| | | | Fathers Can Pave the Way to Peace |
By Seth Mullins
Many writers and journalists in our society have a tendency to take shortcuts when trying to arrive at the root causes of various social ills. They’re apt to make generalizations about how men and women – respectively - innately behave. These types of arguments usually achieve little besides engendering hostility and distrust between the sexes and shifting blame from one to the other. In reality, both are responsible for the destruction and violence in the world, and only by working together can they address these issues.
It’s true that male patriarchy has been responsible for the proliferation of horrific weapons, ugly wars, and greater destruction to nature in the last century than in the entire remainder of the world’s history. But women have been party to this too. For every man with the ambition to stake his claim in the ruthless corporate world, there is a woman who wants such a man to provide for her.
Men, to a large extent, have always been laden with a social expectation that they be warriors. Both of the sexes are in complicity with regards to male aggression; the men are the ones out there performing the role, but both sides have agreed to the terms. This is an arrangement that travels back throughout eons of our history. Men have viewed warlike behavior as the way to procure a mate; and so females, in turn, have learned to wield power with their sexuality. What played out in tribal times as the drive to expand and conquer has translated, in today’s day and age, to cutthroat business practices, war profiteering and the rape of the natural world.
So how do we work our way towards a peaceful world – an end to our pointless and wasteful wars – when men still carry that societal expectation that they must be warriors? There is a crucial distinction to be made – and this is something that a committed father is in a prime position to learn – between a conqueror and a provider. This is the lesson that, when not assimilated, leaves our society vulnerable to random violence and accumulated rage. Fathers can often feel redundant when faced with the larger mysteries of life, because they can’t participate in the act of nurturing the growing life of a baby or of giving birth to it. It can seem as is their job ends at conception. But what has traditionally, in countless human societies, served to curb the more aggressive tendencies in men is the role of fatherhood. Sociological studies have drawn a correlation between the increasing numbers of males who are absent from their children’s lives (i.e., who’ve abdicated their fathering role) and the rise of antisocial behaviors such as violent crime in our society.
Fatherhood is a role that evokes the compassion and generous spirit of a man and also grounds him in the knowledge of his true place in society – as well as in the greater scheme of existence. If more biological fathers would step into the responsibilities of real fatherhood, the world would leap a milestone on the road to peace.
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