StephenKMackSD's Blog

The general story we tell about boys’ friendships does not include a lot of intimacy. We tend to think boys mostly bond over sports and roughhousing. Not a lot of emotional vulnerability there, we think; that’s for girls’ friendships. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is an ethnographic study of boys’ friendships that helps us to rewrite those stories we tell.

As Way learned through years of watching boys develop, their friendships in early adolescence are often marked by intense emotional feeling. She quotes a fifteen year old as saying of his closest friend “My best friend and I love each other. That’s it. You have this thing that is deep. So deep it’s within you. You can’t explain it… I guess in life sometimes two people can really really understand each other, and really have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.” Such responses are typical of 14 and 15 year old boys, she found.

However, usually around age 16 boys begin to experience what Way calls a “crisis of connection” as they grow up and encounter the pressures imposed by our hypermasculine culture. Boys, in other words, are not “naturally” emotionally detached and “independent”; rather, they learn how to be this way, at the cost of their relationships with their friends. The consequences can be extreme, as Way notes that the suicide rate for boys in late adolescence spikes to four to five times the rate of girls just at the age when boys lose the emotional language that they had in early and middle adolescence.

We had a conversation about the topic with Niobe Way on the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking the icon below, or pointing your browser here.

 HUP Podcast – Niobe Way

As she explains in the conversation, the crisis being faced by boys and young men is not necessarily their lack of male role models, as is often assumed. What boys need, she says, is what everyone needs: “People that allow them to express a full range of human capacity. So (they) are allowed to be empathic, allowed to be emotional. Have intimate friendships, express the desire for those intimate friendships. They need models in their lives that foster those kinds of human needs and allow boys to thrive.”

Those models don’t have to be men. Way shows how, in fact, male role models sometimes can compound the problem, in that they’re often products of this same culture and thus can serve to reinforce the crisis of connection. Deep Secrets helps us to break through the stereotypes around the dominant culture of masculinity that all too often result in strict and harmful images of boys and men in society. The book tells a sadly unfamiliar story that has important implications for parents, teachers, and others who work with and live with boys.

Robert Skidelsky handily put Pretty Boy Reactionary and his fellow thinkers in their place. 1865?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces would continue to use “firm determination and assaults” against terrorist elements in the Gaza Strip, adding that Israel would not tolerate attacks on its citizens or communities. Continue reading →

By all accounts, philosopher Richard McKeon (1900-85) was a legend in the classroom. The list of students for whom McKeon shepherded an academic pursuit or two reads like a roster of the twentieth-century’s most noted cultural figures: Robert Coover, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, Paul Rabinow, and Wayne Booth, among them. But McKeon never quite knocked out the one bankable work that makes an intellectual’s name—instead, his contributions—to everything from human rights, medieval philosophy, and the history of science to dialectics, literary criticism, and rhetoric—remain as diverse as the pluralist philosophy he helped espouse.

**

Our own executive editor Doug Mitchell shares the following thoughts about McKeon’s contributions to twentieth-century thought:

The University of Chicago Press has been home to many publications by and about Richard McKeon, going back to editions of Cicero and Aristotle and up to an ongoing series of Selected Papers in three volumes, of which two are already published, with a third due in 2013. McKeon’s range as a philosopher was enormous (from metaphysics and philosophy of science to ethics and international politics to aesthetics, education, and the philosophic arts, with special emphasis on the arts of logic and rhetoric). His participation in curriculum-building at various universities (from Baroda to Puerto Rico to Swarthmore to Chicago), and in establishing UNESCO and the drafting the Universal Bill of Rights at the United Nations has marked him as a significant player in the junction of philosophy with the world of practical affairs.

What may be most striking about his notably original philosophy is its reformulation of the history of ideas as a branch of philosophy and philosophy as an examination of plural traditions of philosophic discourse. This positions his philosophy of systematic pluralism as an entrée to invention and judgment in the extension of techniques of discourse and of avenues to inquiry, eschewing relativisms and deconstructivisms, on the one hand, but also deflecting the absolutism of naturalisms and positivisms on the other. McKeon’s philosophy is undergoing a revival of interest in areas as diverse as sociology, literary history, neuroscience, rhetorical studies, and comparative studies in civilization and world community.

For this reason, the Press is delighted to offer a link to a website devoted to McKeon, established in 2011, which features his autobiographical writings, a bibliography of his works, and samples of his audio lectures as well as his lecture notes.

**

McKeon’s many publications include several published by the University of Chicago Press that are still in print today: Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon; On Knowing: The Natural Sciences; Introduction to Aristotle; Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Volume Two; and The Edicts of Asoka (coedited with N. A. Nikam). For those seeking additional information about McKeon and his philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann’s Richard McKeon: A Study, the first book-length treatment of McKeon’s scholarship, is worth noting, as is Walter Watson’s The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism.

The newly launched Richard McKeon website includes varied responses to McKeon’s philosophies and promises to be a very helpful place to begin for those unfamiliar with this pioneering American intellectual.