Remaining Human Against the Machine (Essential Excerpts)
Essential excerpts on the decline of communities, human devolution, and how standards and rites of passage help us overcome these threats.
On Tuesday, I looked at the way technology was spurring human devolution. Today, I’ll look at a related article which explores the evaporation of male rites of passage and the effect that this absence has had on the quality and wellbeing of modern men.
The article is titled Warriors Wanted and it tells the story of Jim Real Bird, a member of the Crow Nation who struggles to find good young men for his annual reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. It focuses on a perspective that is outside of mainstream America and, yet, which strikes at the most prescient questions of our time:
Who are we?
What do we stand for?
And will we allow technology to replace our human capacity and spur mass human devolution? Will we continue to move towards a world where we are comfortable and entertained, but where we face soul-crushing meaninglessness? Or, will we adapt and clarify cultural standards that promote aspiration and connection?
Warriors Wanted does a splendid job addressing this topic and its causes. Today, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite excerpts along with some other related quotes.
The first quote points to the way technological innovation often incentivizes human devolution:
There is no need to be able to walk 150 miles,” he says. “There’s no need for anybody to be sitting out there at 20-below moving cattle anymore. There is no need to be anything else other than the ability to push a button here and there. We just got a bunch of soft people.
But, so what if people are getting soft? What’s wrong with comfort and ease?
There is a great book by Michael Easter called The Comfort Crisis that deep dives into exactly why excessive comfort is a problem. The basic premise is summarized nicely here:
…a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.
We tend to avoid pain and discomfort. But we need intermittent discomforts in order to thrive. This paradoxical truth reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Sebastian Junger’s Tribe:
Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
So, Where Do We Look to For Worthwhile Challenges, Identity, and Meaning?
More from Warriors Wanted:
“Boys don’t become men automatically,” says (Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men). “You have to learn to be a man, and we need traditions that get them there. Absent those, we’re in trouble.”
Across the country, he says, the events that traditionally taught boys resilience and independence are becoming scarce. Fewer 18-year-olds than ever have driver’s licenses, for example, with the share dropping from 80 to 60 percent in less than two decades. Meanwhile, many male-only spaces are becoming mixed-sex, including the Boy Scouts of America, which started accepting girls in 2019.
“It’s a tragic and arrogant mistake to just back away from literally millennia of learning about the ways in which boys become men and obliterate them entirely, thinking that somehow social media is going to take its place,” Reeves said. (bolding is mine)
Culture once came from your community. You were brought into a tradition. As I argued in Setting the Bar, this is not usually the case today:
It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. But our villages have undergone a rapid deterioration over the past decades. They show all the markers of growth—the new schools, restaurant chains, and Super Targets—but with a marked loss of connection and identity. Communities are no longer the vehicles where culture spreads and evolves so much as they are the playing field where consumerist forces manifest.
Consequently, many people find it more and more difficult to find any purpose outside themselves:
In his landmark book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam looks at the decline of American communities which began their steady devolution starting around 1960.
I find it interesting that Putnam and the next quote from Warriors Wanted come to the same conclusion about what caused the decline of American communities:
After the performance, Lanny Real Bird, Jim’s cousin, hangs out under the announcer’s tent—he catches a break after directing riders earlier in the day. At 64, he says everything changed when the tribe got cable more than 30 years ago. (bolding is mine)
“That was the paradigm shift where the language was put on the back burner,” Lanny says… “People started getting more comfortable putting their kid in front of cartoons instead of teaching them the Crow language.”
Both Putnam and Lanny Real Bird point to cable television as the primary force that drove people away from their communities and cultural traditions. More than any other factor, the television drove people from the traditional sources of character, aspiration, and connection.
Now, we all have a TV in our pockets, buzzing at us all day and learning from each of our choices how to make its entertainment even more irresistible to our unique psychology.
We have not adapted well to our god-like technologies, but I think we can do much better.
Our infinite technologies are not going away. We must give our children a better framework for how to think about technology and to use it without being used by it. I’ll focus on that next week…
If you want more like this, I’ve focused on this topic in a couple of podcast interviews:
Rediscovering Rites of Passage
Thank you for reading and sharing with your kindred spirits!
Carry the fire!
Shane