The relativism of masculine identity and paternity

Violent youths in the ghettos of North America, desperate drug addicts in Latin America, suicidal French adolescents, and people who drop rocks onto cars from Italian highway overpasses have something in common: the absence of fathers. Unlike motherhood, fatherhood is a nearly exclusively cultural status that seems to have emerged with the nuclear family. Motherhood has always existed, on the zoological evolutionary scale. Fatherhood, however, is a recent adaptation, still fragile and uncertain. This means that it is re-taught to each generation; if not, it is lost. The great mythical figures of classical antiquity, Hector, Ulysses, and Aeneas, can be thought of as summaries of the affirmation of the father. In that era, fatherhood bordered on omnipotence, and was opportune as a basis for affirmation in the Western world. Later, industrialization and the world wars scattered fathers far and wide. Likewise, the “terrible fathers”, the 20th-century dictators, speeded the disappearance of the father as a symbol. Skyrocketing divorce rates are statistical evidence of this breakdown. Youths teach each other the rites of passage into adulthood and society, as if they were ashamed to rely upon the father’s experience, despite the fact that in private, they often admit they feel deep nostalgia for the father.