There used to be a beer in Tanzania—Safari brand—that gave you a hangover without making you drunk. In similar fashion, children are often now disillusioned without ever having had any illusions. They are disenchanted without ever having been enchanted. For them, sophistication consists of being surprised by nothing, amused by nothing, interested in nothing, but bored by everything.

Needless to say, this is not a recipe for a happy life. I suspect that boredom of this existentially terminal kind is at the heart of the tremendous and insatiable search for self-destruction that has reached such epidemic proportions in the western world. Only the abyss gives a simulacrum of meaning to an otherwise empty life, and only misery is authentic.

The problem of the meaning of life is not a new one, even if it grows ever more acute now that the struggle for existence has been so decisively won, and genuine, heartfelt religious belief continues to decline. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, understood instinctively that boys need both a belief in something and physical activity if they are not to go to the bad, their natural destination.

Scouting for Boys, the first edition of which is here republished, is the founding manifesto of a world-wide movement to which 350,000,000 males have belonged since its inception in 1908, the year before my father’s birth. [1](The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated two years later by the Chicago millionaire William