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.