For Armando Williams
As this last week has tumbled on by it had occurred to me that my planned series of essays on ancient tribalism is in need of a modern context. Therefore every second Friday will be devoted to using the ancient world as illuminated in the previous tribal masculinity essay as, what Barbara Tuchman described in her book by the same name, ‘A Distant Mirror.’ In this pursuit every attempt will be made to reference the real world of men and youth that I, as a coach, laborer, father and grandfather, encounter in day-to-day life. This tag is essentially serving to build another book, all of which will remain available on this site, with the finished work also being collected in a print edition on its conclusion, most likely in the summer of 2015. Reader comments shall be included in the print edition.
Deshawn and the Wanderer
Yesterday was the last snow storm of the season and I was in no hurry to miss the solitude. The best thing about weather events is that only the worthwhile people emerge from their dens. The bus drivers working are working doubles because the slackers called out, so I thank each one of them for driving.
At 2:28 p.m. I arrive on the corner of Hillsway and Deanwood in eight inches of snow to catch the #19 down into Hamilton. At 2:37 a large, light-skinned African American—but predominantly Caucasian—walks out of the neighborhood, looks to me, looks to the snow, and then asks, “Excuse me sir, are the buses running?”
“They were at ten when I came through here. As long as the drivers have not knocked off at the end of the shift—which starts in a few hours—the downtown buses will be running. The cross town buses are probably done. The fifty-five that I took through here at nine is probably dead for the day.”
He checks his phone and declares, “It is two-forty-one. The phone says the bus will be through at two-thirty-nine.”
“Oh, it rarely makes that time in good weather. We’re looking at maybe three, three-ten.”
He looks at my clothes and beard and says, “Are you a wanderer?” which was a nice way of asking if I was homeless.
“Oh, I was just here visiting a friend down the way—shoveling her out.”
It is obvious that this youth is curious about men, about what they do out in the world. I run into this a lot. I run into this more and more. Ten-twenty years ago most young black men saw me as an enemy, were generally belligerent. Now, they mostly seem to be wandering about in a daze staring into the depths of their cell phone, alone rather than packed up and looking for trouble. As in most things masculine, blacks seem to be one step behind whites in the process of emasculation.
Twenty years ago the typical white boy was wandering alone with his thoughts, alienated from the world which had no place for him, while the typical black boy was packed up and waging war on the world that was supposedly his enemy. Now, the white boys huddle in their mother’s den playing at simulated lives while the black boys walk the streets largely alone and staring vacantly at their handheld device or wonderingly around. I still run into the occasional packs, mostly in the worst areas, but they are specialized, not the norm. Over the past two years I have had many young black men approach me on stops like this, asking for advice, information, guidance, even for protection in a few cases. They are quick becoming as sissified as the whites, making them effectively white and vulnerable to the remaining feral hoodrats.
I immediately become interested in this kid, but must not initiative conversation. He is most likely fatherless and boys like him are routinely marked and approached by charming adult men and then scammed, robbed or manipulated. Besides, race yet divided us in my mind, as I know black adults do not trust white men with their children unless they are a sports coach or employer. I have even had women, seeing me on the bus with gear, ask for my number so that they could arrange for me to coach their son. While white women see sports as a threat to their rising mangina titty baby, black women at least understand that sports are a viable route to manhood.
“Are you headed into work?” he asks.
“Headed home actually. I work midnight—went in in all that warm rain last night; did not think this [snow] was going to happen.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Supermarkets—have worked in grocery stores since I was a teenager like you.”
“Where do you work?”
“Middle River; way out on the #55, then you walk north-east a mile and a half.”
“What is the work like?”
As I answer like I did to so many job applicants when I used to hire for a food market, I notice that he shows all of the signs of being sick to death of school; of the seemingly pointless emasculatory progress of our education system. I have seen this first hand with my sons. If you do not know of what I suggest then read Jack Donovan’s No Man’s Land, a free e-book available through his website.
“What is the pay like?”
“Not good, not anymore.”
“Is that all you do, work in supermarkets?”
[I do not mention I’m a writer as this intimidates people and they usually clam up.]
“I coach boxing up at the martial arts school in Towson.”
“Where is it?”
“Loch Raven and Joppa.”
“I heard there was a boxing team in the area but didn’t know where.”
“Oh, I only have one boxer—I mostly coach stick-fighting. The team is Mister Frank’s Loch Raven Boxing right up here at the Rec Center, although I heard it’s closing, but don’t know when.”
“The building above the football field?”
“Yes, go in and ask for Mister Frank or Alex—used to be ranked third in the nation at one-seventy-four.”
“What do you think my size is?”
“Six-three mid twos.”
“Two thirty-four,” he smiled.
“My name is Deshawn,” he said as he extended his hand.
“James, nice to meet you Deshawn.”
“James, do you think I could box?”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen, and I don’t really know what boxing is about. I play football and basketball—was headed to a game today but they are not responding, so I think I would be the only one to show up on the field.”
“Your shoulders are wide, arms long, hips wide enough to wrestle or do MMA. There’s no reason why you can’t box if you can stand the boredom, the work, and getting punched in the face.”
“What is it like. Do I get punched right away? How do I learn?”
“We discourage you, then bore you, then work you, then beat you. But when you get ready for the beating part we don’t want you getting hurt so we go slow. At Loch Raven first time in the ring they probably just have you throw punches at their pro middleweight while he picks them off, works his defense, and talks to you. Eventually he’ll start touching you, then tapping you, and then hitting you light. Sparring is work, not competition. We don’t put you in with a new guy.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you knuckle heads would go at it, wouldn’t learn a thing, and would develop bad habits. We need to put you in there with a dude that could protect himself from you, and protect you from you. I couldn’t do it. You’d get to me and then I’d have to fight instead of work with you and one of us would get hurt.”
“That sounds okay. I’d like to try it. What about the stick fighting?”
We then had the same type of tutorial on that manly art and he thanked me, “I’m glad I met you Mister James. I think you will see me. For now, I’m headed back home.”
[At some point I asked him if young guys still played ‘smear the queer’ and he smiled, not having heard of the game. After I explained to him he said, “We call that toss and tackle.”]
As we shook hands I reminded him, “Mister Frank or Alex at six, weekdays at the Rec Center, or me at lunch time on Saturday and Sunday at the karate school.”
He smiled genuinely, saluted, and then walked back into the neighborhood, becoming another reason why I like bad weather, because it’s when the good people come out.
Masculine Erosion
This conversation recalled the five readers who have mentioned to me over the course of the last weeks since the publication of Point Of The Family Spear that they had few or no uncles to learn from as boys and youths. Come to think of it, my sons only have two uncles and they live out of state. This is a common dearth in our culture. Having pulled up the outline of the aspects of masculine culture from ancient Hellas the following points of erosion may be noted. Below is a masculine culture check list from ancient Hellas from Of Lions and Men #1, with current notes to the right, for the 7 most immediate masculinity markers.
1. Paternal: The father was one of the three legs of Hellenic masculine culture. In current Western society the father is generally absent in low income families and culturally emasculated, or absent due to work away from the home, in affluent and middle class settings.
2. Sacral: To the extent that there is a sacral aspect to mainstream Western culture it is found in Christianity, the core value of which is, and has always been, passivity in the material sphere, with the consequent modern moral and legal injunctions against physical defense of the self, and the absolute taboo of physical aggression.
3. Agonistic: Toil, suffering through combat training, and masculine physical expressions in sports are only valued in postmodern America when engaged in for profit and celebrity or be females.
4. Tribal: The various feral forms of tribalism extant today tend toward criminal gangs that are primarily using a tribal structure as a replacement for the family, as opposed to the ancient practice of the family being the building block of the tribe. On the other end of the spectrum we have macro-tribalism in the form of racism, or the belief in racial constants in ability and morality that place all agency in the hands of the vast genetic bank rather than with the individual or traditional-sized group. I shall expand on this point in Arуan gods, Latin kings and Nubian princes.
5. Community: In postmodern times ‘the community’ has become a stifling construct rather than a field of expression, exemplified by leftist orthodoxy and political correctness.
6. Enemy: The lethal opponent, the menace that made the man, that gave man his purpose, is no longer permitted. The man and the man’s immediate associates are not permitted an enemy. Only the largest polities—nations—may have enemies. For an individual man to even claim to have an enemy is taboo.
7. Truth: Truth is of no value to the modern person. Its search by the warrior is over. Everything is proscribed, prescribed and priced as in a flea market of defunct ideologies. The masculine mind that ventures into realms apart from the temporal quest for goods and comforts is taboo.
Such are my reflections on last week’s essay in regards to the youth and men I encounter on a daily basis and the ailing society in which I encounter them.
Ok...At 66' and thoroughly fed up with what is becoming the norm in today's society, it is scary to finally read someone who thinks so closely to me. I will be a frequent reader of you now.
Welcome to the site Phillip.
We stare down into the abyss together, wherever you are.
Try the tag view window in the contents box to see if any of those series appear of interest. And congrats on making it to '66!
Thanks for the support.
Your "6. Enemy" is interesting to me, because of Rene Girard's notion in "Violence and the Sacred" of war between men within the community being a dangerous thing, solved in ancient times by the whole community turning on a scapegoat.
Is the whole point of religion and culture to define the enemy in a more rational way than in the instinctive rage of competitive men?
I notice that, in modern secular religion, the enemy is defined by dividing society into the oppressed, the oppressors, and the champions of the oppressed.
Thoughtful comment Christopher.
Religion is fundamentally the hijacking of the transcendent for the good of the material and the yoking of the individual to the temporal order.
Now that I've been strung up, burned, stoned, or whatever in a number of religious minds, I would like to stress that I am not an atheist and don't necessarily see religion as a negative. I like that you brought up the scapegoat, as establishment of the scapegoat was usually a religious function, where now it is a media function, which begs the question, is not the media our priesthood today?
The concept of enemy here is extra-tribal. Keeping the focus on the Hellenic perspective one sees that any man who killed—killed anyone—was taboo. The closer the slain was [culturally and genetically] to the killer the stronger the sanction. Competitors at the sacred agons had to swear an oath that they had not killed outside of sanctioned acts of war, which—very importantly from our perspective—would be accompanied by PTSD 'treatment' in the form of sacred rites. The Indo-European tradition had a notion of the taboo hand associated with drawing blood that was bound up in the psychological construct that was boxing. Boxers were regarded as taking part in a kind of dark angelic dance. Boxers—and thus all members of a given Hellenic community or those gathered for sacred PanHellenic rites—where not the enemies of one another, but civil rivals or sacred opponents. Theogenes was fined and stripped of his victory for spiting Euthymus as if he were an enemy when they boxed at the Olympics.
Lethal violence within the community was universally prohibited, though it did occur, with a small number of athletes implicated in such crimes, namely one Timocreon. This became a problem as Hellenic society gave way to the Hellenistic Age [a kind of ancient 'modern age'], and sacred combatants [equivalent to modern MMA champions] hired themselves out as goons to petty tyrants and politicians. These men were called 'parasites.'
The gravity of the modern reflection that I, as an American, may not have an enemy has two expressions:
If my son is being held by Columbian drug dealers I cannot go to Columbia and get him myself as that is the prevue of the state and the state alone. This notion would seem quite odd to most pre-modern people. If he were being held by the Columbian state and I managed to hire Sly Stallone and Jason Statham to break him out, I would be committing a crime against the United States and Columbia. In the modern world the State—all states—are brother deities, sacred organisms that we mortals may not challenge.
Also, I am expected to treat every one of 300 million Americans as my sacred tribal brother even if they are of a different culture, race, religion, ideology, etc., and even if they attempt to harm, capture or kill my son or I. In our denatured world only the policeman and the soldier is permitted the exercise of the ancient male duty to protect, and they do so as a micromanaged gear in a great engine, far more likely to be discarded or even punished for doing this now specialized duty, than they are to be revered. We still live in a tribal society. But culturecide, globalism, and liberalism has now made us the nominal brothers of people who would be aliens or enemies in any human scale society. In national terms the only thing that remains of the tribe is the coercive apparatus turned inward.
There are still meaningful tribal entities lingering or reemerging, which is a subject for another piece.
Competitive rage is a philosophical idea often entertained by thinkers and dismissed by fighters.
Achilles is a good study of rage, which was not a normative part of primitive warfare, which was more like hunting, replete with sacral elements. The rage comes in with Achilles because he is obsolete and represents champion style honor-based warfare that is being superseded by the emerging larger scale acquisition-based war championed and represented by Agamemnon. Since antiquity scholars have discussed combat as rage based, and Ares—the most reviled God—was seen as a 'raging' personification of madness. Part of this had to do with the fact that most Hellenes were amateur warriors who needed to get drunk and chant and scream to get up the courage for battle. The Spartans—as professional warriors—killed silently, to the music of flutes. I choose the Hellenes for this study partially because they already knew themselves to be somewhat denatured on a poetic level, even as their thinkers tried to imagine a new kind of community man. I would prefer not to get too caught up in what a handful of severe genius's were imagining in their ancient think tanks, but rather the lifeway of the men that made their easy lives possible.
I am in agreement with your final note on the role of modern religion in managing class distinctions, which reminds one of the 1926 film Metropolis. Establishing and managing class distinctions among the people was perhaps the first duty of many organized religions. We might recall that originally state and church were one in the same.
Thanks for checking in Christopher
I like this article.