Understanding Initiation from the Ancients

I was down in the Bay Area last week and got out alive with my skin and a book from Copperfield's in Petaluma. The book was Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation.

Very good, but the whole book revolved, for me, around the Introduction, where Eliade asserts the basic difference between us and the ancients. Why is it, he asks, that we do not practice "initiation" into adulthood, whereas all the ancients did? The answer:

Modern man's originality... lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.

You could say that we moderns orient ourselves by reading history, by gradually building up a knowledge of the world, by the gradual accumulation of innovation and discovery over the decades and the centuries. But ancient man had no history, no libraries of knowledge and sacred books. And yet ancient man needed to know the meaning of life, the universe and everything just as we do.

So ancient man devised the initiation, a process whereby the youth was indoctrinated in all the tribe's knowledge of the world. Ancient peoples do not have a history, but a "sacred history" in which all events are projected back into a primordial time of gods and heroes. Let us put this out in long form:

[T]raditional societies tend to project every new acquisition [of knowledge or history] into the primordial Time, to telescope all events in the same atemporal horizon of the mythical beginnings.

Thus the point of initiation of boys into manhood:

It is to this traditional knowledge that the novices gain access. They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation -- the encounter with the sacred. 

You can see that for a traditional, preliterate society the transmission of the Knowledge to the new generation is a vital task, intimately connected with the survival of the tribe. Indeed, the smaller the tribal unit the more critical is the transmission of knowledge, because if any one young man or woman fails to get the message it may mean the end of the tribe. In our larger societies, this urgency is not so immediate. A significant fraction of a generation can twirl away into folly without bringing the survival of society into question. These fools will just fail to wive and thrive, and drain away into the sand. Or perhaps, occasionally, some one or two of them will discover something transformational, and the new knowledge will be incorporated into the sum of society's understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, the idea that we have abandoned intiation is crazy. We still have initiation, only we call it "school" "university" and "education." That is how we teach the young the Knowledge, the right ways of thought and action, all the right things approved by our ruling class. So nothing has changed. And as for "ordeal," we now have mandatory classes for the young in diversity and inclusion and white privilege.

Naturally, I want to use this information in my quest to understand and demolish the reactionary culture of the left, where I identify identity politics as neo-tribalism and the welfare state as neo-feudalism. It seems to me that the culture of activism, against which I rail with frequency, is a process of initiation, similar to the ancient practice, that teaches the young the left-wing knowledge, and all the correct faith and action in connection with the ancients like Marx and Engels, particularly the faith in the sacred practice, the "ordeal" of "peaceful protest."

Yes, because public protest is not something that people naturally do. The good old "riot" much feared by our bourgeois ancestors was, or tended to be, an instinctive outbreak of madness in response to hard times. But our lefty friends have institutionalized the riot into the sacred observance of the peaceful protest with its very well developed chants, responses, liturgies and processions.

We are, after all, not so very different from our ancestors. Evolution and genetic changes are measured over millennia, according to scientists, and the agricultural age is no more than several thousands of years old, whereas our modern era is no more than hundreds of years old.

And that is why I maintain that our modern lefty reaction is as natural as the birds and the bees. Of course the modern era, with its call to abandon tribe and subordination, has inspired a vast movement of rejection. We are still tribal, feudal, and need to be initiated into the Knowledge in order to take our places as adults.

But for us radicals and revolutionaries that want to introduce our fellow humans, ever so gently, to the new ways and ideas, the lefty reactionaries are a heavy burden to bear.