The varieties of human experience are many, but one thing all societies had in common until modern times was a way for boys to be initiated into adulthood. Nowadays this initiation is talked about in a quaint way, as if it were a ritual, as if you could go into a hot tent with a cool professor and drum, as if it was a mere formality to be gotten through on a special day. It was not.

 

Young boys looked up to the men around them and wanted to be like them. They recognized the inner qualities of confidence and freedom, and the outer qualities of skill and strength. They could also sense the purpose and responsibility that these men had. The boys sensed that they could not have those qualities just by wanting to have them. They needed to develop them. That could only happen through the training and guidance of the men, and through testing under pressure.

 

The test would measure character and skill by placing the boy, when he was ready, in a situation that would make high demands on him, and would reveal if his determination to join the adult world – to be a man – was sufficient to get him to complete the test without giving up or collapsing.

 

It was understood that if he did not pass, he would not be a man.

 

This was a good thing. It set the standards high so the boys would grow strong and prove it. High enough so that everyone would know they could meet a difficult challenge.  That they could be depended upon by the community they were entering to willingly face danger and prevail, if the community were threatened.

 

The boys had a chance to show that they had worked hard and were prepared; that they were willing to risk their lives to meet the demands that life placed on them.

 

There was no way a pre modern people could survive without developing those qualities in men. It was implicit in the training and the testing, and evident in the actions of the boys who undertook it, that it was a challenge they wanted, so that they could prove themselves worthy to enter the community of men.

 

This initiation was not designed to separate them from the people they lived with. It was not done to make them different from the members of their community, or to gain entry into an elite. It was done to integrate them into the community. It was done to validate their manhood.

 

It validated the community as well. It was a way of saying to the group, I admire you.  I am now worthy of membership. I am dependable. I am strong. I am someone who will give everything I have, make myself resolute and strong as I have been trained to do, and dedicate myself to serving the well-being and safety of all of you.

 

To work – to serve the individual and the community – the initiation must be willingly undertaken, and it must provide a genuine test that pushes the limits of the young man taking it, presenting him with real danger and the risk of failure.  It must be a test of the effect of long and difficult training. That training must require the boy to change in order to meet the demands of a form required by the trainers. That form must be well designed to foster the best qualities of the young man. The motivation of the boy taking the test has to be the goal of gaining admission into the community, motivated by a desire to serve the people around him, accompanied by a willingness to face danger and to risk his life — to become a person that other people can depend on. That is how a genuine initiation into manhood works.

 

It was universal in pre modern times. It is rare now. And we see the results in weakness, decadence and confusion all around us.

 

Most work settings discourage initiation into adulthood. Marx and Engels tried their best to valorize industrial labor, but significantly, neither had done any. A service job or a factory job require little skill and provide little satisfaction, degrade people, and make them unhappy. They make few demands and provide no inner reward or outer accomplishment. Traditional artisan training offered many opportunities for true initiation and it still can. But most modern work does not offer this.

 

The process of initiation is emulated in sports and in professional training. But it usually falls short in both arenas.

 

In professional training, in engineering, law, academics, or medicine, there is a demand made on the individuals who participate which asks them to conform to the requirements set by a group of leaders. But these trainees are entering an elite fraternity.   They are not dedicated to the general well being of the community. (There may be some participants who have an interest in tha,t but through selection and training, the rule is that ambition trumps kindness.)

 

The cultural trappings of entry into these worlds and the incentive systems in place which restrict entry and reward entry are all designed to separate the initiated from the rest of society.

 

This corresponds to the formation of a priesthood in pre modern society. Where priesthood was conferred by merit on those who had come through the initiation process and had as its foundation selfless dedication to the well being of the community, it could work. When it was run as a separate track from the process of initiation, it was doomed to promote self-serving manipulation and trouble. It still does.

 

The difficulties people face in these professional settings make good and powerful demands on them and develop many good people. But they were never designed to turn boys into men, and they do not.

 

Contemporary professional training does not make physical demands, develop high physical skill or deep mental focus, or place young men in physical jeopardy. As a result – in the lab, in the courtroom, in the consulting room, at home, with their friends, on the ski slopes or tennis courts – no matter how high their status, how great their wealth or how significant their achievements, these professionals have less confidence in their manhood than they want to have.

 

Athletics emulates initiation. It is necessary for boys. Like training the mind in the professions or trades, it is a great thing.  But like them, it cannot offer a complete initiation into adulthood for most young men.

 

Martial arts can be used to begin the process, and it has been, since the beginning of time. It can still go pretty far along the path. The reason the Marines have incorporated martial arts in the training for every Marine is not because there is a great demand for hand to hand combat on the modern battlefield. It is because it creates an intelligent body and a strong mind.  Martial arts training can push the body to its limit, and put people consistently under high stress.

 

Properly done, martial arts develops the will. It enables practitioners to confront interpersonal human aggression directly, accustoms them to taking the initiative when confronted, to not being intimidated, and to meeting the challenge presented by a committed aggressor with the determination to prevail.

 

There are opportunities for civilian martial arts training that are like this. But they are hard to come by. It is rare to find a martial arts dojo which will push its members to the limit in training, consistently, over the long haul. It is rare — but not unheard of — to find a martial arts dojo which will make demands on the members that will be deeply transformative. It is very unusual to find one in which the leaders care about their trainees selflessly enough to push them hard with both devotion to their maturity and the skill to achieve it.

 

That is because in most martial arts dojos, even ones which are run by sincere and capable instructors, with serious, devoted students, our social norms of comfort and our expectation of praise for limited achievement compromise the training environment, so that if you push too hard or demand too much, people cry, quit, sue, or go somewhere where it is easier to get a rank.

 

Martial arts have a close connection to the few subcultures within our post-modern culture which retain the process of male initiation.

 

The military is one of them. Law enforcement is another. These are treated as marginal subcultures in the modern world, and in many places as suspect ones. But they preserve an ethos of mental and physical training, of service and personal responsibility which were until recently accepted by all people of good will as self-evident virtues and social necessities.

 

These ideals are indispensible and good for young men. This is an unusual idea now, so I want to answer one objection in advance: military and police training do not turn boys into mindless killers. Drugs and gangs and television and welfare and envy do.

 

Many boys are raised without men in their lives. The older people they know may never have been initiated into adulthood. They are raised by pop media.  They come of age by partying, i.e., using illegal drugs and having sex.  Their anti-social and anti-authoritarian posture is a reflex. Their minds are disturbed by desire and anger. They feel weak. They are not capable of working or learning. They do not know what to do.

 

If children are not initiated into adulthood, they will stay children. They will make demands on others. They will not have the ability or the inclination to take care of others. They will indulge themselves when they can. They will ask other people, individually or in the guise of the state, to take on the role of adults and provide for their needs and their happiness. However, as lifelong children, they will not feel that their needs have been fulfilled, and they will remain unhappy. This is how our culture has been crippled by comfort.

 

Girls in pre modern cultures also willingly took on danger and sacrificed their safety and comfort for the sake of the community. Their initiation into womanhood was through childbirth, and they entered the world of adult responsibility, just as warriors did, as life was placed in their hands.

 

The world around us has arisen as it has for reasons we may never fully know. But we do not have to leave it as it is. We can do our part by taking our responsibility seriously. By cultivating our lives — by being decent, by developing sharp awareness and clearly seeing how the lives of the people around us are unfolding. By creating the conditions in which we task ourselves with meeting the demands of a mature and fulfilled life, and by placing healthy, positive demands on the people we care for.

 

We all have the freedom and the power to do that. Freedom and power will come only from that.