The Quiet Dissolutions

Related:

• The Self-Formation of Rulers
• The Dinner Party

Each of the major liberatory moves of the past century had a specific local target. Sexual repression. Arbitrary patriarchal authority. The closet. Racial caste. The therapeutic stigma. Children's terror of their parents. Each move was right about something real. None of them announced that it was also dissolving a precondition of formation. They were not aimed at formation; formation was the substrate they didn't see, and the substrate took the hits.

What follows is the catalog. Each dissolution stands on its own. Together they specify the sociological vacuum in which the contemporary subject is now formed — by which I mean: not formed.

Shame

The deepest. Shame is the standing wrongness of how I am, visible to people whose regard I need. It is distinct from guilt. Guilt is about what I did and admits of repentance. Shame is about what I am and admits only of becoming someone else. Formation runs on shame as its load-bearing engine, because formation is precisely the long process of becoming someone else.

The therapeutic move told us that shame hurts and that hurt is bad. Both halves are true. The conclusion drawn was that shame should be metabolized into self-acceptance, that the wound should be closed. The cost was that the wound was the door. The shamed person looks at himself and sees that he is not yet what he should be; this is not pathological perception, it is accurate perception of a being designed by formation. Self-acceptance closes the perception. The result is the person who experiences his current state as already adequate and feels any suggestion otherwise as an attack. The cadre cannot be made out of this material. Neither can the monk, the scholar, the apprentice, the husband, or the father.

The crisp test: the difference between "you are doing your best" and "this is not yet good." Both can be said with love. Only the second forms.

Judgment

The grammar has been dissolved. People still judge — incessantly, viciously, online — but the public language no longer permits the bare moral verdict. "This is bad" has been replaced by "this is problematic," "this is harmful to X," "this is not for me." Each replacement looks like specificity but is in fact evasion. "Problematic" smuggles the moral content while disowning the speaker's standing to deliver it. "Harmful" displaces the verdict onto a victim. "Not for me" pretends taste.

The cost is precise. Apprenticeship in moral perception requires a master who can say "this is bad" without flinching, and a learner who can hear it without collapsing. Both ends of the transmission have been disabled. A father who cannot tell his teenager "this is wrong" — only "I'm worried about this" — has been deprived of the speech-act that does the formation work. The teenager has been deprived of the encounter with binding judgment that the formation requires. The whole pedagogy is gone, hollowed out from inside its own grammar.

Apprenticeship

The willingness to be openly inferior to a master for years while he forms you. Inferior in skill, inferior in judgment, inferior in standing — and patient with this condition, because the inferiority is the whole point. The apprentice's job is not to express himself; it is to be reshaped.

The autonomy frame cannot accommodate this. The dignity frame reads it as humiliation. The egalitarian instinct treats the master-apprentice asymmetry as suspect by default. So the form survives only in the few domains where its absence is immediately catastrophic — surgery, classical music, certain crafts, a few sports. Everywhere else it has been replaced by the bootcamp, the certification, the lateral hire. The seven-year submission has become the twelve-week intensive, and this is not perceived as a loss because the older form is not perceived at all. The graduate of the twelve-week intensive does not know what he does not know. He has not been formed; he has been credentialed. The two operations have nothing in common.

Vocation

You are formed by what claims you. The form is not of your authorship. Your self emerges through obedience to the form rather than through expression of a prior self. The priest, the monk, the rabbi's wife, the farmer whose family has worked the land for two centuries, the soldier whose grandfather and great-grandfather were also in the regiment — these are vocations. The form has hold of them; they do not have hold of the form.

This has been replaced by the career and the authentic self. The career is a sequence of relationships I elect with various jobs, each of which I reserve the right to end. The authentic self is the prior thing the career is supposed to express. Both presuppose that the self is the author of the form, not formed by it. The intensity available within this frame is real — the obsessive engineer, the founder, the artist — but its structure is the relationship, not the vocation. I have a deep relationship with my craft. The relationship can end. When it ends, I have not been broken; I have pivoted.

The vocation-bearer is broken when the vocation breaks. This is the test. The priest who leaves the priesthood is in a different ontological situation than the engineer who leaves engineering. Almost no contemporary person is in the priest's situation about anything.

Honor

Honor is the condition in which my standing depends on what is known about my conduct, and this dependence is healthy. The regiment's regard binds me. The guild's regard binds me. My father's regard binds me. These are not pathologies of self-esteem to be processed in therapy; they are the social fact that makes formation possible. The apprentice who does not care what the master thinks cannot be formed by the master. The cadre who does not care what the cell thinks cannot be formed by the cell.

The therapeutic move told us not to base our self-worth on what others think. The autonomy frame told us our worth is intrinsic and inviolable. Together they dissolved the mechanism by which conduct gets policed by the regard of those whose regard matters. What remains is the inverse: the algorithmic regard of strangers, mediated by metrics, which forms nobody but addicts everybody. The honor of the regiment has been replaced by the engagement of the timeline. The regiment formed soldiers. The timeline forms users.

The tragic register

Some lives are ruined. Some choices, made wrong, permanently disfigure the person who made them. Some losses do not heal. The category of the irreversible is structurally necessary to formation, because formation exists in time and time is the medium of damage as well as growth. The desert fathers, the rabbinic tradition, the classical tragic stage all assume this. So does any serious parent.

The contemporary register is post-tragic. Every life is a journey of growth. Every setback is an opportunity. Every breakdown is a breakthrough. Every wrong path was a necessary part of the path. The therapeutic obligation is to read our own histories this way and to honor others' readings of theirs. The literature reflects it: very few contemporary novels can write a ruined life as ruined. The ruination always discloses something redemptive.

Dissolve the tragic and you dissolve the urgency. If no life can be permanently disfigured, the urgency that drove formation traditions — get this person into the form before time runs out — has no traction. There is no time running out. Everything will be fine, eventually, by the structure of growth itself.

The threshold

The decisive crossing. Bar mitzvah. Baptism. The taking of vows. The completion of basic training. The moment after which you are no longer who you were before. Every formation tradition has thresholds, because formation requires the structural fact of a "before" and an "after" — the convert, the initiate, the crossed-over.

These have been replaced by gradualism. Adulthood is now achieved continuously, somewhere between eighteen and thirty-five, by accumulating life experiences. There is no day on which you become a man. The bar mitzvah survives but has been reframed as a celebration of the child's particular interests; the formal "today I am a man" content has been hollowed out. Marriage, once a threshold, is now a milestone — quantitatively different from cohabitation, not qualitatively. Graduations, vows, oaths all survive in attenuated forms with the binding force removed.

The cost: without thresholds you cannot ask anyone to die to who they were. The catechumen dies to his old life at the font. The novice dies to her family at the gate. The marine dies to his civilian self in the dirt at Parris Island. Without the threshold, all change becomes incremental update of the existing self, which is the same self that walked in. Formation cannot do its work this way. Formation is a death and a birth, and our culture no longer permits either.

The esoteric

That some knowledge is not yet for you. That premature exposure to certain texts, practices, or perceptions deforms the unprepared soul, and that the master's job includes withholding. The Pythagorean acousmatic was required to listen in silence for five years before he was permitted to speak in the inner circle. The silence was the formation. By the time he spoke, what he said had been shaped by what he had heard, and his speech was a different kind of object than the speech of someone not yet formed by listening. Classical kabbalah barred the Zohar to anyone under forty, unmarried, or insufficiently grounded in Talmud, on the explicit grounds that mystical material received without preparation could derange the reader — produce heresy, madness, a broken life. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Catholic disciplina arcani under which catechumens were dismissed before the Eucharist, the masonic degrees, the Vajrayana empowerments required before practice: every serious tradition kept some of its content behind preparation.

The dissolving move was the doctrine that information should be immediately and equally accessible to all. The printing press began it; the public library extended it; the internet completed it; "information wants to be free" gave it a slogan. Each step rested on real goods — the breaking of priestly monopolies, the democratization of literacy, the end of arbitrary gatekeeping. Each step also took for granted that the relation of the reader to the text was unproblematic, that a text either communicated its content or did not, and that withholding was therefore always a power play rather than sometimes a pedagogical necessity. The whole category of "you are not yet ready for this" became unintelligible. Saying it now sounds like elitism dressed up as concern.

The cost is information without formation. The nineteen-year-old reads Nietzsche on his phone at 1 a.m. and either becomes an edgelord or closes the book; he does not read Nietzsche the way Nietzsche needs to be read, which requires a life and a tradition to read him against. The autodidact who has consumed everything in the wrong order is in a worse epistemic situation than the illiterate, because his deformations are sealed under the conviction that he has done his own research. The contemporary substitute for esoteric structure is the conspiracy theory, which has the form of secret knowledge — they don't want you to know — without the form of long preparation under a master. The QAnon adherent, the wellness influencer, the crypto-historian are all failed mystics. They have apprehended that gated knowledge is more powerful than ungated knowledge and have responded by inventing their own gates and crowning themselves at the inner threshold. The result is paranoid epistemics with no master to correct them and no community to absorb the deformation. What the tradition kept back, it kept back to protect the reader from himself. We have abolished the protection and not noticed that the threat survived.

Productive suffering

That ascesis forms. That fasting, vigil, hard labor, voluntary discomfort, obedience under hardship — these are not pathologies but tools. The desert fathers are explicit. The yeshiva is explicit. The marathon trainer is implicitly explicit. The young insurance underwriter who works through three nights to learn his trade is not being abused; he is being formed.

The replacement is self-care. The replacement frame reads suffering as something to be minimized, prevented, and processed. Boundaries are erected against demand. Burnout becomes a category that swallows the older category of formation. The result is not a population with less suffering — suffering is non-negotiable — but a population whose suffering is unproductive. Anxiety without ascesis. Exhaustion without form. Pain that doesn't shape because there's no one with the standing to interpret it as shaping.

The Catholic Worker house and the CrossFit gym preserve fragments of the older logic, which is why both feel slightly foreign to the contemporary sensibility. The body is being asked to do something it doesn't want to do, on someone else's authority, for the sake of becoming. This is exactly the form the dissolutions removed.

The end-product

Add the dissolutions together. The person who results is not a failure of formation; he is the success condition of a culture that dissolved formation's preconditions. He is what the system actually produces.

He is articulate, friendly, and reflective. He is in therapy or has been, fluent in its vocabulary, capable of locating his own patterns and naming his attachment style. He has hobbies he is intense about and a career he describes as a journey. He has opinions, which he is careful to frame as personal rather than universal, and which shift in response to social pressure he experiences as growth. He is not cruel. He is not lazy. He is genuinely decent in most encounters and capable of real kindness.

He has never been claimed. No form has hold of him. The relationships in his life — to work, to lovers, to friends, to neighborhoods, to traditions — are all relationships he reserves the right to end, and which he has ended, several times, in moves he describes as growth. He has no master. He has no regiment. He has had no thresholds, only milestones, and the milestones have all been quantitatively distinguishable from the lives that surrounded them. He has experienced no shame that survived metabolization, no judgment that bound him, no apprenticeship that subordinated him, no honor that kept him awake at night about what the cell thought, no tragedy that ruined him, no ascesis that shaped him.

The result is a person of extraordinary surface flexibility and extraordinary inner softness. He can do almost anything for a while and almost nothing for long. He is loyal in proportion to satisfaction and loving in proportion to ease. His suffering, when it comes — and it comes — has no interpretive frame in which it forms him; it is unprocessed, and he experiences it as a problem to solve rather than as a material to be worked. He believes himself free, and is, in the specific sense that nothing has him.

He is also, by his own intermittent admission, oddly unfounded. The inner softness registers. He cannot explain it, because the language for explaining it has been dissolved at the same time as the realities it would name. He suspects something is missing without being able to specify what. He sometimes finds himself drawn, half-embarrassed, to forms — the monastery retreat, the martial art with the strict sensei, the Orthodox liturgy, the twelve-step room, the boot camp gym — that operate on logics his culture has officially abandoned. These forms work on him. He notices that they work. He does not know what to do with the noticing, because the dissolved conditions cannot be re-individuated into private therapeutic projects. They were social facts. They needed cells, halls, masters, regiments, tables, thresholds, and bodies in rooms. He has none of these to offer the form, and the form cannot be sustained out of the personal will of one decent, articulate, reflective, unformed person.

This is the figure the dissolutions produced. He is not a villain. He is the result. The catalog of what was dissolved is, read another way, the catalog of what would have to be reconstituted to form him — and there is no plausible vector by which it gets reconstituted at scale. The texts, as before, will keep being read. The cadres, the priests, the journeymen, the soldiers of the regiment, will not be made.