#8 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (spirituality)

In this (spirituality) realm, there is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. (Margaret J. Wheatley, in Diarmuid O. Murchu, Reclaiming Spirituality, New /York, Crossroads, p. 1)

Far from pasting an ethical and electrical-stimulating patch onto our hearts, in order to neutralize all sinister motives, attitudes, perceptions and self-destructive tendencies, we are left to wrestle with the seemingly surreal benchmarks detailed in the Christian ethics summary from the last segment in this series.

Men, from my experience, have as much aversion to conversation about their own spirituality as they do about their emotions. Even within the narrow confines of the institutional church, men generally focus on the balance sheet, revenues, costs and then they adjudge the spectre of whether or not to remain open on the basis of those criteria. When confronting the most conflicted questions and tensions that emerge between and among parishioners and between laity and clergy, they frequently revert to the mediation/reconciliation/social justice guidelines of the secular culture in their best approach, or more likely, defer to their personal favourite in their more narrow and constricted manner. And while these processes have some potential to shift the dialogue into new and more hopeful territory, the fundamental attitudes of each individual remain paramount regardless of the chosen process.

An anecdote from Ruth White’s A Spiritual Diary for Saints and Not-so-Saintly, might open this reflection:

                           Rest in Peace

A stubborn old man plastered the outside walls of his hotel with signs. He was declaring war on the city fathers. Today as I passed down his street, I observed a freshly painted message hanging there. It read:

“Rest in Peace.”

I wondered who was resting. Did the old man give up in his long running battle for survival? Did he win, or did je just give up?

Perhaps I will never know. There is one thing I am very sure about—someone lost! It is even possible, as with most arguments, that no one is resting in peace.Peace is not the child of bitterness and hate. When one person sets out to destroy another, regardless of the cause, it always results in someone being injured. In order for one to win, the other must lose. (Op.Cit., p. 95)

Today, our vernacular terms this idea a zero-sum game.

The point at which any ethical principle becomes operative is the point at which a precipitating and offensive event, statement, action prompts and provokes a response. Victims, especially, are prone to lash out, almost involuntarily responding to that “fight/flight” response, in a culture that literally and metaphorically holds wimps (those who do not retaliate) in contempt. There is a corollary to this truth: the most likely person to inflict an offensive blow, especially one designed to “destroy” another, is the person who is most frightened and unable or unwilling to restrain his vengeance. This paradox, however, remains one of the over-riding and often hidden mysteries operating in a culture dominated by masculinity, in its most neurotic model.

Ours is a culture that celebrates conflict that “wipes out” an opponent, and then cheers the destroyer/terminator as a role model for others who are or will experience injustice themselves. In Canada, professional hockey has the most prominent, visible and recognized stage for this meme. The dockets in the civil courts, too, are filled with cases documenting offenses based on an injustice unaddressed, and needing a outside authority to settle the dispute. Employers, too, are increasingly deploying a strategy that is best summed up in the words of a former supervisor: “Do you think we can get him to resign, if we overload his workload?” Implicit in that rhetorical question is the notion that “firing” that individual would require both time and serious financial costs, but having him/her withdraw silently is clean and simple and cost-free. It is not incidental to note that there is no “requirement” to provide “cause” for the elimination, for the simple reason that the resignation is uncontested.

Other equally sinister and too often secret and thereby anonymous “exclusions” or destructions or character assassinations are happening while these keys are being tapped, with the target of the attack unsuspecting both its emergence and its author.

The political culture has become so violent, virulent and saturated with radioactive words like treason, spy, killing, spilling out of the poisoned fountain of the Oval Office, that ordinary people have and will continue to take violent actions motivated by and “given cover” by the bile flowing from that very fountain.

So, attempting to inculcate, teach, model, apply and ‘garden’ and ‘greenhouse’ even a modest ethic is one of the most, complex and trying and predicated-on-failure of the social, cultural, educational, and political enterprises in any culture.

Hourly, we read and listen to stories of individuals who cross ethical, legal/criminal and constitutional lines, only to be followed by those courageous voices in the wilderness that has become our raging climatic and political ethos. Whistleblower protection could prove to be the single “linchpin” protecting the U.S. political institutions from permanent erosion. Nevertheless, in the prevailing public dialogue, the word “systems” plays such a prominent part in our mostly failed and failing attempts to deal with “miscreancy” (villainy) at all levels.

Just this morning, David Ignatius, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC, outlined his country’s and his paper’s requirement that the Saudi prince, ben Salman, provide assurances that “systems are in place” that will prevent any recurrence of  murder of his colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul one year ago today. And we have evolved to a point where we expect “systems” to ensure our safety, our security, and the enforcement of the ethical, legal principles on which our culture has been established. Every time a “system” operates, carrying out a task, a responsibility, a professional process, in an encounter with other systems, the purpose of that encounter is most likely to be an attempt either to prevent some future injustice, or to impose a sanction for a previous crossing of some boundaries.

Within the bowels of each system, however, both the knowledge of and the sanctions for not executing the details of a “system” of rules, regulations, mandates reside within the “person” of those working within the system. Compounding the dissemination of those regulations, and a commitment to their execution, are so many factors as to render the process of the dissemination, assimilation and prosecution of the system’s rules fraught with not merely synapses but volcanic obstruction. And the size and virulence of the obstruction are highly dependent on the level of trust and respect for the very system that has brought the rules and regulations into existence.

And the level of trust in every system is highly reflective of the level of trust each individual on the shop floor has for the individuals and the teams at the top of the hierarchy running the system. And there is a legitimate argument that posits the notion that each system, per se, is a refuge for both the hierarchy and the underlings to use as a cloud, an obfuscation, a literal and metaphorical cover to escape full responsibility. Start with the notion that no “law” that is itself unjust does not merit either compliance or enforcement. And whether any rule, or regulation is just or unjust depends both on the ethical principles on which it is based, and on whether those principles have a deep and profound resonance among the “unwashed.”

Laws, rules, regulations, codes and systems, by definition, are tools to bring about what in Canada our constitution calls “peace order and good government”…sufficiently abstract and open to interpretation, as to ensure continuing reflection and debate, and thereby to continue to nurture the democratic foundation’s growing strength and health. Control of others, at the root of the smooth operation of any social enterprise, (schools libraries, churches, and corporations, as well as political entities) and the levers of power to both write and to administer those rules and regulations, rest primarily in the hands and the basic beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and the personal ethics of  those in charge. And there are any number of political influences preying upon the minds, thoughts, feelings and perceptions of those individuals at the top of the “system.”

A well-known adage of political life, (and every “system” operates as, and considers itself a political entity) is, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Whether or not the “squeaky wheel” is itself an expression of the most ethical and moral principle often succumbs to the immediacy of “pleasing” and silencing those “protesting” voices. No executive wants to have “turbulence” identity his/her “watch” if that turbulence can be squashed, or silenced by some promulgation of a rule, a regulation a policy or an edict. Often the length of time, and the perception of various options available impinge the decision-making process of any executive faced with the demand for change. Short-term resolution, based on the most simple and direct rule and regulation, disseminated as a matter of “normal” executive leadership, often betrays those seeking change, those who are expected to change, and especially the authority of the executive originating change.

For centuries, for example, the church has banned women from ordination, and relegated women to duties considered expressive of the perceived and historically fossilized exclusion or women from the highest echelons of ecclesial power and decision making. More recently, a cry for both inclusion in all levels of clergy, as well as a zero tolerance policy and rule about preventing relationships between clergy and laity (similar to those previously iron-clad in corporations, yet being relaxed based upon a more tolerant perspective). Similarly, LGBTQ persons have been historically excluded from both church membership and ordination, as the church continues to enforce a perspective that renders the church the arbiter of legitimate sexual relations among both straight and gay individuals. In an attempt to face the need to restrict what it considers “unethical” and “evil” from the perspective of some interpretations of scripture, as well as to attempt to integrate the prevailing political winds of the growing #MeToo movement, ecclesial decision-making forums have and continue to struggle with this vortex of influences. And to take a zero-tolerance position on clergy-laity relationships, for example, regardless inof whether the clergy or lay person is male or female, or straight or gay, is to render any member of the laity, by definition for the purpose of the policy and the regulations, incapable of the maturity and the personal integrity to make such a choice openly, voluntarily and freely. “Power over” is considered to be the predominant principle that is being used to “protect” the “vulnerable” from being abused. This principle, too, is highly operative and even dominant in the secular, corporate world, including all western military institutions.

Nevertheless, both in the “systems” designed to participate in education and in the process of inculcating spirituality, it is both obvious and irrefutable that any conversations, dialogues and encounters between the two participants (student/teacher, clergy/laity) have the potential of entering into highly personal and intimate regions of experience. Any responsible and non-neurotic policy established to “regulate” human sexual relations that bans the existence and the development of such relations from the institution is not merely unnatural, but is also based on the fear and insecurity of those attempting to lead those institutions. There is a legitimate argument that men, in positions of executive power, have over-compensated to attend to the view of the legitimately angry numbers of women who, themselves, have been abused by men in positions of power. A professor in another life memorable for his dramatic rhetoric and personal lecture style once told a class in Comparative Education, “The Russian method of solving a problem is to eliminate it!” Such a problem-solving approach has no place in contemporary institutions.

Perhaps, an enlightened and enlightening approach would be to open the door to a full discussion of the details of each “case” in which the traditional “rules” are being or about to be crossed. Getting to know the personal side of each situation, based on a starting place of “trust” as opposed to a starting place of fear, and ever more despicable, the starting place of protecting the public image of the church or the school board.

And this opens the door to how the culture addresses what it consider all incidents of offense between and among the people. Starting with a premise that human beings are primarily and incontrovertibly “evil” and “have short of the glory of God” (St. Paul) has resulted in highly elaborate, and ever more highly sophisticated body of law, law enforcement, codification, prosecution and enforcement of so many laws, many of them incarcerating millions on one hand for minor, non-violent offences, while failing to investigate, document and prosecute other crimes, especially among the rich and powerful, in all social and cultural institutions.  The basic premises, themselves, are providing a mountain of evidence of how the system cannot be sustained, either by the numbers and the costs, let alone based on the fallacy that punishment acts as an effective deterrent for others.

Let’s continue to explore, to stretch our own comfort levels, in all of our institutions, to contribute to the legitimate evolution of reasonable, and reasonably based standards of comportment and conformity, without every losing sight of the uniqueness and the potential for good that lies within each of us.

Constricting the spirits of both the hierarchies and those for whom they are responsible is neither necessary nor life-giving for either demographic in the "system. In fact, when the system constricts the full life of the individual, it has to be confronted as an act of responsible discipleship and citizenship.

#7 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (ethics)

While words do not by themselves define our identity; it is by words that we attempt to grapple with notions of who we are. Biological nature, for example, may be one place to start. Traits of contentment, cholic, intemperate, patient, loving and even angry and punitive arise usually from the mouths/observations of others, usually beginning with our parents. However, embedded in those attributions and certainly less “visible” and “known” are the intimate and essential attitudes, beliefs, world views, and moods of the person “framing” the behaviour of the baby.

Naming “mama” and “dada” and “spoon” and “dog” and “up” and down” begin to flow from the babies’ mouths and as the process of language development ensues, “body language” becomes integrated into the full “communication process” of the young child, as does the capacity of parents/custodians to “read” the needs, moods, wishes and pains of the baby.

While there is always a question of the precision, accuracy and verification of the “truth” of both of these symbols of communication, there is usually some degree of agreement between baby and parent, allowing for amendment and adjustment if first responses do not seem to satisfy. In each of these exchanges, a pattern of relationship norms and expectations between the two parties takes shape, inevitably revisited, adjusted, amended and deepened in their character with each moment of encounter. Similarly, each of the participants is adjusting his/her perceptions, attitudes and expectations based on the integration and assimilation of the new impressions of the encounter.

It is such a dynamic that attends to each of the encounters between humans of all ages, genders, belief systems, ideologies and the purposes attached to each encounter. Care givers, like mothers, for starters, provide immediate models and messages of the nature of the universe for the child, as do fathers, however at variance the two models may be. Lessons about how to drink from a sippy and then a real cup, toilet training, the impact of crying, and extending to the skills of tying shoes, table manners, and later, the many complex skills surrounding the “socializing” in nursery schools, kindergartens and school classrooms.

Not only is guidance about how to interact with things and others embedded in these exchanges, but also more abstract “principles,” “beliefs,” “attitudes,” “rules,” and “expectations of the adult are being conveyed to the young child, most of these being transferred from a virtual unconscious perspective. We do not normally actively consider questions of “political philosophy” or “dogma” of faith, or “career expectations” in these very early “exchanges with our children. Nevertheless, with or without our conscious awareness, these basic seeds are being implanted in the mind, body, spirit and soul of the young child. So to the extent that we are conscious of and committed to any specifically articulated nugget of belief, social and cultural norm such as our attitude to money, food, cleanliness, tidiness, reading, music, dance, laughter and compromise, these coded messages are being formulated, and then transmitted to the child by the adult.

Typically, fathers’ identification with their sons, and mothers’ identification with their daughters shape many of these early exchanges, as do parental tones, smiles, eye contacts, and auras, most of these latter, without a conscious recognition and acknowledgement by either parent or child. Some typical cultural memes, or norms, also find themselves Even the atmosphere inside the home and the conversations between parents provide additional “cultural” evidence of the ethos of this “world” of the child.

No doubt many readers, if they are still here, are rolling their eyes about the patently obvious and irrefutable platitudes above. However, while perhaps obvious, the early development of the child, and not merely the special needs child, is a critical piece of the business of the society and the culture. It is not another of the many “domestic” files like cleaning, laundry, cooking and meal preparation. These issues can no longer be relegated to the “family” or “life” sections of the dailies, nor to the TVO or other public television outlets. How parents raise their children, feed them, read to them, discipline them and even dress them are significant to the evolving development of the culture. And the political “hands-off” of public institutions, especially provincial legislatures, (in Canada, family issues, education and language are the purview of the provinces) can no longer be justified. We can no longer tolerate a political discussion and debate about the nature of our classrooms that reduces the issues in the debate to numbers of teachers and number of students in classrooms, and the occasional “sex-ed” controversy about which specific pieces of information and issues of judgement are appropriate to which age group.

Questions about tolerance of and access to cell phones in classrooms, for example, should not need to be mandated by a provincial regulation. And while corporal punishment deserves legitimate relegation to the educational museums, there are other “social and cultural norms” about how to monitor, regulate and development comportment of children to agreed principles, behaviours, attitudes and rules. And the issue of ethics as it is applied to both parenting and public education needs to be revisited and reconsidered from a far more elevated and demanding perspective in the public arena. Men have, traditionally, withdrawn from any discussion of family or classroom ethics, leaving the “field” primarily to female parents, members of school councils, coaches, principals and teachers in their respective classrooms. A over the last two or three decades, school boards in Ontario have veered nearly over a cliff in their hiring practices in the elementary panel, by hiring and preponderance of female instructors and principals. There is no argument about the effectiveness or the professionalism of women teachers or principals. However, the “ethics” of basing the proportion of authority figures on the proportion of gender representation inside the school would impose a rough 50-50 assignment of both men and women to these positions.

Young boys, regardless of their preferences for the arts, athletics, science, math or technology, need male models in the front of their classrooms as urgently as young girls need women role models. The fact that the public debate has virtually ignored this slide into “normality” (perhaps as an over-compensation for a history in which most principals were men), illustrates the abandonment of the fathers, uncles, grandfathers from the issues of the classrooms and the spending of public monies in the complex and highly determinative process of learning, education and child development.

We need men to contribute ideas like a very old one that sought the preparation of all classroom teachers as “researchers” in the formal academic sense of that word, so that all classrooms would thereby incorporate the opportunity to become learning labs. Such a shift in teacher training, prompted, nurtured and fostered by both mothers and fathers, of all political stripes, would dramatically and permanently shift the ethos in many classrooms, the motivation and excitement of many teachers and principals, the deeper and more sustaining relationship between public classrooms and the faculties of education, psychology, leadership, and ethics. This initiative would not, or at least should not, offend the many female teachers and principals already working in public classrooms. In fact, conversely, it would shift an emphasis on “proper, politically correct” expectations to a more relevant and operative perspective that examines how children learn, what new teaching/learning research applies to each classroom, and how new approaches might flow from the classrooms in both urban and rural communities.

An “educational culture” dominated by one gender will, naturally and inevitably veer toward the norms and the expectations of that gender. Football in secondary schools, for example, is one case in point. A school and board culture dominated by men will be more likely to perpetuate a football agenda, while one representing an equal proportion of men and women are more likely to be critical of such an approach, given the mounting evidence of concussion and long-term CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy) the term used to describe brain degeneration likely cause by repeated head traumas. Similarly, yet conversely, a faculty balancing numbers of men and women in a school is less likely to adopt a norm of communication that ranks language and rhetoric by colour. Designed primarily as a device to “minimize” or actually eliminate the verbal expression of male rage, such a process, by definition, objectifies and stigmatizes young boys.

Alternatively, various processes that coach children into becoming peer monitors, mediators and friends in the broadest sense of that word, and that focus on the isolation, alienation, ostracism and abandonment of “different” children (the extreme poor, the racialized, the challenged, the over-weight, the fragile and shy young boy, the bully, whether male or female, the uber-rich, or the member of an unfamiliar faith or ethnicity) and the many options open to all students to participate in the process of authentic integration of those children, both short and long term, merit serious consideration and implementation, monitoring and realigning.

Education, as an authentic extension of the family, demands the active, willing and creative contribution of both mothers and fathers, both in the specific curricular implementation and importantly in the establishment of a respectful culture, based on both masculine and feminine perspectives, attitudes, beliefs and processes. And men can and will only grow to appreciate both their own children and the kind of school and classroom they inhabit, on an intimate, and not necessarily interfering manner.

Another ethical tenet to which we all pay lip-service in many of our communities in North America is the fundamental tenet of most faith communities:

                     always treat others as you would like them to treat you

In part number 5, we noted the conflict between men and women regarding sexual activity, and the need for more men to respect the “NO” of their female partners. Similarly, we also mentioned the too many cases of women who, having willingly and eagerly entered into a relationship, then revert to vengeance when that relationship terminates. The premise, “it takes two” too often becomes part of the detritus of the marriage. “No Fault” divorce, obviously may cover the distribution of matrimonial assets, and the potential for an agreement on “shared” custody; it clearly does not account for the private, silence, secreted vengeance of offended and victimized women who perpetuate their version of “pay-back” on their former spouse often for the rest of their lives, and certainly for the length of their children’s education and development.

Perhaps the Christian faith has a potential, if ignored, guidepost that could serve to mediate both of the male and female attitudes of disrespect and blame and judgement above. In Ronald Preston’s chapter “Christian Ethics,” in “A Companion to Ethics” edited by Peter Singer, he writes these words:

…the distinctive feature of Jesus’ ethical teaching is the way it radicalizes common morality. For instance, there is to be no limit to the forgiveness for injuries, not only the ground that it will win over the offender but because it corresponds to God’s forgiveness for us. Similarly love of enemies is enjoined not because it will win over the enemy (although of course it might) but because God loves his enemies. There is to be no restriction on neighbour love. Anxiety is the surest sign of lack of trust in God especially anxiety over possessions. So far from motive not being important provided the right action is done. Jesus was penetratingly critical of the self-love of ‘good’ people and it is clear from many passages in the gospels that he thought bed people to be not nearly so bad as the “good” thought them. Underlying all this teaching lies the fact that Jesus was a man of faith (trust). Faced with the ambiguities of existence he looked at the weather, the sun shining and rain falling alike on good and bad, and saw it as a sign of the unconditional goodness of the creative power of God. A sceptic would have drawn from the same evidence the conclusion that the universe is quite indifferent to moral worth, Ion this respect Jesus is an archetype for his followers….

His ethics is very different from an everyday ethic of doing good turns to those who do good turn to you: that is to say an ethic of reciprocity. This is invaluable as far as it goes. Social life requires a level of mutuality on which we can normally rely. One of the perils of international relations is that governments have not sufficient confidence in their relations with one another for mutuality to be relied upon. However, in our lives as citizens we do usually count on it. Some people behave better than the rule of reciprocity requires. Some keep it exactly on a fifty-fifty basis. Some get by with a minimum of co-operation. Some who do not even do that are likely to end up in prison. Jesus goes much deeper, explicitly warning against loving only those who love you, ad saying that there is nothing extra-ordinary in that…He goes beyond the world of claims and counter-claims, of rights and duties or something owed to others…. Jesus calls for a certain flair in life, a certain creative recklessness at critical points….The thrust (of the teaching of the Beatitudes) is towards a self-forgetfulness which results in an unselfconscious goodness. Writers on spirituality often call it disinterestedness. Jesus spoke severely against self-conscious goodness…In the allegory of the sheep and the goals the sheep are unconscious of either their goodness or of rewards. The rewards Jesus spoke of cannot follow form the direct pursuit of them. Indeed consciously to pursue disinterestedness is self-defeating. One cannot pursue self-forgetfulness. (p. 95-6)

The complexity of Christian ethics, the state which paradoxically follows a “non-pursuit” premised on an unconscious disinterestedness, seems so far removed from the STEM, male dominated, profit-and-extrinsic-rewards-driven, job-relevant, human-reductionistic, instant gratification culture in which we are currently impaled. And contemporary masculinity is, if permitted and recognized by the millions of men on the planet, regardless of our faith community, might like to be reminded of his “creation” in the image of God. And even the churches themselves, have either forgotten or lost sight of the complexity and the magnetic appeal of such an ethic.

#6 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (gender)

Men, far from resisting the implications of the power of words, received and/or uttered, like the kids in Narnia, have a waiting door into the secret “forest” of our sensibilities and our verdant imaginations (both personal and the “other” whether writer or friend) where the words we choose become historically archived imprints of our identity, our legacy and our most important dreams and aspirations.

Launching all of our interactions (both interior and with others) from the starting line of this belief, attitude, perception and conviction, will help to soften our dependence on our insecurity, and the corresponding default to using words as “tools” in an instrumental and too often manipulating exchange of power. Refocusing on the long-term, intimate connection of the current “moment” to what our imagination conceives as something called eternity (with thanks to Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope) offers a new lens to our potential and the potential of the words we choose. And through those lenses, we are more able to re-position our person and our identity as the gardener of our own legacy, reputation and contribution to the world community, and not merely to “fixing” the problem of the moment. The concept of identifying with whatever we are hearing from the other will be significantly enhanced, not merely by sensing empathy (walking a mile in his/her mocassins) but also by letting our own conception of our better angels “speak”, “write” or “draw” the picture those angels would honour forever.

If each and every moment of our existence, and that moment in the life of each other person were imagined as an integral and indelible scratch on the cave of eternity, rather than an impulsive, reactive and frightened response coming from the vault of our fear and neurosis, “fired” as a way to fend off what we can only conceive as “a threat,” imagine the transformation we can achieve together. Words, deployed as the arrows from the quiver of our fear and distrust, can and will only generate a similar and parallel response of the arrows from the quiver of the other’s fear.

Now that we have accumulated more than a surfeit of military weapons, as well as clouds of environmental gases that can and will eradicate our species, surely taking a look at how we might have arrived here might be instrumental in restoring the honour and the benefits of a perspective that points to the shared goal of survival and a new kind of planetary “garden”. Surely we have reached a tipping point in the manner by which we perceive/conceive/conceptualize our identity and the purpose/meaning of our existence, individually and collectively. One of the primary cornerstones of our identity points to our “use” of words as tools, weapons, and instruments of power over our colleagues, and our adversaries. Anything outside of ourselves, especially for men, including the universe itself, has been historically conceptualized as “for our use” and for some even our “dominion” over the universe.*

Not incidentally, our “reading” of these words provides an authentic opportunity to reflect on the significant difference between a literal denotative interpretation of these words and a metaphoric, connotative, mythical reading. Our chosen lens or perspective on our experience, in all faith communities, of the words that have been transmitted as the sacred belief of that faith community need and deserve a finely tuned reading and interpretation of those words. Not necessarily needing a philosophic or academic doctorate, but rather an acknowledgement of the history and origin of those words, from other human beings, depicting their best estimate of the origins of the universe, and reflecting a basic awareness of the multiple “voices” and meanings and reverberations of their words. There is no justification here for the “power-over” interpretation, as we have come to understand power in the manner by which we have destroyed habitats and eradicated millions of species, ostensibly to “serve” our most base and self-centred interests, passions and ambitions. Rather, merely to underline the early perceived differences between the human being and all other species, the words in Genesis offer a pre-historic conception, as our acceptance of and gratitude for that mythical gift is no less needed.

Clearly, the western allegedly Christian culture has imported these words from Genesis into the often-aggressive and virulent debate between “creationists” and evolutionists, and the implications for those opposing viewpoints in designing school curriculum. As a similar “incorporation” of eternity into our conception of the universe, only this time from the other end of time, we are invited to begin our own seeding of our imaginations and conceptions of our place in “time” as in the nunc fluens (the flowing now, of the river of eternal time from beginning to end).

Writers from all ethnicities, geographies, religions, languages and historical periods have been able and willing to stretch their own and their readers’ intellectual, imaginative and even affective and spiritual horizons to embrace both ends of time, while at the same time accepting and even depending a micro-measuring of its relevance in the scope of our brief existence. This experience need not be restricted to only a “faith” or religious dogma. In fact, such a reduction signifies a reduction and constriction of our perception/conception of God, while perpetuating a separation of the secular from the sacred. Words really do matter, whether we are tweeting to our colleagues, or framing our identity and existence in the world.

Not only will an enlarged and enhanced exposure to the words of our best and most revered authors and poets provide new and more varied word choices for each of our encounters and relationships, that additional reading will inevitably contribute to our growing confidence in all of our relationships. Not only by providing specific word choices, but also by providing scenes, scenarios and comparative situations to those we currently face, exposure to the imaginative gifts of our authors and poets enhances our perceptions, diagnoses and thereby our interventions for whatever situations enter our paths. As one contemporary CEO put it, “Give me a literature student who understands the patterns elicited and detailed in literary works, and I can and will teach him/her the details of the balance sheet!”

The wisdom of that highly sophisticated and cogent cornerstone of that CEO’s hiring policy and perspective, however, seems to have been lost, avoided or outright rejected by the curriculum designers in many western universities, (while pandering to the STEM demand of the current training vogue). It has also been glossed over by those responsible for religious theory and praxis, preferring the false safety and security of a “hardened, fossilized, rigid and immutable” set of religious “beliefs and dogma” rendering the ecclesial hierarchy, and the corporate edifice into another “law enforcement” agency, against the presumed and assumed “evil” of human beings. Even the elimination and/or reduction of basic courses in Literature from many of the STEM curricular requirements, and from the medical and science faculties robs those students, and the culture they will server, demonstrates an endorsement of the erosion of the importance, the relevance and the enrichment that can come only from “words” and their intimate, irreversible and deep connection to our most secret and creative thoughts and feelings.

Historically, men have attempted to divide another of the indivisibles of human existence, thoughts from feelings. The zygote of sacred/secular and the zygote of intellect/emotion ought never to be completely separated in the insemination of our world view, and our identity. The zygote is the fertilized egg cell that result from the union of a female gamete (egg or ovum) with a male gamete (sperm), in the embryonic development of human and other animals, the zygote stage is brief and is followed by cleavage, when the single cell becomes subdivided into smaller cells. Just as we cannot eliminate the zygote of egg and sperm from our human biology, we cannot either eliminate or negate the need of such a fertilization, prior to individual cleavage into subdivision of the many cells of our bodies, that can be compared to the process of growth and development that is unique to each of us.

And here is another word that demands the attention, the integration and the nurture in the culture deemed by the masculine gender of the western culture:

ANDROGYNY: the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics into an ambiguous form. Androgyny may be expressed with regard to biological sexual gender identity, gender expression or sexual identity.

However, is befits the dominant literalism of our current thinking, public discourse, and reductionism,  we have eliminated the “psychological” and the cultural and the spiritual and the intellectual and the imaginative potentialities of this concept. Far from reducing it to a merely biological, physical, expression, the word and its connotation has far more expansive and extensive application. It can be applied to a world view, an attitude, an appreciation of our individual and unique psychological identity, as originally offered by Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and theorist whose attribution of the “anima” (the female spirit) in all men, and the animus (the male spirit) in all women. For Jung, these unconscious traits “reside” in the Shadow, “the inferior being in ourselves, the one who wants to do all the things that we do not allow ourselves to do, who is everything we are not. The shadow is the personal unconscious; it is all those uncivilized desires and emotions that are incompatible with social standards and our ideal personality all that we are ashamed of, all that we do not want to know about ourselves. It follows that the narrower and more restrictive the society in which we live the larger will be our shadow….(Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology, Penguin, Great Britain,1966 p.49)

“The unconscious of a man contains a complementary feminine element (anima), that of a woman a male element (animus). The most masculine of men, will often show surprising gentleness with children or with anyone weak or ill; strong men give way to uncontrolled emotion in private, and can be both sentimental and irrational; brave men are sometimes terrified by quite harmless situations, and some men have surprising intuition or a gift for sensing others people’s feelings. All these supposedly feminine traits, as well as more obvious effeminacy in a man. This latent femininity in a man is, however only one aspect of his soul, his anima. An inherited collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman.” (Fordham, op. cit, p. 52)

Here we can explore the intersection of the complexity of human psychology and the dictates of a restricted, repressed and constricted definition of masculinity by too many men in North America. Fighting, denying, ignoring, refusing to acknowledge and also punishing (especially as a function of a religious, spiritual and ethical theory and praxis) or even competing with another of the many concepts that remain beyond empirical definition and measure and scientific study, the anima, North American men hoist themselves on our own petard: harm ourselves by our own plan and attitude and intent to harm those we consider to be too effeminate for our comfort. There is no escaping our own anima, nor is there any place for such an elimination or its vindictive punishment inside our faith communities, nor within the legal constraints of our civil and criminal law.

Rather, we need to become open to, receptive of and embracing that side of our identity (our anima), not restricting our conception and belief of masculinity to what can be empirically perceived by the senses. It is not only our adolescent football of hockey team members who reject anything hinting of the “fag” the “wuss,” the “girlie” and the “cry-baby”. Too often these epithets are uttered in derisive contempt by our mothers, our girlfriends (behind our backs), our work-mates, our classmates. And of course, stamping on many of the political debates about KGBTQ rights, this drumbeat of the masculine denial and rejection of even the spectre of an anima in the most straight men without being acknowledged and accepted, especially among the most power men among us, this denial results in further persecution of the LGBTQ community, both socially and criminally.

With respect to our faith institutions, too, a denial of the unconscious male anima has for centuries resulted in the rejection of non-celebate clergy, gay clergy, and the concept that the deity must remain conceived, perceived and presented to the laity as exclusively male. It has also led to an impossible and unenforceable divide between male clergy, and male faculty from their female parishoners and students respectively.

Based on the assumption of the “weakness” in power of the female “clients”, this fallacious premise ignores and denies the biological impetus to connect and to relate. It also perpetuates the perceived inferiority of the women, who themselves have a self-respecting and powerful voice either to accept or to reject invitations to relationship from men, regardless of the perceived power imbalance. From the masculine perspective, the sign hanging from the window of a co-ed’s room in a university residence rings loud and clear: “What part of NO do you not understand!” There are far too many instances of men presuming and assuming the consent of their sexual partners when such consent has not been offered. And there are also too many instances of women who originally consented to relationship and later, after the termination of the relationship, betrayed their own original consent and the “now offending” male, in an act of willful and illicit and jealous vengeance.

Is it only an appreciation of the potential of an androgynous deity that can and will ameliorate much of this contemporary shackling leg-iron that enslaves much of “establishment” society? It could also free many members of the LGBTQ community who, like many men and women in the straight community, struggle with rejection and alienation based on an innate fear of sexuality.

As the still dominant gender in our contemporary culture, men have much both to atone for and to learn about who we are, and how we might more effectively and mutually relate to our female partners, daughters and mothers. “Taking care of our own business” of knowing who we are, and whom we can become including both an enhanced vocabulary and an enhanced perception of our worth and value, as individuals and as a gender seems like a reasonable attainable goal.

*Genesis 1:26-28 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the flesh of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

#5 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (words)

A word is dead when it is said

Some say. I say it just begins to

Live that day. (Emily Dickinson)

We are all indebted to the American poet not only for her monumental contribution to American “letters” but also to the succinct, pithy, cogent and explosive nature of the human imagination. Far from proclaiming a religious dogma in the thought kernel above, Dickinson is pointing to, and inviting her reader to pause, and to reflect on the “universe” of pulsating, shining/mirroring energy of speech. It is speech that originates deep in the soul of every one of us potentially and predictably joining the moment of the utterance to every other moment, from beginning to forever. If as Blake reminds us, there is a universe in a grain of sand, there is an eternity in each and every word spoken, written, drawn and even scrolled on the back on millions of t-shirts.

Far from being constricted to a literal, denotative, scientific, and measureable “definition” or meaning, each word, like every musical note, every ballet pirouette, every brush stroke on canvas, if we would breathe, drink, smell, taste and linger over its impact on our whole person transports us into the universe it opens, the world of the person uttering the word and the depth of that person’s soul. However, the complexity of such a “between I and Thou” (thanks to Martin Buber) seems to have been set aside, or passed over, neglected and ignored in a masculine-dominated, product-driven, profit-pursued, transactional culture.

James Hillman excoriates the trajectory of psychology for its having fallen into the trap of literalism, of symptom, of nominalism, of an epistemology that renders all “unusual” behaviour into one of two “thought/concept” buckets: illness or evil. Endemic to this approach, (a failure to both client and profession, according to Hillman) is a universe, a cultural command that reduces each human being to a function, that old trap of thought, feeling, cognition, and pragmatic “realism”. Driven to demonstrate “value,” whether to a parent, or a teacher, a coach, a spouse or even a deity, men more than women are enchained in the iron ring of insecurity, abandonment, alienation, separation and a profound scarcity.

Such a trap has roots in:

Ø  a predominant theology of “sin” and “fallen” (erected on a presumption of hubris),

Ø A mis-apprehended notion of “education” (e ducere, to lead out) that attempts to “paint on” or even dig trenches for seeding by educators, thought and skill nuggets, rather than drawing out of the learner what is already within,

Ø a cultural imbalance veering toward detachment, objectivity and transaction at the expense of subjectivity, relationality, connection, empathy, and a shared inter-dependence

Ø an obsession with the tools, technology and the binary logic of the algorithm

that drives the current revolution

Ø the business model based on the principle of maximizing profits and minimizing costs

Ø the compulsion to equate the value of the human participation in the business model with units produced, time saved, and tension/conflict eliminated

Ø the separation of the “research and design” function into “costs” from the “profit centres” of revenue

Ø the scorched earth policy and practice of eliminating worker support systems like unions

Ø a deliberate process of weaponizing the language of business, politics, religion and ethics

Ø the ubiquity of social media constricting thought and feeling expression to the guttural verbal grunts/tweets/posts/ of the caveman

It is not a stretch to point out the link between the literal reductionisms of language, communication and the economic dynamic of the “bottom line” to the dramatic rise in psychic pain, loss of identity and alienation of large swaths of the North America population, on both side of the 49^th parallel. The fact that public discourse, including media vocabulary and perception, focuses on the sordid side of human misdemeanour and the statistics of how the economy is now and is projected to work, as well as strained attempts to draw comparisons of dynamics, personalities and outcomes from history with the objective “data points of now, leaves a gaping hole in the human appetite for new and imaginative ways of experiencing that shared “now”.

“Spin doctors” as a spiking growth industry, is just one of the many signs of a  growing dependence on “managing the minds and perceptions” of customers, clients, voters and even sadly, institutes of higher learning. Words, sadly, are being physically, emotionally and psychically abused, just as are the millions of species we have lost in the last three or four decades. Reducing the public vernacular to the “lipstick” and the “mascara” and the “special effects” of the literary/imaginal/theatrical/fantasy artists on whose imaginations we have depended for centuries, for some, may hint at a convergence of the world of art and politics. For others of us, we see both the political and the artistic being shaped and sold for “ratings,” electoral victory, the individual resume, and the preservation of a perfect public image. And at the heart of this theatrical “production” is a dominant, richly funded, co-dependent and narcissistic (and mostly masculine) edifice over which the public masses are losing, or have lost, influence and possibly even control.

While this horrific and seemingly uncontrolled steam-roller of the public debasement of words is drowning the public airwaves and filling the ‘cloud,’ at the same time, among another demographic, the sale of books, both of fiction and non-fiction, in hard copy and on line, rises. So it is not that language is dying out completely.

Some reading data might be useful, for our shared consideration here. (From bookriot)

·        According to “bookriot,” in 2017, in the U.S. people over 15 spent an average of 16.8 minutes a day reading (not including work or school), down from 22.8 minutes in 2005.

·        Women read more than men, 19.8 minutes per day compared to 13.2, with men’s reading time declining more quickly than that of women.

·        Those between 20 and 34 read the least (an average of 6.6 minutes per day, while those over 75 read an average of 51 minutes per day.

·        The Pew Research Center reports that in 2018, the richest adults are three times more likely to read than those with a household income under $30k.

·        College grads are five times more likely to pick up a book than high school grads.

·        The NOP World Culture Score Index rates India as the country with the most reading per person, at eleven hours per week, with Thailand a distant second.

·        Significant too, a study of K-12 student reading habits showed that six extra minutes of reading per day can turn a struggling reader into one who meets or surpasses their grade’s benchmark.

·        Students who read 15 minutes or more per day (about 46%) made accelerated reading gains.

·        Also, third grade students who are proficient in reading are almost five times more likely to graduate high school than their peers with below-basic reading skills.

·        Compared to primetime TV, children’s books expose kids to 50% more words than primetime TV, according to a paper from University of California, Berkeley.

·        A 2016 study showed book readers have a 20% reduction in risk of mortality, over 12 years compared to non-book readers

·        Adults who read for 30 minutes a week reported feeling 20% more satisfied with their lives according to a Quick Read study.

·        One study showed reading reduces stress by 68%, more so that listening to music, having a cup of tea or taking a walk.

Merely somewhat illustrative of some of the points above, the limited data supports the empirical impact of exposure, digestion, contemplation and sharing of words.

However, having spend a quarter of a century in classrooms dedicated to the “teaching” of English, I have noted a consistent, persistent and regrettable lack of enthusiasm, motivation, participation and engagement with the nuances and the images, the moods and the emotions of the words of novelists, both male and female, among male adolescents. Of course, needing to be factored into this non-scientific and purely anecdotal study, is the adolescent male public show of derision and disdain for anything that their female classmates consider significant, while they are universally drowning in the tidal wave of their own hormone growth  and development. The occasional male exception to this pattern often takes the form and voice of young men arguing, debating and disagreeing in the class discussion of whatever specific title is under review. In fact, some of the most invigorating discussions in my experience were led by young men whose intellectual scores soared, while their reading/writing scores remained near the bottom of the scale.

It may seem a stretch to extrapolate any conclusive and definitive observations about the link between the adolescent English classroom of small Ontario towns and the decline in both reading habits and linguistic patterns of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the Hillman observations about psychology’s detour into empirical, literal, binary evil/illness attributions and diagnoses and their parallel “remediative” therapeutic interventions, including an excessive dependence on pharmaceuticals and a spike in “talk” therapy, based on the tenets and approaches of C/B (Cognitive/Behavioural) in contemporary counselling services, we are witnessing a parallel and discouraging pathway into a kind of reduction of the premises underpinning the experience of millions of people needing psychological, emotional and social support. Band-aids of language, including body language and thinking strategies, as they are applied to an individual in the vortex of a culture which minimizes the fullness of the complexity, the subjectivity, the imagination and the uniqueness of each individual seem to be of limited effectiveness.

However, such policies and practices must comply with government’s budget constrictions on public expenditures for “medical services” in another of the multiple short-term, numbers-based (clients and dollars) approaches of a culture making short-sighted, minimal and public-relations-based decisions on behalf of the political class. At least in Ontario, all counselling covered by the health care system operates under the umbrella of a medical office, employing a corps of social workers, with the occasional psychiatrist for reference and for more profound and complex needs. Taking for granted the assumption of a transactional, cost-profit-driven model of reducing the human being to a medical case, a counselling case, a customer, the decision-makers rely on the silent compliance of the mass of people with their “thinking” and their assumptions. And the results, as James Hillman is determined to remind us, we have more therapy and are more ill at ease than ever.

I once asked a graduate of a school of finance to consider reading Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a short, pungent, poetic and masculine piece of fiction depicting an old man’s catch of a marlin off the Florida Keys, only to have its flesh removed by other fish, leaving only a mere carcass for him to beach, as his trophy to be witnessed and shared by the young boy in his life. Its masculinity jumps from both the plot, a highly challenging and even life-threatening adventure of the kind that fascinated Hemingway and the economic and even sparse language of both the descriptions of the scenes and the actions. My request came after a protracted deep and unwavering experience of the resolute, tightly-locked, repressed and denied volcano of emotions that were roiling in the soul of the young man. After three or four years of waiting, I have given up on waiting for and expecting any word that the Hemingway book had found or will find its way before that man’s eyes and soul.

Again, anecdotal, personal recounting of a single narrative of personal experience does not a “research study” comprise. However, it might be a glimmer of light into what appears to be a deep-seated cultural pattern (today we apparently call them memes) of the reliance by many males especially on the numerical details of the black and white of the balance sheet and the pursuit of its remaining in “black” as opposed to sliding into the “red.” Corroborating narratives of the examination of literal pieces of evidence, stripped of the complexities of context, (to reduce the argument to its bare essentials), in so many varied and seemingly disparate fields (medicine, law, accounting, ecclesial leadership, engineering, environmental diagnosis and preservation) seem to offer additional support for the thesis.

Another male acquaintance sends weekly gifts of poetry through the digital universe, in his life-giving, and life-sharing pursuit of a community of minds, hearts imaginations and otherwise silent partners in his life-long love of poetry. A retired pediatrician, this man, whom I know only by name and gift, has an obvious and deeply-held conviction that through the exposure to, and receptivity of, and  sharing of the complex and living “word” of our shared imaginations, is one pathway to the kind of “between” that Buber was imagining as the resting place of the deity, however it might be perceived or conceived.

Joseph Campbell writes these words in his Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God:

Animals area without speech, and one reason, surely, is their inability to play with sounds. They are without art—and the reason, again, is their inability to play with forms. Man’s capacity for play animates his urge to fashion images and organize forms in such a way as to create new stimuli for himself: sign stimuli, to which his nervous system may then react much in the way of an isomorph* to its releaser.

Campbell then quotes the British poet, A.E. Housman, on his triggering principle that is effective in the poetic impact:

Poetry seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with other, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite**: “A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.” Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keat’s last letters, where he says, speaking o f   Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation is the pit of my stomach. (A.E.Housman, The name and Nature of Poetry, (London Cambridge Press, and New York, The MacMillan Company, 1933, p. 144, as quoted by Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, the Masks of God, New York, Penguin Putnam, 1959, p.40-41

For additional exploration of poetry, for men, please refer to the worked edited by Robery Bly, James Hillman, and Mchael Meade, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.

*In the central nervous system of all animals there exist innate structures that are somehow counterparts of the proper environment of the species. The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler has termed these structures in the central nervous system “isomorphs.” The animal, directed by innate endowment, comes to terms with its natural environment not as a consequence of any long, slow learning through experience, through trial and error, but immediately and with the certainty of recognition. (Joseph Campbell, op. cit. p 35)

**Eliophaz is called a Temanite. He appears in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. Epiphaz appears mild and modest. In his first reply to Job’s complaints, he argues that those who are truly good are never entirely forsaken by Providence but that punishment may justly be inflicted for secret sins. (Wikipedia)

#4 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (anger)

Suggestions that men open up to our own vulnerability, weakness, uncertainty and also to the insights that can and will only come from those moments in our lives when we suffer any kind of objection, rejection, discipline, and ostracism will seem paradoxical to the millions still struggling with accommodation, integration, acceptance and the flow of that energy.

So much human energy is being spent in various initiatives designed to integrate individuals into their families, into their day-care, into their sports teams, in what is a broad-based social commitment to what in Canada the constitution calls, “the peace order and good government” of the nation. Each of these efforts, some of them experimental, others quite seasoned and traditional, merits the study and exploration by all policy writers in all organizations, especially among educators, law enforcement, the athletic coaching fraternity and all those engaged in the broad field of social work, psychology, psychiatry and even, or perhaps especially the clergy. Conforming to the expectations of others, starting with the first few months of life, it turns out, is a central theme of each individual’s existence.

Of course, the earliest experiences of a young boy with his family begin to imprint those “nurture” patterns on his perceptions. Instant attention to the most immediate irritation from the child is an almost hourly “demand” on the parent. And the decisions made in those early moments, like the angle of the tennis racket, simultaneously illustrate and foretell future responses that seem to be “successful” in quieting the child, or not. Holding, making determined eye contact, touching, the tone of voice, the time-lapse between the first cry and the parent’s response, the duration of that response, even the confidence of the parent to discern the child’s need and the length and depth of response are all factors that begin to set patterns that will carry over for decades.

Trust, reliability, security and safety, in the child’s terms, are almost exclusively within the purview of the parent of the young child. And while each child’s needs and sounds are unique, there is also a difference between the intensity of a male baby’s early irritation and then anger and that of his sister, unless there is a complicating illness, or symptom to be considered. Into this vortex of intimacy between parent and child, naturally and undoubtedly unconsciously, enters the whole history both of the parent and the culture of his/her family of origin. Loud and heavy-handed experiences, as perceived by the now parent, from his/her childhood will play a part in the predictably less loud and more moderate and modest interactions with the new baby.

Unless otherwise impeded by specifically diagnosed physical ailments, the new born will “warm” to the affections, soothings, smilings and nurturing of the parent’s arms, eyes, voice and attitude. The opposite is also predictable: parental irritability, impatience, harshness and general attitude can and will impact the child negatively. And, surprise, both boys and girls need such intimacy, perhaps even in inverse proportions to the social myth that “girls” are more fragile, more needy and more appreciative of warm nurturing. Research indicates, sadly, that many mothers look into the eyes of their young daughters more frequently and for longer periods than they do with their young boys. Dads too have a significant role to play in their chosen and respective interactions with both their boy and girl babies.

Parents, especially mothers, of young boys imprint signals about the female voice, image, character, expectations and trust-worthiness that will, like indelible ink, remain in the synapses, and in the “gut” of the young child for the rest of his life. For young boys, these early messages will inevitably inform their deeply buried “gestalt” of the opposite gender. And such a “gestalt” will shape their unconscious perceptions of each and every female the child encounters henceforth.* And, whether these early impressions are reinforced by future encounters with female teachers of a strident and perfectionistic anality, or hopefully with moderating, accepting and mentoring female teachers who, themselves, have minimal issues arising from their early experiences will help to shape the young boy’s relationships with women for a long time.

Of course, as the young boy grows, takes in other impressions from the wider world of child programming on some screen, and through interactions with peers, both male and female, he will evolve a kaleidoscope of impressions of how the world “works” and how he “fits” into it, or not. This point of interface between the individual child and the “world” of his family, his day care, his soccer or hockey team, and his classroom and playground is the point at which the racket of his person receives/accepts/interprets and then strikes the ball of the other in his personal tennis game. Not to reduce human experience to a tennis match, especially the competitive aspect of the game, (although that aspect seems to attend more human interactions every day), yet, the racket-ball concussion is an useful analogy for the physical, social, emotional and even intellectual encounters of one’s life.

We have, in essence, constructed a culture based on a skill set that determines whether each young boy (and girl) will thrive, will develop, will inculcate the values that will be necessary for additional growth and responsibility. And this skill set needs an original, unique and nurturing ethos in which to develop. Whether based on some athletic skill, or artistic skill, or a martial arts skill set, or some digitally-based or math-science skill set, through the discipline dedicated (and supported) to the attainment of a degree of proficiency, the child will come into contact with others who share his passion. Identity, unfortunately increasingly every day, seems dependent on the mastery of some skill set, both to satisfy and to gratify the needs of the parent, and then the mentor and teacher, the coach and eventually, with a potentially smooth glide-path into part-time employment, further education and permanent employment and family life. At least the social and educational systems seem to champion the skill-set achievements, although, there are signs that some early athletic activities are less focused on competition and winning/losing than on “having fun”…and not incidentally providing a safe place to meet, to greet, get to know both self and others, and to experience both acceptance and welcome, on one hand, and potential rejection and alienation on the other.

 James Hillman’s work in The Acorn Theory, as well as in his other works, shines a light on the biography as both integral and essential to an individual’s perception of himself and his place in his world. The biography necessarily includes and “integrates” all of the events, persons, achievements, failures, losses and the imagination of the person, including those signals of the special talents, metaphorically encapsulated in the person’s “acorn”. Whether the parents, or the teachers, or some peer or role model perceives, or signals the “special” quality of each individual, the capacity to grasp, and to honour this uniqueness lies at the heart of much of human identity, achievement and self-confidence.

If a child perceives, or even intuits that he is not wanted, not known, not engaged and especially if he feels ignored, immediate nervous system circuits “go off” that send messages inside his own head that “there is something wrong with this picture” even before he might be able to articulate these words. If he perceives that those close to him are struggling with their own “selves” at his expense, he quickly learns both where his place is in the current tumult and whether and where he might be able to have his own needs addressed. A naturally innate rebellion of some size and degree will accompany most adolescents, depending on the unique circumstances and his perception of the target of his irritation, sense of injustice, need to belong, need to be recognized, or even need to help. And the system of justice, education and health have traditionally tolerated this rebellious “acting out” unless and until it over-reached some legal, or civil boundary. The process of hormone development in adolescence, both its alacrity and intensity, is a norm with which western culture has done a fairly remarkable job of accommodating. However, if the process is impeded, restricted, thwarted or denied, there is no doubt it will erupt, probably destructively, later in the thwarted individual’s life.

While hardly prescriptive, the preceding outline of a young boy’s early life is prologue to opening the door of the explorer into the darkness of male anger, that seemingly radioactive explosion whose half-life is still unknown, unpredictable and too often unmanageable. Certainly not restricted to males between fifteen and twenty-five, male anger nevertheless is a “force of nature” with which angry men and the rest of the culture will continue to have to respond. Its roots can be as simple and obvious as racial bullying, gender bullying, physical oddity bullying, profound poverty, linguistic impoverishment, cultural ostracism. Less obvious, but potentially equally impactful, is the role of parental default, including absence, abuse, sexual abuse or even social media bullying for whatever real or imagined motivations or revenge.

Most, if not all, of the incidents of masculine anger, contempt, hatred, and the ensuring violence could, if we were patient, diligent, and more interested in prevention, as a culture, than in immediate, fear-based, so-called “deterrent” punishment (much of which is demonstrably NOT a deterrent), bed traced back into the early life experiences of the “guilty” individual. His fears, his self-loathing, his alienation, his impressions of his own identity and how it simply appears to him to be abhorrent to others in some way, or his belief/perception/conviction that others are, themselves, abhorrent to his view of how the world should be are likely to lie at the heart of his “nuclear” explosion. Case studies, for the purposes of the sentencing, while useful, are nevertheless, less detailed, less compassionate, less disclosive because of the secrecy of the individual and the time and cost of the recording biographer, will not comprise a full biography. Of course, in the most serious cases, the courts (for the culture) require a psychiatric assessment (For the purposes of these notes, the cases of the sociopath and psychopath and the most violent sexual offenders have to be considered “off limits” given the limited numbers and the highly complex issues they incarnate. More research could, potentially, include evidence and analysis and  that lead future cultures to prevent much of the anger and violence of even these individuals.)

The North American “obsession” for the “bullet” of conviction and incarceration of primarily young men, of primarily minority black, brown, indigenous young men, especially when compared with their “white” counterparts engaged in similar acts of lawlessness, illustrates a cultural contempt both for those young men and for the acts they have perpetrated on “our” dominant, colonial establishment culture of law enforcement. We have adopted a long-standing posture of “eliminating” the complexities we simply do not understand and do not care to become fully familiar with and to fully embrace. And we rationalize our complicity through such pathetic social and cultural placebo’s as “public safety” and “removing the threat and endangerment” of these terrible young men.

Regardless of the relative poverty or affluence of the North American family, and regardless of its racial components, its religious roots, or its ethnic identity, all families are living in a culture saturated with socially acceptable and fiscally and economically sustained and enhanced, as well as politically motivated establishment-induced-and-funded violence. Everywhere we all look, listen, overhear, read or seek entertainment, we are being fed a cultural menu and diet saturated, not only with cholesterol and sugar and salt that threaten our very longevity, but with open, blatant, unremitting and irredeemable violence. Whether in the guise of law enforcement, national security, corporate malfeasance, religious imperialism and colonialism (known in the religious business by its benign and highly moral and ethical name of “evangelism”, often deployed through the penetration of shame and guilt), the abuse of power saturates the contemporary neighbourhoods, streets, boardrooms, and political corridors and offices of the highest echelons of power. And young boys are watching, listening, learning to participate, whether vicariously or directly, in and through gangs, drug deals (to ameliorate their personal, social, psychic pain), video games, recruitment to various “cells” that are themselves dedicated to their personal and collective perceived victimization.

Here are a few of the current and highly seductive, if highly addicted to violence “cells” to which young men are being attracted, through methods, promises, fantasies and  propaganda on social media into the violence they perceive as their “answer” to their unique and desperate plight.

 INCEL: a cult of committed young men who rage at their rejection by women (often, perhaps always, precipitated by their incompetent, irrelevant and disrespectful methods of attempting to inaugurate conversation and the development of relationships with women), a recent example of a young “incel” recruit (involuntary celibate) who killed several and injured many more by driving his van along a pedestrian street in Toronto.

ISIS: recruits, yearning for an opportunity to become heroic “killers” empowered beyond their wildest fantasies of their own “power”….incarnated and transferred to an external, addictive and highly punitive and vindictive religious cult dedicated to what mainstream Muslims consider a perverted version and interpretation of their religion. Many recruits who have killed for ISIS in the Middle East, have now returned to their home countries, and are living incognito in their communities, threatening, as CBC reported recently, to rise up if we are not treated with respect here in our home country. So the seeds of the original motivation for their initial recruitment have been nurtured and grown in the hostility of the Islamic terrorist battlefields when they tasted the thrill of killing, and now, having returned “home” they offer the spectre of more violence if they are “provoked” by a community that neither understands nor accepts their recruitment, their violent, and adopted identity and history nor their unimpeded re-entry into civil society.

TALIBAN: allegedly restricted to the streets and the battlefields of Afghanistan, these terrorists threaten the stability of that country, the prospects of a free and fair election and the stability of any future government  that does not include their personnel and their demands. Dedicated to the restriction of, or prevention of the education of young girls and women, the imposition of sharia law, and the elimination of “western” influence and power, these outlaws, at least from the perspective of the west, threaten to deplete resources of NATO allies in the pursuit of an unachievable goal of peace and security in that land.

DRUG GANGS: those opportunistic young men who traffic in the trade and profit to be gained by the importation and sale of illicit drugs, feeding the insatiable appetite for those drugs among especially North American youth who themselves feel dispossessed, lost, alienated, abandoned and effectively trashed by the established education and social systems they have abandoned, willfully or involuntarily. Supporting their efforts, many of them now desperate and survival-based, are arsenals of guns, including assault weapons, themselves manufactured and sold by an industry that feeds both the underground market and the military sales of weaponry to American and Canadian “allies” like Saudi Arabia. These initiatives, on the surface included as an integral component of the GDP of both Canada and the U.S. and the source of both revenue and employment for honourable men and women, continue to provide the very instruments of both war and gang violence, all the while condemning the ravages of both and the human costs of the wounds and sacrifices in both theatres. And then there is the law enforcement aspect of these gangs, and the racism that comes driving into the encounters between police and young minority men…complete with fired bullets into fleeing bodies, and the impunity of acquittal of many of the offending officers. Inevitably, the trust and safety that are supposed to be incarnated in such law enforcement detachments, especially among the minority families and communities, atrophies before our collective eyes, as we all contemplate the impact on the futures of the other young boys living in those communities.

And, if these examples of violence are not enough, just turn on the television and watch the trailers for prominent dramas, saturated with their own violent scripts, shoot-outs, chases and violent seizures, ostensibly on behalf of a public alleged to be more “safe and secure” through the heroic efforts of these uninformed, or disguised officers of the law. And then insinuate the violent video games into the hands, eyes, ears and minds of millions of young boys, supported by their male parents, in an inexhaustible goal of “making young and strong young men” out of the offspring.

In Canada, a respected English department of a prominent university English Department offers a graduate course on the cultural implications, both positive and negative of the national sport of hockey, historically one of the most prominent and socially inculturated activities for young boys in every community in the nation. Should one opponent (the competition could be merely “friendly” as in shinny on a pond, or much more intense, with competitors vying for a spot on a highly advanced amateur team like the national team, or especially for a spot on an NHL team) commit an obviously premeditated act of violence on his competitor, that competitor, or his team-mates are expected to retaliate, as a matter of honour, in order to protect the respect he and his team deserve. Violence is considered an integral aspect of the game, and while the number and severity of violent attacks has been significantly reduced in recent years, whenever a fight breaks out, the crowd eagerly applauds, cheers and engages in the violence. The highest levels of women’s hockey, by comparison, is completely devoid of such violence, without compromising the skill, speed, and the entertainment value of the sport.

Young men, on reflection, face multiple complex influences when confronting their frustrations, and their rejections, and their ambitions…not the least of which is their resistance to the nuances and the usefulness of verbal and written language skills that come to them through film and through reading. Their universal consideration of experiences in the “literary” world as effeminate, by itself, constitutes one of the more glaring and blatant examples of the kind of blind, proud and self-sabotaging attitudes that continue to impale young men and boys on their own petard, not to mention the dangers and the threats such blind hubris, as a mask for profound insecurity, impose on the rest of society, especially their female partners.

Violence, anger and the accompanying actions are rarely an effective resolution for any conflict, and as soon as men come to that truth, openly and willingly, the better off they and we will be.