|
For tens of thousands of years tribal people everywhere have greeted the onset of puberty, especially in males, with elaborate and excruciating initiations -- a practice that plainly wouldn’t have been necessary unless their young were as extreme as ours. This is terribly important. It means that when conservatives talk of rock culture subverting the young, when others talk about that same culture liberating the young or when postmodern technologists talk of our electronic environment “rewiring the software” of new generations -- they are all making the same mistake. They fail to understand that a psychic structure that has remained constant for 100,000 years is not likely to be altered in a generation by stimuli that play upon its surfaces. What’s really going on is very different: the same raw, ancient content is surging through youths’ psyches, but adult culture over the last few centuries has forgotten how to meet, guide and be replenished by its force….For about forty years now, the young have generated forms -- music, fashions, behaviors -- that prolong the initiatory moment. In other words, we cherish and elongate adolescence (or “initiatory receptivity”) as though hoping to be somehow initiated by chance somewhere along the way. For tribal people, the initiatory moment was by far the most intense period of life, lasting no more than weeks, at most about a year. For us, it now lasts decades. And it’s as though the pressure to make it last decades increases its chaotic violence. This very extension of the initiatory moment is helping to drive everyone mad….Unlike us, tribal people meet the extremism of their young (and I’m using “extremism” as a catchall word for the intense psychic cacophony of adolescence) with an equal but focused extremism from adults. Tribal adults didn’t run from this moment in their children as we do: they celebrated it….The crucial word here is “focus.” The adults had something to teach: stories, skills, magic, dances, visions, rituals. In fact, if these things were not learned well, the tribe could not survive. But the adults did not splatter this material all over the young from the time of their birth, as we do. They focused, and were as selective as possible about, what they taught and told, and when. They waited until their children reached the intensity of adolescence, and then they used that very intensity’s capacity for absorption, its hunger, its need to act out, its craving for dark things, dark knowledge, dark acts, all the qualities we fear most in our kids -- the ancients used these very qualities as teaching tools.
-- Michael Ventura, Letters at 3 AM
|
