Culture and the Crisis of Young Men
After over twenty years in education, there is not a lot about our schools that still surprises me. But even I was taken aback when I learned not long ago about the phenomenon of a “room clear,” and its increasing prevalence in American classrooms. This occurs when a student’s outburst in class becomes so violent and destructive that the other students must be “cleared” from the room for their own safety. Because no physical intervention is permitted on the part of school faculty and staff, the troubled student is typically left to rampage through the classroom at will; pictures of the aftermath of these events often resemble the effects of some sort of natural disaster.
I can say with certainty that no such phenomenon ever occurred when I was a student in school, nor even in the early portion of my career as an educator. The fact that these events are now fairly common points to emotional and psychological trends among young people that are mounting to crisis levels. If we were a serious country, this is all we would be talking about; the spectacle of watching an entire generation of our children lose their mental bearings before our eyes would consume us with urgent horror.
Rather than bemoan this indifference at length, let me call attention to one obvious, though meaningful, aspect of the “room clear” phenomenon. As far as I can tell, in almost all of the cases, the student on whose behalf the room clear is initiated is a boy. Perhaps the reader assumed this already; it is hardly surprising to discover young boys more prone to physical aggression than their female counterparts. But there is something extraordinarily significant about this fact nonetheless.
One of the most common laments about boys these days is that they have become weak and effeminate. Childhoods filled with video games, high fructose corn syrup, and the relentless ministrations of helicopter mothers have left the typical suburban boy a soft, hapless, unambitious mush of torpor and unreliability. Studies have repeatedly verified a decline in average testosterone levels among young men, a phenomenon that unquestionably points to an impingement in the development of manhood. Repeated ideological screeds against “toxic masculinity,” and the recent fad for dressing young boys as girls, and pretending that they are such, only seem to confirm our sense that the virility and assertiveness customarily associated with manhood are becoming almost obsolete in our society.
It is impossible to deny this phenomenon, or to avoid the sensations of dread it induces in us when we do acknowledge it. But it must be pointed out that this phenomenon is unfolding alongside another one, which is the increasingly mindless violence and aggression to which many other young men are subject. The boy whose behavior initiates the room clear is obviously not deficient in assertiveness; what we see in his case is a blind rage that has no proper channel. It is the same blind rage that drives the ungodly amount of bloodshed soaking America’s inner-cities, almost all of it perpetrated by young men, often still in their teens. Because this violence is an urban phenomenon, it does not fully register with the wider public, but that violence is a real fact about young men in America today and must be factored into any assessment we make about their present character.
Yet even in the ‘burbs, there is plenty of evidence that rage and aggression have consumed the minds of a disturbingly large portion of America’s young men. The all-too-common spectacle of school shootings is only the most obvious manifestation of this trend. What is far less often acknowledged is the constant, low-level violence and abuse that is a common feature of life in those same schools, even in some of the most affluent areas of the country. I heard a mother tell a story once about how her son went to the bathroom just before getting on the bus in the morning, and then as soon as he got off the bus in the afternoon, because he was too afraid to use the bathroom at his high school during the course of the school day, so frequent were the assaults that took place there. When the riots broke out a couple of years ago, most of them unfolded in urban neighborhoods, but it was quite common to see children of comfortable suburban families participating and egging on the violence. These anecdotes alone suffice to demonstrate that a taste for unconscionable destruction is not restricted to young men living in the inner city.
So in fact, when we assess the state of young men in America, we are confronted with an apparent contradiction: extreme passiveness beside extreme aggression; an absence of assertiveness and a wantonness of violence; a deficit of the customary masculine traits alongside their destructive excess. Of course, one obvious explanation of this discrepancy is that in fact these tendencies are two sides of the same disfigured coin, that the constant suppression of healthy masculine instincts in young men eventually occasions their eruption in unhealthy ways. Too many attempts to make the young boy like pink and play with dolls drive him to tear apart his classroom and his society. There is much to this, and I have no doubt that in many particular cases, something like this psychological dynamic is unfolding. But I doubt that in most cases, this is what is going on. I doubt that we can adequately explain the excesses and deficiencies of aggression we can now observe in young men, on the scale that we now observe them, as the frustration or exhaustion of their opposite. Individual human natures do not usually encompass such enormous disparities, and to assume this level of complexity in the character of an entire generation is just far-fetched.
What we are left to confront is a perplexing divergence among America’s young men between those prone to excesses of rage and those subject to deficiencies of assertiveness - a social contortion and privation of manhood. An etiology of this state of affairs that points to a single cause for such disparate phenomena would seem entirely chimerical; nonetheless, I think there is a single cause for this state of affairs, and I think it is quite obvious.
A culture inheres in the collective effort of a people to hold an ideal of human flourishing in their attention, and to conform their individual and collective characters, along with their rites, their customs, their labor, and their artwork, to the standards derived from this ideal. So defined, it is the most evident thing in the world that in America, at the present day, there is not a culture. There is social organization, there is politics, there is media and entertainment, but there is nothing at all resembling the sort of communal edification that alone deserves the name of culture. What we are witnessing is what happens when you raise an entire generation of young men without a culture.
Through stories, through legends and heroes, a culture presents perfected images of the human person for the emulation of its adherents. The importance of this aspect of culture for the proper development of young people cannot be overstated. Through this influence of culture, the shy or withdrawn young man discovers patterns of proper self-assertiveness, the expansive young man patterns of restraint and composure. Through the rituals, customs, and forms of discipline which culture invites young men to participate in, the various extremes towards which their native personalities incline are modified and corrected, and a kind of noble medium of comportment is cultivated. Culture provides a kind of center, rectifying our various defects through its preservation of a vision of perfected human nature.
Take away the influence of culture throughout the formative years of a generation of young men, and the result will be exactly what we are witnessing: an exacerbation of all the worst tendencies in their individual characters, whether those tendencies incline towards an immoderation of the masculine traits, or towards their deficit. Thus we see a prevalence of young men randomly assaulting the elderly in public places at the same time we see a prevalence of young men preferring to dress like girls. Because there is no cultural center exerting its centripetal force upon the character of these young men, their personalities spin off centrifugally into whatever idiosyncratic extremity their own nature impels them towards.
What we call Western culture was, among other things, one prolonged struggle to maintain the very moral equilibrium that young men in our day and age lack. This is especially evident in the forms of education which grew out of that culture – the very forms which classical educators are at pains of recovering. The reading fare provided to young men had a decided bias towards the heroic. Hector, Aeneas, Alexander the Great: these were the figures presented to their burgeoning minds for their emulation. The physical, frankly martial, exercises that typically made up one aspect of the schooling young aristocratic men received was implemented to instill hardiness and daring in students. So a considerable portion of the education these students received was designed to cultivate their capacities for courage, for ambition, for self-respect – the whole suite of masculine virtues. At the same time, the ubiquitous influence of religion and the rigors of discipline, not to mention a long course of study designed to nourish the reflective capacities, ensured that whatever modes of behavior emanated from a boy’s mere self-assertion received their proper corrective, so that no excesses would be countenanced in the pursuit of those virtues. Balance and composure were everything, and in the repeatedly formulated notion of the completed man – the “Renaissance man” or the “man for all seasons” or “man thinking” – Western civilization returned again and again to this conception of a manhood that achieves a kind of dynamic balance between a destructive aggression and a servile passivity.
The Greeks, in particular, were clearly preoccupied with the need to get this balance right. In their respective reflections on education, Plato frets that the Lydian mode of music will render young men too effeminate, while Aristotle admonishes an undue emphasis on “gymnastic” – which would have encompassed military exercises – at the expense of the training of the intellect. Pericles made it a point of pride among his countrymen that the Athenians did actually manage to pull off something like this moral balance as a national trait, celebrating the Athenians’ love for beauty even while extolling their military successes. In the person of figures like Sophocles, like Xenophon, and, of course, like Socrates, we can see that the Greeks’ pursuit of the ideal of completed manhood could enable the realization of something quite close to complete men.
Beyond the ancient world, this drive towards fostering the masculine virtues in their proper measure remained a central impetus of culture. What we call chivalry was, in its essence, an attempt to nourish the martial, assertive characteristics of a man while chastening whatever destructive tendencies might be latent in those characteristics. Chaucer’s Knight, who, having vanquished enemies on crusading battlefields across half the known world, yet bears himself “meekly as a maid” on pilgrimage, is only one very famous exemplar of the medium between humility and aggression that culture once placed before the eyes of aspirant young men. The ideal of chivalry outlasted the Middle Ages, and the order of knights, by many centuries, and left a lasting impression on Western civilization; in figures as distant as Sir Philip Sidney or Horatio Nelson, we can trace its vestigial influence, and in the notion of the gentleman – the man made gentle – we can discern its latter-day embodiment.
The recovery of culture presently underway, which has found its home in the classical schooling movement, must take up this ideal of balanced manhood once again. There is no greater need in our present age than such an ideal. The crisis afflicting America’s young men is apparent to everyone, and the nostrums prescribed thus far for its remedy have not been fundamental enough to be effective. Only by encountering a compelling cultural narrative, and learning to associate the stories of their own lives with its overarching story, will young men in the present age be able to discover the center lying at the heart of their own being.