24/7, Festivity, Holiness

“Festivus” was made famous by a Seinfeld episode.  It’s also a real thing, first introduced in 1966. The word, associated with “feast,” indicates a joyous time associated with eating.

Special feasting days depend on a calendar that has not been homogenized.  Particular days are recognized as different, special. Typical examples: birthdays, wedding anniversaries, national holidays, religious commemorations, harvest festivals. These are differentiated times, times which encourage recognition of worth beyond  everyday utilitarian concerns. They acknowledge the complex constitution of humans, a constitution that includes a vital orientation to, as the ancient Greeks put it, the good and the beautiful. This means that a well-integrated life will blend various commitments, not allow one to metastasize and rule imperially over all the others.

Today, the imperialistic activity is commerce.  Time not engaged in commerce is said to be “wasted.”  The

culmination of such an attitude is an era in which 24/7 is unreflectively praised as a good thing.  But the 24/7 world is one in which the festive dimension is marginalized. As a result, some constituents of a complete life are sidelined. A fuller experience would incorporate important life-dimensions associated with beauty and goodness, dimensions such as awe, gratitude, savoring, commemoration, and reverence.

The American ancestors of our 24/7 world (“all utilitarian activity all the time”) would be the Puritans.  So worried were they about idleness (the devil’s workshop) that they banned even Christmas. Pausing in the regular course of things, suspending work, marking a special day by conspicuous feasting, partying, joyful activities, these became, not marks of full humanity, but temptations to be avoided.  

Such an attitude can be explained, as Max Weber famously did, by a transformation in religious ideas, specifically by the acceptance of predestination.  In the older, Catholic, culture, anxiety about salvation/damnation could be attenuated by good works, by taking sacraments, by indulgences. Calvinism’s emphasis on predestination swept these away.  Individuals felt a crushing concern about whether their pre-ordained destiny was salvation or damnation. Such high-anxiety discomfort had, somehow, to be relieved. Into this gap came worldly success and well-being. These took on new roles: public signs that one was part of the elect. Work hard, gain material success, separate oneself from the underclass and,  voilà, there is a clear signal of future salvation.

Such a theological understanding occasioned changes in language.  Since words form part of a semantic landscape, changes in meaning are hardly ever isolated. Terms change connotation in relation to one another.  “Labor” no longer signalled: effort to secure sustenance. It became: path to accumulate wealth. Concomitantly, “leisure” took on an association with laxity and laziness.

It had not always been so.  For the ancient Greeks, leisure was schole.  It did not indicate absence of activity, but time set aside for a particular kind of activity, one that satisfied higher aspirations. This is clearly indicated by the English successor term “school.”  Leisure, in the older semantic landscape, was not at all about laziness or wasting time. Quite the contrary. It was about making good use of time, satisfying our vital orientation toward the good and the beautiful.  It might be acknowledgement of athletic excellence at the

Olympics, pursuit of intellectual curiosity at school, or embrace of awe and dependence in a religious ceremony, but it indicated something as crucial to human life as material well-being.

Once “labor” becomes “means of achieving wealth;” once “leisure” is transformed into “waste of time,” the groundwork is prepared for a value system in which 24/7 is widely and automatically praised.

The casualty in all of this is festivity.  More generally, the casualty is an integral, holistic, understanding of the human condition.  “Holiness,” after all, is both a cognate of healthiness and another way of indicating “wholeness.” We can, of course, reject holism and engage  in single-value imperialism. We can minimize the festive. We can transform official festive days into little more than forced time off. In doing so, we dismiss an important dimension of the festive, its role in allowing us to affirm our vital orientation to multiple  dimensions of worthiness. Once this attitude becomes dominant, language is cheapened. The labor/leisure correlative pair becomes the work/laziness set of opposites. In general, the 24/7 world represents the triumph of single-value imperialism.

The original “festivus”  commemorated a married couple’s first date.  Love, life-partnership, family, form important parts of the human aspiration toward the good and the beautiful.  Setting aside time to celebrate them is a is a way of embracing the fulness of human aspirations. A mode of living which minimizes such celebrations, a 24/7 world, is neither healthsome, wholesome, nor holy.

Commensality: please come back

Paradise News, a 1991 David Lodge novel, relates the story of a defrocked priest who visits the United States. American customs seem strange.  Particularly striking is the penchant for nibbling, gobbling, munching, snacking. “Americans seem to like to eat on the move, like grazing cattle.”  As if to vindicate Lodge’s observation, a recent article reports that “The days of eating three large meals a day have gone the way of the butter churn.”

The central term “meal” has actually shifted its meaning.  “There’s a changed definition of what a meal is.” Formerly,  “meal” would have been associated with a

plate of warm food cooked nearby, a table or other communal setting, and people sharing food in that setting.  Today, “I might have a piece of fruit and trail mix and call that lunch.”

National food guidelines in the US still suggest three meals, with perhaps one snack.  That pattern, as the news report suggests, is becoming an ideal more respected in the breach than in the observance.

The move away from meals to snacks is but another manifestation of a philosophical shift in self understanding, one that came to prominence after the Renaissance. It was a shift which tended to isolate individuals, to treat them as separated, disconnected from their social and natural settings.  The notion of humans as isolated units brought important corollaries that remain with us today: an emphasis on “subjects” as the source of meaning, while surroundings become mere “objects”; the transformation of “choice” from a term indicating “selection among options for good reasons,”

to a quasi-magical incantation “thus I will it”; “freedom,” the actual capacity to set a course and achieve it, a capacity rooted in discipline and cooperation, becomes “autonomy,” radical disconnection; finally,  the tendency to isolate leads to prioritizing purity and disembodiment.

None of these favors a meal in the traditional sense. A meal, after all, involves other people, some elements over which we have no control, cooking, which emphasizes mixture not purity, awareness of dependence (not autonomy), and an unbreakable connection with physicality/embodiedness.

By contrast the self-definition as “isolated units” favored

a new player in the industrialized world: advertising.  The older understanding of choice as electing among options was informed by social factors: tradition, family habits,  religious customs, the need to provide a reasonable account of one’s selections. Once these traditional guidelines receded, advertising, appealing to privatized selves prizing individual choice, could advance with hardly any hindrance.  

What we find today is that the new understanding of who we are, i.e. encapsulated selves, is conjoined to well-financed publicity machines.  Not surprisingly, one result has been a decline in shared meals and a concomitant increase in snacking, i.e. privatized nutritional episodes.

The main victim is not, as is often thought, the three-meal pattern. There is no magic about the number 3. Rather the real victim is the centerpiece of regularly patterned meals: commensality, eating in the company of others.  

Such eating both reflects and reinforces a multi-dimensional sense of who we are. The multi-dimensionality of the value landscape in which we find ourselves is reflected in diverse commensal occasions: lunch with friends, with colleagues,  a birthday celebration, a national day of commemoration, or a religious service. Each of these fosters a value-shared link: family affection, friendship, persons associated in a common purpose, special recognition for a specific individual, national pride, sensitivity to the sacred.  

Some historians of food suggest that the contemporary practice of three meals became prominent in conjunction with the rise of industrialization. Similarly, we could say that the snacking phenomenon is taking hold because persons now define themselves almost exclusively as consumers, i.e. as those whose main relationship to the natural world and to others is “buy something, use it up, discard it.”  For the consumer, in its fullest form, a single value dominates life.

Commensality, by contrast, keeps multiple values alive. As a result, it finds itself more and more marginalized in a world world in which humans define themselves primarily in utilitarian, consumer-centered terms.  The commensal and the festive go together. The festive, in turn, offers an important antidote to the consumerist attitude. It says: pause, thank, share, i.e. recognize more to life than the utilitarian side.

The French sociologist of food, Claude Fischler, has gone so far as to hypothesize that a major contemporary problem, obesity, waxes and wanes in parallel with the absence or presence of commensality.  Attempts to improve nutritional health, when aimed at privatized selves seeking to maximize their privatized range of choice, will, on Fischler’s perspective, regularly fail. They actually reinforce the anti-commensal bias which represents a major constituent of the problem.

Logic versus Experience

The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno was a paradox-spinning machine. He used his considerable skills to prove counter-intuitive claims like “there is no such thing as motion.”  One of his most famous paradoxes has to do with Achilles (a speedy runner) attempting to overtake a tortoise (famously slow). The tortoise has been given a head start. To  reach the tortoise and then overtake it, Achilles must, first, cover half the distance to the tortoise. By then the animal, however

slowly, will have moved forward. Once again, Achilles has to arrive at the half-way point before reaching his competition. But this “get to the half-way point” pattern will never end.  There will always be yet another, and still another, half-way point. Conclusion: Achilles will never catch the tortoise, i.e. common sense is just appearance. There is a deeper level of reality, accessible via logic. It casts doubt on much common sense.

In the area of food this would translate into something like Brian Wansink’s famous never-emptying soup bowl.  Wansink’s conclusions are now suspect, but his experiments were attention-grabbing. The bottomless bowl involved hidden tubes that gradually refilled soup as it was being consumed.  In that case, Achilles (soup eater) would indeed never catch the tortoise (empty the bowl of its contents). All of it, though, was rooted in trickery.

Regardless of what Zeno could concoct in the realm of pure logic and Wansink in the realm of rigged experiments, good old lived experience leads us to believe that Achilles would sprint right past his challenger, and diners could empty a bowl of soup. Careful attention to detail can indicate why Wansink’s bowl is never emptied.  Careful attention to logic seems to support Zeno.

Still, in life, both logic and experience need to be balanced off each other. The logic of Zeno may be impeccable, but surely his conclusion is flawed.  

Zeno succumbed to a  pervasive philosophical temptation.  It involves two steps:. (1) substitute a mental grid for lived experience. (2) make that grid one of granularism.  In other words, substitute isolated units for the continuum that is life experience. For Zeno this meant thinking of time as a series of discrete points.

So prominent is Zeno’s legacy that we  automatically think that, of course, time is composed of separate, discrete

instants. But lived experience, if we will attend to it, suggests otherwise: not granular units, but events and spans, entangled fluxes of experience.  Temporality is inherently linked, as Aristotle long ago noted, to activities and events. In this characterization time is not a separate, neutral counter but is correlative with events. Baseball still treats time this way. It is the activities on the field, not a separate clock, that determines the time of a game.  Post-Einstein physics moves in a similar direction.  If we could move at the speed of light, it suggests, we would never age.

The Zeno grid assumes that a photograph captures something basic--an instant, a moment, a discrete unit.  Experientially, however, discrete moments do not exist. Photographs distort experience, creating a singular instant as if it existed separately. There is no frozen instant. Temporality is continuous. The present is the past flowing into the future.  

Traditionally, this sense of time as correlative with events was taken for granted.  One of the characters in Dickens´ A Tale of Two Cities says he is tired

because he has worked through “two tides.”  It is, as we know, possible to impose a granular grid, one disconnected from specific actions. Such a time might even be necessary in an industrial world, one where whistles and horns signal the beginning and end of work.  

Still, natural time persists.  All biological entities (and even geological ones)  are

beings in time. This means that temporality is measured by spans associated with activities. Examples: Achilles racing the turtle;  working through one or two tides; the era lived at a specific address; a birthday party; the trip to Morocco; the high school years. In each case, temporality and activity are intertwined.  Time is not artificially cut up into discrete units. It is characterized by courses of overlapping activities connected by some thematic ordering.

Zeno, his descendants, and our dependence on clocks  have left such a legacy that we hardly question the granular understanding of time.  It may have once been quite natural to speak of time in terms of tides. Today, that way of speaking, instead of balancing clock time, has been totally occluded.

It does not have to be so. Experience and logic can serve as mutual self-correctives.  After all, Zeno, no matter what were his intentions, has taught us an important lesson.  If we start with the assumptions of a granular take on things, we will land ourselves in impenetrable paradoxes.