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It has become the fashion for mythopoetic dudes (men in the men's movement who focus on their inner lives) to explore old folk tales for deep, symbolic meaning, but it's not something I've ever done. But, for once, I'm going to try my hand at a little soulful sleuthing. I'll take as my illustrative myth or folk tale the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
When the story begins, the town of Hamelin is overrun with rats. A piper approaches the town council and offers to rid the town of its rats for the sum of 100 guilders. The mayor and his councillors, skeptical but having tried everything else, agree to the deal. And the piper does it; playing his pipe, he leads the somehow hypnotised rats out of the town and to their deaths in the river. But now the story turns ugly. The town council, knowing that the rats are dead and cannot return, refuse to pay the piper. In response, he plays his pipe once again in the streets of Hamelin, and this time all the children of the town come out and follow him, and are never seen again by their families or anyone in the town.
This bleak story tells what can happen when a whole community or society loses its integrity, its honour. Let us consider how it might apply to our situation today.
Royalty and the rats
Perhaps the essence of work is that it is a transaction; something is done in exchange for some return. In the story, the piper rids the town of rats in exchange for (the promise of) a sum of money. What might rats symbolize? Poverty, squalor, dirt and disease, the loss and spoilage of stored food and clothing; all of these are associated with rats. During the last few hundred years it has been men who, through their work, have reduced these problems (if only in the West) to a shadow of their former magnitude.
The average standard of living in Europe or North America today is one that was enjoyed only by royalty just five hundred years ago. Fresh drinking water and indoor plumbing have produced similar astronomical shifts in personal health and hygiene. Plague and contagious diseases have been all but eliminated. Modern food preservation, transportation and refrigeration give us a huge variety of fresh foodstuffs throughout the year.
I imagine that, as you read the above, you were probably thinking "Yes, but..." The fact is, we have become so focused during the last thirty years on the dark side of our technological culture that we have become almost unable to recognize its accomplishments.
And therein lies the problem. For what we owe to men, in return for these hard-won achievements, is honour. And we owe it because, and this is important, they did what was asked! We didn't say, back in the industrial revolution, "Make sure that you don't scar the environment as you dig your coal mines and build your steel works." We didn't say, "Be sure to avoid the trap of creating an impersonal, institutional medical system as you develop science to fight disease." But today, we are acting as if we did.
Now that the deed is done and it seems that no one can take away our disease-free environment, our indoor plumbing and fresh drinking water, our seventy-year life expectancy and our royalty-like levels of privilege and consumption, we are saying, "Shame on you, men, for polluting the environment, for impersonal, drug-oriented medicine, for economic and military imperialism. And most of all, shame on you for oppressing women, children and minorities."
A curable confusion
I believe that at some level we know that, like the councillors of Hamelin, we are welching on a deal. We are avoiding paying the piper and we are flirting with disaster. For what might the loss of a community's children symbolize? Firstly, it would surely represent the departure of a great deal of joy and personal fulfillment from the lives of the townspeople, and its replacement with a long-lasting grief. And, more fundamentally, it could stand for the loss of a society's ability to renew itself, to recreate itself and move forward into the future. Without children, a society cannot regenerate. This story suggests that a culture without integrity does not survive.
In a profound, spiritual sense, I believe we are facing such a possibility today.
The loss of integrity inherent in our refusal to give men the honour that is their due has created a deep wound in our culture. Out of that wound is leaking away the very energy we need to create a positive vision of our future. Pop feminism's invention and simultaneous conviction of "the Patriarchy" (i.e. men), and men's collusion in their own betrayal, has introduced a void, a kind of hopelessness, where we might have been experiencing hope and anticipation.
We have become confused, but it is not too late. We can still have a change of heart, and choose to pay the piper. We can re-evaluate the one-sided analysis that seems to convict men, and expose its faulty premises, first to our own satisfaction, and then to others.
To honour men again, we will not need to dishonour women. We will not need to turn our back on the modern problems of environmental destruction, pollution, racism or sexism. We will simply begin to say, to men as well as to women, "Thank you for a job well done." And as we do that, we will find new energy to address the work that lies before us now. For we will know that we live in a society of integrity, where people are paid and honoured for their work, for achieving what we ask them to do.
Let's begin to honour the good work that men have done in building our world. Let's acknowledge the political triumphs of freedom and liberal democracy, the economic triumphs of our high living standards, and the social triumphs of universal access to education and medical care. Let's begin to pay the piper.
David Shackleton is a thinker, writer and speaker on gender and spiritual growth, a men's work leader, and editor/publisher of Everyman: A Men's Journal.
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