Earlier this week emailer George sent me a link to a new article by Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. As many of you will already know, Morson is fascinated by parallels between the current crisis of our constitutional order and the pre-Revolutionary period in Russian history. His latest article focuses on the almost mind boggling upsurge of revolutionary terror in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century--and the liberal embrace of this virtual orgy of violence. That liberal reaction--which Morson wants us to see in our current "mainstream" progressives and liberals--led directly to the Bolshevik Revolution, with violence on a scale unparalleled in previous history.
I'll provide some fairly extensive excerpts and you can judge for yourself as to the aptness of the comparisons between Russian liberals and those of our own day and in our own country. For all the historical, social, and political differences between then in Russia and now in America, I do find the parallels to be striking. Morson clearly wants us to consider those parallels and to find common elements that underlie revolutionary violence, and it's there that I question whether his explanation of the common elements is completely satisfactory.
What I'd like to do here is to point out elements of current events that remind one of central themes in the thought of Mircea Eliade. Eliade saw many parallels between the thinking and acting of "archaic man," the man of "traditional" societies of any age, and the ideologies of the modern Western world. Thus:
Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world's structure—myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: "myth, then, is always an account of a creation."
That may seem abstract, so let's draw out some more concrete implications. For "archaic" man, the ordered, structured world is brought forth by the gods from a primordial chaos. Creation or, better, origin myths expresses this worldview. However, for the man of any society, we are faced with the reality that our existence always threatens to slip back into chaos--more so at some times than at others. Thus, a key part of traditional religion has always been to seek to "regenerate" the ordered world through rituals. Those rituals typically occur at the New Year--or other significant times, such as the spring planting or harvest. The rituals often include elements that invoke an overturning of the entire order of the world or of human society, to make way for the new creation or regeneration of a perfect order. Such disorder can obviously lapse into outright violence.
So, for example, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), Eliade describes the ancient Babylonian New Year rituals:
The first act of the ceremony ... marks a regression into the mythical period before the Creation; all forms are supposed to be confounded ... every feature suggests universal confusion, the abolition of order and hierarchy, "orgy," chaos. We witness, one might say, a "deluge" that annihilates all humanity in order to prepare the way for a new and regenerated human species. (p. 57)
I suggest that what we are seeing in the chaotic riots and "peaceful" violence is an unconscious reenactment of these types of rituals--indeed, the ritual element in Leftist demonstrations should be very apparent. The prominence that sexual disorder has for the modern Left--the "trans" movement (I think 'movement' is the right word) epitomizes and evokes the 'abolition of order'--is a strong indication of what's going on: a ritual evocation of chaos that will, by magical reenactment, lead to a 'regenerated human species.'
