You are watching a classic Western movie. A lone cowboy rides into a dusty town. He has no backstory; he has no friends; he may not even have a last name. He appears, performs a manly feat (albeit reluctantly), and then rides off into the same solitary horizon from which he first emerged.
A lot of men think of manhood according to this script. Men are self-begotten. We come into existence like Adam, alone. True men are those who wear isolation as comfortably as an old pair of jeans. They are, as the phrase goes, “self-made men.”
As common as this narrative is, it is a fiction, no more real than the stage name “John Wayne” (the actual name of the movie star was Marion Morrison – not nearly as heroic!). The truth is that no one can become a man by himself. This is not just true biologically; it’s true psychologically. Becoming a man requires being taught, inducted, and received by other men. This is a universal rule of human sociability. A man who is not affirmed in his masculinity by other men will always have a nagging insecurity. The question, “Am I really a man?” will be answered by the awkward silence: “How can I know?” Boys detached from other men do not march with the gusto of a fearless cowboy; they limp with the touchiness of a fatherless orphan.
Why do men need other voices to instil and affirm their identities? There are two reasons.
First, manhood is something that must be taught. To understand this point we need to erase the stark line so often drawn between “nature” and “nurture”. Human beings are a strange creature. Our development is nowhere near completed when we are cast out from the womb into the world. Much of what it means to be human – to speak, to stand upright, to live in a family, to hold a fork – is a product of education, not instinct. This fact is not accidental, but fundamental. God has designed us to be social animals. This means that nature and nurture are both part of one complimentary process, each playing a vital role in producing a morally competent person.
We need to appreciate the implications of this for graduating as men. Over the last sixty years, a lot of “experts” have denied that manhood needs to be rooted in culture. They have dismissed all inherited forms of manhood as perverse “stereotypes”. In theory, this was supposed to liberate men so that they could choose a preferred existence like they might choose a pair of shoes. In fact, this has put men in an impossible position – one that might be likened to a third-grade student being sent to the library to educate himself. The only thing worse than having too many road signs is having none at all. This is the confusing position of modern men. When all traditional types of masculinity have been stripped and whitewashed, men are left in an illegible world. Rather than feeling free to do as they like, they feel utterly disoriented. In this sense, the sexual revolution has not just failed women; it has failed men.
The reality is that boys need accumulated wisdom to teach them what it means to be a man. They need, in other words, to be enculturated. Just as a child needs an adult to teach him how to cut meat, boys need men who can teach them the character and practices that make up their future calling. To expect boys to figure out on their own what it means to be a man is just as ludicrous as expecting them to figure out on their own how to solve differential equations. There is, in fact, no such thing as a self-made human being. Either boys will be taught by the good and wise, or they will be taught by YouTube and social media. The Lone Ranger is a myth; there are no individuals. We all copy the behaviour of someone else, for better or worse.
Yet, there is a second reason why we need voices to affirm our identity. This reason is less cognitive than emotional – we might even say physical. Modern society underplays the importance of ceremony in our lives. We treat rituals and rites as if they are disposable wrappings. This is naïve. Ritual speaks to the body as words speak to the mind, and just as we have both minds and bodies, so we need both words and actions to affirm our existence as men.
Marriage provides a simple illustration of this need. Without marriage, a young man and woman cannot be sure where they stand in relation to each other. There is no bedrock to which they can anchor their feelings. A wedding ceremony fills up this space. There is a real sense that something happens in and through the marriage service. Prior to the formality, there are two individuals. It is only after the service is finished that the two are made one.
Men need something similar to confirm their place among other men. More than words, they need action. They need a group of men to stand around them, perhaps even lay hands on them, and to pronounce, “Today you are one of us.” If this sound strange, the reason is because modern society is indeed strange. We have failed to do what just about ever other culture and tribe from around the world has done previously. We have abandoned all of the rites of passage that used to signal a moment of separation and initiation, a time when boyhood was left behind for something better and more permanent, namely, manhood.
The honest truth is that it’s almost unbearable for men to live without such external validation. This is why men who are not welcomed into the ranks of strong and godly men will inevitably go looking for such brotherhood elsewhere. They may find it in a college fraternity, through CrossFit, in the army, or – if the pain is great enough – in a gang. But the principle “it is not good for man to be alone” applies more broadly than marriage. Men need men, and they will either find a circle of peers to affirm them, or they will be cursed to an existence not much better than that of Gollum in Lord of the Rings – friendless and therefore miserable.
The main takeaway from all of this is that men are not born, but made. Both by training and by ritual boys need to guided and welcomed into a brotherhood of authentic, Biblical masculinity.
Now, anyone agreeing with this conclusion will be left with two questions. The first is, how do you decipher between healthy cultural forms of manhood and “toxic” ones? The second is, how do you recover rituals after they have vanished from society?
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