Boyhood and Youth - Some Reflections

 I am currently reading through Anthony Esolen's book Defending Boyhood (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2019).  The whole idea of Esolen's work is to talk about facets of boyhood which have been lost regarding the proper development of manhood, although I initially thought it would be a sort of prompt for reflection regarding boyhood and masculinity.  In a way however, I guess it is, but it also establishes some principles.   I wanted to dissect some of this initially and then add my own reflections to the observations I make.  

I note first on page 14 of Esolen's book, where he talks about how a boy looks toward a certain type of man to grant liberty of intellectual and spiritual "combat," (I am not quite sure why the author uses this word, but we'll go with it) and about discourse regarding higher things.  There is a rubric, Esolen notes, as well as the wonder of the search into mysteries.  Looking on page 15, I understand what he is saying about "combat" now - it has to do with questioning and dissection of rules about things, or in another way of putting it, refining the rubric.  This "combat" though is not an end unto itself, as that would actually be the truth, a truth free of subjective feelings, social comfort, and convenience for convenience's sake.  Those factors often lead to an acceptance of a half-truth, and two half-truths, as Esolen notes, can produce a whole lie.  It therefore means as we see on page 16 that combatting the rule is the way of seeking the truth that inspired the rule.  It does not mean the rule is thrown out, but rather clarification happens.  Seeing it that way, there are many things to unpack here.

Truth is unchanging, objective, and is ultimately rooted in divine law - that is factual whether dealing with a Church teaching or just basic safety (not touching a hot stove, for instance).  Questioning or challenging a rule in the right spirit is not denying the truth behind the rule, but rather seeking where the motivation for it comes from.  In watching several of these "HOA Karen" videos on YouTube in recent weeks, we see how a supposedly good concept - a community organization which is supposed to promote safety and order in a community - can be twisted and corrupted into a system where the lives of rightful homeowners are micromanaged and manipulated to control rather than preserved, and an astute homeowner will see the absurdity in this and challenge it.  The idea of "combat" that Esolen notes in regard to rules has to do with two important components.  First is actually knowing the rule.  As Sun Tzu's book on warfare notes, you have to get inside an opponent's head in order to understand how to prevail against them.  One aspect of this intellectual "combat" is knowing a rule first before you decide to mount an offensive against it.  Second, strategy is key.  Once you know the rule, then you have to strategize how to combat the rule without compromising its original spirit.  In other words, if we mount a half-cocked offense against something, it will not go well for us.  And, this is where another concept comes into play.

The term "malicious compliance" is often employed with HOA disputes, and it is a way for a homeowner to show how absurd an interpretation of a certain rule is.  It's actually a good tactic, in that one is using the very weapon directed against them as an offensive advantage.  When it comes to boyhood and masculine mentorship, this can be a key bit of wisdom we can use.  Jesus Himself employed it in the parables in a way that is a radical reinterpretation of what the parable is often interpreted as saying.  When Jesus says "love your enemies" for instance, he is not meaning that you go up and give the person who just wronged you a humongous bear hug and tell them you love them - that will get you smacked down pretty fast in all honesty.  What it means is a little tough love in some cases, meaning that you set boundaries, and you communicate to your enemy in a way that respects their personhood that they crossed a line.  You are not tolerating the wrong they committed, but rather handling it strategically.  And, it is done in the proper spirit and not as a vindictive action.  Looking at it from that perspective, it makes more sense than the false altruism that many well-meaning but misguided Christians tend to impose upon themselves when dealing with an adversarial situation.  Boys need to be taught that at a young age, and of course they will make mistakes and fall short - we are fallen humanity after all, and screwups are a part of the learning and growth process.  The idea of "combat" then means fighting smarter, not harder.  

So, how did that impact me as a boy growing up?  I was one of those kids that defied a lot of things and I had my own set of quirks.  While I was considered to be a good student in school and overall I never was much of a disciplinary challenge to my single mother, I was a kid who marched to his own drummer in a proverbial sense.  And, it created a little friction with my dad too.  This is where the "combat" of rules that Dr. Esolen talks about comes into play.  Boys should be mentored by their fathers in all honesty, but not every father is up to the challenge.  Part of mentoring a son is encouraging them to refine the person they already are, and not forcing them into some preconceived mold the father has.  My dad unfortunately failed miserably at that, and he and I never had the best relationship because what so many others saw as strengths, my dad acted like he was ashamed of them.  Also, not having him in my life as much as I should have didn't help either, as it created further dissonance between us.  I believe my dad loved me though, and I did love him, but our personalities clashed and we couldn't stand a lot about each other either.  However, "being about your father's business" does not necessarily apply to biological parents - we can have other mentors who are father figures to us, and thankfully I had a few of those.  It doesn't mean that when we butt heads with our biological fathers that we ignore everything, as they too can have valuable insight for us, and I actually learned much from my own father too.  For instance, I hated eating cooked vegetables when I was growing up, as often the texture of them was weird.  The problem wasn't the veggies themselves, but the way many people cooked them - they literally boiled the hell out of them until they became a yellow/green mush, and they were just nasty to eat. My dad showed me something though that revolutionized that - he knew how to steam things like broccoli and cauliflower properly so that they were actually appetizing to eat, and I owe him a lot of thanks for that.  My dad also taught me about fishing, and I learned some good life skills from him such as how to wash my own laundry, and that made me more self-sufficient.  I also found out that I inadvertently picked up a few traits from my dad that have served me well over the years - for instance, having multiple copies of certain documents, etc.  When I began sorting through a lot of my dad's stuff after he passed, I saw patterns I myself have in what he kept, and I realized I carried more of my father's attributes than I thought.  It was an epiphany to me, and it made me appreciate my own father more.  He and I disagreed on a lot, but in the end, he also made his own valuable contributions to my development from boyhood to manhood. 

I am also looking later into this same chapter, and came across page 29.  This talks about how boys form relationships as they develop into men, and there are two things Esolen notes that are of interest.

One, what a boy seeks from other boys and men is generally public in nature.  This entails things that either directly resonate with their masculinity, or in a more professional and fraternal sense.  That is why we as Catholic men seek out organizations like the Knights of Columbus (of which I am a 4th-degree Knight myself) and also we tend to be more into organizing politically and socially.  This happens in boyhood as well, as I recall my own boyhood adventures - as the intellectual among a group of other boys in my neighborhood for example, I was the one always trying to create my own re-creations of the explorers I read about in my history books, and I would elaborately construct forts and other structures as part of my "domain."  One of those I recall when I was about 10 years old was actually creating an island in the middle of Grassy Lick Run in the town of Kirby where I lived, and it was an interesting experiment now that I look back on that.  If you saw Grassy Lick Run then, it wasn't much - at its deepest it was maybe 3 1/2 feet, and that was underneath the bridge that crossed it going up Rock Oak Road.  So, in about 8 inches of water that I waded out into just beside the bridge, I hauled large river rocks, piled them, and then scooped dirt from the bank to pile on top of them - I ironically go this idea from reading about the Aztec chimanpas, and I wanted to build my own.  After scooping all that dirt onto the rocks, I then "forested" my island with some weeds that had some nice flowers on them, and that little makeshift island (it was about 5 feet in circumference at most) was a kingdom for me, or rather a "colony" of the little kingdom of forts and other things I had all around the community.  I recruited some local kids as allies to help me do all this, and looking back on it the experiment was pretty good.  Also, at a year or two older, I actually had a whole political movement planned out as well that I wanted to start, and I remember writing out a whole manifesto about it - I kind of wished I had kept that, because it would have been interesting to look back on now.  I saw myself then as a visionary, a "leader of men," and I would recruit younger boys to my cause and make them my minions, or in some cases a de facto junta over my various forts and the island I constructed in the middle of Grassy Lick Creek.  That activity for me fulfilled a social function that was crucial to my development as a young boy.  And, of course, I needed other boys to make it happen, so I recruited and was often successful.  

Secondly, what a man seeks from the opposite sex is often private and not public, as Esolen points out.  The affinity of a boy for a girl is a lot more specified, and even from an early age when no sexual desire is evident a boy wants to impress the girl he has an interest in.  I recall a very quirky way I did that back when I was 11.  I had always wanted a chemistry set, and that Christmas Mom got me one.  At around the same time, I began to develop an interest in the landlady's granddaughter, a beautiful young lady named Jennifer who was about a year or two younger than me.  She came from a rich family though, and she had no interest in any of us local boys, and she was often kind of dismissive of us in all honesty.  I remember trying to impress Jennifer by utilizing my chemistry set to make her perfumes and soaps - a lot of this involved using a bunch of Mom's perfumes she never wore anyway, and the remains of bars of soap in our bathroom.  I would use some things in my chemistry set to synthesize a variety of potions into an aromatic concoction, and then I would gift-wrap them and give them to Jennifer whenever she was down to visit her grandmother's store.  She was perhaps my most serious early crush, and I had it bad for her.  She, of course, didn't reciprocate my feelings, and I have the distinct feeling that many of my well-intentioned gifts I bestowed upon her ended up discreetly discarded in a garbage can somewhere (and in retrospect, who could blame her?  While noble in attempt, the poor girl may have broken out in hives or something with the ambiguous concoctions and soaps I created!).  The point is, when a guy seeks the attention of a lady, he often reveals things about himself to her that no one else would either understand or appreciate.  That is something we even carry into adulthood, as with the right woman a man can feel more like himself and by sharing those more intimate parts of himself, he is committing himself to that woman - that is also the basis of marriage too, and why "the two become one flesh."  These two aspects of a young man in particular - the public part of himself he shares with his buddies, and the more intimate private part of himself he shares with his girl - are not contradictory:  he is the same person, and both parts of that person are what make him who he is.  It is like the fictional jazz musician Moses Godfrey noted in Nat Hentoff's book Jazz Country - you cannot ask a person to "be themselves" because they are a different self to a different set of circumstances.  One can be a son to one's mother, but cannot be that same son to one's wife - he is a husband.  He can be an employee in the workplace, but also be a student at his school - they are not one and the same as each requires a different set of personal rubrics.  This is true as well when a guy is socializing with his buddies - he is not going to be tell them the sweet romantic stuff he shares with his girl, although they may see how he looks at her, and many of them will have their girls they like too so it will be an unspoken understanding among them with that.  Because guys tend to be more vulnerable with girls they have an interest in, they may actually do things that may seem silly if they did the same things in other circles of relationships they have.  Oddly, this still holds true as adults as much as it does as boys, although by that point men are more mature and they can talk about some different issues and even share some ideas based on the solidarity of being husbands to their respective wives.  Even so, even in adulthood when men have wives like that, the circle is smaller at that point.  Let me give an example of a couple of individuals.

There is a guy who has a Filipina fiancee, and he has a friend who has been married to a Filipina for several years, so naturally that creates a point of mutual recognition between the two friends.  The conversations they have will go something like this:  "You know, the other day my fiancee was so sweet because she is always making sure I eat my breakfast, etc.  Is this what a typical Filipina wife will do?"  The friend in this case responds that his wife - he may have been married to her over 18 years at this point - does the same thing, and he also thinks it is a sweet gesture.  Unless one has a friend who has a similar experience though, this is not something that one can talk about with just anyone.  It is based on a shared experience, and the point of true friendship in that case is being able to bounce insights off each other and perhaps even gain new insights from each other too.  That is a good thing, and it is 100% true masculinity for two guys to have a conversation like that.  This starts even in boyhood as well, where perhaps two friends from similar backgrounds can relate regarding a certain circumstance both face.  This was true for me as a kid growing up in a low-income single-parent household in a small town in West Virginia - many of us neighborhood kids did face similar challenges, and often we could talk about that because we knew where we came from too.  Shared experience is what creates the communicable traits of community, something we talked about before, and now let's put that together.

All of us have "stories," and we also are members of one or more types of groups, either by choice or circumstance.  The collective "story" of that group is one in which all the members of it share, but there are also things called individuality and distinctiveness, and those dictate how the individual shapes their part of the "story."  What is unique to that individual, in Personalist terms, is called incommunicable traits. What they share with others in the same group is called communicable traits, or universals.  At the core of that is what makes up the story - this is a series of central narrative convictions that evolve around the response to four fundamental questions:  who am I? where am I? what's wrong? and what's the remedy?  Yes, for those who have read my stuff for the past 10 years now, you know where I am going with this - this again is the CNC model that Pentecostal theologian Kenneth Archer proposes, coupled with the thesis that Catholic philosophy professor John Crosby gives, both in their respective books.  This kind of fits into Esolen's thoughts too, as he talks about the male proclivity to rank things, and me even proposing this model is my attempt to do just that.  Like Esolen notes on page 33 of his book, I as a man do not see these two concepts (Crosby's and Archer's) as the same, but rather they can be viewed in one of two ways.  They can be contrasted against each other (the philosophical vs. the theological in this case) or they can be compared and as I have done synchronized into something more complementary.  I have always had a knack for doing that, and thankfully according to Esolen, it means I am a normal male of the human species.  Esolen argues - more or less - that instead of suppressing this proclivity in boys, we should be nurturing it and encouraging it to grow, and teaching things such as critical thinking, problem solving, and fundamental skills that will aid in evolving both of those in the mind of an impressionable boy.  It teaches boys to think on their feet then, and instead of worrying about the problem, it sets the boy's mind into a sort of "survival mode" to where he comes up with his own solutions.  Let me tell you how that relates to me. 

Like many people, I have faced my fair share of adversity and challenges.  You have read about some of them over the past year.  If a boy in particular is taught at an early age to anticipate variables, and then challenged with a way to address them, it will be an asset to them later.  This starts in the way they are educated.  Part of my teaching style I communicate with my high school juniors entails making them think.  I challenge them, girls and boys alike.  For instance, if I am asking them about something, I want to make them think, to get into problem-solving mode.  One thing, for instance, I do with my students when they ask what the letter of something starts with, I will say "the fifteenth letter of the alphabet" (which is P), and then I watch them when faced with a challenge trying to figure that out - it is a little bit amusing to watch them recite the alphabet while counting on their fingers, but eventually they get it.  Another thing I do as well is utilize word association - for instance, if I am teaching the components of the liturgy to my students, I will ask them about the General Confession as part of the Liturgy of the Word, and if they have trouble I will ask them "What is the highest rank an Army officer can have?" and then say, "OK, you got that, so combine that with what the one sacrament is where we tell our sins to a priest."  Once they make the association, they are like "Oh yeah, I know this!" and they end up actually doing good on a quiz if this comes up.   While girls in my classes tend to grasp this quicker, the boys love the challenge and will jump on it, and often they still recall it weeks later even if otherwise they are loud and distracted in class.  This is a master stroke at learning to solve a problem presented to you, and once the students understand what you are doing, they are able to think on their feet more.  These are ways I learned too in many cases, and it does work wonders with intellectual development.  The down side to it though is that I actually have to do with 11th graders what I learned in 6th grade.  Such is the culture we live in though.  Problem-solving is a skill that any person of either gender can benefit from, but teaching boys from an early age to assess a situation quickly and think on their feet is a valuable skill that could save their lives.  And, it is something lacking in much of today's youth, especially boys, because often boys have a lot stacked against them that they shouldn't have to struggle with, mostly because of the leftist domination of education and other societal factors that could be taken into consideration as well.  

I will probably visit this more later, as I also have a second book of Esolen's on the way I want to reflect on as well, but thank you for allowing me to share here today.  And, hope you will join me again next visit.