It’s Friday. It’s blog day. So what to write about this week?  Well I think I might cheat again and borrow some ideas from the wonderful Charles Eisenstein.  He publishes essays fairly regularly and they are always worth reading.  The most recent is entitled ‘The Death of the Festival’ and I think it is pertinent to some of the scenes we saw at the weekend in the UK as supposed ‘fans’ stormed London and the Wembley stadium to see the football final.  I will put a link at the end in case you wish to read it for yourself but in essence he is arguing that whilst we live in what appears to be a ‘civilised’, highly technical, rational society we still respond to  life’s challenges in primitive ways. 

There are deep seated patterns and rituals which still become enacted in modern forms. One of these is the notion of the scapegoat where someone has to pay for the failure or the tragedy. In earlier societies this payment may have been with their life. The payment seems to defuse the tensions which have arisen and some form of peace is restored.

Over time institutions arose which enabled a channelling of this energy. They were known as ‘festivals’.  Festivals have served as ritual enactments of the breakdown of order and its subsequent restoration through violent unanimity. A true festival is not a tame affair but one where normal rules, mores and structures are suspended. Things are turned on their head, rivalry might be enacted through competitions and sporting events, work is suspended, people eat and drink to excess. He argues that festivals like this serve to cement social coherence and remind society of the catastrophe that lays in wait should that coherence falter.  We see the remnants of these festivals in Bonfire Night with its burning of Guy Fawkes (in the UK)  and Hallowe’en. But, Eisenstein argues, they have become diluted and sanitised. In Celtic times Hallowe’en, or Samhuinn, was a period of three days when time was suspended. People did crazy things. Men dressed as women, farmers gates were unhinged and left in ditches, people’s horses moved to different fields. This reminds me of the ‘mischief night’ we used to have on November 4th when I was a child and of course the ‘trick or treat’ which later arrived from the US. Yet now these have become events for children to dress up and eat sweets. They are devoid of meaning and indeed of any power: bland and trivial. Similarly, to attend a modern music festival ‘on-line’ bears no resemblance to the ritualistic process and raw excitement of attending one physically.  

We hunger for a deep, non-sanitised reality: the thrill of a walk in unknown territory, that smattering of risk or danger which makes you feel alive.  He goes on to argue that in the absence of genuine festivals the pent up tension erupts in spontaneous quasi-festivals. Another name for these is ‘riots’.  

I suspect that what we saw at the weekend in the UK was just such an eruption. After the weeks and months of being ‘locked down’ there is this deep need to ‘break free’ and in the racial abuse we see the old scapegoating as a means of dealing with the deep frustration of ‘not winning’. He goes on in a second essay to explore the ritualistic nature of some of our responses to the pandemic: the wearing of masks, the sanitising of hands, the division into the jabbed and the un-jabbed - the clean and the unclean!!  He questions our desire to bring in greater and greater control and our readiness to see ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘anti-vaxers’  as modern day heretics.  Don’t get me wrong. I am not a conspiracy theorist nor an anti-vaxer but I do think there is value in standing back and taking a longer look at what might be going on.  We cannot control all of life. We have to live it with its risks. We need the people who challenge and question orthodoxy, even if we think they are wrong! We need to be aware of the ways in which we fragment as a society and find ways to create events and experiences which bring us together. We need to be wary of the sterile and on occasion to revel in the mess.

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-1-the-death-of-the-festival/