem discussed by The Washington Post's Sally Quinn in her latest "On Faith" column? The column is titled "Sex assaults in the military: An epidemic that is being ignored," and its prime concern is that "there were about 26,000 incidents of sexual assault in the military last year ... an astounding average of more than 70 per day."

Why does the military, Quinn would like to know, seem to be unable — or unwilling — to ferret out and prosecute the miscreants who commit these heinous crimes? The writer seeks that there be "people ... going to jail" and "a court-martial in every case, and more people in power ... not just sputtering with outrage, but acting out of outrage."

Air Force Chief of Staff
Gen. Mark Welsh

But she sneers at a claim made by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, in a hearing before Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and the Senate Armed Services Committee, that "roughly 20 percent of the young women who come into the Department of Defense and Air Force report they were sexually assaulted in some way before they came into the military. So they come in from a society where this occurs. Some of it is the hook-up mentality of junior high, even, and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”

Quinn is wrong to sneer. According to Wikipedia, "In the United States, several studies since 1987 have shown that one in four college women have survived rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime ... It has been estimated that one in six American women has been or will be sexually assaulted during her life." Yes, the military culture can and does magnify the problem of sexual assaults and rapes, and yes, it also has means of investigating, prosecuting and punishing such crimes that do not apply in civilian affairs. But the underlying problem is society-wide, and just focusing on the situation in the military misses that.

Poet/social critic
Robert Bly

Robert Bly would say that the perpetrators of sexual assaults and rapes remain "half-adults," most of them. They, like the huge numbers of young people who do not commit such crimes, share the attribute of not being fully brought to maturity by the time they are nominally all grown up. That happens in part because our society has come to disparage the initiation rituals of old, the ones that were once associated with our world's primary religions, ancient mythologies, traditional folk customs, and the like.

According to author Mark Gerzon's review of The Sibling Society in The Los Angeles Times:

The "sibling society" is Bly's metaphor for a world where "adults regress toward adolescence" and "adolescents . . . have no desire to become adults"; where admiration for elders has disappeared, tradition has eroded, ancestors have been forgotten; where the family is being destroyed everywhere, by everyone; where children's brains are addled by day-care and TV; where adolescents, lost and self-destructive, dwell in bastions of boredom called high schools; where parents, particularly fathers, have abdicated their archetypal roles; where mass culture provides not elders but movies about infantile "grumpy old men"; and where respect for ancient myths and tribal ritual has been replaced by the cynical self-centeredness of "do your own thing."

A "kingdom without a king," as Gerzon puts it, is a recipe for chaos, in Bly's view. I would add that it is also a recipe for "anything goes" when it comes to how half-adult men treat girls and women.

Michael Gerzon, author
of A House Divided:
Six Belief Systems
Struggling for America’s Soul

Never mind that I fully agree with Gerzon that:

By the time Bly reaches his epilogue, he seems to sense the one-sided quality of his argument. He allows himself to muse that perhaps there is "some good" or a "gift" buried in this flattening of hierarchy and questioning of authority. If so, he never finds it. Instead, he portrays everything through the same bitter, despairing lens.

Bly's book is a flawed vessel for an important idea: we need to reinvent the faith-based, spiritual, religious wisdom that can form us properly as human beings, so to head off the various sorts of misbehavior that boil over, in the military and outside it, as sexual assaults and rapes.

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.

The Sibling Society, Part 1

Robert Bly's 1996 book The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood has a lot to say to us now, as we try to sort out such matters as the lead story in today's print edition of The Washington Post, "Abuse cases up in military." The story informs us that "The Pentagon, using anonymous surveys and sampling research, estimated that 26,000 personnel experienced 'unwanted sexual contact' last year, up from about 19,300 in 2010, according to an ongoing Defense Department study." That's a two-year increase of 34.7 percent.

Furthermore, the "chief of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention branch [Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski] was arrested by Arlington County police early Sunday and charged with [wait for it ... ] sexual battery." Krusinski, while drunk at 12:30 a.m. last Sunday morning in a parking lot in Crystal City, Virginia, allegedly grabbed the breasts and buttocks of a civilian woman he did not know. She managed to fend him off and call 911. A 41-year-old officer, he's been relieved of his duties and will either be tried in a civilian court or court-martialed.

The Post story details the ways in which the Defense Department, the military, and Congress are suddenly trying to crack down on sexual assaults and rapes in the armed forces. My attitude is: Good! It's about time!

But it's also, I believe, just putting fingers in a dike that has sprung countless, and enormous, leaks in our society in recent decades. That's where Bly's book comes in.

I've been reading the book for some weeks now and trying to figure out how best to paraphrase it. Bly's notion of a "sibling society" is admittedly hard to grasp. Sibling is, of course, a word that includes our blood brothers and sisters. Bly now extends it outward to include all our age peers. And he says we are now, many or all of us, just "half-adults." (I prefer to call such people "post-adolescents" or "adultescents" instead.)

Bly calls us "siblings" to indicate that we in the last several generations have silenced the erstwhile voices of authority who, traditionally, handed down to us when we were children the norms and ethos of our ancestors. Those norms, that ethos, was derived from the word of God if we are Jews, Christians, or Muslims. If we are from other cultures such as that of the Hindus in India, they came down to us from the small-g "gods."

We've set all that aside, in part because we've become predominantly rationalist-secularist-humanist, and in part because it bears the stink of paternalism. The authority figures that passed along to us the norms and the ethos of our society have always been male — in particular, when we were growing up, our fathers. Today's feminists have labored long and hard to "deconstruct" that aspect of our culture.

Bly applauds feminism and the women's liberation movement — most of it. But he thinks we've tossed the baby out with the bathwater by abolishing the idea of the strong father who lives with his wife and children in a two-parent home and helps initiate his sons and his daughters into true adulthood.