Great piece, as always, Sam. Two questions for you: one, besides formalized initiation rituals (sports, military, or otherwise), how do you think we can build this reckoning with hardship back into our lives? I think about this a lot, with two young kids who are growing up in a world increasingly different from the one I grew up in. And two, what do you think makes some people respond “yes, yes, yes!” to these rituals, and others, “no, no, no!”? For me, your response is a litmus test on whether or not we’ll get along.
Lou, it is a crucial question. Digging into what is lost in the ritual is step one. I focused on the loss because I do not think our society will ever reach critical mass to actually do something about it without knowing the "why". My guess is that military and sport are where old schools rituals still apply. But neither are sustainable, nor are they widely applicable enough, nor are people going to have any interest in them. Given this, my sense is that young people will find their rituals elsewhere - gangs, extremist ideology, etcetera. It is the Wild West. I have some idea what a true community based system can look like since I know people who are building small ritual processes around the country and banding together to replace what has been lost. At some point I would like to write about it. Hopefully when that time comes, that can serve as an answer to your question. For your second question, I wonder the same. I am not sure I would understand someone who shouts "no" at rituals that teach a sense of belonging/purpose/usefulness/mastery/awe. Despite thinking a lot about it, it seems to come down to an intangible for me, like some question that my subconscious asks the other person - do you want to experience life fully or not before your time is up? Do you want colors more vivid, taste more vibrant, gratitude more intense, community tighter, or not? The ritual that simulates death is the ritual that reveals the value of life. I believe it is literally the unapologetic desire to soak up every second on earth that makes the difference between the "yes" and "no" crowd. Not surprisingly, the "yes" crowd seems to be those who have had close calls with death, deal with death often, or are hardcore introspectors. Just my thoughts, but these are epic questions.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Clearly the ritual void is one that needs to be filled — since those alternatives are not any I’d like my son (or my daughter, for that matter!) getting into. Good motivation to try and formalize something within our own family.
And yes, I think that intangible is something you either have or you don’t: I don’t think it can be taught. But I do think it can be cultivated — that spark is probably innate, evolved with us over the hundreds of thousands of years of genetic evolution. It just takes a willingness to embrace hardship once and an environment which supports it. Unfortunately, that’s something which seems to be rarer and rarer these days (see question one). All the more reason to build it ourselves.
I think your intuition is spot on. It is up to families for now. At some point, the small groups doing this around the country will, I hope, expand. The question then becomes if it does grow to a national scale, does it soften? Does it get forbidden? Does it still achieve the tight, communal, meaningful nature of the pre-state rituals when it has been corporatized? It is up to us and our communities, and the pendulum may very well force us to figure this out in our lifetimes.
(And just to clarify — when I say “your response,” I mean any person’s response and whether or not I’ll get along with that particular person — not you, personally!)
In our world where virtually everything is made too easy, I'm reminded again of "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times".
Suffering has power. Willingly suffering and choosing to stay with it and overcome it rather than fleeing before it changes you. It's not about masochism but the subversion of reality into something of worth. There 's an aspect of the performative in the latest craze for ice baths and cold showers, but it hints that something is missing from the modern world. When comfort is so all encompassing that me must find aspirational discomfort on tik tok and instagram videos, something may have gone off track.
I can’t help but wonder as I am reading your essay that your training rituals as a seal, had the same purpose. The scenes from watching Mossad training came to mind. For all of us mortals, we have no such physical and mental rituals. Each of us will eventually be faced with a moment of truth. Until then, each of us adopts some kind of tools to remove anxiety, i.e., think, meditate, work, exercise, etc.
I completely agree Barry, and even those who go through rituals still commit themselves to thinking, meditating, work, exercise. My feeling is that no matter how intense the ritual, the benefit is perishable. It must be kept up. This is one of the reasons why I do not think a ritual like the Mandan one is required, and that we can short circuit the entire thing with the exact points you brought up.
In the formative years of my teaching career (yes 2-5) I cut my teacher’s teeth, and built the foundation of my teaching ethic, approach, and style at a “therapeutic” boarding program. Along the way I also developed and implemented multiple English/Language Arts courses. However, central to this time was being a program “passenger” through the process students engaged in: working on a wood corral, “teaching” on a farm, and immersing in the 7 ritual experiences central to the 30-month curriculum. Each of the rituals was an exercise in deprivation giving way to revelations of self-understanding. Over time, the 24 hour experience grew to 72, then 120. In all instances it was the letting go of all the outside “stuff” that allowed for growth.
Fast forward to the latter years of my career, working within more “traditional” settings but with similar students, it became increasingly evident that parental, institutional and societal efforts to protect kids were redirected from where necessary (abusers, poverty, chemicals, etc) to creating bridges over the very struggles teaching us how to persevere.
I always felt we were letting kids down by not building into our rearing and teaching ritual frameworks such as the one at that boarding program.
This is a well nuanced position: "it became increasingly evident that parental, institutional and societal efforts to protect kids were redirected from where necessary (abusers, poverty, chemicals, etc) to creating bridges over the very struggles teaching us how to persevere."
I believe this is the root of the problem. It may have started out with noble intentions, but it is turning into destructive ends. You offer us a great path forward. I look forward to seeing a resurgence of programs like this.
There are a lot of rituals that get to this point without going to that extreme and we've lost them all. Even the rigors of military training have been reduced to make it more accessible. Ranger School was close and you can see it's imprint on people forever.
I ordered his book and still haven't gotten to it. I look forward to digging into it. If he was talking about rituals like this, he was onto something.
He wrote two books, other than his poetry. Iron John is one and The Sibling Society is the other. Both are good. Iron John triggered a short-lived "men's movement" which was derided, and mocked relentlessly and then finally ruined by the insincere "Promise Keepers." For a while, it seemed it might work out, but Bly himself was too pagan and too leftist to see who he should embrace. We are living now with that failure, a failure Bly predicted.
Lucca, for my part, I think it is up to the individual for the time being. Nature does not dictate our rituals anymore; tribe no longer dictates them; and government probably should not dictate them. Families need to do it, and at some point, maybe we will build communities that can institute their own rituals. This will be a long evolution, but my hunch is that it will happen no matter what, whether we do it now voluntarily or later when we are forced.
I think we have to seek them out in other societies that still have them. A good example would be in Oaxaca, Mexico, a place I highly recommend visiting.
And learn them from other sources--e..g from living in China and Taiwan in part, I learned a lot about tea and began sharing it with other people over time--now I've spent thousands of hours drinking tea as a daily ritual--I see it connected to other rituals and practices I've formed along similar wavelengths--meditation, martial art, buddhism, taoism.
It's more of a life path rather than a consumeristic attitude towards "taking" it. It helps that I grew up and lives in major urban areas in CA, with large Asian populations and access to culture, so the bridge towards going deeper in that directly always felt pretty natural to me, even though obviously, most people don't do that.
It's more of a life path rather than a consumeristic attitude towards "taking" it. It helps that I grew up and lives in major urban areas in CA, with large Asian populations and access to culture, so the bridge towards going deeper in that directly always felt pretty natural to me, even though obviously, most people don't do that.
From my experience raising three kids in a suburban world, sports was a good start. My son started wrestling in middle school and played football in high school. My kids always knew that academics came first. so they wouldn’t be seeking athletic scholarships to college and we never got into travel teams etc.
But sports teach, from a young age, that you don’t need to stop when things get hard, that you need to sacrifice for the greater good, and that food tastes so much better when you’ve worked hard.
These same lessons could come from farm work, I would imagine.
This is great, John. I agree with you - there are many ways to gain the value of rituals. Sports are excellent. Farm work, too, is the one that I got the most value out of when I was young. We have the option to gain the best of both worlds.
My shoulder blades were twitching quite a bit as I was reading this Sam—sitting in my comfy chair with my coffee and my luxury problems. Death could be around the corner or around the world. My only recognition of it would likely be after the fact. Once again your visceral writing brings me a perspective that I can honor and appreciate—but have no experience with. Such is our detachment.
I believe the beauty of these rituals is that once we understand their value, they are not actually needed. We can find the same meaning elsewhere. But knowing what we are and how we came to be this was is half the fun for my part.
“Death is no longer a cause for dread but an old friend; a giver of perspective; it is at first a rest from a maxed-out ritual, and in the end a rest from a maxed-out life.” I’ve almost died twice, once after many hours of great pain, another time almost painlessly. There’s no question that coming close to death creates great perspective on the rest of life’s challenges.
The coming of age rituals of the Plains Indians were next-level (the Sioux were brutal, too). The question is, what happens when you combine this level of willingness to face reality with a high culture? Classical Age Greeks? Renaissance Europeans?
This is a brilliant point on both accounts. My gut is that we will find that balance - similar to Athens - once again because we will have to. But not necessarily like the brutal rituals of the Plains. What that is will look like I think we are starting to have some idea, but, regardless, I do believe we need to expedite it.
I’ll bet your right, Sam. BTW I don’t know if you’ve ever studied the physiology of crucifixion but it’s really, truly agonizing. As I was reflecting further on your essay I wondered what you might think about the fact the Catholic Church especially, but also the various Protestant and Orthodox Churches have made the crucified Jesus the core emblem of their message for two thousand years. It seems to me to possibly be the very type of empirical reality-check for which you’re calling in your essay. Another cause for the increasingly self-delusional detachment from reality that is so widespread might well be the crisis of faith that has almost completely overcome the most advanced societies and nation states.
Chris, you are doubling down on the extremely perceptive points. I had not thought about the crucifixion in this way, but it almost seems as if it is a form of catharsis. By deeply contemplating the suffering on the cross, we are able to psychologically experience to some extent the actual event and death as if we ourselves are undergoing an ancient ritual. I'm looking forward to chewing on this one. Thank you.
Great piece, as always, Sam. Two questions for you: one, besides formalized initiation rituals (sports, military, or otherwise), how do you think we can build this reckoning with hardship back into our lives? I think about this a lot, with two young kids who are growing up in a world increasingly different from the one I grew up in. And two, what do you think makes some people respond “yes, yes, yes!” to these rituals, and others, “no, no, no!”? For me, your response is a litmus test on whether or not we’ll get along.
Lou, it is a crucial question. Digging into what is lost in the ritual is step one. I focused on the loss because I do not think our society will ever reach critical mass to actually do something about it without knowing the "why". My guess is that military and sport are where old schools rituals still apply. But neither are sustainable, nor are they widely applicable enough, nor are people going to have any interest in them. Given this, my sense is that young people will find their rituals elsewhere - gangs, extremist ideology, etcetera. It is the Wild West. I have some idea what a true community based system can look like since I know people who are building small ritual processes around the country and banding together to replace what has been lost. At some point I would like to write about it. Hopefully when that time comes, that can serve as an answer to your question. For your second question, I wonder the same. I am not sure I would understand someone who shouts "no" at rituals that teach a sense of belonging/purpose/usefulness/mastery/awe. Despite thinking a lot about it, it seems to come down to an intangible for me, like some question that my subconscious asks the other person - do you want to experience life fully or not before your time is up? Do you want colors more vivid, taste more vibrant, gratitude more intense, community tighter, or not? The ritual that simulates death is the ritual that reveals the value of life. I believe it is literally the unapologetic desire to soak up every second on earth that makes the difference between the "yes" and "no" crowd. Not surprisingly, the "yes" crowd seems to be those who have had close calls with death, deal with death often, or are hardcore introspectors. Just my thoughts, but these are epic questions.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Clearly the ritual void is one that needs to be filled — since those alternatives are not any I’d like my son (or my daughter, for that matter!) getting into. Good motivation to try and formalize something within our own family.
And yes, I think that intangible is something you either have or you don’t: I don’t think it can be taught. But I do think it can be cultivated — that spark is probably innate, evolved with us over the hundreds of thousands of years of genetic evolution. It just takes a willingness to embrace hardship once and an environment which supports it. Unfortunately, that’s something which seems to be rarer and rarer these days (see question one). All the more reason to build it ourselves.
I think your intuition is spot on. It is up to families for now. At some point, the small groups doing this around the country will, I hope, expand. The question then becomes if it does grow to a national scale, does it soften? Does it get forbidden? Does it still achieve the tight, communal, meaningful nature of the pre-state rituals when it has been corporatized? It is up to us and our communities, and the pendulum may very well force us to figure this out in our lifetimes.
(And just to clarify — when I say “your response,” I mean any person’s response and whether or not I’ll get along with that particular person — not you, personally!)
In our world where virtually everything is made too easy, I'm reminded again of "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times".
It comes truer and truer as time goes by. I think the general consensus at this point is we need to hold tight and lean into the cycle.
Suffering has power. Willingly suffering and choosing to stay with it and overcome it rather than fleeing before it changes you. It's not about masochism but the subversion of reality into something of worth. There 's an aspect of the performative in the latest craze for ice baths and cold showers, but it hints that something is missing from the modern world. When comfort is so all encompassing that me must find aspirational discomfort on tik tok and instagram videos, something may have gone off track.
I can’t help but wonder as I am reading your essay that your training rituals as a seal, had the same purpose. The scenes from watching Mossad training came to mind. For all of us mortals, we have no such physical and mental rituals. Each of us will eventually be faced with a moment of truth. Until then, each of us adopts some kind of tools to remove anxiety, i.e., think, meditate, work, exercise, etc.
I completely agree Barry, and even those who go through rituals still commit themselves to thinking, meditating, work, exercise. My feeling is that no matter how intense the ritual, the benefit is perishable. It must be kept up. This is one of the reasons why I do not think a ritual like the Mandan one is required, and that we can short circuit the entire thing with the exact points you brought up.
In the formative years of my teaching career (yes 2-5) I cut my teacher’s teeth, and built the foundation of my teaching ethic, approach, and style at a “therapeutic” boarding program. Along the way I also developed and implemented multiple English/Language Arts courses. However, central to this time was being a program “passenger” through the process students engaged in: working on a wood corral, “teaching” on a farm, and immersing in the 7 ritual experiences central to the 30-month curriculum. Each of the rituals was an exercise in deprivation giving way to revelations of self-understanding. Over time, the 24 hour experience grew to 72, then 120. In all instances it was the letting go of all the outside “stuff” that allowed for growth.
Fast forward to the latter years of my career, working within more “traditional” settings but with similar students, it became increasingly evident that parental, institutional and societal efforts to protect kids were redirected from where necessary (abusers, poverty, chemicals, etc) to creating bridges over the very struggles teaching us how to persevere.
I always felt we were letting kids down by not building into our rearing and teaching ritual frameworks such as the one at that boarding program.
This is a well nuanced position: "it became increasingly evident that parental, institutional and societal efforts to protect kids were redirected from where necessary (abusers, poverty, chemicals, etc) to creating bridges over the very struggles teaching us how to persevere."
I believe this is the root of the problem. It may have started out with noble intentions, but it is turning into destructive ends. You offer us a great path forward. I look forward to seeing a resurgence of programs like this.
Thank you for joining in, Chuck.
There are a lot of rituals that get to this point without going to that extreme and we've lost them all. Even the rigors of military training have been reduced to make it more accessible. Ranger School was close and you can see it's imprint on people forever.
So perhaps Robert Bly was right all along.
I ordered his book and still haven't gotten to it. I look forward to digging into it. If he was talking about rituals like this, he was onto something.
He wrote two books, other than his poetry. Iron John is one and The Sibling Society is the other. Both are good. Iron John triggered a short-lived "men's movement" which was derided, and mocked relentlessly and then finally ruined by the insincere "Promise Keepers." For a while, it seemed it might work out, but Bly himself was too pagan and too leftist to see who he should embrace. We are living now with that failure, a failure Bly predicted.
As a society, we have no real rituals.
What to do about that?
Lucca, for my part, I think it is up to the individual for the time being. Nature does not dictate our rituals anymore; tribe no longer dictates them; and government probably should not dictate them. Families need to do it, and at some point, maybe we will build communities that can institute their own rituals. This will be a long evolution, but my hunch is that it will happen no matter what, whether we do it now voluntarily or later when we are forced.
Little things. Family dinners. Walks. Group morning runs. All very important.
I think we have to seek them out in other societies that still have them. A good example would be in Oaxaca, Mexico, a place I highly recommend visiting.
And learn them from other sources--e..g from living in China and Taiwan in part, I learned a lot about tea and began sharing it with other people over time--now I've spent thousands of hours drinking tea as a daily ritual--I see it connected to other rituals and practices I've formed along similar wavelengths--meditation, martial art, buddhism, taoism.
We do live in an age where we can take something that works out of each culture.
It's great that you could learn something from somewhere so far away.
It's more of a life path rather than a consumeristic attitude towards "taking" it. It helps that I grew up and lives in major urban areas in CA, with large Asian populations and access to culture, so the bridge towards going deeper in that directly always felt pretty natural to me, even though obviously, most people don't do that.
It's more of a life path rather than a consumeristic attitude towards "taking" it. It helps that I grew up and lives in major urban areas in CA, with large Asian populations and access to culture, so the bridge towards going deeper in that directly always felt pretty natural to me, even though obviously, most people don't do that.
The void of uselessness to the self, only to be be filled by the destruction of the self. The paradox of self-knowledge so well described Sam.
It hits hard my friend. Thank you.
You are most welcome, Asperges.
From my experience raising three kids in a suburban world, sports was a good start. My son started wrestling in middle school and played football in high school. My kids always knew that academics came first. so they wouldn’t be seeking athletic scholarships to college and we never got into travel teams etc.
But sports teach, from a young age, that you don’t need to stop when things get hard, that you need to sacrifice for the greater good, and that food tastes so much better when you’ve worked hard.
These same lessons could come from farm work, I would imagine.
This is great, John. I agree with you - there are many ways to gain the value of rituals. Sports are excellent. Farm work, too, is the one that I got the most value out of when I was young. We have the option to gain the best of both worlds.
My shoulder blades were twitching quite a bit as I was reading this Sam—sitting in my comfy chair with my coffee and my luxury problems. Death could be around the corner or around the world. My only recognition of it would likely be after the fact. Once again your visceral writing brings me a perspective that I can honor and appreciate—but have no experience with. Such is our detachment.
Thank you Dee. My shoulders twitched a bit as well.
Catlin actually painted the scene. Here is a link to one of his paintings: https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/edu/object/cutting-scene-mandan-o-kee-pa-ceremony
I believe the beauty of these rituals is that once we understand their value, they are not actually needed. We can find the same meaning elsewhere. But knowing what we are and how we came to be this was is half the fun for my part.
Whoa—that painting.
“Death is no longer a cause for dread but an old friend; a giver of perspective; it is at first a rest from a maxed-out ritual, and in the end a rest from a maxed-out life.” I’ve almost died twice, once after many hours of great pain, another time almost painlessly. There’s no question that coming close to death creates great perspective on the rest of life’s challenges.
The coming of age rituals of the Plains Indians were next-level (the Sioux were brutal, too). The question is, what happens when you combine this level of willingness to face reality with a high culture? Classical Age Greeks? Renaissance Europeans?
No doubt pretty special.
This is a brilliant point on both accounts. My gut is that we will find that balance - similar to Athens - once again because we will have to. But not necessarily like the brutal rituals of the Plains. What that is will look like I think we are starting to have some idea, but, regardless, I do believe we need to expedite it.
I’ll bet your right, Sam. BTW I don’t know if you’ve ever studied the physiology of crucifixion but it’s really, truly agonizing. As I was reflecting further on your essay I wondered what you might think about the fact the Catholic Church especially, but also the various Protestant and Orthodox Churches have made the crucified Jesus the core emblem of their message for two thousand years. It seems to me to possibly be the very type of empirical reality-check for which you’re calling in your essay. Another cause for the increasingly self-delusional detachment from reality that is so widespread might well be the crisis of faith that has almost completely overcome the most advanced societies and nation states.
Chris, you are doubling down on the extremely perceptive points. I had not thought about the crucifixion in this way, but it almost seems as if it is a form of catharsis. By deeply contemplating the suffering on the cross, we are able to psychologically experience to some extent the actual event and death as if we ourselves are undergoing an ancient ritual. I'm looking forward to chewing on this one. Thank you.