The first lesson of initiation is to teach the young man not to try to get rid of his pain until he has first learned whatever it has to teach him. – Richard Rohr

Theologian Richard Rohr has been writing recently about the absence of initiation rites in modern societies, rituals that he says took place “in every age and every continent for most of human history” and “were considered central to the survival of most cultures.” The demise of such rites and rituals, therefore, has dire consequences. A society without initiation rites is a society in which whatever wisdom it may have accumulated is lost to younger generations.

The driving force in our public life today is the overwhelming urge to avoid pain, or even anything vaguely unpleasant. In fact, the growing fascination with the differences among the baby boom generation, Generation X and the millennials has generally turned the concept of wise elders on its head.

From baby boomers struggling to set up a PowerPoint presentation to venture capitalists struggling to avoid missing the “next big thing” among the billion-dollar gazelles that seem to emerge weekly, anyone trying to understand the changes flowing from the most disruptive trend of the past 30 years – the digital communication revolution – does the same thing: look to the youngest person in the room for the answer.

If wisdom comes from accumulated experience, the older generations seem to be admitting that it is experience unavailable to them and thus something to be sought in youth.

Such abdication of responsibility for cultural continuity is as much a problem for the older generation as it is for the younger. Our civic discourse has increasingly descended to the adolescent shouts of “I want this, and I want it now.”

On one side, we hear would-be executive leaders who are little more than archetypes of banana republic strongmen inflating themselves by expressing the pain their supporters undoubtedly feel, while offering no meaningful explanation for what the pain means and how we can learn from it. On the other hand, we have romantic, fairy-dust socialists channeling the same pain into promises of a revolution in which someone else will provide the healing salve.

Nowhere, it seems, are there grown-ups who have suffered reversals, experienced pain, survived and stayed around, able and willing to share the lessons they have learned. When I was a young policy analyst in the 1970s and ’80s, I was blessed to be able to work with and learn from men like Allen Pease, Maine State Planning Office director, and Dick Barrringer, founding director of the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service, and to see and respect the leadership of legislators such as Joe Brennan, Joe Sewall, Harrison Richardson and Neal Rolde.

On commissions established to address significant state and municipal problems, I was fortunate to serve, observe and work for months at a time with political and civic leaders such as Ed Muskie, then-Bates College President Hedley Reynolds, Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Sidney Wernick, banker Bob Masterson, educators Linda Abromson and Marcella Violette and multi-faceted Portland leader John Menario.

While all these women and men rarely agreed on any given issue, to a person they were gracious, engaging and above all eager to learn and committed to finding feasible (though rarely ideal) ways to address major state issues from education reform to river protection to civic leadership. In many ways, service on such commissions served as rites of initiation for people such as David Flanagan, Charlie Colgan, Alec Giffen, John Dorrer and many other young idealists who have spent their lives working to find useful solutions to the public policy issues that Maine has faced over the past 30 years.

The structure of state leadership has changed significantly over that period. Where once there were many major Maine-based businesses whose leaders lived in the communities where they built their careers, we now see branch managers cycling through their corporate bureaucracies. Where once we had long-serving legislators who carried with them extensive institutional memories, we now have term-limited officeholders increasingly dependent on a professional staff and lobbyists. Where once we had governors who brought substantial legislative experience and existing relationships with those in the legislative branch, we now have news-cycle celebrities speaking largely to their political bases.

But a new generation of leaders, often with business, administrative or philanthropic rather than political backgrounds, is now coming to the fore – at the Maine Development Foundation, the Maine Technology Institute, the University of Maine System, the Maine Community College System, the private colleges and the ever-richer and increasingly important Maine-based foundations. It is now incumbent on those of us who enjoyed the initiation rituals now 30 years past to find ways to transmit whatever lessons we have learned to this new generation of Maine leaders.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions, Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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