Effervescent Christmas

This ad appeared in the Boston Globe during the Christmas shopping season of 1919. Note the enticement to become consumers rather than producers of music.

The assembly hall at Phillips Exeter Academy is usually the site of serious, sometimes grim, subjects: global warming, war, poverty, the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, one of our music teachers, Eric Sinclair, got up on stage and sang Christmas carols.

This assembly used to be an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for long enough that the current students had never experienced it. I never heard an explanation for why it was stopped, but I’ve assumed that, in the spirit of diversity and inclusion, we had decided that the “harm” it might do to people who don’t celebrate Christmas was more important than the “collective effervescence” it inspires among those who know the words to the songs.

Was this experience of joining together with others in song more common before Netflix and doom scrolling? Before we traded in our pianos for record-players? Before we all had our own Spotify playlists and air-buds? Did we know the words to more of the same songs and sit around the fire or the piano and sing together?

Christmas and Christmas songs seem to be one of the few things that still permeate our national culture down through the generations. After the assembly, Eric said he wasn’t sure this youngest generation would know the words. They did.

They belted out “Deck the Halls,” and “”Jingle Bells,” and when Eric sang “had a very shiny nose,” they even knew to shout back: “like a light bulb!”

Adam Grant guessed that the numbers of depressed Americans quadruped during COVID quarantine because we were being denied “a special kind of joy.”

“Peak happiness,” he said, “lies mostly in collective activity.”

Grant’s NYT op-ed is where I learned the term collective effervescence. “We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence,” he wrote.

According to my AI friend, Gemini, the term was coined by Emile Durkheim in 1912 and describes the feeling of energy and harmony that people experience when they come together in a group with a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share moments with others, such as being in a stadium that erupts in simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance.

Grant described the feeling more broadly to include “creating together and solving problems together.” He chided Americans for thinking that the pursuit of happiness is a solitary endeavor and called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.”

Unfortunately, the end of pandemic lock-downs didn’t end what the surgeon general calls our loneliness epidemic. And there’s no end in sight.

It seems like every new invention and every social trend has the effect of pushing us away from each other. My parents’ first home was just around the corner from both of my grandparents. Then we moved to the suburbs. By the end of the day on Christmas, nine people will have spent a combined 60 hours driving to our holiday celebrations over the last few days in search of an effervescent Christmas.

I hope we were wrong about the harm these songs might cause.  I can't recall a single religious theme in the lyrics Eric sang. They were all about decking the halls and dashing through snow.  And one song at the end had an inclusive message, about German and British soldiers playing soccer during a Christmas truce in 1914.  The assembly ended with these words: On each end of the rifle we're the same.

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The Fragility of Modern Families

Girlhood

December 29, 2017

It’s all of 7:30 a.m. and the sun still hasn’t made an appearance. The outside temperature is 3 degrees below zero. I’ve been sitting here watching my photos scroll past on the laptop. It’s a slideshow that picks photos from my hard drive at random—the kids when they were tweens; the kids when they were toddlers; the trip to Wyoming, Christmas 2010. . . . . They are all good times and almost all family times. You don’t take pictures when the car breaks down, and you rarely take them at work, even if you spend more of your time and energy there. Also, raising a family is difficult—sometimes there is stress. Sometimes there is shouting. Sometimes you can’t believe what you’ve gotten yourself into. None of that makes its way into the photos.

As I watch our family history flash by, I'm grateful the kids are all home this holiday, but feeling a little wistful that in about a month, our oldest will turn 24; our youngest will be off at college, half a day’s drive away. When we dropped the twins off at their dorms this summer it felt like the end of something—was it the end our modern family?

Well, no, of course not. We've had a lovely holiday, with lots of time together. My friend Tom’s only daughter had just two days off, so she flew in from Chicago for just a brief visit. Our girls are here for a number of weeks. So we’re lucky, but I do wonder how our family will evolve down the road. I’m hoping that we end up more like one of the many families you see on TV.

In "Modern Family," for instance, everyone ended up living close by, just a few minutes’ drive away from each other. In that show, cousins are like siblings. Aunts and uncles and grandparents babysit. They’re always popping in on each other and they get together in every episode. Most sitcoms are like that. Somehow, extended families stick together. I wonder how they managed to work that out. Frankly, it doesn’t seem all that modern.

I’ve been lucky. My siblings and I all live within an hour or so of each other. But we don’t live in the same town and that hour drive means there’s not much “popping in” or babysitting. Still, we’re way better off than most of my cosmopolitan acquaintances, like Tom, who have to get on a plane to see members of their extended family.

Working class folks have a better shot, it seems, at ending up close by. If you work in the factory, you might get your son or daughter a job there. But then all the factories are closing. If you send them off to college in some distant state, as in the recent film, Lady Bird, chances are, they aren’t going to come back to live in your town. College educated professionals have to go where the jobs are for the most part. Maybe that’s why the mother in that film freaks out when she drops her college-bound daughter off at the airport. The mother in Boyhood also has the realization that her family life, as she’s known it, is coming to an abrupt end on the day her son, Mason, leaves for college. “This is the worst day of my life,” she sobs. “I just thought there would be more.”

What are the odds that Mason or Lady Bird will end up living nearby, within a short drive? And in what sense are you any kind of a family if you see each other just two or three, or even five or six times a year. How many plane tickets can you afford? Is electronic communication enough?

The tenuousness of family life, it seems to me, is one of the things included in what Richard Hofstadter called the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament” (42). The loss of profound family “communion across generations”—and the feelings of social and psychological security that come with it—leaves us with a deep sense of anomie, what Mark S. Weiner refers to as a persistent “ache for everything that is lost” in the transition from traditional clan-based societies to modern individualistic societies (167-8). I’ve been reading Weiner’s book, The Rule of the Clan and Hofstadter’s book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, over the holidays.

Hofstadter shows, in part, that intellectuals are seen as responsible for imposing modernism on everyone else, and so have attracted the hatred of all.

Through most of our history, Weiner argues, humans have lived in big extended families, tied to a particular geographical area. Those societies are characterized by “communal warmth,” intense social bonds, solidarity and security. For modern liberal societies to form, “it is necessary to ‘cut the ties of kinship’—to create a cultural identity that, while not replacing family bonds, trumps their significance, and that displaces the authority of the extended family with the revolutionary, individuating power of the nuclear family.”

It’s a complicated story, but when you think about it, there are an awful lot of obstacles to the maintenance of family ties beyond (and even within) the nuclear family. Weiner argues that at the center of our modern societies is an ethos of individualism that is at odds with the ethos of solidarity at the heart of traditional clan-based societies that keeps families together. The individualistic ethos was on full display in Lady Bird. When asked if Lady Bird is her given name, the title character answers yes, “I gave it to myself, it was given to me by me.” Weiner argues that the ache for solidarity is always with us, though, and the film ends with Lady Bird in her dorm room in New York City recalling her hometown with fondness and introducing herself to new acquaintances as “Christine,” the name her parents gave her.

Liberal societies will fail if we do not find decent substitutes for the solidarity of traditional clans, Weiner argues. We need unions, clubs, bowling leagues, organizations of various kinds, and above all, nation states to fulfill the functions of clans, to hold us together, and to reduce the sense of anomie that arises in the absence of strong extended families and traditional culture.

Other books I’m reading also address this problem in different ways. In More than Just Race, William Julius Wilson considers the relative importance of culture and social structure in causing poverty. Conservatives like J. D. Vance would have us believe that poverty could be solved if individuals would just act differently—according to more appropriate cultural norms. But Wilson references extensive social science research that shows structural factors (economics, demographics, public policy) have a much greater impact and in fact cause the dysfunctional cultural practices that Vance puts at the root of poverty. Wilson calls for the kinds of collectivist or state-sponsored structural adjustments that Weiner might say are necessary to preserve liberal modernity against that ache of individualism.

Finally, in her book, Radical Happiness, Lynne Segal, notes that as policy makers and yoga instructors, retailers and psychologists, HR departments and pharmaceutical companies promote ever more paths toward individual fulfillment and happiness, we see “precipitously rising rates of anxiety and depression” (Kindle version, location 80). The reason, she says, is that we are overemphasizing individual causes of unhappiness and underestimating social causes. We need to shift our focus from private happiness to what Hannah Arendt called “public happiness” (127). Segal's prescription calls for involvement in movements for social change and political activism. For one thing, only social change can address the structural and social causes of our depression and anxiety (which are perhaps a greater source of our misery than our own individual craziness), and at the same time the very act of bonding with others in a political crusade is psychologically therapeutic for the individuals involved.

Hitler, Trump, and Anti-Modernism

From an exhibit at the museum in Dachau

The Nazi Party, according to an exhibit on Weimar Germany in the museum at Dachau, appealed to Germans who opposed the "modernization of society."  Maybe ten years ago, Karen Armstrong said in an assembly at Exeter and in her book, The Battle for God, that the rise of radical fundamentalism all over the world in the 20th century is essentially a rebellion against modernity.  Is this essentially what Trump voters are rebelling against, too?  In his recent book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra argues that the many angry people all across the globe today have one common gripe: "resentment at a ‘modernity’ that promises equality and freedom and delivers only the dog-eat-dog brutality and competition of neoliberal capitalism."

I grew up with a faith in the inevitability of progress: the evolution of societies and people from backward to advanced, from ignorant to enlightened,  the steady advance of technology, prosperity, and democracy that promised better things always in the future.  Today, such faith seems naive or delusional when you consider the worldwide rise of right wing extremism, the rotting out of the Republican Party, global warming, terrorism, email, and the appearance of the phrase "President Trump" in newspapers everywhere.

An article in the current Atlantic magazine quotes Claude Levi-Strauss saying that "civilization has been in decline since the Neolithic period."  The article profiles an anthropology professor at Washington College who claims hunter-gatherers where healthier, happier, and probably even smarter than moderns.  Jared Diamond argues similar things in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel and elsewhere, and James Loewen coined the term chronological ethnocentrism to capture our unwarranted assumption that humans today are smarter and better than humans in the past.

Is it possible that history is one long and steady decline from golden past to dystopian future?  When you look at the desperation that seems to have driven white working class Americans to vote for Trump, it seems plausible.  Rising mortality among middle aged white people without a college degree, the opioid epidemic, declining incomes, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector of the economy, the increasing precariousness of middle class families. 

The Exeter faculty book group read Tribe, by Sebastian Junger, over spring break.  The book supports Levi-Strauss's claim with a lot of compelling stories that show how people are really better off living in small, communal, groups like the hunter-gatherers than in our alienating, competitive, individualistic modern societies.  (Reviews of the book break down along predictable lines, between those who think that life among pre-modern peoples was nasty, brutish and short, and those who think it was paradise lost.) 


Hitler and the Nazis, and perhaps Trump, seem instinctively to have tapped into this chronic dissatisfaction with modern life.  An exhibit at the Documentation Center at the Nazi Party rallying grounds in Nuremberg included a reference to the phrase Gemeinschaft statt Gesellschaft (community instead of society) and a video about what was going on behind the scenes at the rallies.  Party members arrived by the hundreds of thousands on trains from all over, and stayed in crowded, unsanitary conditions in row after row of tents.  In the film, attendees can be seen swilling beer, washing up outside, joking and horsing around.  The film was meant to show that the Nazi rallies weren't as well organized as they appeared in films of orderly columns marching in lock step, enthusiastically hailing the Führer.  

But more significantly, it showed how the party attracted followers in part by fulfilling a fundamental human need for belonging.  The shared hardship of those camps created a sense of mission and common purpose that formed party members into a mass tribe.  Accounts of Trump rallies suggests a similar tribal solidarity there.  

I just read this review by Christopher Benfey in the NYRB of a batch of books on the history of utopian dreams in the US.  Utopian visions and communitarian experiments tend to spring up, the author argues, when the real world seems to be getting uglier.  "In the background of every utopia is there is an anti-utopia," the author of Utopian Thought in the Western World wrote back in 1979, at the beginning of our current descent into the neoliberal anti-utopia.  It's no coincidence that many of the utopian visions of the 19th century emerged from the industrial hellscape of Manchester England, the Nazi Party succeed amidst the despair of the Great Depression, and Trump's surprise victory emerged from the hollowed out post-industrial rust belt .  

From the Weimar Constitution

Much has been written about how the neoliberal order is tough on white working class folks without a college degree.  But is it really so great for the supposed winners: the educated, cosmopolitan "elites" living along the coasts and working knowledge economy jobs?  The Hunger Games competition for an education that has turned childhood into a resume-building exercise, the electronic collar of emails and laptops and workdays that never end, the breakdown of family life as we uproot ourselves in a desperate search for the next great opportunity--that may be just slightly less bad than unemployment in the industrial ghost town.  And if you think educated knowledge workers are immune to the offshoring and outsourcing that has done so much damage to high school diploma class, consider the H1-B visa and this episode of 60 Minutes. 

In our discussion of Tribe last week, the book group speculated about how we might apply lessons from the book to make Exeter a better place.  According to Benfey, most utopian experiments have had a few things in common: "that society should be based on cooperation rather than competition; that the nuclear family should be subsumed into the larger community; that property should be held in common; that women should not be subordinate to men; that work of even the  most menial kind must be accorded a certain dignity." The architects of these experiments hadn't read Tribe but they might have.