I
don't believe for a minute that all those terrifying "drug edu-
cation" spots on TV will scare kids out of trying drugs. In
fact, they may have the opposite effect. Everyone longs, sometimes
secretly, to experience altered states of consci- ousness.
Adolescents are intrigued by death and danger, not repulsed.
How can people lure them into movies with the same symbols they
somehow think will repel them from drugs? Our drug epidemic
may or may not be a serious one. But I believe it is the symptom of
a deeper cultural disease - the disappearance of legitimate
occasions for ecstasy, trance, emotion and feeling, and the erosion
of traditional rituals. When I was a kid, people got
"high" at revivals and during other religious events.
Everyone needs to experience that special kind of mental elation now
and then. If we don't do it one way we will do it another. We won't
outgrow drug abuse until those needs too, not just needs for bread
and housing, are cared for. Man does not live by bread alone. In
recent years I've become much more interested in this issue of
"ritual" (a word I usually define as "symbolic
action", in contrast to myth, which is symbolic thought. The
two go closely together and are seldom discovered in isolation from
each other.) I forget just when the word "ritual" ceased
having a negative, sticky-sanctimonius connotation for me and began
serving as a pivot around which I could organize a lot of the loose
ends not only in my thinking but in my life... I become convinced at
that moment that although modern urban man was certainly not
religious in most conventional senses of the word, neither was he
secular in the way I had once thought. I could see that ritual and
religion were not going to wither away, and that the real issue now
was whether they would be used for man's liberation or to keep him
in bondage. Harvey
Cox: The seduction of the spirit, The use and misuse of people's
religion, A Touchstone Book, New York, 1973.
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