A while ago, there used to be a magazine called Whole Earth Review. Not all that many people remember it now, but at the time it brought together some of the most cutting edge thinkers around. It was an offshot from the seminal Whole Earth Catalog, which ran from 1968 to 1972, and which had been set up by Stewart Brand – who also founded Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. Among Whole Earth Review’s early editors were Kevin Kelly, who would go on to set up a magazine called Wired, and Howard Rheingold, who would years later identify the phenomenon of smart mobs.
The Whole Earth Review emerged, in other words, out of conversations between people who had a habit of being a long way ahead of their time. (All of the Review’s back issues are online, by the way – go read.) And in the winter of 1989, an especially interesting issue of the Review came out. Its subject: “the global teenager”.
Before you ask, no, the Review didn’t predict the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the London riots; not exactly, anyway (although there is an article on a certain technology, “gradually becoming accessible to the general public”, called Usenet – which noted with interest how “Chinese students in North America used it to organise support for the pro-democracy movement back home”).
Instead, it did something arguably more interesting and important: it jumped, feet first, in to what the global youth bulge would mean for the world. Not just in consumption patterns, or the need for investment in education or job creation or whatever, but at a much more subtle, interesting and fundamental level.
The key article is one by Michael Ventura, who today writes for the Austin Chronicle. The piece was called “The Age of Endarkenment”. And if you have any interest whatsoever in how young people are driving historical change, then it deserves a read. Below is a small sample to whet your appetite – but seriously, read the whole thing.
Ventura opens by talking about the extremism of adolescence (“‘How old’s your kid?’ ‘Fifteen.’ ‘Oh my God.'”). And, he continues “all our models for dealing with these issues are psychological”. Which is, he says,
…frankly, absurd. You can’t reduce a collective phenomenon, a phenomenon that cuts across every class and most countries, that has fundamentally the same elements in Harlem and Beverly Hills, at Woodstock and Tien An Men Square, in English soccer matches and Palestinian villages — you can’t reduce a phenomenon like that to individual and family causes. To try to do so goes far beyond not making sense — it’s to ignore the most important piece of data we have, which is the very fact that the same basic thing is happening everywhere to everyone. As the mid-1990s come and go, and kids become the dominant population of most of the world, there’ll be no way to ignore that data anymore.
After all, he goes on, it’s not as if the extremism of adolescence is anything new:
Robert Bly and Michael Meade, among others, teach that tribal people everywhere 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. But, unlike us, tribal people met the extremism of their young (and I’m using “extremism” as a catch-all word for the intense inner cacophony of adolescence) with an equal but focused and instructive extremism from the adults.
The tribal adults didn’t run from this moment in their children as we do; they celebrated it. They would assault their adolescents with, quite literally, holy terror; rituals that had been kept secret from the young till that moment — a secrecy kept by threat of death, so important was this “adolescent moment” to the ancients; rituals that focused upon the young all the light and darkness of their tribe’s collective psyche, all its sense of mystery, all its questions and all the stories told to both harbor and answer those questions. Their “methodology,” if you like, deserves looking at, since these societies lasted with fair stability for at least 50,000 years.
But with the onset of modernity, we stopped providing our kids with initiation. Up until the mid-twentieth century, Ventura writes,
Initiation didn’t happen, hadn’t happened in the West for a long time; the dark craving-period in the young was most often utterly squashed, such that it turned in on itself, creating in individuals a kind of deadness, a stiffness that became adulthood, maturity. By the age of 17 or so the effects of a repression from which there was virtually no release or escape had made most people rigid enough to assume the responsibilities society demanded. It was a rigidity that passed (and, in our nostalgia, still passes) for strength, a sort of lifeless life, where one did one’s duties and made a virtue of stoicism. Whether or not people felt particularly alive, they got things done. And certainly there was something to be said for that.
But then something blew up. “All over the world,” he continues, “the children born during and just after the Second World War hit ‘adolescence’, the initiatory moment, with a vengeance, in virtually the same way, with negative and positive poles of the same phenomenon, virtually everywhere.”
And then?
This phenomenon, or complex of phenomena, multiplied geometrically every year, it seemed, until now the dark-tinged craving-period we choose to call “adolescence” has literally become the cultural air we breathe. And while it’s true that most of these forms are now corporately controlled, they originated from the bottom up, they were spontaneously generated by young people — and the corporations that now control many of them are run by people of that first generation of these unleashed young. The result is that, under the guise of entertainment (music, movies, television), a sense of adolescent volatility is now enforced the way the image of “mature” rigidity once was …
The way that tribal people treated this period in their young was to expose them, through precise ritual, to what the Australians call “the dreamtime” — the psyche’s mysteries in their rawest form. And that is what this world cultural environment, structured by the
priorities of adolescence minus the in-struc-tion of fully initiated elders, is doing: it’s exposing everybody to the mysteries of the psyche in their most raw acted-out forms.By the mid-1990s half the world will be “teens.” Half the world will be in that natural, unavoidable state of craving extreme and dark
experience while, at the same time, demanding the structure of instruction — instruction that no one can give on such a scale. And if it can’t be done by the family or the community, where can they turn but to the larger collective? Hence their demand — inchoate, unreasonable, and irresistible — is that history initiate them.History itself.
What a ride.
For we’ve already seen what happens when this nonverbal and unconscious demand of youth is acted out in the sphere that we usually call history. It was attempted briefly in America during that time we label “the sixties.” And in France, in ’68; in Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring”; in China during the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, in Tian An Men Square. It’s still going on in Palestine, while in Europe the impulse has birthed the Greens, in Russia “perestroika.” (You can’t credit mass events to one man, as Tolstoy so brilliantly diagrammed in War and Peace — even if he’s Gorbachev.) It happened in Cambodia — where what mostly happened, if you strip the political lingo from it, was that the kids murdered the grown-ups. And the prolongation of the initiatory moment has everything to do with why there’s such a massive drug market in the United States. And it will keep on happening, more and more, everywhere, until —
Until what? That is the question, and nothing but history can answer it. There’s no going back. In many tribal initiations, if you don’t pass you die. We don’t know what will satisfy the demands of this massive, unprecedented attempt at initiation, or if it can be satisfied. But we can guess the consequences if it can’t.
And yes, of course: no one phenomenon can supply the entire context of what’s happening to us all. But I have no doubt that this unconscious, compulsive prolonging of the initiatory moment into decades — is at the crux of our fate.
All this in 1989. Like I say: 21 years ahead of its time.
What alarms me is that we hardly ever – actually, no, never – talk about this stuff. Instead, we kid ourselves that we’re going to ‘manage’ our way through the cascade of sychronous crises currently threatening to overwhelm us. Sure, a big part of the solution is about institutions, economics and politics. But the collective existential dimension to all this is pretty fundamental. And most of us over 30 are pretending it’s not there.
