Male Initiation in America

Male Initiation in America

This is an updated version of a section from Chapter Five of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence.

Part One

A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free! – Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Western culture long ago lost its connection to the great spiritual mysteries and the mythic framework that gave a sense of meaning to life. Partially resulting from that process, the world is now reeling from the effects of over a century of constant warfare; up to 200 million people died violently in the 20th century.

Some claim that patriarchy is the source of our violent ways. But from the point of view of indigenous cultures, masculinity is not inherently violent. It is the natural aggression in young men that, when not properly channeled, turns anti-social. Patriarchy is the rule of uninitiated men.

From a tribal perspective, modernity lacks the traditional rituals of initiation. Boys do not become mature men automatically; something in them must confront a symbolic death. According to Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, boys were guided through three stages. The first was separation from the community. The second was liminality, that ambiguous and terrifying period when old identities were torn away and, wrote Mathew Arnold, the initiates were “…wandering between two worlds; one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Here they learned sacred knowledge of the tribe and a sense of what they were meant to be was recognized. In the third stage, re-incorporation, the community welcomed and celebrated those youth who had completed the trials, those persons who had died as boys and been reborn as men. This process replicated the universal stages of the Hero’s Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell.

In our culture, we retain patterns of socializing young people, but little more. Our substitutes for initiation teach the values of competition, materialism, and individualism – within the heritage of militarism and Puritanical unease with the physical body. Most of our rituals, then, are reaffirmations of the status quo. Our rites of passage merely note very mild transitions into the consumer lifestyle, rather than marking any meaningful change. “Because our culture denies the craving,” writes Michael Ventura, “we can’t possibly meet the need – so most of us never truly grow up or feel, in our heart, adult.”

Consider two other aspects of traditional initiation of which modernity is ignorant. First, most indigenous cultures were polytheistic. They were open to the idea that we have been here before, and that we reincarnate to re-learn what we once knew and have forgotten. In the Dagara language of West Africa, as Malidoma Somé taught, the word for initiation translates as “remembering”.

Second, writes Francis Weller,

In the indigenous context, initiation was never meant for the individual. It had nothing to do with personal growth or self-improvement. It was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater community into which the initiate was brought and to which they now hold allegiance. They were being made ready to step into their place of maintaining the vitality and well-being of the village, the clan, the watershed, the ancestors and spirit. It was never about them, but about the continuum of generations to come...

Boys learn their gender roles very early. Psychologist Carol Gilligan observed that boys at around the age of five begin to mute their emotional expression. “The sacrifice of relationship is the ritual of initiation into patriarchy.” Girls, she notes, go through a similar process later, at twelve or thirteen. But both lose a degree of relational capacity, or “voice,” in a “process of initiation that is akin to trauma.” And each boy learns, through a hundred subtle lessons in which he is pitted against others, that competition is the culture’s primary value.

The media offer us endless examples of people embodying the struggle to survive as the fittest. In this context, consider Project Runway, Survivor Dancing with the Stars, Chopped and countless other reality shows that invert the original meaning of competition (to petition the gods together) in favor of the exclusive celebration of one winner/hero. They are the opposite of initiation rituals. We recall that traditional ritual elders encouraged all participants to complete the initiation, to help them endure its trials. The TV “elders” emphasize the slow, tension-filled process of winnowing out the losers. This ritual humiliation is evidently popular among TV viewers. Chopped emphasizes this even further, the title punning on both a cooking motion and elimination of the loser.

American initiations are class-based. Middle-class white youth experience a conventional series of events intended to mark their passage, such as birthday parties, graduations, Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. These ceremonies are confirmative rather than transformative; they mark the social standing of a family as much as the new identities of the participants. “The traditional wedding”, writes sociologist Ronald Grimes, “is as much a product of marketing as it is of religion...A new family experiences itself as real to the extent that it can afford to enact the ceremonies that advertising has taught us to fantasize”.

The churches have retained the rite of baptism in its various forms, all of which are rooted in the ancient rituals of purification and initiation into community. But modern rites of passage offer no sense of risk – the potential loss and restructuring of identity. Thus, it is rare for a young person to feel (and be treated as) fundamentally different, let alone transformed, after having been baptized or Bar Mitzvahed.

And because we live in a secular and tolerant society, most of our ceremonies of transition lack another factor that is necessary for radical change to occur – irreversibility. Psychologist Luigi Zoja points out that one reason for the recent decline of the religious vocation is the very possibility of breaking one’s vows and leaving the priesthood:

…the reversibility of the vocational choice deprives it of its radically transformative character, complete with the death of the old personality, necessary for the satisfaction of our need for deep psychic rebirth…A similar consideration could be applied to marriage…”

If we know that we can change our mind and return to our old ways, it is not an initiation.

Part Two

Whoever isn’t busy being born is busy dying. – Bob Dylan

Some college fraternities have retained classical, if superficial, ritual forms. Ultimately, though, writes Ray Raphael, they “allow a youth to retain his childish ways while simultaneously laying claim to a more manly status.” The rituals of societies such as Yale’s “Skull and Bones” are usually quite successful in their goals of cementing life-long political unions. They offer upper-class young men confirmation of a sense of entitlement – and, regretfully, into a sense of group identity that excludes the vast majority of their own social class, let alone normal citizens.

Noam Chomsky insists that in democratic societies it is highly educated people who are in fact the most highly indoctrinated. In America, as opposed to authoritarian nations,

…you don’t get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can’t do it…A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

Then come academic and professional tests based upon competition. But doctoral and licensing exams function to incorporate only the chosen few. The issue of merit is crucial to an understanding of American social initiation. Tribal societies value the contributions of all their young men; initiations are communal, and for the most part mandatory. Though the dangers are real, all the young men are encouraged to complete the transition. By contrast, in America, one of the primary functions of academic and professional initiations is to choose who will succeed, and who will not. It’s simple economics. Cui bono (follow the money): raising the demand and reducing the supply, the gatekeepers raise the price of those within the pale. Dean Baker asks “why do america’s doctors make twice as much as those of other wealthy countries?...When economists like me look at medicine in America – whether we lean left or right politically – we see something that looks an awful lot like a cartel.”

With competition as our most fundamental value, we are forced into definitions of both success and masculinity that can only be understood in terms of the relative failures of others. Acquiring money and consumer goods, rather than the achievement of wisdom or service to his community, become the marks of the successful man. And the inability to acquire wealth (or – in America – at least independence) results in guilt, shame – and rage. It creates a population of self-defined losers who are excluded from the initiatory group. In 2004, long before the depression of 2008 and Covid, the population of such “disconnected” young Americans (18 to 34-year old males who were not working, were not in school and lacked a degree beyond high school) was nearly four million.

But they are not to blame. Most of them know intuitively that modern culture provides neither a community of elders nor safe containers for them to risk real transformation. Instead, many find themselves attracted to hate groups, which accept them solely based on their race and gender but offer them a continuing sense of both belonging and of privilege. But since all “pseudo-rituals” – including substance abuse – are inherently unsatisfying, providing neither the real transformation nor the acknowledgement that all young people long for, they must be repeated endlessly.

Many young men, mostly from the middle class, attempt to create their own initiations by intentionally approaching or creating the symbolic brush with death that real initiation provides. They may climb mountains, ride motorcycles, participate in “extreme” sports or go on solo vision quests in the desert. Such experiences have the undeniable potential of validating one’s sense of ability. They may provide the exhilarating sense of having passed through danger.

But this brush with literal death lacks a symbolic component; it occurs outside of a ritual container; and it has no social or spiritual context. One may experience momentary authenticity and potency; but without being welcomed back into the village as a transformed person, one receives little lasting nourishment. And the longing for this acknowledgement is so intense that one returns to the experience over and over, as with substance abuse, hoping to get something it cannot provide. This too is the essence of addiction.

Working class men experience another traditional form of what I call pseudo-initiation: the military. Boot-camp instructors know the essential principles of initiation. Former officer Gwynne Dyer observes that basic training works with three common adolescent components: “…a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolutely desperate desire to fit in.”

The process breaks down a recruit’s sense of individuality and replaces it with loyalty to the group. Philip Caputo wrote that by the third week of basic training, young men had learned to obey orders instantly, without thinking: “Each platoon had been transformed from a group of individuals to one thing: a machine of which we were merely parts.”

The military (and the police) are among the few institutions in America that are highly ritualized, and this is a major attraction in our secular society. The destruction of an individual ego by the “elders” and its replacement with membership in something that mimics a closed initiatory group does thrust the young man into a form of liminal space. Within that space, the training does present obstacles to be overcome that can evoke the trials of the traditional Hero’s Journey. Trainers, however, typically assign those obstacles the stereotyped, desensitized and racialized characteristics of the enemy. This process literalizes what otherwise might have symbolized the transformation of a person’s inner demons.

As former officer Dave Grossman writes, “The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy”. By contrast, Richard Heckler identifies the young warrior’s deeper desire:

We aspire to be defeated in battle by powers so much greater than ourself, that the defeat itself will have made us larger than when we arrived. We long for the encounter that will ultimately empower us with dignity and honor”.

But military empires have no interest in the emergence of the soldier’s sense of individual purpose, despite the invitation to “be all you can be.” Indoctrination into the cult of the warrior is a particularly cruel parody of the real thing. For psychologist Robert Moore, these ceremonies “initiate the boy into a kind of masculinity that is skewed, stunted, and false. It is a patriarchal ‘manhood,’” initiation into the culture of death, of killing – or dying – rather than living for the world. “Que viva la morte!” cried the Spanish Fascists.

The irony is that a form of death is precisely what the young men are unconsciously looking for – the symbolic death of their own childhood. Undeniably, the experience of combat will strip away a young person’s sense of innocence. He may return home wiser or more cynical about his own darkness – or that of his nation – but in this third phase of the hero’s journey, he brings no gift back to his community. And, despite a few well-publicized events, most are never welcomed back, because their very presence reminds the nation of its imperial complicity. A loss of innocence by itself rarely brings new social or spiritual status, only depression.

There is a paradox centering on the issue of choice. Tribal people gave boys almost no choice at all; often the adults dragged them abruptly out of their innocent lives among the women with no warning and thrust them, terrified, into prolonged initiatory ordeals. But in our ceremonies of social confirmation, the higher the class, the more choice one has, since there is no question either of real danger or of transformation. Modern, pluralistic society gives people the option to fail, or to not even make the attempt. But this freedom of choice ensures the weakness of our ceremonies.

Then there are those who truly have little choice – lower class youth, many of whom take advantage of the very few opportunities to channel their energy and their inherent longing for initiation into drugs, violence, suicide (suicide is certainly not limited to poor populations) and youth gangs. Gangs meet many of their initiatory needs, including protection, significant relationships, intense experience, identification of the “other” (other gangs), discipline, allegiance to a cause or leader, visible group identification through clothing, even ritual scarification (tattoos).

And gangs provide another factor that helps to constellate the archetype of initiation in young men: the sense of irreversibility, in the dire consequences of leaving the group. But with no overarching mythical container, and no true elders to guide them through the brush with symbolic death and to teach them a cosmology that places their suffering into context, they create rituals of death, not of life.

We could think of American youth gangs as emerging from the older, ethnically-organized criminal groups (see An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America by George De Stefano), that brought their certain initiation rites from Europe. Members of these violent fraternities understood intuitively that, just as in the military, their younger recruits had to be given new identities, qualified by their actions and character, vouchsafed by a sponsor, in elaborate initiation ceremonies. As in the indigenous traditions of which this is a poor substitute, aspirant are tested and accepted into a secret clan of superior men. Curiously, the phrase “made man” is in the passive tense. Has he made himself, or has he been made by others? Regardless, writes the novelist Don DeLillo, in Underworld:

Once you’re a made man, you don’t need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself. You’re all there. You’ve made. You’re handsome. You’re a sturdy Roman wall.

In this context, it’s worth asking, what’s the difference between a frat and a gang? While drawing from very different populations, they have similar traditions. As Ibram X. Kendi writes, “they’re both blamed for predisposing their members to violent acts, but they’ve sparked radically different public-policy responses”.

The teaching tools for both are violence, misogyny, substance abuse and unreasoning loyalty to the clan. But while prep-school boys will be welcomed into the ranks of WASP leadership, inner-city can only expect to develop a ritual relation to the “spirits” in the bottle. In this context, drug addiction and alcoholism can be an unconscious search for initiatory rebirth. What is missing, according to Zoja, is the ability to assume responsibility for one’s own destiny. “It is in the world of drugs that the theme of death is continually activated.” The addict may live in “a kind of tormenting ambivalence, in a daily compromise between the need for radical and definitive change and the…escape route of his daily habit.” Addiction inverts the initiatory process, bringing a temporary “rebirth” without the symbolic death of an immature state of the personality. Too often, it is literal death that follows. In Michael Meade’s words, such attempts at self-initiation become:

…miscarriages of meaning, tragic acts or empty forms…seen with an eye for initiation and mystery, addictions are rites of substitution…that can’t quite create a breakthrough. The ritual keeps repeating the same alchemical mistake and moves toward actual death when real change was the desire ...unlike the conscious efforts of rites of passage, the sacrifice doesn’t work; a spiritual home in the heart of the tribe is not found…Without a ritual to contain and inform the wounds of life, pain and suffering increase, yet meaningful change doesn’t occur.

Drug use and gang membership lead inevitably to another pseudo-initiation: prison, an environment that is a twisted yet powerful manifestation of sacred space. A prison cell, like a monk’s chamber, is the ultimate ritual container. Many inner-city youths know this and perceive prison as precisely the place for their rites of passage to occur. For most, the possibility of incarceration remains a deterrent. However, writes poet and former gang member Luis Rodriguez, “…for those who see incarceration as directly tied to their cultural identity, whatever fear exists is reduced.” But the prison environment can turn young men, imprisoned initially on non-violent offenses, into warriors in service to a corrupt cause, the culture of death.

Part Three

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. – W. B. Yeats

The closer we look at socialization into the class system, the more important becomes an unbiased view of mandatory (that is to say, forced) public education. The facts, as reported by former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, are startling. He asks, “Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure that not one of them (American children) ever really grows up?” The system, modeled on that of the militaristic Prussian state, was established by 1910. Since then, several generations of children have endured a process that was quite deliberately created, in the words of H. L. Menken, “…to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

The result of over a century of public schooling, says Gatto, is “not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers.” It encourages children to “… not think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing.”

Or, to rephrase this process in archetypal terms, education in America utterly reverses the age-old tradition of drawing out of a young person a conscious awareness of his or her own unique gifts and purpose. Instead, it assigns them a number in the production / consumption system. It has reached its logical but predictable conclusion in standardized testing. The system functions with the explicit intention of killing hope and converting it into docility and narcissism.

Leaving aside questions of class, historian James Robertson gives us another example of how our transitions reflect our American emphasis on radical individualism (as opposed to individuality). Most Americans, sooner or later, feel a compulsion to leave home that may not be shared by young people in most other cultures.

Initiation into adult life does not take place within the family, and it does not mark acceptance into a stable order in a fixed community. Rather, the rite of passage into adult life is a “declaration of independence”, accompanied very often by physical departure from both family and community…The ritual American act of courage is the declaration of independence-rebellion-migration of the American adolescent.

He writes that one of our few significant rites of passage becomes the test for a driver’s license. But there is no symbolic death of the “boy”, except in the gang initiations, car accidents and football injuries that adolescents create for themselves in their search for some meaningful transition out of childhood.

What are the broader consequences of this condition? Let me make a deliberately provocative assertion: In modern culture, an uninitiated male – that is, almost every single man – will, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, literally or symbolically, attempt to kill someone. He may personally engage in violence, usually upon people he knows and loves. More commonly, he will passively condone violence – whether fictionalized in the media or perpetrated by agents of the state upon the darker skinned Others of the world. Alternatively, he will turn his violence inward: in addiction, suicidal behavior or the depression that has reached epidemic proportions.

Boys are not alone in their unconscious attempts at initiation. While girls may not hurl themselves headlong toward death, they may unwisely create life too soon in early pregnancies. They may also fall into depression, addiction, and/or abusive relationships. For both, the results are unpleasant at best, disastrous at worst.

Part Four

Every increase in knowledge is an increase in sorrow. – Traditional

It should be no surprise, then, that so many American men experience the trauma known as the midlife crisis. Psychologist Murray Stein’s book In Midlife notes the striking similarities between the traditional pattern of initiation and that of the mid-life transition. It often begins in a tragedy such as severe injury, job loss or especially, divorce. A man enters the separation period of moodiness, regrets about the past and obsession with death. Next comes liminality, with its diminished sense of identity and the re-emergence of issues that had lain dormant during his heroic early adulthood. Most men pass through these stages to the next phase – re-integration – soon, and without significant change. Some, however, remain in liminality for years, more or less by choice, and emerge fundamentally altered, determined to live with new awareness and purpose. They understand their liminal condition as a “permanent dimension or depth of the psyche, a ‘layer’ that threads through all time and occupies a space in every period of life.”

One of Carl Jung’s most fundamental contributions was his idea that nature intends the second half of life to be a period in which we become aware of matters not meant to be addressed earlier. For him, it was normal and appropriate for a man to turn inward, emphasize his “inferior function” (usually his emotional life), and give serious attention, perhaps for the first time, to religion and to the fact of death.

But Jung (and Freud before him) dealt almost exclusively with affluent Europeans. And for a hundred years, they would experience their guided transitions only inside the private therapeutic chamber, not as part of a ritual community that might welcome and bless them.

The author Sam Keen told of sage advice he received during his own midlife crisis:

There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is “Where am I going?” and the second is “Who will go with me?” If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.

Seen from an indigenous perspective, however, midlife may well be only a modern construct that tribal people with intact ritual traditions at appropriate ages simply never had to endure. They experienced two halves of life: childhood and adulthood. For them, “midlife” occurred in the brief years of physical maturation, exactly the years we refer to as adolescence.

So midlife crises occur in the lives of modern men precisely because they rarely have the opportunity for initiation during adolescence, and this is why the three-phase structures of both transitions are so similar. The mysterious beauty of this comparison is that nature seems to bring forth spontaneously in middle-aged men what pagan people deliberately provoked in their youths.

But for the vast majority who are not even aware of nature’s challenge, consumer culture has provided something else – the invitation to remain forever young. From Peter Pan to Woody Allen to Michael Jackson’s “Neverland” Ranch, the media have given us images of boys who won’t grow up – as well as celebrities who never seem to age. In the 1980’s, with obviously face-lifted and hair-dyed Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the White House, the nation heard a new comic cliché: Dahrling, you look mah-velous! The joke, of course, was on all of us, as Americans had begun a crash program of cosmetic surgery. Journalist Joan Ryan observed that three of the most popular TV shows of the 1990’s – Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City – were about “adults who can’t quite escape from adolescence.” The mythic literature tells us about ourselves, and we snicker anxiously, as we did at Bill Clinton’s frat-house antics, and now at the manchild Trumpus and his “MAGA makeup” fans.

But to Paul Shepard, Americans celebrate childhood innocence because their own childhood did not serve its purpose. It is “to grieve for our own maturity, not because maturity is synonymous with childhood, but because then it was still possible to move, epigenetically, toward maturity.” One of the costs of this clinging to childhood in the modern world is alienation, that sense that we have lost a true animating spark – and if we have, then so has the natural world. Thus, generations of young men fall into the trap of projecting their own need for rebirth onto the world itself; and they mistakenly set out to literally destroy it – or themselves – rather than to “die” into adulthood.

Modernity has created a population of tens of millions of unrooted, uninitiated men and elevated that condition to one of relatively high status, thus inverting in less than a century one of the oldest of all social relationships. Old people (whom we formerly called elders) no longer have the status in they once had; rather than turning to them for spiritual and ritual guidance, we segregate them into the ghettoes of nursing homes and gated communities because their very existence reminds us of that demon, old age. Perceiving themselves as useless, the elderly, especially recently retired men, often decline rapidly toward life’s final initiation into death.

Or they may resent the young out of envy and thus engage in the oldest of patriarchal myths, the killing of the children. For more on this theme, see my essay, “The Greatest Generation”.

Traditional societies, by contrast, have always ritualized this last phase of life as a final initiation into the world of the ancestors and spirits, as one more rebirth into another state of being.

It is precisely this – rebirth – that young men are crying out for in their outrageous and risky behavior. They long to have their natures transformed to be able to serve a meaningful cause. And a quality of rebirth is what they could provide for their communities if we were to create – or remember – meaningful initiation rituals for them. Kim Rosen writes:

In Impossible Darkness

Do you know how the caterpillar turns?

Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon?

You liquify. There in the thick black

of your self-spun womb,

void as the moon before waxing, you melt

(as Christ did for three days in the tomb)

conceiving in impossible darkness

the sheer inevitability of wings.