Customer Reviews

The Sibling Society

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Those familiar with "Iron John" know Bly's style, and how he uses fairy tales to illuminate the hidden recesses of modern culture. In "The Sibling Society," he pulls off an amazing feat. Using simple tales such as "Jack and the Beanstalk" and the Hindu myth of Siva/Ganesha, Bly points out many of the failings evident in modern culture. His insights are measured, wise and seem quite accurate to me. Time and time again, I found myself paging through the book, nodding "Yes! That's it." It seemed as if I were seeing the plight of Gen-Xers like myself clearly for the first time.

Unlike most of my generation, I was raised in a traditional two-parent household. My mother was strong, gentle and patient, my father an old-fashioned, firm but fair disciplinarian. Needless to say, I was shocked when I went away to college. Though I drank, the debaucheries most people went through seemed silly and shallow. Even in corporate America, I find `brown-nosing' and petty backroom politics, instead of solid analysis and ethical behavior, to be the focus of most people's careers. Not that I am always perfect, but at least I try.

I think Bly has done a wonderful job illuminating the nature of the dilemma I've been facing for years. Though some of his points are arguable, I think the synthesis is a pretty accurate Freudian/ Jungian relating of mythic elements of our psyches to the realities of modern life. His pointing out how the "super-ego" has shifted its emphasis from moral/ethical domination to a success/ popularity one seems to me quite apt. I can see it operating all around me. I was raised under the "old" system, and to this day find the "new" system quite alien.

As an answer to the critic below, perhaps you are transferring your "shadow" onto the author. If anything, he is trying to awaken us from cultural trance we find ourselves in. His aim is not, heavy intellectualism, but communicating the essence of mythic/poetic dream images to normal men and women. That is much more useful than turning out a tome that a few solitary scholars will ever read. I think few authors manage to say so much so simply as Bly manages to.

You want to know what Britney Spears, Columbine, and Gary Condit have in common? Just read this book and you'll get your answer as well some great insights into our twisted little culture at the present. Yeah, yeah, yeah, online detractors, I heard it all before-he's stolen material from such classics as "The Culture of Narcisissm" and other works. He's unfocused, pompous,etc. Call him what you will, but I think it's brilliant how he uses myths and fairy tales to lead us into our modern day predicaments that we all sense on some vague level but can't articulate them clearly. And in the end, he is right on target with his arguments. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't whisper "sibling society" under my breath-whether it's that I see a 45 year old mother of 4 with a picture of a supermodel taped to her fridge to stop her from eating or the myriad of "reality programming" shows on every major network. Bly is a cultural prophet with a very thought provoking set-up that stays with you long after you finish the book.

Bly sees a break down in traditional values, with the consumer society and television being major culprits.He also blames the baby boomers because of their disrespect of authority.(However, baby boomers were the first generation to be consumerized;since, the trend has much intensified.)He shows that the young can't grow up because they don't have real adults to guide them, and the commercial interests are keeping them at an adolescent stage.As he did in "Iron John", Bly laments the absence of fathers in the family, and the impossible burdens placed on mothers.The strength of the book is his exposition of a disturbing trend in modern society: the "arrested development" of the young, which is denying them a fully human life.Bly's social theory lacks rigor, but overall this is a very important tract for the times.

In the Sibling Society, Robert Bly has found our culture's shadows: we have failed to provide a moral compass for the young. By refusing to become fully mature themselves parents have abandoned their children to inadequate day care and hours of television and computers rather than passing on the values of the culture on a one to one basis. The effects of turning young children over to unlimited hours of television has affected their ability to focus and apply themselves to the tasks of school.

Yet school also takes some lumps from Bly. He believes that education is not what it should be because it is in collusion with the valueless sibling society that is; it does not consider what the past has to teach us.
A seeming contradiction is Bly's discomfort with authority of any sort yet he expresses a longing for the order that mature uses of authority would bring.
Promise Keepers, a men's organization that asks for responsible maturity, has missed the mark according to the author by ignoring the good gains made by women in the past thirty years. He recognizes the need for mutuality between men and women.
At the age of 70, he reflects upon the changes brought about by neglecting to teach the collective wisdom everyone took for granted a generation or two ago. He has lived through turbulent times and given a great deal of thought to what has happened in families, the leadership of this country, the media and their effects upon the young generation. Bly's view will not be popular with those who have taken popular culture for granted. For example, he believes that western movies have affected the psyches of males in our society by overturning the bases for a civilized and moral society in favor of a macho male code.
Reagan and Bush come in for hard criticism for leadership styles that disregarded the good of the whole by favoring the rich to the detriment of the environment and to the detriment of those who work hard to get ahead and cannot.
Poet and storyteller, Bly loves metaphor and for this reason, his ideas are sometimes difficult for readers to understand. He often quotes transcendent writers from our culture such as Emily Dickenson and Henry David Thoreau as well as from cultures around the world including Kabir and Rumi. He is in love with the transcendent in a non traditional way.
While the Sibling Society deals with important issues in an original and provocative way, the book is an over-generalization, lacks clarity, and often sounds downright peevish and cranky by ignoring the outstanding work of some parents, teachers and youngsters. Bly has failed to give their successes any praise. But it was probably not his wish to give a more balanced view.

It has taken a poet to tell us what we normally expect from the Psychologists, Political Scientists, and Sociologists. Robert Bly, in "The Sibling Society," has, as he did in his seminal work in social criticism, "Iron John," told us things about ourselves that we needed confirmed by an independent source. "The Sibling Society" is that source. It confirms that we have become a culture that sanctions adult juvenile behavior. By ignoring our deeper responsibilities as parents, we have learned to ignore the difficult problems of our society; and in the process, we have lost an essential element of what it means to be an adult society. In effect, we have become the children of our children.

At least that is Bly's theory.

It is a powerful and beautifully told theory. One related to us through allegory and morality-based fairytales. It is centered on what the author sees as the nation's rapacious greed, its narcissistic self-absorption, and the neurotic need for unearned (one-way) love, and attention -- especially from our own children who we try to make our friends.

Bly is not alone in having isolated these factors as the key symptoms of a much less orderly American culture. John Ralston Saul in "The Unconscious Civilization" comes to similar conclusions -- as does Theodore Dalrymple in "Life at the Bottom." However, it remains arguable whether these factors are in fact the true root causes of the American dilemma of its emerging adult adolescence.

And alternative theory that, arguably fits Bly's anecdotal data with equal facility is to view Bly's factors as symptoms of a deeper cause. That cause being the desire to take credit for things that have been bequeathed to us but for which we have yet to take direct responsibility, and which we have not been actively engaged in accomplishing or furthering. In effect, America has become a culture that lives on psychological and emotional credits, mostly off the "past achievements" of its forefathers. By "pocketing" past achievements, with little real effort on our part, we derive a vicarious but undeserved, false and thus exaggerated sense of our own achievements. The byproduct of this "taking of unearned credit" and of becoming comfortable living on psychological and emotional credit, is a life lived beyond our psychological and emotional means as a nation. It is this false sense of achievement that leads to self-doubt, lost of confidence in our selves as a nation, and to Bly's factors as collective compensatory behavior.

We Americans are fortunate to have inherited both natural, societal and spiritual bounties that make us the envy of the world. But the democratic freedoms we have inherited are a "work in progress," not the end of history as at least one scholar has declared. Both our natural and our spiritual endowments are things that require adult supervision for proper maintenance, safe-guarding and further development, on to completion, lest they be squandered along the way.

What Bly seems to be saying is that by reverting back to adolescence, America has begun to squander these bounties. It is a powerful but disturbing read. Five Stars.

Just the title alone inspired me with many observations on modern society, in which no one wants to be/respect the authority figure, we all collaborate instead of taking orders from anyone, there is no right or wrong, only "your truth" and "my truth," and the most important thing is for everyone to be self-actualized.

However once I began reading the book I found it to be somewhat rambling and unfocused, with many allusions to various myths, straining to fit them into preconceived interpretations to align with his theme. There are many isolated nuggets providing fruitful food for thought. But it is necessary to take these nuggets and develop them on one's own in order to derive maximum benefit. Nevertheless, providing the nuggets at all is a valuable service from this book.

Bly's thesis is that the wonderful age of the 1960's somehow went awry, resulting in generations of unparented children who become sullen and resentful, and ultimately socially necrotic. Bly fails to realize that this outcome is the inevitable result of a narcissistic generation that distrusted all authority and sought to discredit and dismantle it. The "baby boom generation" has now reached late maturity and wonders where their parents have gone. Their parents, the "greatest generation," strove and gave them so much, and they grew up feeling entitled to the benefits of engaged civic society without realizing also the dues required in its maintenance. As a result the baby boom generation continues to mortgage their children's futures, in the form of a massive national debt which has been consumed to continue to provide the quality of life that they have come to expect, provided by the modern-day omniparent called government. The culture has evolved from a culture of authority to one of argument. In this argument, money and mass media have the loudest voice, and society and government do their bidding.

The unanswered question is whether the baby-boomer "sibling society" is a transitory phenomenon to be succeeded by a new "greatest generation" in posterity who will once again have to sacrifice, strive, and take up the slack. Or, whether we have permanently abandoned the responsibility to take our turn as the parent, only to find that we will now be parented by our creations (mass marketing, technology, etc.), fascinating us, directing us, and telling us what we want.

In writing the book, Bly's goal is to extirpate the sibling society that he has described. He hopes to accomplish this by encouraging our generation to reach out and mentor youths. However, the erosion of culture means much has already been lost and may be beyond retrieval. The sibling society may never know how to move beyond only crude efforts of being Big Brother.

Robert Bly's best yet.

What happens while both parents work making money? Robert Bly, using 'Jack and the Beanstock', and other fables, addresses the children who watch too much TV, lose the ability to imagine, and remain adolescents their whole life.

What can we expect as these people take control of our governmental and educational institutions?

A 'must read' for parents, but read it carefully! It may be too true!

In the last 20 years or so I have heard that we are going thru a shift of paradigm in the (Western) world. Robert Bly pinpoints the shift from a paternalistic society to what we see today. A society that heralds the individuals right under the name off freedom, but in reality puts good old greediness on top. We all say me-first, and the children pays the price. - The book is not an easy read, in spite of the shift between the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and Mr.Blys comments. It takes what todays siblings think they lack: TIME. MAKE TIME.

In 1996, one couild travel the world and find middle-aged men and women wearing the laid back GAP uniform of tee shirts and jeans or khakis, people who were largely like one another, regardless of origin, all sort of melting into one great big GAP army, which was good, right? Wrong saith Robert Bly, who decries the inability of middle-agers to embrace adulthood along with all of it's TRAPpings and responsibilities and even hierarchy. The democrotization of the family, where the kids are left with 'friends' as folks and no real authoritarian figures has left us with some pretty scary statistics concerning teenage pregnancy, adolescent crime and general aimlessness among our youth, says Bly.

Armed with myths over 1,000 years old, Mr. Bly recounts ages gone by when girls and boys were guided by mothers and fathers through the harrowing trials of growing up and becoming Adult, when the strength of the family was found in a present mother, a present father and a stable, economically viable America where the middle class could thrive and the poor were taken care of.

Not so now, says Bly.

Sadly, kids have grown up first in impersonal daycares, then in front of the t.v., and finally on to the computer, where the more imaginative and creative impulses are bypassed and modern marketers are allowed to blaze their ways directly into the middle brain of our most precious, our children.

No more time spent outdoors with dad and mom, no more family picnics, no more real time to connect with Nature at large which is so vital to human (humane) development.

Bly points several fingers at several 'culprits'. Advertisers who appeal to the most base instincts in the most efficient ways possible, large corporations who have demonstrated zero social responsibility or concern for the citizens of their parent Countries, eschewing loyalty for labor (cheap), previous patriarchal systems where men were allowed to revel in some sort of warped sense of masculinity where women and children had no rights or say in how their world should be run, and then, too, feminist groups who have advertised the death of masculinity in virtually any form in reaction to asaid patriarchal systems, and on and on.

Bly points only halfheartedly at some possible solutions, where men and women become present in children's lives and intervene in critical periods throughout an adolescent's and young adult's life to aid them along the road to becoming an adult, and even protecting them from the 'world' at large.

But by the tone of the book, not much Hope is held out, in my view, where this book, initially poking fun and playing games, eventually becomes a sobering account of the State We're In.

Bly is arguably the best living American poet, but is probably most well known for his epochal work Iron John from some 25 years ago. What he showed in The Sibling Society is the artist's challenge to his culture: every artist of any genre worth the name in any era has been capable of this daring, of the willingness to pull the covers of appearance, pretension, and denial away from the most troubling and destructive elements of a society in decline, while revealing a way out and forward. Bly does all of this in this book for an America that, as he saw in the 90's, was already in a steep if unapparent decline. It is the role of the artist to see such trends before the mass media, before the corporate and governmental leaders of a culture can see it. Artists can do this because they are tuned into the culture's shadow-self, its thanatos -- they have trained themselves in detecting it within, it informs and enriches their art. Thus, they can see it in their culture. If you've read Bly's poetry, you know he has taken that journey inwardly, relentlessly questioning himself, his origins, his prejudices, his darkness. The next step is to perceive the reflection (not a projection, but merely a reflection) of that darkness in one's own society. Bly has done it here and in his other works -- his poetry on the Iraq War, his book on the human and cultural shadow, and many of his other works. As a nation, we ignore poets and artists like Bly at our own great and inevitable peril.