Living the Answer Blog

Throughout the ancient hunter societies… and throughout the hunter-gatherer societies that followed them, and the subsequent agricultural and craft societies, fathers and sons worked and lived together. As late as 1900 in the United States about ninety percent of fathers were engaged in agriculture. In all these societies the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year.

When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich… developed a metaphor: a hole appears in the son’s psyche…

We know of rare cases in which the father takes sons or daughters into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building, and those efforts at teaching do reap some of the rewards of teaching in craft cultures. But in most families today, the sons and daughters receive, when the father returns home at six, only his disposition, or his temperament, which is usually irritable and remote… Fathers in earlier times could often break through their own humanly inadequate temperaments by teaching rope-making, fishing, posthole digging, grain cutting, drumming, harness making, animal care, even singing and storytelling. That teaching sweetened the effect of the temperament…

[T]he father as a living force in the home disappeared when those forces demanding industry sent him on various railroads out of his various villages… When a father now sits down at the table, he seems weak and insignificant and we all sense that fathers no longer fill as large a space in the room as nineteenth-century fathers did.

Robert Bly argues in Iron John that the diminishment of the father’s role in family life is destructive to both daughters and sons, but particularly to the son. With his principal image of manliness reduced to a half-stranger whose regular appearances every evening do little to impact the real life of the family, the son is left with terrible deficiency: “How does he imagine his own life as a man?”

Bly suggests this absence leads to two different types of men. The first “fall into a fearful hopelessness, having fully accepted the generic, diminished idea of father. ‘I am the son of defective male material, and I’ll probably be the same as he is.’” The second type become what Bly calls “ascenders,” striving with a hint of mania to redeem a maleness they do not really know. “The ascensionist son is flying away from the father, not towards him. The son, by ascending into the light, rising higher on the corporate ladder and achieving enlightenment, to some extent redeems the father’s name… Society without the father produces these birdlike men, so intense, so charming, so open to addiction, so sincere, as those great bays of the Hellespont produced the cranes Homer noticed that flew in millions toward the sun.”

What can be done to try to cure this father-deficiency? Well, first we must understand the problem, which goes well beyond mere lack of time spent with the father. After all, throughout history fathers have been busy, off hunting, or farming, or in the shop. So while the quantity of time spent with the father is certainly important, more important are the qualities of the father which are on display during that time.

In the modern family, the competencies of the father are almost entirely centered in a workplace that remains utterly opaque to his children. His experiences, his skills, his struggles, failures, and victories, and the respect of his associates are all hidden from his family.

A few weeks ago, while spending the night at my father’s house I could not help overhearing him leading a conference call in the next room. As I half-listened to him confidently directing colleagues on the other side of the globe, I was struck by the fact that my father is, in fact, quite good at what he does. It’s not that I hadn’t known that before, but the intensity with which I realized it while actually listening to him conduct business – something I’d never done before – was actually quite startling.

Instead of observing their father’s competencies, children are usually treated to a view of him at his most limited, treading more-or-less awkwardly in a realm in which the mother is the expert. (Generalizing to the family structure which remains most common in America, of course.) She knows where things are, what must be done, and how to do it, and, through no fault of her own, quite outshines the father in her command of most domestic situations. The man who might be capable of programming supercomputers, commanding battalions of soldiers, or performing lifesaving operations is reduced to hollering, “Honey, do I need to cover this dish when I put it in the microwave?”

A part of the solution to this deficiency can be found in introducing children to their father’s work, taking them, in Bly’s words, “into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building.” The difficulty, of course, is that many jobs just don’t lend themselves to observation, particularly by children with limited attention spans. Today, I could appreciate my father’s teleconference, but try to sit me down to listen to a lengthy meeting or analyze a spreadsheet back when I was ten, and I probably would have called Social Services. With the exception of a fortunate few, the average worker today faces a similar dilemma. What child would be excited to learn about C++ functions or the intricacies of actuarial calculation?

That being said, the typical office worker should not assume his children would not benefit from some exposure to his work. Seeing where Daddy works and observing the respect of coworkers is not insignificant for a young boy or girl. However, today’s worker usually needs to do more than simply exposing his children to his working environment. This is one of the reasons why I believe it is so valuable for men to cultivate handyman or outdoor skills.

The man who can change his car’s oil, fix a leaky faucet, put up a shed, skin a deer, or gentle a horse has a precious opportunity to display the competence and confidence that his children, and particularly his sons, have such a deep need to experience. There are other venues for displaying ability, of course: through the arts, or community leadership, or technological prowess for example. However, few things can beat simple manual skill to interest and impress children of all ages. (I still chuckle at the memory of two small children standing wide-eyed and on tip-toes next to the bathtub in a friend’s house while I simply changed a showerhead.) Anyone who has observed a little boy trailing along after his father, plastic tools in hand and ready to “help,” knows that herein lies a powerful avenue to a child’s psyche.

Whatever avenue one chooses – and it should be unique to each man and his interests, family, and work – the structure of the modern world means that today’s “hidden” fathers must put extra thought and extra effort into allowing their children to experience a maleness they can respect, appreciate, and, in the case of sons, emulate.

Rereading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy recently, I was struck by the essential distinction he draws between the balanced, moderate Aristotelian idea of virtue and that of Christianity. Discussing “the paradoxes of Christianity,” Chesterton writes,

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency…

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little… But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem with Paganism tried to solve; that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way…

Paganism declared that virtue was in balance; Christianity declared it was in conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.

The tempered, moderate virtue of the Greeks ends up respectable but lifeless.  Seeking, for example, the virtuous balance between pride and abasement, the Greek “would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air.” “This is a manly and rational position,” Chesterton agrees, but, “Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full color.”

This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass… Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.

In contrast, Christianity manages to save both. “In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners… Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.”

Chesterton argues that this paradoxical wedding of extremes goes to the heart of Christianity; a religion which promises, after all, that “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it,” and founded upon the Christ, who “was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”

In fact, this principle characterizes Christian ethics. Take, for example, man’s relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, a wondering joy, alternately exuberant and hushed, at the beauty of creation; on the other, a gritty hatred for the evil and wrong intermingled with the good. Or Augustine’s Just War theory, which holds that violence can be right and good… so long as it is motivated by love of our neighbor.

And what of romantic love? Commenting on Christ’s command to “hate” one’s own wife (Luke 14:26), C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him… To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil.” And yet, this submission to a higher love in no way diminishes the love that Scripture anticipates between man and wife. After all, they are told to love one another “as Christ loved the church;” an overwhelming idea even when considered only in light of his sacrifice on her behalf, which is itself a mere expression of the inexplicable delight which led prophets from Isaiah to John of Patmos to speak of Christ “rejoicing” in his bride. And of course, the vast majority of scriptural discussion of marriage takes the form, not of commands or propositions, but of a book of love poetry considered so inflammatory by colonial Americans that their youth were not allowed to read it until they reached adulthood!

Why does all of this matter? Two reasons. First, there is the obvious fact that a better understanding of our God and our faith is always valuable. Secondly, a renewed attention to that element within Christianity “of emphasis and even frenzy… the collision of passions” which Chesterton notes might serve as a corrective to the tendency within comfortable American Christianity to be exceptional largely for our dullness. This is not to suggest an artificial fanning of passion, but rather a simple recognition that, contra the intuitive, classical view, virtue is not necessarily found in moderation, in a Goldilocksian “not too hot and not too cold;” that the faith which Dorothy Sayers called “the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man” has not lost the spirit of the Creator who decided to stage a play, and spun a universe from nothing to serve as the set.