A Requiem for Friendship

Mark Shea recently called our attention to Anthony Esolen's 2005 article, A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution. This is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking article and well worth reading. He argues that the sexual revolution, especially in the acceptance of male homosexuality, inhibits close and warm friendships among men.

Why is this the case? Because it prevents men from getting close together without being considered homosexual.

I am sorry to have to use strong language, but only when sodomy is treated as a matter of course for everyone (as in the institutionalized buggery of boys and young men in ancient Sparta) or when it is met with such opprobrium that nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it, could Lincoln and his friend share that bed without suffering ridicule. The stigma against sodomy cleared away ample space for an emotionally powerful friendship that did not involve sexual intercourse, exactly as the stigma against incest allows for the physical and emotional freedom of a family.

This, like other aspects of the modern society, is particularly hard on boys.

....All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.

Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.

In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.

(See the article I wrote on my wife's blog to learn about my family's tradition.)

And, of course, we all know what has taken the place of that sign.

The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel.

In summary,

So far, I have lamented the attenuation of male friendships, which suffer under a terrible pincers attack: The libertinism of our day thrusts boys and girls together long before they are intellectually and emotionally ready for it, and at the same time the defiant promotion of homosexuality makes the natural and once powerful friendships among boys virtually impossible.

What is the cost of destroying friendship between men, and especially between boys? Well, I guess you can't count the harm to boys because our society simply doesn't care about them. In fact, it treats boy-to-boy friendships the way the Gulag treated any cooperation between its political prisoners: they are counterrevolutionary behavior (i. e. "sexism") that must be rooted out. So what does society lose from withering boyish friendships?

Well, quite a bit.

Consider how strong and audacious are the emotions of the young man. Suppose these are not directed towards sexual liaisons with young women, towards playing house. They do not therefore cease to exist; they must find some object. In the past that object would be the world and the group’s conquest of it.

He goes on to give the examples of Louis Pasteur, Gershwin, C. S. Lewis and Tolkein, among others. How many benefits on the scale of penicillin or The Lord of the Rings is our society willing to flush down the drain for the sake of its gods of feminism and libertinism?

Anthony Esolen, by the way, is a an author and regular contributor to the Latin Mass Magazine, among other publications. His most notable work, in my opinion is his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

TTL