The fire we carry

There is a moment that recurs in the life of a people: the moment it decides it has gone soft.

It is never a pleasant recognition and it has never once been wrong. It arrived in Athens, in Prussia, in Bohemia, in the industrial cities of England and America, and in the United States in the middle of the last century. Each time, some men concluded that the answer began with the training of bodies. And each time, the body turned out to be the door rather than the room.

None of what follows is ours. We are not the first to feel this and we will not be the last to answer it. What we can do is refuse to answer it badly, which mostly means reading what the others did before pretending to invent it.

Athens

The gymnasion was not a gym. It was where a man trained and where philosophers taught, in the same colonnade on the same afternoon — Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were both gymnasia. Nobody had to argue for the arrangement. It was the assumption.

Plato argued for it anyway, in the Republic. A man given only physical training turns savage. A man given only music and letters turns soft. Neither is fit to be trusted with anything, and the two must be blended — the blending, not either half, is what produces a man you would follow. Aristotle pressed the same charge against Sparta, whose young were made ferocious by athletics alone and were worse citizens for it.

The Athenians had a word for what they were after: kalokagathia, beautiful and good, the two held together as a single quality. And they had an oath. At eighteen a young man entered two years of civic and military training, and swore at the end of it that he would not disgrace his arms, would not abandon the man beside him, and would hand on his fatherland greater and better than he found it.

Not stronger than his neighbor. Greater than he found it.

Prussia, 1806

Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army in a single day and occupied Berlin. Among the responses was a decision to rebuild the country by rebuilding its young men — open-air gymnastic grounds, begun in 1811, which spread across the German lands inside a decade.

What we take from it came later, and came here. Germans exiled by the failed revolutions of 1848 built Turner halls in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Davenport — buildings that housed a gymnasium, a library, a singing society, and a debating hall under one roof, because it did not occur to anyone to put them in separate buildings. Those halls are substantially why physical education entered American public schools at all.

Bohemia, under Austria

Sokol — the falcon — was founded in Prague in 1862 by a people who had a language and a history and no state. Its halls followed the same pattern: gymnastics, a library, lectures, a theatre. Its motto came from Juvenal, a sound mind in a sound body.

Sokol raised no army and won no election. It produced a generation of Czechs who knew exactly who they were. That turned out to matter more than either: when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia they moved against Sokol early, arresting its leadership in 1941 and killing a great many of them, and the communists finished what was left. Two regimes understood precisely what a gymnastics club was for. It is a compliment of a kind.

The industrial cities

England and America in the middle of the nineteenth century produced a piety gone thin and a working population gone indoors. The response took the name muscular Christianity, and its institution was the YMCA, founded in London in 1844 and in America shortly after.

Its emblem was an inverted triangle — spirit, mind, body — and it meant all three or none of them. Two games were invented at its training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, by instructors trying to keep men moving through New England winters: basketball in 1891, volleyball in 1895. Both long outlived the theology that produced them, which is the ordinary fate of good work and no argument against doing it.

America

Theodore Roosevelt made the case first, in an 1899 speech he called The Strenuous Life: that ease is not a thing a nation should want for itself, and that a people which prizes comfort over effort has already decided how its story ends.

Half a century later the point acquired numbers. A 1953 comparison of American and European schoolchildren on six minimum tests of muscular fitness found American children failing at roughly fifty-seven percent against about eight percent abroad. The findings reached the President. Eisenhower convened a conference and stood up a council on youth fitness in 1956. In December 1960, a month before taking office, Kennedy published an essay in Sports Illustrated called The Soft American.

Two presidents, sixty years and two parties apart, making one argument. It was not a partisan concern then and there is no reason to make it one now.

Out of that decade came the program this site takes its standards from. At La Sierra High School in Carmichael, California, boys were sorted into color groups by demonstrated performance and wore the color as their gym trunks — white, red, blue, purple, gold, and, for two students in the program’s entire history, navy blue. To rise, a boy had to meet the ceiling on every event. To keep his color he had to keep meeting the floor, every testing period, or lose it in front of everyone he knew.

It worked well enough to become the model for the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, and well enough that the men who went through it were still talking about it fifty years later. The second one is the part that matters.

What happened to it

In 2012 the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was retired. Its replacement measures whether a child falls inside a healthy range rather than how he ranks against other children, and the awards were discontinued deliberately, on the reasoning that ranking children harms them.

That is a real argument and not a stupid one. But it should be understood for what it was — a decision, taken on principle, to stop asking a young man to be excellent and to begin asking him to be well. Whatever was lost was not lost through neglect. It was set down on purpose, and nobody has picked it up since.

Where the shape came from

One more debt, and it is structural rather than physical. Benedict wrote his rule in the sixth century: a fixed daily order, work and study and prayer held together, and a man who has been through it deciding when a novice is ready. It carried the West through the collapse of one civilization and seeded the universities of the next — and it did so as a network of small, local, self-governing houses following a shared rule, with no headquarters anywhere. That is the arrangement we copied, and it is why nothing here is the community you actually join.

None of these was a fitness program

That is the thing worth noticing, and it is the entire reason this site has a reading list.

The gymnasion had philosophers in it. The Turner hall had a library and a debating society. Sokol had a theatre. The YMCA had a triangle with two other sides. La Sierra gated advancement on conduct as well as performance, and narrowed the margin as a boy rose, so that rank tightened the standard instead of loosening it.

Every one of them started with the body. Not one of them stopped there. You start with the body because it is the least arguable thing about a man — he either does the pull-ups or he does not, and nobody has ever talked his way past the number. It is a door. It was never the room.

Now

Times are hard in ways that are well documented and do not need arguing here. Fewer men belong to anything. The associations Tocqueville found Americans forming at every turn — the clubs, lodges, leagues and societies he judged to be the actual school of American self-government — have been thinning for fifty years, and the measurements are not seriously disputed. Most of what is wrong is not in any one man’s hands.

This is. What you can lift, how far you can run, what you have read, and who you have given your word to. All four are available this week, to anyone, without permission from a single institution.

That is not a consolation prize. Tocqueville’s claim about associations was not that they were pleasant; it was that a people who cannot form them cannot govern themselves, and that the habit is learned in small rooms among men you know by name. Adams held that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Madison held that republican government presupposes those qualities in a higher degree than any other form does. Neither man thought a republic could manufacture the citizens it requires. That has to happen somewhere else, on purpose, among people who have agreed to hold each other to something.

So this is where we start, and we start here because it is the part that waits on nobody. Read the standards. Train against them. Read the books. Find three men and do it where you live.

What these movements have in common is that each was a serious attempt to form whole men, each of them worked, and each was eventually set down — not refuted. We do not imagine we are cleverer than the men who built them. We think the fire was left on the ground, and that someone should pick it up.