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In the end, Mr. Keen states his purpose explicitly. He isn't trying to explain the quintessential journey to masculinity, or even the average journey. In
I'm torn between the fourth and fifth starts on this one. On one hand, Mr. Keen does an excellent job of describing the need for authentic, thoughtful masculinity and detailing a process to achieve said state. On the other, too much of Mr. Keen's book is couched in semi-poetry or the language of second wave feminism to really resonate with me.In the end, Mr. Keen states his purpose explicitly. He isn't trying to explain the quintessential journey to masculinity, or even the average journey. In this book, he's detailing his own path, complete with personal revelations, a failed marriage and lot of self-examination. Mr. Keen is hoping to elicit a conversation with the reader, and I suspect that he'd be pleased that I disagree in places.
It also helps that Mr. Keen turns an eye toward defining modern masculinity as a partner, not parallel opposite, to modern feminism. In one of the last chapters, Mr. Keen provides one of the best accounts of masculinity in a world of liberal feminism vs radical feminism that I've ever seen. Man or not, anyone interested in gender theory would benefit from reading at least that section.
On the whole, you don't see many thinkers approaching a topic like masculinity. It's too politically and socially charged. Plus, whatever position they take, an author will end up offending someone. And some readers will certainly bristle at Mr. Keen's definitions of manhood. But I respect him all the more for approaching the topic without shrinking. He doesn't couch his language or pull his blows. In the end, Mr. Keen wrote the book that he set out to, and I guess that deserves the extra star.
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It starts with the patriarchal model, which had shaped society for so long.
Now, there's a lot to say about the patriarchy, but, think what you want, one thing was clear-cut with such a system: individualities might have been stifled, but gender roles were then clearly defined. When it comes to manhood, this meant not only a set of behaviours and attitudes to be expected (emotional self-denial so as to feed toughness, aggression, violence, willpower, and competition) but, also, when and how a man could be truly called a man (after all, every society had/has rites of passages clearly demarking the transition from boy to man, and it's not so long ago the time when young men were drafted into a national military service...). Now that the patriarchy has been on its way out (again, the book was published in 1992) what's left, then, of such clear-cut gender roles? What's left of past ideals of manhood?
Well, as Sam Keen brilliantly demonstrates, not much apart from the damages such model has caused. Delving into such damages, in fact, is where this book proves truly insightful, if not prophetic in regards to some of the gender debates still plaguing society nowadays. Here, he indeed does two things that needs to be acknowledged, especially since, more than thirty years on, his message still isn't politically correct, when not completely overlooked within certain parts of society.
First, he obviously agrees that the patriarchy disserved women, who were kept in a submissive role which was terribly unfair and exploitive. He doesn't deny that, and, unless you're a sexist jerk, nor should you as a reader. But, he refuses to solely blame men for such a past system, for women not only fuelled it (raising sons and daughters to be as the system expected them to be) but also benefited from it. It's all very well indeed to denounce, as feminists have been doing, the so-called 'male psyche' supposedly inseparable from violence and a blunting of feelings, but that's missing the mark -men were not violent and emotionally blunt because of their innate nature, but because they were part of a system which assigned them the roles of providers and protectors, tasks women gained from, and, again, raised even their own sons to embody.
'There can be no question but that the historical humiliation of women, the demeaning, the cruelty reported by feminists is a fact. But men's suffering from gender roles is also a fact.'
'short of an utopian world from which greed, scarcity, madness and ill will have vanished, someone must be prepared to take up arms and do battle with evil. We miss the mark if we do not see that manhood has traditionally required selfless generosity even to the point of sacrifice.'
And indeed, the patriarchy surely was toxic to women, but it's not women's lives which were deemed expendables, as it was not, for example, women who were forcibly drafted to serve as canon fodders when wars broke out, or, expected to die so as to save lives (we heard 'women and children first', I have yet to hear 'men first' when boats were sinking -literally and metaphorically speaking...). The patriarchy was evil, but women had indeed as much responsibility in its survival as a system as men. Was it any good, though?
Here's where his second point comes to the fore: the patriarchy was toxic to men too, for it encouraged the toxic view of masculinity we all are familiar with by now, and which has been as destructive to men as it has been to women as collateral damages.
Now, one has to be careful with the word 'toxic'. Willpower, selfless ambition, aggression, ego driven ethos to climb a pecking order, competition, denial of emotion and feelings... It all sounds very negative, yet these are also the traits which contributed to push societies and civilizations forward. We ought to be careful in not completely demonising them. The point, though, is that when taken to an extreme they not only damage individuals (for, again, men do suffer from such toxicity) but the society they give birth to. Sam Keen's argument takes here a further dimension, as he claims that the capitalistic system we live in not only encourages, but also rewards such toxic behaviours, at the expense even of our environment. His point is remarkable, not least because there are still influential feminists out there who still remain completely clueless as to what it clearly demonstrates. Let me explain.
Men were not at the top because they were biologically superior to women, but because of the expectations put on them and the destructive and self-destructive values and mindset instilled in them so as to meet these expectations. When women wanted to be emancipated, they had no choice but to play the exact same game so as to reach the top too, that is, they had to embody the same mindset to succeed, and so embrace traits which would have been labelled 'masculine', 'manly', in the past (ambition, ego, toughness, aggression...). The system is indeed so that, to succeed (be it in business, politics, or else) women had to become as toxic as the men in charge. Here's the point, and bear in mind that this was written about thirty years ago (!):
Some feminists, who harbour a secret belief in the innate moral superiority of women, believe that women will change the rules of business and bring the balm of communication and human kindness into the boardroom. To date this has been in vain hope. Women executives have proven themselves the equal of men in every way -including callousness.'
This is a crucial point to make, because it shows that such toxic traits are not innate, let alone innate to men only. Such toxic traits, in fact, have nothing to do with gender -they are the products of a toxic culture. If we want to get rid of them, then, it's not men as men that we should attack (the stance still taken by some feminists wrapped up in misandry, and for whom every societal problem stem from a patriarchy where men are supposedly the only guilty party because of their biology or innate 'male psyche') but, the culture itself. How to do so?
Here Sam Keen shows himself tentative, if not naïve, although I personally agree with his vision. What we need, is indeed to tame such traits, to detoxify them, and, instead, channel them for good.
'men require a revolution in identity in which we measure success by our capacity for compassion rather than by accumulation of power, and virility by the capacity to nurture, husband, and mentor.'
Is such a model of manhood compatible with free market liberalism, which encourage a selfish warrior mentality (both in men and women) over nurturing and compassion? I, like the author, highly doubt it; and this is where the bucket stops in here.
This is a remarkable book. It's full of insights and prescience, and, a classic when it comes to challenging the patriarchal model, not only for its negative impact on women, but, also, on men too. As it turns out, there is no gender war: we're all complicit caught in a system we inherited, and it will take a lot of healing, let alone redefining of our values, to fully recover and move on. It will, obviously, take time; especially since acknowledging men as victim too still is not politically correct. But we are getting there. As a Millennial reading this thirty years after it was published, I can see men and women of my generation and younger agreeing with its main tenets, which gives me hope.
A classic, even if psychoanalytical meanderings burden it too much at times for my full liking (again, my rating is severe but I can't ignore such boring and, to me, incomprehensible babblings).
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Truly an American Hero, and rare human being on the same level of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. This is a modern day philosopher that is truly a great man, father, writer, and American.
He is someone to be paid attention to in our age of distraction and bullshit from our phony "leaders" who suck up to the lobbyists paid for b
I met Sam Keen recently at an Esalen workshop in Big Sur, CA. He was so profoundly amazing, honest, powerful, and wise, that I had to go back and re-read Fire In The Belly.Truly an American Hero, and rare human being on the same level of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. This is a modern day philosopher that is truly a great man, father, writer, and American.
He is someone to be paid attention to in our age of distraction and bullshit from our phony "leaders" who suck up to the lobbyists paid for by non-American banking cartels.
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We are loyal creatures. But there is nothing worth being loyal to anymore. Companies and women can drop a man in this society with no repercussions. In fact, the state incentivizes it.
If men have nothing to be loyal towards, who will keep the
While this had some interesting ideas, it was too tainted by the feminist idea of toxic masculinity and the need for men to become more sensitive, and blaming things on men. Men do not behave this way. They need to redirect their energy to productive things.We are loyal creatures. But there is nothing worth being loyal to anymore. Companies and women can drop a man in this society with no repercussions. In fact, the state incentivizes it.
If men have nothing to be loyal towards, who will keep the society running?
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Men cannot find themselves without first separating from the world of WOMAN.
The man has unconscious bondage to women. WOMAN is the mysterious ground of our being that we cannot penetrate. She is the audience before whom the dramas of our lives are played out. She is the judge who pronounces us guilty or innocent. She is the Garden of Eden from which we are exiled and the paradise for which our bodies long. We have invested so much energy in trying to control women because we
L THE MAKING OF A MANMen cannot find themselves without first separating from the world of WOMAN.
The man has unconscious bondage to women. WOMAN is the mysterious ground of our being that we cannot penetrate. She is the audience before whom the dramas of our lives are played out. She is the judge who pronounces us guilty or innocent. She is the Garden of Eden from which we are exiled and the paradise for which our bodies long. We have invested so much energy in trying to control women because we are so vulnerable to their mysterious power over us. Like sandy atolls in a monsoon swept ocean, the male psyche is in continual danger of being inundated by the feminine sea.
One of the tasks of manhood is to explore the unconscious feelings that surround our various images of WOMAN, to dispel false mystification, to dissolve the vague sense of threat and fear, and finally to learn to respect and love the strangeness of womankind. It is the woman in our heads, not the women in our beds who cause most of our problems. So long as our house is haunted by the ghost of WOMAN we can never live gracefully with any woman.
1) Woman as Goddess
2) Woman as Mother
3) Woman as Erotic Spiritual Power
Dad is no longer present to teach his sons how to be men. Meanwhile, the son must develop various strategies to deal with the power of Mother. A man must take leave of motherland.
II. THE RITES OF MANHOOD
Our modern rites of passage- war, work, and sex-- impoverish and alienate men.
In the secular theology of economic man, Work has replaced God as the source from whom all blessings flow. Work now satisfies many of the functions once served by religion. Here are some of the unwritten rules that govern success in professional and corporate life:
1) Cleanliness is next to prosperity. Sweat is lower class.
2) Look but t touch
The less contact you have with real stuff- fertilizer, wood, steel, chemicals, the more money you will make.
3) Prefer abstractions
4) Specialize
We succeed in our professions to the degree that we sacrifice wide ranging curiosity and fascination with the world at large, and~become departmental in our thinking. The profession, like medieval castles, are small kingdoms sealed off from the outer world by walls of jargon. Once initiated by the ritual of graduate school, MBAs, economists, lawyers, and physicians speak only to themselves and theologians speak only to God.
5) Sit still and stay indoors
The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males.
6) Live by the clock.
Ignore your intimate body time, body rhythms, and conform to the demands of corporate time, work time, professional time. When time is money we bend our bodies to the demands of EST (economic standard time) We interrupt our dreams when the alarm rings. Instead of taking our time we respond to deadlines.
Most successful men become Type A personalities, speed freaks, addicted to the rush of adrenaline, filled with a sense ot urgency, hard driven, goal oriented, and stressed out.
7) Wear the uniform
The higher you rise in the establishment the more colorless you become.
8) Keep your distance stay in your place
The hierarchy of power and prestige that governs every profession establishes the proper distance between people. People above you, people below you, and people on your level, and you don̓t get too close to any of them.
9) Desensitize yourself
10) Don̓t trouble yourself with large moral issues.
The more the world is governed by experts, specialists and professionals the less anybody takes responsibility of the most troubling consequences of our success -- failure.
III. TAKING THE MEASURE OF A MAN
Authentic manhood has always been defined by a vision of how we fit into the universe and by the willingness to undertake an appropriate task or vocation which have changed at various times in history.
We live in the urgency of the moment, captive to quarterly profit reports and trends of the day, but desperately needing an opening beyond the present to something that offers us more hope and dignity.
Currently the most popular way to settle questions of morality and value seems to be the public opinion poll. All too often it turns out to be the lowest common denominator of opinion as it has been formed by the mass media. Is there no higher authority than the judgments of the majority? Should we simply adjust our ideals to the constantly shifting winds of fashion.?
A Brief History of Manhood
Take an archaeological journey into your soul and you will discover the bones of ancient hunters, warriors, wandering philosophers, desert saints, and robber barons. You are the heir of all of the ways men have defined themselves. Together, the responses men made to the circumstances of their times form the history that undergirds our present condition.
We listen to these elders whose voices are still within us, not because they give us answers to our 9yestions, but because they give us courage to respond to the vocation of our moment in history our ~
1) Hunter
2) Planter
Life was a struggle between chaos and cosmos. The challenge was to harmonize with the forces of nature sufficiently to survive.
3) Warrior
The habit or warfare replace the theater of nature with the theater of politics. The battle was no longer against chaos but against an enemy of the tribe who had been defined as the incarnation of evil.
Warfare which began as a heroic way for an individual to make a name for himself, evolved into conflict without individuality or honor.
4) Homo Sapiens
The warfare that raged without also raged within the psyche. Man stands divided against himself, the psyche is a battleground between "I want" and "I should" the task of reason is to put an end of this inner warfare, to adjudicate the conflict between desire and duty, to bring order out of chaos, to control the rebellious emotions and bring peace within the psyche and the polis.
5) Dionysian Man
For every Pat Boone a Mick Jagger, for every Rockwell a Picasso, for every philosopher
a rogue, for every Labor Day a Mardi Gras. Man will not be defined by reason alone.
"A man needs a touch of madness, otherwise he will never be free. "--Zorba
While Apollo counsels everything in moderation, the wild man advises us to follow our bliss and explore the deepest desires of our being.
6) Prophetic Man
Man is more than culture. He cannot be guided only by his tribal conscience or he may
exploit the stranger, destroy the alien, be ruthless to all outsiders, and still feel guiltless.
A man is a man only when he measures himself against something more universal than
the morality of his own time.
7) Man as Image of God
A man is most virile not when he insists upon his autonomous will but when he
harmonizes his will with the will of God.
8) Man as Power
9) Scientific Technological Man
10) Self-Made Man
11) Psychological Man
12) Postmodern Man
He is no longer trying to improve his soul, develop his willpower, or save himself for
some future heaven. He has given up the quest for a single identity, a consistent point of view or triumph over tragedy. His stance is one of irony rather than romance. His tastes, lifestyle and convictions are formed by fashion. His life is organized more around the idea of taste than of right or wrong. His world is aesthetic rather than moral. He is a blank page, upon which the moment writes its tale. Weightless he suffers the unbearable lightness of being. Without an organizing center, postmodern man is lost in a wilderness of confusing plurality. But, paradoxically, being bereft of
moral landmarks, he is in a unique position to undertake a new journey.
The great paradigm war that is shaping up involves two radically different views of the future. The Radicals and the Progressives
Radical:
ecological
horizon is local and planetary
loyalty is to home hearth and community
organizing metaphor is biological world governed by respect for all species
Eros is for sensual enjoyment of natural world, wilderness, garden, intimacy, friendship and community
view men and women as mysterious opposites
Progressive:
economic
horizon international urban and abstract loyalty to job profession and corporation organizing metaphor is technological world governed by economic developmentEros for organizing, entrepreneurship, inventing manufacturing and consuming products view men and women as essentially identical
lV. A PRIMER FOR NOW AND FUTURE HEROES
I trace the spiritual journey into the self men must undertake in our time and sketch a portrait of the resulting heroic virtues.
Two visions of manhood:
Homesteaders:
Citizens
Believers
Culture-bound
Once born
Frequently unconscious
Good they do springs from their practice of civic virtues, adherence to duty, law and
order, conserving tradition
The evil they do springs form obedience and banality
Pilgrims:
Questers
Questioners
Transcend their time and tribe twice born
painfully self-conscious Undertake heroic journey
The good they do springs form their invention of innovative virtues, prophetic visions, sensitivity to new vocations, the evil they do springs form overreaching ambition or hubris.
Rite of Passage:
separation, initiation, and return.
From Having the Answers to Living the Question
A man may begin his pilgrimage in a hundred different ways. The death of a father, mother, wife, friend, or child suddenly opens up an abyss of terror into which everything that felt safe and secure disappears. The Mercedes, country club, and investment portfolio hold no magic against death. You wake up some Monday morning and realize that your job, your wife, your friends bore you, and you have a powerful urge to run away. Call it a mid-life crisis, depression, alienation, the dark night of the soul, the opening of anew path. But honor it. Listen. Respond.
Questions that animate Homesteaders:
What is my duty?
What do my neighbors think?
How can I become a success?
How can I gain money, power, prestige?
Do I have the courage to fight for my country?
Can I suffer without whimpering?
How do I provide for my family?
Pilgrims ask:
What must I do to die with a sense of completeness?
In what measure are my values mere prejudices, my duties blind commitments to unexamined norms?
What have I sacrificed to win the approval of others?
What do I really want?
What brings me joy?
Who am I when I dream?
What do I Fear?
Who has wounded me?
Whom have I injured?
How do I deal with guilt?
Do I need to have enemies?
How do I forgive?
Whom and what will I love?
How will I express my sexuality?
Who are my people?
Where is my place?
What is the source of my power self-esteem?
What is sacred?
For what would I sacrifice my time, my energy, my health my life?
What can I do to lessen the quantity of evil?
What are my gifts?
Live the Questions
To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions.
From Cocksureness to Potent Doubt
To date, the virtues we have expected of good men have been clarity, decisiveness, willpower, the ability to control feelings, persistence, self-confidence, and a stoic attitude in the face of suffering. But these virtues are incompatible with a life of questing and questioning. Nothing is less appropriate in out time than the posture of certainty. I doubt therefore I am. The adventure of the spirit begins when we stop pretending and performing and accept our confusion and insecurity.
I , therefore I am:
obey the will of God
fight
make
work
possess
consume
doubt
The stone the builder rejects becomes the foundation of the new temple. The willingness to doubt and question is itself our new sacred ground.
Psychological courage is rarer than its physical counterpoint.
Sin is seeing your life through somebody else̓s eyes. Infantile guilt and shame alienate us from our true self Spiritual maturity involves learning to look at life through our own eyes. At some point, we must kick Dad and Mother, priest, poet and president of our psyche and seize the authority for our own lives. We must become responsible for our own values and visions. On the pilgrim's path each man must become Moses, going on a vision quest to some mountaintop and returning with the ten or twenty commandments that he holds sacred.
Stress is not simply a disease; it is a symptom that you are living somebody else's life, marching to a drumbeat that doesn't syncopate with your personal body rhythms, playing a role you didn̓t create, living a script written by an alien authority.
Depression is more than low self-esteem; it is a distant early warning that you are on the wrong path and that and that something in you is being pressed down, beat on, kept
imprisoned, dishonored. Burnout is the nature̓s way of telling you you̓ve been going through the motions but your souls have departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker.
The virtues:
1) Wonder
Without wonder, the world of men turns into compulsive activity and self-sealing
systems of thought. A man who penetrates beneath his facade loses the illusion that he is
a conqueror of life. He no longer sees the world as an arena for his triumph, or nature as
a thing that can be controlled. To wonder is to open ourselves to the fit of being with a
sense of gratitude. Over the last few centuries men switched their stance form wondering
to knowing.
And how can I say why?
His life was anchored in the great simplicities of earth:
The touch of the lithe bones of children,
The hue of polished stones,
The astringent sun and antiseptic air of the desert,
The elegant geometry of shells and driftwood long bathed in the sea,
The perfume of early blooming lilacs,
The silent testimony of redwood trees,
The refreshment of all that is beautiful and graceful,
And yet there was the resonance of those elusive harmonies at which music hints and for
which faith strives.
He lived with a growing ability
To deepen the covenants of friendship,
To admire simplicity and dedication,
To accept limitations and disappointments without resentment,
To forgive the unacceptable and trust the unknown,
To love without grasping
To be grateful for the gift of life.
In his ambiance, I learned that it is a good thing to take time to wonder.
2) Empathy
Step out of the hierarchical way of viewing relationships and have become cobeings. You know immediately when you are with them because they don̓t talk at you don̓t interrupt, don̓ give advice. They listen and stand beside you, and in their presence, you have an uncanny feeling that you have been given the permission to be yourself
3) Heartful mind
The rule of life applies to cooking fish, sipping bourbon, and puffing pipe, as well as to thinking, was to savor this time. "Simmering̓, he called it. When you wake up in the morning never get out of bed-- simmer.
Trust yourself in the deep uncharted waters. When there is a storm you are safer in the open sea. If you stay too near the dock you will be beaten to death.
To see why solitude is a virtue examine the bloody history of the twentieth century in which men, moved by various ideologies and isms have killed hundreds of millions of their fellows. The great moral failure of our time has been the willingness of men to become passive members of anonymous masses in mindless conformity. With scarcely a moments reflection, men have handed their freedom of mind and spirit over to ruthless governments and leaders. We rush to escape from freedom.
Solitude begins when a man silences the competing voices of the market, the polis, the home, the mass, and listen to the dictates of his own heart.
4) Moral outrage
The horror we regularly visit upon each other comes not from any innate sadism or desire to act cruelly toward others but form our desire to belong to an in-group. It is not our aggressive drives that have taken the greatest to~ in history, but rather ~unselfish devotion, hyper dependency combined with suggestibility.
5) Right Livelihood
6) Enjoyment
As you read this sentence somewhere in the world everything lovely and terrible is happening.: Lovers are shuddering in orgasm, babies being born, men are torturing the innocent, growing flowers, writing poems, burning rain forests, building hospitals and so
on.
Look at the checkerboard, blink your eyes, and the pattern changes. Now it is red squares against a black background rather than vice versa. Suffering and joy are like a trick Gestalt picture. One of the disciplines of spiritual life is the practice of shifting ~yspectives, turning the diamond to see each of its facets. To get through the w6rld we have to care until our hearts break and cram our lives full of enjoyment.
Most men are decent, serious, and hardworking and wl~ What they are not is juicy, sensual, and fun. The most successful are too busy to waste time on simple pleasures like jasmine and friendship.
If I were prescribing a cure, I would suggest a regimen that would restrict our daily diet of excess abstractions and revive our rapidly atrophying senses. Bird watching, talking
with children, visiting friends, preparing feasts, making love, fiddling in the garden, playing ball in the streets, listening to music, reading, walking, sitting quietly and doing nothing would be encouraged.
7) Friendship
8) Communion
9) Husbanding
To husband is to practice the art of stewardship The husbandman is a man who has made the decision to be in place, to make commitments, to forge bonds, to put down roots, to translate the feeling of empathy and compassion into an action of caring.
Our habit of constant movement, of severing roots with people and places, and our consumer lifestyle keep us from belonging somewhere. Our quest for upward mobility keeps us moving on, every five years on the average until we don̓t belong anywhere and can̓t go home again.
After being on the road the hero must have the courage to come home again and dwell in a single place, tend it, and make it rich with the treasure he has accumulated on his pilgrimage.
10) Wildness
Men are overdomesticated. Human beings are creatures of the wild. Within the parenthesis of the city, and during the brief years of vigor, we live within a space and item we domesticate by harnessing our cleverness and our will to control. But, finally, nature has its way with us and we are destined to return to that vastness beyond ourselves that we do not control.
V. MEN AND WOMEN COMING TOGETHER
I explore the reconciliation and common vocation of men and women.
An impediment to authentic love is the romantic way we think about love. The popular metaphors for love suggest liquidity: being swept away; waves of pleasure; softening; steaming; orgasm; egos dissolving; two becoming one; the right chemistry that produces fusion. Or we think of it as a state of permanent peace.
Romantic notion of love is harmful codependency. In love, No is married to Yes, elemental forces lie flint and steel meeting but not mixing; and encounter in which I and thous stand firm. True love is the only just and holy war. Two friends pledge loyal opposition to one ~
The virtue of anger:
Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out righteous from unrigteous.
Immediately after a storm, the water runs muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to
discriminate, for the mud to settle.
What kind of impact does the absence of initiation rites have on the maturation process of an individual?
Why does modern jobs leave people depressed?
How do we reclaim our Selfs in a financially driven world, where so many of us has adopted "a market orientation towards ourselves".
This book challe
The book is meant to uncover a new route to authentic manhood. Sam Keen takes modern society's often contradictory expectations of what it means to be a man and contrasts it with traditional cultures.What kind of impact does the absence of initiation rites have on the maturation process of an individual?
Why does modern jobs leave people depressed?
How do we reclaim our Selfs in a financially driven world, where so many of us has adopted "a market orientation towards ourselves".
This book challenges an outdated definition of masculinity that leaves men impoverish and alienated, and tries to replace it with of purpose and fulfillment.
3 ideas from the book ——->
———1. Traditional vs. Modern roles ———
The good and the bad news about the traditional rites of passage:
👍 Traditional people knew who they were. (At least they had clear expectations.)
👎 These traditional rites prevented the development of individuality.
👩🦱🧑🦱 Traditionally you were a child, and then a man or a woman. This eliminated any time where freedom could develop. This was a great way to ensure conformity in the tribe. Carefree years of adolescence is a modern invention.
——— 2. Stress & Dragons———
If I would rank key events that triggered spiritual growth for me, then being close to burnout would rank as nr.1.
"On the path to authentic selfhood we must remain for a time in the dark side of the soul until we reach the very bottom of despair."
Philosophers and theologians and pilgrims talks about this part of the journey as being crucified, losing the ego, descending into hell, or battle dragons. Now we call it by clinical names like stress, depression, burnout.
Tricks like stress & time management, mindfulness techniques, and learning to cope w. stress, might actually destroy the significance these experiences of despair ones had on people's lives—or at least delay the growth that needs to happen.
—— 3. The Corporate Hearth ——
Companies are trying to turn the workplace into the new home and hearth. I can relate to this a lot since I'm in the tech industry where this trend is quite intense. A Company "culture" is invented, with it's own "myth and rituals" and we are expected to view the workplace as a "family".
But "under those velvet gloves is the iron fist of warfare.". I think I know what Sam means by that. I have seen what happens when striving companies hits a rut: No more bean bags and office dogs!
It's easy to forget the real purpose of a business when it's so well hidden.
⚖️ VERDICT:
It's a short and sweet read, but feels a bit dated (91'). The time of "It's the cost of the toys that separate the men from the boys" mindset among men seems to have past. But I think some of the alienation around masculinity is still around! It would be interesting to read a more recent book in the topic.
So I can see how
I came to this book expecting a lot, as it was highly recommended, and it delivered. Certainly in the first 2/3. After then, when it started to talk about how men and women can be together, the book dated itself very quickly. And that's no surprise - it's almost 30 years old and things have changed a lot in the intervening period. The politics have become more divisive, the labels more restrictive. The book also emerged as a far more personal journal than it was up to that point.So I can see how this is an important book to read to get a sense of the grounding of men's work, just as you should read Robert Bly, but neither will equip a thinking and feeling man well for life in the 2020's. They just won't. We need a clearer lens of masculinity, of sovereignty, of healing.
For that, I think some of Keen's thinking deserves to be revived. His notions of the masculine healing the earth are powerful and should be fleshed out and modernised. The discussion of male communion is timeless, and still vastly underdone in contemporary western society. And his description of the journey within to become a man is worth reading and re-reading.
In all, Fire in the Belly deserves to be read and thoroughly engaged with for any man or woman wanting to understand the male journey.
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Reading the reviews of this book, it is clear that Keen steps on a few n
Without having the physical space and only a virtual presence, Keen invites men on an initiatory journey to evaluate their masculinity. Initially published in 1991, some of the contemporary references Keen makes are dated, but the mythological truths on which his thesis is based remain unsullied. As should be the case, because Keen, like Bly before him, relies on the archetypes of the psyche to create his map of masculinity.Reading the reviews of this book, it is clear that Keen steps on a few nerves, particularly those of ideological feminists. He rather skewers the movement, which, as he points out, has lost its philosophical (or, as he calls it, "prophetic") underpinnings. Ideological feminism, he points out, "is animated by a spirit of resentment, the tactic of blame, and the desire for vindictive triumph over men that comes out of the dogmatic assumption that women are the innocent victims of a male conspiracy."
I mention this because his critique of ideological feminism from a perspective of mature masculinity is refreshing because it offers an alternative, one not based on victimhood or passive-aggressive misandry.
On the flip side of the coin, he is no less demanding that we look unflinchingly at the sometimes horrific costs of an immature, unconscious masculinity. He moves easily between the social and the individual perspectives. I think that most men reading this book will glean some insight from his psychological investigation. It is an excellent book, worth checking out from the library.
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However, I was surprised by the depth and power of Keen's vision of how basically the "new m
A good friend gave me this book. I started out skeptical because the basic premise starts with traditional gender roles/identities (masculinity vs femininity), and this completely ignores/dismisses the experience of many people who are gay, transgender or otherwise don't fit traditional categories. I felt this was a major weakness in the book throughout (though Keen does slightly acknowledge it up front).However, I was surprised by the depth and power of Keen's vision of how basically the "new masculinity" means being a steward of the earth - it's an ecological vision, very much rooted in and quoting from Gary Snyder and deep ecologists. Keen implores men to stop finding masculine value in cars, conquests, war, business, etc (the many ways we are destroying the planet and people) and instead to dig in to the earth and take care of land and people - the old meaning of "husbandry".
So, if you were to take out the stuff about "being a man" and change it to "being a human," I'd be all about it. And, for straight men with traditional lens on gender, this is a pretty powerful book pointing in an absolutely necessary direction, one that you definitely don't get in TV commercials.
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Sam Keen really takes you on a tour of masculinity within Fire in the belly: On being a man. The main thesis is that men are (generally, like with any conversation about stereotypes) feeling a lack of identity after women have brought about a revolution within their own gender. He posits the question: how can somebody who identifies as a man become actualised as a man? Keen never claims to hold the answer but sees Fire in the belly as a catalyst for questions.
Firstly, Keen pulls apart the concepts of women and WOMAN (written in all caps in the book). Women are the individuals who each identify as a woman. WOMAN is something quite different. More of a concept, a fantasy, or an alluring phantom that haunts the lives of most men. Think of the surreal cartoon women who appear in the music video for 'Do I wanna know' by the Arctic Monkeys or the teacher and mother from Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'. Emotions and memories stretched over insecurity like a mental tannery, creating something that men project on all of the women they interact with. They see them as goddesses, mothers and as erotic-spiritual power. These are apparitions men need to dispel before they can create a lucid and authentic sense of masculine identity.
Once the apparitions are distilled we can start to piece together why men are how they are and this necessarily involves diving into the past, specifically the premodern past. Men have played many roles and have been furiously painting it or writing it down for millennia; no wonder it is called HIS-story. The roles include the hunter, the farmer, the warrior, the socratic (reason-loving) man, the Dionysian (pleasure-seeking) man, the prophetic man and the compassionate man (Jesus). Each were at a given point seen as the superior masculine ideal within a society. The ideals were sticky because each has left their imprint on the contemporary man. The warrior's need to keep his cool by suppressing emotion and making each move with cold calculated rationality, while also feeding paranoia and degrading femininity. The prophetic man's need to feel divine guidance by considering how each of his behaviours may be judged, while judging others and persecuting them. The Dionysian man's need to live in a dream-like pleasure state by chasing every temptation, while leeching society's resources and treating people as disposable for their own gain.
The archetypes of men continue to appear right into modern societies, albeit with a different flavour. The industrious man was common throughout the 19th century and laid the foundations for the widespread work ethic we experience today. A slight variant was the 'self-made man', a seemingly heroic figure who slowly eroded the world's view of aristocracy while violently dominating nature and living a shallow life. One that hits close to home for me is the 'technologist' who sought to amass knowledge and solve the world's problems, usually though inventing and innovating but tending to overtly frame life as a problem to be solved. Keen goes over some other archetypes like the introspective man and 'personal growth' man, but the one I found the most interesting was the post-modern man since he seems to fit most of the people I know. His drive in life is to shape his experience like an aesthetic, where situational taste becomes everything and meaning is lost in the confusion of that lifestyle.
Having established the roots of the various masculinity flavours, Keen then sets forth a path that a man can take to transcend these stereotypes. To forge an individual authentic identity that fits to the man's needs and context like a glove. The journey to do this is more about asking lots of questions instead of findings answers. Keen advocates for men who have caged their emotions to find ways to feel them again. Not just a little but to the full. This may be painful at first but the intense negative emotion which may be felt is the perfect catalyst for personal change. After this, men need to figure out who they want to be by identifying their desired virtues. These can mostly be inferred from people they admire and Keen also adds his own suggestions including: wonder, moral outrage, right livelihood, communion and cultivation.
Keen then starts to close the book by exploring how men can then re-approach their relationships with women, specifically hetero-relationships (in a very hetero-normative manner). He states that romantic love is a 'dance with three movements': solitude, conflict and intimacy. The first movement is just ensuring that both people in a relationship make time for just themselves, to avoid creating a harmful codependency. The second movement I questioned lots, where Keen states that a lack of conflict means unexpressed feelings since conflicting needs are inevitable between two people given enough time. To express these fully and have healthy conflict is part of being in a relationship. However the last movement, intimacy, seems more obvious and straightforward. He mentions how earlier in the book that men tend to have sexual initiations within contemporary society. Especially through male banter, wet dreams and pornography. This has lead the typical man to objectify and obsess about performing in his sexual life rather than explore his sensual pleasures in any depth. Men should try to let go of anxiety about performing during sex and instead begin to explore his sensual nuances.
Overall I found it a profound read. It is obviously quite dated with its ideas strewn with binary gender talk and heteronormativity. However it at least is a book about masculinity which hasn't decided to refute feminism but outright appreciates it. I would recommend it! Whether you are a man, woman or distinguished non-binary reader. It has affected how I see myself and spawned some crises about what I want my life to be.
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"I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kinds we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like This book was recommended to me by an actor/friend (Aleks Mikic ~ known for Secret City, Preacher and more) after he read my Frank Kafka quote:
"I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kinds we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. —Franz Kafka
It's a bit of a self-help book. Especially if you're at a point in your life when you are wondering about your purpose in life as a man or woman. There were potions that awakened me or reminded me of my life. I said to myself, "Hey, that's right."
And so, it was a quick read and an ideal reference for anyone forming a behavioral science or psychological help group therapy class. Here are the lines that impacted me:
A man must go on a quest to discover the sacred fire in the sanctuary of his own belly to ignite the flame in his heart to fuel the blaze in the hearth to rekindle his ardor for the earth.
Today I look at an old picture...I do not see, but remember well, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the feeling of being both proud and embarrassed by the secret life the boy was living.
"If you aren't harried, worried, and a little bit nuts you don't understand what's going on around here." Nobody can predict the shape of tomorrow's world.
Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, "What does a woman want?"
First and foremost, women want what they have been denied —justice, equality, respect, and power.
Two questions a man must ask himself: 'Where am I going?' 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get those questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
"I know it is time for you to go. As much as I want to be with you. I know there is no way for is to remain lovers. I am too old and too raw to be casual about love and you are too young to be faithful and make graceful commitments. Go, without deception or guilt. I love you. Good-bye."
Listen with the third ear and you will hear the echo. "It's not the money, it's the principle." (It's the money)
"I'm not mad, but..." (I'm mad.)
"I don't depend on women." (I depend on women.)
Imagine that long ago your mother wrote and inserted the software disk that preprogrammed your life. She etched the script for your life, inserted a Philosophy Of Life program, on the blank pages of your mind.
For many creative men WOMAN is the muse and inspiration for their work. She possesses a semi divine power to call forth their creativity. Without her inspiration they cannot paint, write or manage. She is the anima, the spirit and soul of a man. Without her a man is only will and intellect and blind force.
Most modern men have never learned the joy of solitude.
Male psyche is, first and foremost, the warrior psyche.
Don't ever start the day any faster than you intend on ending it. You take it easy.
We don't work just to make a living. Increasingly, the world of work provides the meaning of our lives. It becomes an end in itself rather than a means.
Things They didn't tell you at the Harvard Business School:
-Cleanliness is next to prosperity.
-Specialize (The modern economy rewards experts, men and women who are willing to become focused, concentrated, tightly bound, efficient.)
-Sit still and stay indoors (The symbol of power is the chair).
-Live by the clock (When "time is money" we bend our bodies and minds to the demands of EST-Economic Standard Time.)
"Would you be willing to be less efficient?"
One of the first and most crucial lessons little boys learn is: Please your mothers, or else!
And the penis is the straight and narrow pathway to paradise, the bridge over troubled waters we traverse to find the missing parts of our severed selves. That is why sex is so important for us. A woman once told me, "I finally understood that for most men the penis is their only "feminine" part. It is only when they are doing things with it that they allow themselves to feel."
Practically speaking, the way each of us defines our sense of ideal manhood or womanhood is by establishing a kind of inner HALL OF FAME where we applaud heroes and heroines of the moment. Tell me whom you admire and I will tell you what kind of person you aspire to become.
...and much much more.
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Unfortunately, the book does not live up to the strong beginning. It weakens to a trickle with Keens' professorial lecturing and attention to the precise ideas that don't -in my view- work for men looking for their soul. For example, in the chapter relating to aggression, Keen expounds about how the "War System" has influenced all our human relationships; we want to get ahead, step over anyone who gets on our way and destroy our opponents. Really? Is that all there is to aggression? Right then it became obvious Keen has too narrow and ideological a view to help men find their Manhood.
Most importantly, the aggression issue is not properly addressed. Keen devotes several pages to what is wrong with war-like behavior and only, as an afterthought, adds a page at the end of the chapter on the survival value it has. So in essence, after lecturing non-stop about the evils of aggression he tells us that at some point we might need it. Most men reading books on masculinity, and I would underline this if I could, are looking for a justification and articulation of our fierceness, NOT blind destruction, but fierceness as a vital force. We want to hear it is OK, justified, necessary and GOOD, since we are mostly bombarded by the media with bad examples of the destruction male aggressiveness causes. It is an energy, intrinsic in our psyche and physiology and something I'm sure most men picking up a book like this are looking for. Keen ill-serves the reader by giving it such a one-sided treatment. He will return later in the book to the topic of fierceness but it is unfortunately too little.
Further, he also blames the "lack of thunder in men" on the "corporation" state and consumer mentality pervasive in American society. This stroke me as hopelessly naive.
Keen also states that the defining quality of a man ought to be "wonder". I thought about it and while I see value in that quality which -blame it on generation X- I don't feel often, I also see that one could make the argument for "wonder" for both men and women, not just men. Which begs the question, how would wonder help define one as a Man? Then again, can a sense of wonder make one a better person? Probably, in the same way that jogging can help you be a better boxer, except that it won't teach you to actually box. Wonder is fine, but it doesn't really speak to me about being a man necessarily.
Keen spends the vast majority of the book going on a diatribe about left-wing issues (most of which I actually happen to agree with - yet find inappropriate for the subject at hand) and arm-chair philosophizing that is too self-serving to be of much value to me. Fire in the Belly seems to me more an excuse to bash the system than to deliver a guide to that gritty and moist zone men like me are trying to get to. It is mostly empty and subjective, nothing really to -as Keen himself pretentiously stated as a goal for the book- to "move the head, the heart and the gonads". I'm also not sure if a man who "to this day avoids in class reunions the football heroes" of his high school is resolved enough to write a book on this subject.
I'd recommend Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly to anyone looking to travel this path. Even if unnecessarily convoluted and abstruse at times, it is by far the best in a genre so sorely lacking in good material. Other books such as Wild at Heart take too Christian a perspective and The Compleat Gentleman is, despite some awesome insights, even worse than this book in pushing a political ideology (conservatism), from a man who found the romance of war after refusing to serve in Vietnam and from the convenient position of no longer being of active duty age.
Some people have found good lessons in Fire in the Belly, I say more power to them. I'd would suggest borrowing it from a library or reading through the first chapters and skimming the rest at a bookstore, before buying it.
...more What is the meaning of masculinity and does it have a "modern" shade?
As a reader, I typically dismiss analyses of manhood as self-indulgent and ephemeral. So what if we are suddenly enlightened on the true injustices faced by modern men? Would it help us better feed the hungry and dress the poor? Nevertheless I listened to this audiobook because 1) it was short and 2) I had trouble defining my own masculinity.
About one month has passed since I finished this book, and
**Read audiobook version**What is the meaning of masculinity and does it have a "modern" shade?
As a reader, I typically dismiss analyses of manhood as self-indulgent and ephemeral. So what if we are suddenly enlightened on the true injustices faced by modern men? Would it help us better feed the hungry and dress the poor? Nevertheless I listened to this audiobook because 1) it was short and 2) I had trouble defining my own masculinity.
About one month has passed since I finished this book, and I still prominently remember two messages.
The first is Keen's general thesis – that masculinity is found in man's innate passions. The metaphorical "fire in the belly." Tradition notions of macho tough guy and postmodern interpretations of the passive salaryman are both evidence of manhood lost. Self-help materials have flooded into society acting ironically as an external source telling us that only we can help ourselves. Modern men overweight money, fame, sex as our ultimate purpose when these concepts are really just figments of an individual's imagination past a certain point.
The second point I remember stems from Keen's discussion of the modern office. We now spend the majority of our waking lives in the office. The company tries to mold itself as our new cause and purpose, providing incentives like pay bumps, promotions, higher status. Perhaps this is why men no longer move with a purpose. From an early age, we are given one by others and when we are finally adults free to do what we want, all we have learned to do is look around for an instruction manual.
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Would not recommend for the common church attender. The reason being the combination of crude language and syncristic ideas. I would, however, recommend for a man serious about soul work and has the paradigm that had space for a book like this.
Key phrases/words:
- WOMAN
- Rites of Passage
- Warrior Psyche
- Economic Man
- Sex
- Virility
- Virtue
- Fierceness
- Intimacy
- Pilgrimage
The meat of the book lay out how capitalism killed the soul by trading our old-timey, comfortable gender roles for new, fully automated ant colony gender roles and we need a retu
Same old, same old, mean ol' society makes dudes fit mean ol' dude gender roles, toxic masculinity is killing us, we need to be softer and cry more and hug children, etc. Real Dr. Phil stuff. Probably good advice, but preachy, and decidedly less Jungian than advertised, unless the references to initiation rites qualify.The meat of the book lay out how capitalism killed the soul by trading our old-timey, comfortable gender roles for new, fully automated ant colony gender roles and we need a return to the Hero mindset, which sounded good when I heard it but, upon further reflection, doesn't actually mean anything.
It did finish strong, with the up-play of responsibility and generosity, the wistful longing for home and hearth, social cohesion, unity of tribe.
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Most recently, I've co-authored a new book with my son Gifford, entitled Prodigal Father Wayward Son.
When not writing or traveling around the world lecturing and doing seminars on a wide range of topics on which I am not necessarily an expert but a skilled explorer, I fiddle with growing things on my farm in the hills above Sonoma, and practice the flying trapeze.
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If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble."
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