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The Sibling Society
By Robert Bly
Addison-Wesley
319 pp.; $25
You find yourself in a sociology class where the instructor passes out a final exam containing a single question: "You have just received a $500,000 advance to write a book that captures the essence of American society at the end of the twentieth century. What did you say in the one-page proposal that sold the publisher on your idea?" What an interesting question! But then, of course, you must answer it.
The solution, as any economist would tell you, lies in modeling. No book can take in the whole multifarious reality of America, but a book can offer a simplified model that makes sense of all manner of previously unsorted experience. If the model is a good one, it will provide satisfying shocks of recognition.
Robert Bly, poet and men's movement guru, essays such a model in The Sibling Society. Bly's earlier book, Iron John, rethought several aspects of being male through imaginative use of a story by the Brothers Grimm. The book hit a nerve, inviting men beleaguered by the women's movement to reclaim their maleness with greater hope. In The Sibling Society, Bly sets out to examine the contemporary American scene by exposing its contradictions. Bly writes, "People don't bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults." Trying to find our way out of repressive paternalism, we have created a society where giving way to impulse is the rule and regression to childhood reigns supreme.
Half-adults, Bly tells us, are comfortable only with others of their own age. Everyone is a sibling, relating by first names. This is the master-image of Bly's model--the sibling society--and to a degree it rings true. Around the world, Bly writes, half-adults wear the same jeans and T-shirts, listen to the same heavy beat music, and attend only to opinions of their peers. The sibling society disregards elders and demonstrates no concern for children. Half-adults become teachers and professors who inculcate this pattern in another generation, often losing the wisdom and culture of the past. Chronological adults, rather than providing models for maturity, themselves imitate adolescents. Bly concludes that this horizontal thinking has a flattening effect, robbing the "siblings" of meaning and purpose.
I read Bly's introduction with interest. His model suggests connections between issues that might otherwise be considered in isolation: our national romanticizing of adolescence; vicious press attacks on elected officials and general hostility to all leaders; consumerism permeating cultural expectation while offering no real satisfaction; the celebrity replacing the hero; the extreme American desire to be loved.
Bly's associative leaps are grounded in wide reading, ranging from Maclean's brain research to D. W. Winnicott's observations on murderous infant rage. As in Iron John, he includes bits of story and poetry from other countries, some of which he has translated himself. While he criticizes present culture, he does not romanticize the past, recognizing its limitations and dangers. Likewise, he uses a Hindu story at some length, but does not sentimentalize Indian culture, citing current problems. He seems evenhanded and realistic.
My intrigue, however, soon gave way to overload. Bly is more ambitious in The Sibling Society than in Iron John. Instead of using one tale to hold the work together, he uses many. He tells a little of a tale, expounds on U.S. or world culture for a while, and then continues the story. Each time he returned to the tale, I struggled to understand how the issues he raised were related to it.
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