Settle down, you kids! says Robert Bly -- in his own childish way
By LAURA MILLER
Illustration by
Katherine Streeter
with his 1990 bestseller "Iron John," Robert Bly proved that
there's a huge market for the daffy ruminations of an avuncular
white-haired poet with a penchant for fairy tales and ethnic vests. He succeeded by
targeting one of the zeitgeist's major soft spots: the
confused state of contemporary masculinity. Bly's intervening years leading
men's movement seminars, lectures and woodland pow-wows, however, haven't
firmed up our sense of what a man's gotta do. Instead, what they've done is
soften Bly's head.
Like "Iron John," Bly's new book "The Sibling Society" shows a few
glinting strands of truth woven through the general fuzz of its fabric.
Yes, we could certainly use a high, wide and handsome concept of
masculinity that doesn't center around gunplay and stoicism. And yes, as
Bly maintains in "The Sibling Society," "We are now living in a culture run
by half-adults. . . we are losing our ability to mature." But when the
prophet who delivers this pronouncement seems as guilty as any of the rest
of us, what's a nation of adolescents to do? Reading "The Sibling Society"
is like getting an anti-drug lecture from a teacher with a bong on his desk.
According to Bly, in our "sibling society" (a culture that's
centered in the West, but spreading to the developing world), adults want
to remain kids and kids have no place to look for models of grown-up
behavior. The unmistakable signs of our lingering teenage mentality
include: insistence on immediate gratification, knee-jerk rebellion, global
cynicism, fetishizing of youth, transitory and shallow relationships,
rampant individualism, inability to see beneath surfaces, rejection of
tradition and valuing popularity above all else. Because the participants
in this mindset see the world as "flat" -- made up of people all more or
less at the same level as themselves and no one particularly deserving of
authority -- Bly calls them "siblings," with all the implications of envy,
bickering and pitched competition that come with that word.
As Bly perceptively observes, sibling rivalry leads to a compulsive
desire to deface the very idols we hunger to believe in: "Every detail of a
president's life is used to discredit him. President Clinton has his
faults, but no other American president has been put in the stocks so soon
and left there so long." Our greatest failure -- the inability to parent
our children -- derives from our carping conviction that there's no such
thing as a legitimate hierarchy and our unwillingness to assume the
difficult responsibilities of adulthood. It's so much easier to sprawl
around in the family room, fighting over the remote and griping about a Mom
and Dad who, in actuality, no longer exist.
Of course, pointing out the prevailing decay in any society is
relatively easy. One might say that the difficult, mature work of figuring
how to fix it -- or even a credible description of how we got this way --
is missing from Bly's book. The solution he advocates, echoing the
prescription for male anomie in "Iron John," "requires elders, ritual, and
initiation." The source of the trouble, as he gingerly limns it, is the
breakdown of the simple, time-honored structure of the family, in which the
father was the unquestioned leader.
Feminists vehemently nailed Bly for blaming them for the crisis in
masculinity described in "Iron John." This time out, he takes pains to
cover his hindquarters from similar attacks by noting that girls as well as
boys face the daunting path to adulthood with virtually no guidance and
plenty of encouragement to remain immature. The true perpetrator of this
dire state of affairs, however, remains foggy and obscure -- like practically
everything else in "The Sibling Society" besides the central complaint. And
who really believes that adopting a package of ceremonies unrooted in felt
tradition or faith is going to salve our angst?
Although Bly shows a dawning awareness that the atomizing pressures
of advanced commodity capitalism -- rather than ideologies like feminism
and Marxism -- might be the driving force behind these social changes,
he can't quite let go of his old theories. Even more disappointing is his
unappetizing depiction of the adulthood he advocates; "renunciation" is his
operative word. That sounds like a spoiled child's idea of discipline; an
adult might be more inclined to see that the rewards of commitment and
patience are deeper and far more satisfying than the instantaneous
gratification of impulse.
The dissonance increases as Bly turns up his crotchety, uninformed,
blanket disapproval of all popular culture, echoing curmudgeons from time
immemorial and dissipating the impact of his more trenchant observations.
He detects le deluge in TV, computers, deconstructionism, fast food,
multiculturalism, Madonna, the avant-garde poet John Ashbery, disco, rap,
"Forrest Gump," "Twin Peaks" and Cristo art projects. He ludicrously
describes grunge rock, action movies and body piercing as "humorless," and
frets about the "heavy beat" that characterizes "the sort of music that
children hear much of." Awww, Pops; lay off, will ya?
Bly prescribes a renewed respect for authority, and by presuming to
diagnose our illness, seems to be presenting himself a worthy avatar. But
"The Sibling Society" does not inspire confidence. Here is a book that
seems not so much written as transcribed: a rambling, often incoherent
diatribe full of sloppy writing and faulty research, non-sequiturs and
half-baked analogies. Surely no one even read the manuscript through before
it saw type, so glaring are the errors in many cases: lists with repeated
words, flat-out self-contradictions and missing transitions.
Bly's reliance on fairy tale and myth, often at the expense of
old-fashioned clarity -- a technique kept under stricter control in "Iron
John" -- blossoms into full loopiness in "The Sibling Society." Here is a
passage from the chapter on Jack and the Beanstalk: "Despite the controls
that the church fathers laboriously laid out in their various councils to
intensify the codes, and despite the various ideas of order that we make up
in solitary rooms, we had better know, once we reach the top of the
beanstalk, where the Giant's cookie jar is, and we had better climb in.
Then, from inside the cookie jar, we can sing a little; 'Irene, goodnight.'"
No mention of a cookie jar occurs in his version of the fairy tale, and as for Irene. . .
well, your guess as to who she might stand for is as good as mine.
Similarly, the beginning of the book's epilogue can be summarized
as follows: (1) a paragraph describing Bly's "lightheartedness,"
inexplicably brought on by a t-shirt from a drug recovery program reading "Do
you feel like we do?"; (2) a paragraph complaining
about bank voice mail and
tellers who call him by his first name; (3) a paragraph asserting that the teller
is thus dissing Bly's ancestors; (4) a paragraph beginning with the cryptic
sentence: "But as I began to realize the extent and implications of the
sibling society, my lightheartedness went away, and some weight, as of
economics, settled in." Huh?
Writing is hard work, requiring the "discipline, inventiveness,
persistence, reading abilities and reasoning abilities" that Bly bemoans as
absent from our slipshod society. Furthermore, the act of buying and
reading a book is a great gesture of faith and good will on the part of the
reader, an indication of a readiness to engage with the author, to entertain
and consider his ideas at length and in depth. Surely it deserves to meet
with more respect than is shown in "The Sibling Society." And surely, the
very minimum requirement of an adult is that he pursue his chosen vocation
with care and diligence.
One gets the impression that Bly has spent too much time gassing on
to followers who sit rapt at his feet, eager for every word and willing to
swallow his bizarre, free-associative utterances without question. In
short, he has been indulged and expects that to continue. Like daddies have since the world began, he urges, "Do as I say, not as I do," and asks to be
vested with a reverence he has not earned. If the message of "The Sibling
Society" is that everyone should just grow up, then Bly should first
remember that maturity begins at home.
![[The Cranberries' preachy CD leaves sour aftertaste]](cranlink960506.gif)
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