The Pull of the Man

So I՚m not going to Burning Man this year, for various lame reasons. But I feel myself pulled towards it nonetheless, in a weird way that is not exactly wanting in the normal sense. I guess I do want to go again, but I՚m not completely sure why – sure, it՚s a hell of a fun party, but I՚m not that much of a party person. The art is spectactular, but art is not usually capable of motivating me to travel so far from the comforts of home. The political aspect of it – the gifting economy, the sense of collectively building a workable temporary utopia – has a lot of appeal, but it՚s hard to see what it has to do with the power structures of the default world, and politics without real stakes is an unredeemable waste of time. There are a ton of interesting weirdos to meet there, but those connections too don՚t seem to travel back into the default world. I certainly had some worthwhile and unique experiences, but for the most part felt kind of out of it – too old, too asocial, too square, too intellectual, and without access to the right kinds of creative power that would enable me to go beyond spectator status. And it really is not a place for spectators.

Yet still I feel oddly drawn towards it, and I probably can՚t adequately convey the nature of that oddness. After all, it is not so odd to want to go to Burning Man. I assume I am pulled in by forces that are similarly acting on all the 80,000 or so people who are there, as well as those like me who are just dreaming of it. But what is the nature of those forces? They are no doubt various and ill-defined, yet somehow they have sustained the event for 30 years, an incredible length of time for a something like this to persist.

One of my kids asked me the other day about the Grateful Dead concerts I went to in my youth – what did I actually do there? He seemed to be after a deeper answer than “go nuts and have fun” – probably he takes me more seriously than I do myself. And truly, that answer isn՚t satisfactory even to me. I was looking for something larger then that, although I couldn՚t say exactly what. And it՚s not just me, everybody goes to concerts and other happenings or public events because they fill deep and usually unarticulated emotional needs – for meaning, for community, for beauty, for access to the sorts of things that tend to get left out of life under late capitalism.

There is a ritual nature to these events. A ritual, broadly speaking, exists any time humans come together around some shared focus of attention. Every random concert or performance has something of the ritual about it, but Burning Man is more explicit about its ritual structure, from its physical layout to its practices. Black Rock City is arranged in concentric circles, surrounding a mostly empty circle of desert, and directly in the center the Man himself.

There are some other centers of attraction in the layout, such as a cafe/community center ( a center for talks, small-scale performnances of the hippie arts and the like, and one of the very few places you can spend money). Another is the Temple, which is more for silent contemplation and connection to the higher powers. These two and centers and the main center, the Man himself, are laid out on a central axis.

I have to admit I spent an awful lot of time at the Temple during my one burn – that wouldn՚t have been my conscious choice, there were plenty more fun or interesting places to be than that, but that is where I felt myself pulled. The Man and the Temple are both burned towards the end of the Burning Man week, which determines the temporal side of the large-scale structure of the Burning Man ritual. And, of course, it has the nature of a sacrifice.

Sarah Perry recently published a useful summary of some functionalist approaches to ritual. Such theories are all very well and I՚ve spun them myself, but they are kind of mechanistic and feel external to the phenomenon they are trying to describe. They can explain from an evolutionary standpoint why rituals exist, but they can՚t convey what they are like. Yes, people may perform sacrificial rituals in order to signal commitment and gain status – but that is probably not what they are thinking and feeling while they are doing it. If they are, it isn՚t working – something designed to be directed at lofty communal goals is being perverted into base, greedy, individualistic goals.

And who knows, maybe the vast majority of religious display is infected with this sort of egotistic hypocrisy, but I can՚t believe that it all is. Perhaps I am naive, but it seems to me that people are often quite sincere in their displays of religious enthusiasm – that is, they actually want to participate, they want to be directed at something outside of and higher than their usual concerns, and they are drawn into the ritual based on its nature and their own, not by external compulsions or calculations. Since people are not naturally going to stop engaging in egotistic calculations, part of an effective ritual is that it breaks down individuality. This condition is both terrifying and desirable, and this contradiction underlies some of the weird dynamics of ritual and religion.

It is this desire for transcendence that strikes me as somewhat mysterious, at least in my own case. This mysterious attraction appears to be spiritual in nature. I really hate to use that word, my self-image rejects it. It՚s embarrassing to find myself longing for spiritual experience, to want to be in the sort of place and state of mind in which the individual ego gives way, where the infinite contacts the finite, where the ineffable expresses itself. Such desires don՚t fit in with my self-conception as a realist, pragmatist, materialist, member in good standing of the techno-intelligentsia, and general competent adult.

Maybe It՚s not the spirituality that is embarassing – after all this is California in the 21st century, and everyone is permitted, if not actively encouraged, to engage in all manner of practices. No, it is the longing that is vaguely shameful – at my age, I should just go after what I want, or give it up, all this mooning after the impossible-to-get seems juvenile, especially in the land of do-as-you-please.

But I don՚t think my feelings and reactions are anything out of the ordinary. I may be more conscious of them than normal people, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn՚t make them special. So I conjecture that rituals are structured in such a way as to focus people՚s attention and desire onto something transcendent, that is, something not quite real in the ordinary sense, and thus not really attainable. Longing is built-in to the structure of the sacred.

And if something shameful adheres to the notion of longing, at least a ritual allows people to do it collectively, to align their longings with that of others. Individual longing may be a puerile waste of time; collective longing defines a culture.

[My earlier trip report and an alternative, less weighty view of the nature of the event.]

Blame Game

The tragic shootings in Arizona are a good place to look at issues of how people think about causality and its agentive correlate, blame. Why do things happen? Physics says that ever damn thing in the trailing light-cone of a given event contributes to its happening. But that's completely useless to everyday cognition. Some things seem more causal than others, and some things seem blameworthy -- that is, they are both causal and according to our moral feelings, they should not have occurred, they only occurred because some agent did something wrong, whatever that means.

Usually someone who shoots and kills someone else is to blame, because we think they caused this regrettable action. But if the person is insane, whatever that means, we assume that they do not actually have the same kind of non-caused causation that a normal, free-willed person has. They are machines at the mercy of chemistry and brain anatomy -- unlike us. They are not to blame. Even Jon Stewart last night was talking about "the complex ecosystem of causality", which is pretty heady stuff coming from a fake news show.

If we can't blame the individual, can we blame the various factors that caused or enabled his action? These include:
- the ready availability of guns (and in particular automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines)
- the atmosphere of violence in current politics

Krugman makes the case as well as any, referencing the concept of "eliminationism" which I believe was originated or at least promoted by Dave Neiwart. The rightwing response is to dredge up some instances of violent rhetoric and imagery on the left, which of course exist. But is there anything really comparable to the gun-toting rallies of the right? Doesn't seem that way to me, or anybody else I respect, but maybe I'm biased.

The wingnutosphere is in full counterattack mode. Here is wingnut hack writer Andrew Klavan:

"To be sure, there is a lot of heated rhetoric in American politics, as ever. For instance, last spring, three Democratic congressmen cruelly slandered Tea Party members by accusing them of spitting on them and calling them racial slurs"

And here is shrieking harpy AtlasShrugs deciding that Palin and the tea parties can't be to blame because Loughner had "targeted" Gifford back in 2007. Of course the source she cites does not actually say what she says it does.

It is interesting to see these kind of moves being made -- it's an attempt to break a causal chain by showing that it has origins elsewhere, because if Loughner was "targeting" people in 2007 thent he tea parties aren't to blame because they didn't exist. Technically this is called "explaining away". In this case, it's a weak move because (a) the report doesn't say anythign about "targeting" in 2007, and while the tea parties and Sarah Palin may not have been factors in 2007, the eliminationist rhetoric of the right was certainly in the air, and had been for many years.

Glenn Beck trying to equate an armed militia with an elderly university professor.

Here's a pretty good roundup of wingnut spinning.

There is an interesting two-stage socio-cognitive process going on: first, telling causal stories to make sense of events, in which we try to build causal chains out of the seamless web of the physical world. Second, the moralizing and politicizing of these chains, in which we try to assign not just causation, but moral value and blame. Krugman was quick to blame the right, maybe too quick, and the right was quick to try to counterattack to break this linkage.

My point is that this is a somewhat fictional process. We're battling over what stories are most real, and concomitantly, who are the good guys and bad guys. Like religion, it is a form of ritual collective cognition. We even have institutions for official, ultimate, socially-sanctioned blaming -- courts of law. The quasi-religious atmosphere that still adheres to courtrooms reflects the sacramental aspects of this process, the hushed acknowledgement that they are places where we have the awful and mysterious power to make fictions and reality coincide.

Perhaps the ultimately real story is that we are all pretty much like an insane person, our actions not under the control of some mysterious acausal freedom but instead subject to the generalized causal workings of the universe, as much as a falling rock or the lion hunting the deer. But it's vital to pretend we aren't.

[[update: here's another nice instance from Rush Limbaugh:

"What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He's sitting there in jail; he knows what's going on. He knows that ... the Democrat [sic] Party -- is attempting to find anybody but him to blame...He knows if he plays his cards right that he's just a 'victim.' He's the latest in a never ending parade of victims brought about by the 'unfairness of America.' The 'bigotry, racism, homophobia' of America. The 'mean-spiritedness of America.'

The poster at Washington Monthly seems to think that this is gibberish, but it makes perfect sense in the analytical framework I've sketched out. The Democrats want to blame the Republicans, and so the Republicans, as a defensive move, want to blame Loughner alone, and thus attack any connection between "mean-spiritedness" and his actions. And Limbaugh just takes the battle one step further and asserts that Democrats are "supporting" Loughner because they want to remove some of the blame from him and put it on the Republicans. This is of course nuts, but it's the product of Limbaugh's honed instincts as a propagandist and wholly political animal.]]

Republic of Heaven

This year they moved my polling place to City Hall, right on the ocean. This is one of the most beautiful times of year here in Pacifica; it was a cool clear day with a high surf, breaking over the sea wall, and producing a fine mist instead of the more usual fog, so everything was suffused in a blinding white light. Since I already have a model in my head of voting as participating in a civic ritual, it felt like entering Democratic heaven.

I enjoy election time, it's a chance to come across whole classes of people I never see in ordinary life, and enter different spaces. Everyone's spirits seem a little bit freer than usual, with this temporary escape from the usual structures of power into the sphere of democracy. Even if the candidates are bought and sold, and cynicism is off the charts, the feeling persists, because ritual is powerful that way.

I approach voting the way I do actual religious services -- with mixed feelings, genuine enthusiasm combating a more informed and powerful skepticism. With something of a sense of duty -- it's not like this is what I really want to be doing, but it's what humans do, and since I haven't invented anything better for myself yet I must participate along with the community if I don't want to be a complete outsider to life.


Of course around here people are also high on the other civic religion of the US, baseball. I have to admit that I have an active disinterest in professional sports and although almost everyone in the Bay Area has Giants fever, from intellectuals to manual laborers to punk anarchists, it leaves me cold. This makes me feel like an awful snob. From my outside perspective, pro sports seems like an even purer version of The People's Romance -- a sort of Schelling point for communal enthusiasm, a way to unleash the spirit in a controlled and harmless way (not always harmless, actually the US is pretty tame in this respect compared to European soccer hooligans and the Blues and Greens of Rome). I can see the functional role. But why can't this be something that's at least interesting? Why can't every city fund a big band, for instance, and have them engage in a series of cutting contests until they reach the World Series of Jazz? That would at least be worth watching.

[[note: the post title is a reference to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, whose plot involves nothing less than a war on god himself -- the Republic of Heaven is what will be established in his place. ]]

Inaugural

I gotta say, I'm having a bit of an allergic reaction to the pomp, circumstance, fawning, gushing, and self-congratulation. My cynicism modules are revving up.

But only a bit. On the whole, it's a great day and I wish the new President a lot of luck. He's going to need it.

I guess I will attempt to turn my cynicism into detachment. Observe the civic ritual, how it sacralizes power, how it operates to the People's Romance as a marriage ceremony does to a more conventional romance, how it acts as a Schelling point for the coordination of sentiment. One can be a bit suspicious of this process while still joining in the celebration. That is the methodology of the anthropologist, the participant-observer.