The Vertical and Horizontal

Coming of age in the turbulent late 60’s, I was of the “never trust anyone over 30” generation. I fiercely rejected the idea of the old bearded guy in the sky who demanded my obedience and compliance and didn’t do well with the clean-shaven teachers in my high school either. I signed up to help dismantle the top-down hierarchy that sent young people to war, steered them to Wall Street, modelled both sexual and emotional repression. I went from an all-boys high school that was a Country Day School for Young Gentlemen complete with suit-and-tie dress code and calling your teachers “Sir” to a hip college where I attended protests with some of my teachers, backpacked with them and occasionally smoked marijuana together. The energy shifted from top to bottom to side by side, from a vertical hierarchy to a more horizontal connection. I went from college to teaching at a school where the kids called us teachers by our first names, we played together, camped together, cooked together occasionally. 

 

But as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” I’m re-reading a sleeper book by Robert Bly titled The Sibling Society where as early as the 1990’s, he warns us of the dangers of dismantling hierarchy instead of replacing it with a more positive hierarchy. As he describes it: 

 

“Paternal society had an elaborate and internally consistent form with authoritative father reflected upward to the strong community leader and beyond him to the father god up among the stars, which were also arranged in hierarchical levels, called the “seven heavens.” Children imitated adults, and were often far too respectful for their own good to authorities of all kinds. However, they learned in school the adult ways of talking, writing and thinking. For some, the home was safe, and the two-parent balance gave them maximum possibility for growth…”

 

 Less you worry that Bly is evoking a MAGA naïve mentality, read on:

 

“…for others, the home was a horror of beatings, humiliation, and sexual abuse, and school was the only safe place. The teaching at home and in school encouraged religion, memorization, ethics and discipline, but resolutely kept hidden the historical brutalities of the system.”

 

The above is certainly why things had to change and taking part in that movement, as I did, should not be a matter for shame. But we need to acknowledge a sense of stability that was lost when babies were thrown out with their bathwater and take a look at how we’re suffering in a different way from the result. Read on.

 

“Our succeeding sibling society, in a relatively brief time, has taught itself to be internally consistent in a fairly thorough way. The teaching is that no one is superior to anyone else, high culture is to be destroyed and business leaders look sideways to other business leaders. The sibling society prizes a state of half-adulthood, on which the repression, discipline and the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system are jettisoned. The parents regress to become more like children, and the children, through abandonment, are forced to become adults too soon and never quite make it. There’s an impulse to set children adrift on their own. The old (in the form of crones, elders, ancestors, grandmothers and grandfathers) are thrown away and the young (in the form of street children in south America or latchkey children in the suburbs of this country) are thrown away. …

 

What the young need—stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories, the truth of history—is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them. As we look at the crumbling schools, the failure to protect students from guns (Note: This was published in 1996!!!!), the cutting of funds for Head Start and breakfasts for poor children, cutting of music and art programs, we have to wonder whether there might not be a genuine anger against children in the sibling society.”

 

In short, the dismantling of the old hierarchies has not gone well for children and is getting worse every year. Bly,  who recently left us at 95 years old, would be aghast, but not surprised at where we are almost thirty years later. Indeed, he predicted it!

 

“Looking at the decline in discipline, inventiveness, persistence, reading abilities and reasoning abilities of adolescents now compared with adolescents thirty years ago, we must be ready to grasp how much steeper the decline will be thirty years from now. “

 

The good news is that it is possible to dismantle toxic hiearchies without dismissing the notion of vertical culture. We can cultivate a surface respect of younger for elder "just because" while also nurturing the deep respect that comes from the elder’s conscious work of attaining life-affirming wisdom. We can teach children that they are perfect as they are, but have to put in the work to prove it and that it will require some uphill ascent. When I read the statistics and hear the stories of children’s intellectual, emotional and physical health in sharp decline, I believe it, but don’t see it so much in the actual children I’ve known for a half-a- century. There are plenty of schools and plenty of parents doing skillful work in navigating the horizontal/vertical culture divide. It is possible. But not without being aware of these forces at work. 

 

A lot of food for thought here. Enjoy the meal.