Georgetown Island, where we spend our summers, is 300 years old. Let the festivities begin! Wherever there is celebration, there is food. Georgetown’s festivities began, naturally enough, with a birthday cake.
Festivity, despite its prevalence in history, is sort of fading in our age. We have embraced the 24/7-365 world. That means nonstop work, interspersed with diversion. Such diversion, It is important to add, offers a poor and false substitute for festivity. In fact, a defining trait of our time is the substitution of entertainment, pleasure-seeking, and diversion, for festivity.
Festivals are about a combination of factors: (1) recognizing how we are part of something greater than ourselves, (2) appreciating the dependencies that characterize our lives, and (3) suspending our normal schedules to celebrate those interdependencies.
“Festivity” is at heart a religious affair. Why? Because its mode of responding is built around the nexus identified above: dependence, gratitude, celebration. The wider world, which includes sources of nourishment, biological ancestors, political and social ancestors, along with the ability to bring about future generations, all of this is understood as a gift. Within such a context, the festive dimension is fundamental. The regular workaday efforts at making a living remove us, much of the time, from this festive awareness. They should not, however, completely occlude it.
Such occlusion is more than ever prevalent today, dominated as we are by the 24/7-365 commerce-and-diversion lifeworld. In the United States, Thanksgiving long remained a firewall, an inviolable witness to the festive. Now, as that holiday gets overrun, nothing is left to block the new prototype: Las Vegas. Here is a place where even major national and religious holidays never interrupt the commerce-and-diversion industry. The resulting symbol for us: not the social grouping seated around a meal table, but rather the singular self seated at a slot machine.
How did we get here? In terms of ideas, the answer has to do with “philosophical anthropology,” the general way we define ourselves. It is hard to deny that we are creatures of hunger. Hard also to deny that we are creatures of natality, i.e. we have been born. Hunger and natality, these set the stage for the dependence-gratitude-celebration triad that defines the festive.
But hunger and natality mean dependence, an admission that we are beholden to forces outside ourselves. Modern philosophy, post-Medieval philosophy, was a huge attempt to escape from dependence. It was all about self-sufficiency. To get there, intellectuals had to redefine the human being. This redefinition was rooted in a fantasy about human origins. The fantasy came to be known as the “social
contract” story. The story starts not with birth from an actual female, not with hungry infants suckling at the breast, not with relatives and community members who are supplying food. It begins with full grown individuals, portrayed as “encapsulated selves” as critics call them. These encapsulated selves then agree, rationally and in terms akin to a commercial exchange, to enter into a contract and become social, members of a community.
Because philosophy forgot hunger and natality, it drifted away from the genuinely “festive.” With self-sufficiency all the rage, the encapsulated human became the default position. In addition, to the degree that humans forgot their hunger and natality, the world to which these connected them was also transformed. It became more and more mere matter, stuff to be manipulated. Humans began to understand themselves, not as woven into the fabric of things, but as outsiders somehow stuck in a natural setting that was neutral, indifferent, waiting to be transformed and mastered. Dependence, gratitude, celebration? Not in this newer world.
So our time and that of the ancients sort of reverse each other. Holidays like Thanksgiving lose their vibrancy. The draw of Las Vegas becomes ever more powerful.
Food also takes on a different meaning. Fast food is what results from a world in which festivity has lost its primordial pull. A traditional Catholic calendar identifies each day as a feast day. Though they may not all be major celebrations, all meals, drawn from the earth’s bounty, shared with others, accompanied by gratitude, should be somewhat celebratory. By contrast, in our 24/7-365 world, pausing to recall how each day is really a feast day and each meal should be celebratory, these become the exception, not the rule.
Philosophical shifts in self-understanding make major differences. Start with a physiological creature who is hungry, has been born, is thankful and thoughtful. Then festivity is primordial. Start with an encapsulated self fascinated with self-sufficiency, set over against a neutral reality, a reality simply awaiting manipulation. Then the 24/7-365 world becomes our default condition. Goodbye Thanksgiving. Hello Las Vegas.
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