Robert Bly on the Culture of Inversion and Self-Colonisation in the Sibling Society
Discussion
Paul Kingsnorth:
"The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.
Back in 1996, Bly could already see around him the problems which have since blossomed into a full-flowering pathology. America and the world influenced by it, he wrote, was “navigating from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way”. From the patriarchal frying pan, the West had jumped into the post-modern fire:
“People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be … Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents — seeing that — have no desire to become adults. Few are able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane — tradition, religion, devotion.”
Bly believed that the old “vertical society” of the West had been discredited by the upheavals of the 20th century. This discrediting was both inevitable and at least partially necessary, but as in the 1640s, the collapse of the old order had unleashed an uncontrollable destructive energy, manifesting in a cultural revolution against all things “vertical”. War had been declared on all aspects of “the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system”, whose genuine faults had become associated with all and any impulse-control, hierarchy, order or structure.
A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’
Bly was fundamentally a worker in myth, and The Sibling Society, like his earlier book about men, Iron John, shifts between his retelling of classic fairy tales, and his analysis of their application to contemporary culture. He believed that the fundamental problems of his time were not political or economic, but mythic. They manifested at the level of deep story, on which all cultures are built. The modern West, without knowing it, had taken an axe to the root of its own mythic structures, as Jack takes an axe to the root of the beanstalk. The Giant in that story, retold by Bly here, represents Freud’s “death instinct”, which had taken hold of American culture. The Giant is a killer of fathers, destroyer of families, eater of children. He lives in a castle surrounded by rocky, barren lands, and he has ravaged every living structure around him. He has no family, no past and no future. In his castle, he gathers his wealth to him, and eats and eats and eats.
It is the Giant — resentful, angry, greedy, marooned in a permanent present — who best represents what we have become, nearly three decades after Bly’s book was published. The culture of inversion is the Giant’s creation, and ours. Adolescent and surly, unmoored from both culture and nature, betrayed by our own desires, we can find little good in the past and little hope in the future. Then as now, the governing attitude to our own cultural inheritance is what Bly called “a sort of generalised ingratitude”:
“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”
But the most striking argument that Bly made as he analysed our cultural collapse was that Western culture was now doing to itself what it had long done to others: colonisation. The methods that Western colonial administrators had used to demolish and replace other cultures — rewriting their histories, replacing their languages, challenging their cultural norms, banning or demonising their religions, dismantling their elder system and undermining their cultural traditions — were now being used against us. Only we had not been invaded by hostile outside forces: this time, the hostile forces were within.
No conservative, Bly could nevertheless see that the culture of inversion, already in full swing in the Nineties, was a product of the elite Left, who had “taken over the role of colonial administrators”, and set about colonising — or should we say “decolonising”? — their own culture from within:
“They teach that European kings were major criminals who dressed well … that the Renaissance amounted to a triumph of false consciousness, that the Magna Carta solved nothing … that Mother Theresa was probably sexually disturbed … that Beethoven wrote imperialist music, that Mencken was a secret fascist, that Roosevelt encouraged Pearl Harbour, that President Kennedy’s Peace Corps did not work, that Freud supported child abuse, and that almost every one of his ideas was wrong.”
America, said Bly was “the first culture in history that has colonised itself”. Twenty-five years on, America’s fate is also the fate of Britain and other European nations. Our internal colonisers have been ruthlessly effective in the intervening decades, and the “culture war” is a product of their success:
“If colonialist administrators begin by attacking the vertical thought of the tribe they have conquered, and dismantling the elder system, they end by dismantling everything in sight. That’s where we are.”
It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.
“The inner dome of heaven has fallen,” wrote Bly. “To say we have no centre that we love is the same thing as saying that we have colonised ourselves. What we need to study, then, is how a colonised culture heals itself.”
How does it heal itself? Bly, mythologist and poet, had an answer: through story and ritual. The work of the age of inversion is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved."