Civilized Behavior

It is possible to define civilization as opposed to other terms that signify groups of people: tribe, clan, gang, society, culture. While there is some disagreement about the precise definition of civilization among those who worry about such things, it is possible, I believe, to understand it as something distinct from those other kinds of groupings. Or, to put it in negative terms, one does not have to conflate all those terms as if there were no distinctions to be made.

The most helpful definition I have encountered is the one that says civilization requires three things: learning, religion, and law. To be blunt about it, this is to say that to the extent that a social group lacks any or all of these three things, that group is, to that extent, lacking in civilization. This obviously implies a continuum, with social groups that are more or less civilized at one end and those that are not civilized at the other.

(Not that this is an argument-settling example, but new towns on the Western frontier saw themselves as having passed over into something better when they had added a church, a school, and a law enforcement officer.)

It is important to note that all three of these qualities --- learning, religion, and law --- are not natural; that is, not instinctive. A group of people has to decide to devote time, energy, and money to learning; to set it as an ideal; to push for it for as many people as possible; to honor it; to create the resources necessary to learning, the books and libraries and museums and schools and teachers without which learning is close to impossible. A group of people has to decide to institutionalize religion and use it to give meaning to existence, to provide moral guidelines, to provide common beliefs and common practices. And a group of people has to decide that there will a code of law, derived from a moral code, that will help people refrain from acting in ways that may be "natural" but are also destructive both to the individual and to the society. They have to decide to do these things because they recognize that it is better to do so.

It is this last --- the importance of law --- that has been on my mind recently. Maybe this is nothing more than a function of aging, or maybe I'm reading the wrong daily publications, but it seems to me --- and I will claim nothing more than "it seems" --- it seems to me that there are more and more instances of people acting in ways that can be described as "natural" but are profoundly destructive of themselves and the people around them.

These are the parents who beat and torture their infant children, often to death, because the child has disturbed or interrupted or annoyed them. This is the mother who drives herself and her children into the lake so that they all drown because she feels bad. This is, apparently Jodi Arias, who seems to have felt entirely justified in doing what she did to her erstwhile boyfriend because he rejected her. This is the aggrieved former husband (or, more and more often) boyfriend who kills his ex and their children and, usually, himself as a way of punishing the ex for having caused him pain.

And there is the phenomenon of gangsterism that is so common in some urban areas that we hardly even mention it anymore. Within that world, the logic is clearly that the world is a war of all against all, that the end justifies the means, that the end is that I want something, and that preventing my getting that deserves death.

And there are the mass killers of Columbine and Viginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown. Whatever their mental health diagnoses, on some level of their interior life they "knew" that what they were going to do was justified.

And, perhaps most pertinent, the rapist: I have sexual desire and you will satisfy it, whether you want to or not.

I have never been a watcher of reality TV but I will confess that recently I have found myself staring in slack-jawed amazement at Harcore Pawn. There are several kinds of behavior manifested in these episodes that rightly provoke dismay, but the one that fits here is the person who demands that the pawnshop give him or her money, no matter what. It doesn't matter that there is no ticket, that what the person wants to do is against store policy, or in contradiction to the contract that he or she signed. It doesn't matter; they don't want to hear it.

On some unattractive level, this is amusing. And we can pass it off as simply weird, even aberrant. But I think that both of those responses miss the point: There is a profound sense of self-righteousness in these people which is something like "Because I want it you have an obligation to give it to me. And if you thwart my desire, you deserve to be punished."

And, on another level entirely, there is the Islamist belief that if you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe, you must die. That's a really big time version of this, but as we say in philosophy, it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree.

These are the beliefs and practices that law is meant to protect the society from. Civilized societies know that seeing the world as a "war of all against all," a place where the only ethical code is that the end justifies the means, and that desire defines the end, and that physical violence is the only determiner, is profoundly dangerous to the individual and to the society. And so such societies write law, make policies, and enforce those laws.

But it is obvious to anyone paying attention that the law alone is not sufficient. I believe that we could have as many policeman as civilians and it still wouldn't be "enough." A critical mass of a society has to be self-governing in order for it to be and remain civilized.

And self-governance mostly boils down to choosing to do the right thing rather than the desired thing; to do what is better for the other, or for the group, than what is better for me. To boil it down even further, it means that the parent knows --- deep in his heart, as we say --- that no matter how annoying the child is being, that the parent's primary responsibility is to the welfare of the child. It means that the pawn shop patron knows that no matter how powerful his desire, the contractual and mutally respectful relationship must be maintained. It means that "I want a baby" is not a good reason to have a child. It means that the individual knows that although "the end justifies the means" may result in short-term gain, in the long term it will be destructive to all concerned.

As I said at the beginning, maybe there is no issue here; maybe the vast majority of the American population is effectively self-governing and I should simply stop paying attention to the various sources of sensationalism. I hope that's right.

If it isn't right, then these seemingly separate instances of abberant --- that is, uncivilized --- behavior are harbingers of social breakdown and remedial work cannot begin soon enough,

Democratic Participation

There are two conceptual problems when trying to talk about “school reform.” The first is that those who are already involved in the debate are fighting for specific policies that they want to see implemented now, while lacking any historical or philosophical understanding of American public schooling; in other words, no understanding of how we got here and, therefore, little or no informing background concerning what public schooling ought to be and why.

The second is that the debate is being waged by a relatively small group of people, while the great majority of the population is entirely disengaged from it. It is an extreme example of “inside baseball,” even though the questions and the potential answers affect everyone in the polis, and in serious ways.

These two conceptual problems create a practical problem. Because the debate is focused entirely on the operational, any attempt to place the debate in a larger historical and philosophical context will inevitably be seen as pedantic, inapplicable, and boring.

This has created a classic vicious circle: The people who will be most affected by any such policy decisions don’t want to hear about it thereby allowing the handful of people who do care about it to fight it out without awareness or participation from the larger public. This makes it an excellent metaphor for all the political questions of our time and well our politicians know it. While some pundits decry the lack of honest and intellectual public grappling with important issues, successful politicians and their handlers know that it is much safer to speak banalities and pre-approved catch-phrases, which the larger public is apparently happy to let them do.

It would be helpful to understand that this democratic process --- that is, a political process which engages all citizens so that it can in fact be “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” --- is at the heart of the creation of schools paid for by public funds and then requiring all students to attend them for as long as possible in the context of over 300 million persons. It would not be an exaggeration to say that choosing to do such a thing was and is the greatest experiment in democracy ever attempted.

Although we now take the ubiquitous public school for granted, it was not always thus. During the Colonial Period and well into the 19^th Century, virtually all schools were funded by private money, by tuition. It wasn’t until the 1830’s and 1840’s that states took the extraordinary step of imposing a new tax to support schools for all students. To show what a remarkable step this was, consider the fact that Thomas Jefferson went to the Virginia House of Burgesses three separate times to request funding for a free grades 1-3 education for all students. All three times, his proposal was rejected.

Why, then, did state legislators, then as now leery of imposing taxes, choose to fund schools with public money? The answer is simple and straightforward and easy to understand: By the 1830’s, the United States had committed to a democratic republic form of government, one in which they knew that the suffrage would be extended more and more, and they knew that if citizens were going to be granted liberty, they would have to be taught how to use that liberty well. While they still could take for granted the influence of home and church, the way that the State would form citizens by imbuing them with the right principles and the right practices, would be at school. To put it another way, religious sectarianism and ethnic solidarity were fine in the home and in the neighborhood, but the way young people would all become Americans was in what Horace Mann called “the common school.”

Over time, more and more young people went to school and spent longer and longer there. It happened slowly, but it happened steadily, until by the 1950’s it was taken for granted that (virtually) everyone would graduate from high school. We take this for granted (to the point where those who ‘drop out’ of high school are a scandal) but historically this was not just unprecedented, it was remarkably odd. That everyone should read and virtually everyone should vote was unimaginable through most of human history.

That schooling in the United States has become more and more democratic --- that is, more and  more inclusive --- is a straightforward story, based on a kind of faith that more schooling makes for more personal and social success.

Where the story has not been straightforward but, rather, full of contradiction and conflict, has been in our definition of the deep purposes of publicly-funded schools.

From the time of the Colonial one-room school house until the end of World War I in 1918, there was a remarkable consistency in the publicly understood purposes of schooling. To review the history of this period of some 300 years is to reveal what seem like big changes, but the common element, despite huge changes in circumstance, was the belief that public schools were meant to form students as American citizens. But, as with so many things, that was no longer the case after 1918. From that time to the present, there have been deep and powerful conflicts within the American public over the role and purpose of public schools. Rather than a commitment to a fairly consistent set of principles, the period since the end of World War I has seen dramatic shifts in our thinking about the purposes of public schooling: progressives vs traditionalists; essentialists vs those who believed in a child-centered curriculum; scientific curriculum-making vs social meliorism; life-adjustment vs back-to-basics.

This is a frustrating story, at least for those of us who believe it’s possible to settle on a set of right purposes and figure out how best to achieve them. But here is the comforting or confounding thing about this story (depending on how you look at it): Our commitment to democracy has led to our inability or unwillingness to commit to a form of schooling specifically aimed at preparing young people to be thoughtful, active, and principled citizens of a mass and pluralistic democracy. 

Within the great democratic conversation, there is so much disagreement that we have not --- for good or ill --- been able to come to a consensus about what the deep purposes of school should be. As a result, our default setting is to think of schools as places that are relatively safe, where a reasonable number of academic and other activities are available, and where young people can be free to “develop” without attempts by teachers, administrators, or the State to “form” them.

Currently, the battle over the purpose of public schooling is dominated by the conflict between what we can imprecisely call the “standards” people and those who represent the “ante-standards” people. These are shoddy descriptors that would rightly offend both sides, but some kind of shorthand is needed.

After the institutional self-immolation of the ‘60’s and ’70’s, there was first a public outcry against what was happening in public schools, and then the Federal pamphlet “A Nation at Risk,” and then the governors of the several states committing to a re-definition of public school curriculum, and then to each state creating a set of academic content standards.

Logically, having standards in any field of human endeavor implies having an assessment to find out if those standards have been met, so there had to be some form of testing and given the many millions of students, that testing would have to be standardized. With the involvement of the Federal government in the “No Child Left Behind” act, given the immense amounts of money that almost every school district depended on, standardized testing became the tail that would wag the dog.

The not necessarily wise but logical development of this process has brought us to “Race to the Top” and the  Core Content Standards, both of which have provoked a reaction, mostly by teachers but apparently by more and more parents. Anger over the dominance of standardized testing, a frustration which has been growing greater and greater over the last dozen or so years, has led some teachers and others outside the system to contend that students, parents, and teachers should “opt out,” which would amount to a kind of passive resistance movement.

Anger over the Core Content Standards is a whole other kettle of fish, but is related because of its connection to and its dependence on the standardized testing industry.

I think it is essentially important to see the current conflict in two larger contexts. The first is that it is just the current manifestation of the on-going and ever more complicated debate since 1919 over what the purpose of public schools is and how that purpose should be pursued.

The second is that everyone involved on both sides of this conflict is convinced that they are right and the other guys are wrong. This is at the very heart of the great democratic conversation and so is entirely understandable. Both sides are involved in an incredibly varied, rich, frustrating, and engaging democratic process, and the stakes seem incredibly high.

Bu like all the battles fought before it in this on-going war, this will be resolved, one way or another and life will go on.

There have been so many ebbs and flows, triumphs and failures, in this process since 1919, that I’m less worried about the specifics of the current iteration and much more worried about the apathetic self-removal of the larger public from the conversation.

We live in a time where self-interest and self-importance predominate. If I don’t have children in public school, I don’t care. Even if I do have children in public school, I care only about them and their experience.

But this conflict requires that eventually the public come to a meaningful conclusion about the deep purposes of the most “public” institution in the United States.

We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific, and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic democracy.

All You Need is Love

Yesterday I had lunch with 17 men whose only common bonds were their friendship with and affection for Pat Mullen and their having gone to the Jesuits for high school and/or college. It was almost entirely a wonderful experience. The conversation was easy; no one was texting or checking his cell phone; and there were lots of funny stories, most of them true, all of them self-deprecating.

But I am prone to abstracting things beyond all recognizability so part of me part of the time was wondering about the people from those stories who were no longer with us, who had died. Died! These were vital, enjoyable people, people whose presence in my life made it better and more meaningful, and now they were gone. How could that possibly happen? What could that possibly mean?

And given that the lunch group was made up of men who were 70 and 71, I smoothly shifted into wondering about our deaths. How we looked and how we acted did not line up with my image of being 70 and yet I know that none of us has too terribly long to be here. Being there in the midst of all that vitality and energy and humor, it was almost impossible to imagine.

This kind of thinking leads one almost inevitably to some kind of fatalism, a spiritual throwing-up-of-hands, a giving up, and I could tell that I wasn't far from that.

This morning I was blessed by a Facebook post by Darya Bronston, a long version of the Liberty Mutual TV ads based on the notion of paying it forward (you can see it here), and it struck me that in the midst of all the confusion and contradiction that is life, the one thing that is always true, that always matters is acting in love.

Aristotle taught essentially the same thing, except that he framed it as "practicing the virtues." He knew that the only way to achieve happiness --- not pleasure or the satisfaction of desire, but happiness --- was to act well.

And, of course, it was Jesus of Nazareth who taught this most powerfully: "Love another as I have loved you."

For those who are tempted to believe that this teaching has to do only with romantic or filial or familial affection, read Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 4-7. This is seriously demanding stuff.

And the much more recent Immanuel Kant argued that we must never treat other people as "objects" but only as "subjects;" that is, that we must never use people for our own purposes as if they were things but must always treat them with the respect that is due them because of their inherent worth and dignity.

To act in love always. Always. To use a line from one of the characters in the James Lee Burke novels, "everything else is just rock 'n' roll."

I recommend the video that Darya posted. I also recommend a Valentine's Day meditation I wrote almost five years ago: Devotions

And, as I say in the "Devotions," properly understood, John and Paul were right: "All You Need is Love."

A Reminder from the Reverend Doctor King

"Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and wrong and are a matter of what the majority are doing. Right and wrong are relative to the likes and dislikes and customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein's theory of relativity, which properly describes the physical universe,  to the moral and ethical realm.....This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens."

                                                                     from "A Knock at Midnight" (1963)

Our Time

My perception is that we live in a particularly confounding time, and the more history, literary criticism, and culture criticism I read, the more convinced I am that I'm right.

There are, however, two things that I must keep in mind when heading into this. The first is that temperamentally I am prone to pessimism. I have fought against this my whole life, and I like to think that I've hidden it pretty successfully, but I know it's there and I certainly don't want my version of culture analysis to be nothing more than a feelings-driven rant.

The second is that I have lived through a time of remarkable change, in matters small and large, and the tendency --- especially as one gets older --- is to see change as leading to things that are not just different but worse. This, too, I hope to transcend.

For a long time, I have thought that the period between the Civil War and World War I was a time of defining change in American life; that the change took place before the War; and that the period after the War right up until our own time is of a piece. In other words, and in very broad strokes, that there was an American life before the Civil War that was irretrievably lost; that there were a large number of economic, social, and political changes in the period between 1865 and 1914; and that the new American life that came about because of those changes has been remarkably the same since 1919, despite the obvious differences on the surface.

I make this point partly for its own sake but mostly to set up an example. The changes in American life between the Civil War and World War I were huge and most, if not all, of them were driven by the changes in our economic life. The North's victory had committed the United States to the modern way of doing things which positioned us perfectly to take advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's. Put briefly, this led to the creation of monopolies and to the creation of vast new wealth, much of it held by people from places different from the established centers of economic and political power in the East.

These were "the new men," the nouveaux riches, the "men of affairs," the masters of what Twain called The Gilded Age. These were men for whom wealth was all, except to the extent that wealth led to power. There was much talk of an "invisible government," the influence wielded by the wealthy on matters of public policy. And it was not mere talk: Commodore Vanderbilt once said, "Law! What do I care about law? Hain't I got the power?"

These new economic realities provoked a number of reformist (and even revolutionary) responses; it was a time of a great deal of unrest. But the movement that won out was Progressivism and the most visible sign of its real-world triumph was that it held the White House from 1901 to 1917, under Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.

Progressivism is difficult to talk about because it is made up of a complex and even contradictory set of attitudes and goals. In general, the Progressive story is about the conflict between liberal righteousness and evil. But in practice, the movement included a revolutionary mood but resulted in no revolution; it was the political champion of the middle class but also encouraged socialism; it was devoted to the poor and downtrodden but also enthusiastic about imperialism. So it's not that Progressivism was a unified and coherent movement.

But either despite its incoherence or because of it, Progressivism became the popular response to the economic evils of the time. There was an enthusiasm for it unlike anything that we have seen in our lifetime.

One of the many things that I find confounding about our time is that although many of the same economic evils exist today, there is no generally embraced response to them.

Both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were meant to be reformist but it didn't take very long for both of them to be quietly moved to the sidelines.

Bankers and other versions of financiers have committed the most egregious crimes against both the law and the people to whom they had a moral obligation, yet, with the exception of a few highly publicized scapegoats, they are not only not in jail but are continuing to make obscene amounts of money.

It is also hard --- hard for me, at any rate --- to believe that federal and state executives and legislators are as inept as they appear to be. It is far easier to believe that there is still an "invisible government," one that influences through power that comes from wealth and economic influence.

And while our involvement in overseas wars is not popular, there is little enthusiasm, much less a wide-spread popular movement, against them.

So, despite living with essentially the same phenomena that created Progressivism in the 1890's, we mostly just go about our business, tacitly giving our approval to the way things are.

It's important to remember that while it is true that industrial capitalism has produced great wealth for a few people, and created a perhaps-too-large gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, it is also true that industrial capitalism has --- contra Marx's prediction --- created wealth and distributed that wealth much more widely than anyone could possibly have predicted 100 years ago. Most of us have a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of which didn't even exist 60 years ago.

So maybe the reason we are as tolerant of economic and political misbehavior as we are is that most of us are so well off. We have bread and we have circuses, and we have very, very little knowledge of  the past and its meaning for the present. (And the few financiers and politicians who are revealed, shamed, removed from their positions, and jailed are seen as just part of the circus.)

The Progressives of the 1890's rightly saw the miserable conditions of the new industrial cities as a target for reform. Industrial capitalism had created a widespread and intense poverty that was morally unacceptable. The victories of the Progressives, although hardly total, were victories against that poverty.

We have no analog to that progressive enthusiasm, perhaps because most of us are so well off and few of us are aware of and morally outraged by the morally unacceptable conditions of our own time.

But just as it is difficult to talk about Progressivism because of its complexity, it is difficult to talk about our own time in this regard. While it seems obvious to me that there is not a generally felt enthusiasm for reform, it is also true that there are thousands of public and private agencies that work tirelessly on behalf of those who are in need.

Maybe that lack of generalized enthusiasm is because we have been so successful in creating "progressive" social agencies and we now see that as a reform already accomplished.

I don't know. I told you: I find this time confounding.

The Meaning of Music

The music we compose; the music we listen to, in concerts and in the car and at home and on our MP3 players; the music we dance to and sing along with --- that music is not mere distraction or entertainment, not merely the sound track to our lives, not merely sound to drown out the silence. Besides being all those things, all that music is also representative of how we think about ourselves, each other, and the world.

Music, in other words, reveals and represents the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist. This is more true of our time than of any other because music, for the first time in history, is available to everyone all the time; and the nature of the music we listen to is formed by the tastes of the great mass of people as never before. Or, rather, the incredible variety of musical types is formed by the tastes of the unfathomable diversity of the listening audience.

It's worth noting that historically this is a great oddity. Through most of the history of the West, the experience of listening to music was limited to performance and performance was usually for the privileged few. It wasn't until the late 18th Century that the performance of music had moved from the chambers of the aristocracy to the public halls, and not until the 1950's, with the invention of the transistor radio and the car radio and the home stereo system, that listening to music all the time became possible. We have no idea what the great operatic voices of the 1770's sounded like but we have every recorded note of contemporary singers available to us through a variety of media.

And music, like almost everything else in modern life, has been commodified, so that giving the customer what he wants has become the driving force behind musical creativity. This has many drawbacks, as does the commodification if so many inherently worthwhile things, but it also means that contemporary music is more revealing of the zeitgeist than music has ever been. Previously, one could argue that while the great musical composer might have seen the world in a certain way, it was impossible to say with any certainty, using music as evidence, how the great mass of people understood human nature and the nature of the rest of creation.

But if we allow that music is representative of how we see ourselves, how we see our relationships to one another, and how we see our place in great scheme of things, then we have a historically unique amount of data to use in the process of using music to reveal the spirit of our time.

I write this because I have lately been in mind of a clever cultural insight from a mid-20th Century English author: "When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order. When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling 'Look at me! Look at me!'" With apologies to him, and with well-deserved humility, I want to try expand that insight, both backward and forward:

When I listen to Bach, I hear the divine order.
When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order.
When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
When I listen to the "serious" music of the 20th Century (Stravinsky, Cage, Glass et al) I hear confusion and disorder.

This last is not an insult, although I admit to loathing 20th Century music. Confusion and disorder were the self-conscious goals of musical composers, choreographers, and visual artists of the early 20th Century, a revolt against what they saw as the unnatural and repressive constraints of the past. To me it is clear that the talented, even gifted, composers and choreographers and artists of our time have succeeded grandly.

What is particularly interesting is how confusion and disorder inform so much of popular music. While much --- but not all --- of contemporary balladry still maintains a clear language, there is a whole world out there of very popular music which is little more than beat and rhythm covered by lyrics that are not only incoherent but which, under any kind of analysis, reveal no clear meaning, even line to line.

The interesting part is that this is exactly what the aesthetic revolutionaries of the early 20th Century were pushing for. They believed that there was no meaning and that rules of composition were arbitrary and without meaningful purpose. Their goal was the sensational, the shocking, the momentary. Life was made up of a series of feelings, insights, desires, fears, etc., without pattern, and certainly without meaning, and art --- if it were to be genuine --- should represent that reality. Life was chaotic and mostly based on the senses and an honest art should reflect the truth of that experience.

Whether in the concert hall or on ear-buds, music reveals and reinforces an understanding of reality and one's place in it. While many of us are prone to dismiss the criticism of contemporary distractions by saying, "Oh, it's just entertainment," on some level we know better. We live in a time when what the people want is the ultimate arbiter of taste, so what do we want? Or, to really push it, what should we want?

The Meaning of Christmas

No matter how conscientious one is at trying to stay out of line of fire and wait for the attack to be over, it seems impossible to avoid entirely the almost literally non-stop bombardment of "holiday" ads --- in print, on television, on billboards, on the radio, before movies, on virtually every site in the virtual world of the internet. It can be done, of course, but it would require a true retreat from the world, not merely a vague attempt to ignore, and I'm not willing to do that, so I continue to be hit, as it were. I wish that they were, as so many old movies and TV shows put it, only flesh wounds, but I know better: each one is a blow to the soul.

This has been going on for so long that most of us take it for granted, although I think that it goes beyond that. My intuition is that some critical mass of us now positively affirms the contemporary nature of "the holidays" with all its pressure to buy exactly the right thing for all those people who are going to be disappointed and critical if you don't; to entertain friends, neighbors, and family, and to do it in a way that will not allow for criticism from them; and to be "joyful" through it all. "The Holidays" as social and emotional obligation: One can almost see the old cartoon portrayals of the fat, cigar-smoking capitalists chuckling with satisfaction at how cleverly they have co-opted the events and manipulated us.

This is, of course, not just cognitive dissonance but the imposition --- and now the embracing --- of obligations that are impossible to meet. Through the influence of the most talented and effective industrial psychologists in the world, we have become our own crazy-making torturers.

(From 1958, here is Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas" wherein he satirizes the commercialization of Christmas. He was right then, but the current reality has gone way beyond what he was seeing. For one, we have successfully commodified all the traditions of Christmas. Even the most faithful or the most sentimental stories are vaguely accepted as just part of the great blob of "holiday tradition.")

I suggest that, to the extent each of us finds it possible, to step outside this dance circle and think about and act on either of two actually meaningful ways of looking at these end-of-year celebrations. (There are other traditional and meaningful celebrations at this time of year, none of which I know enough about to include here.)

The first is the orthodox Christian understanding of Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, the coming into the world of the Messiah, God Himself choosing to live not only among His creatures but as one of them; to live a fully human life with all its joys and sorrows; and ultimately to suffer and die, just as we do. The story as it used to be told was this: After Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin, one of the effects was that Heaven was closed to humans, and it would take a sacrifice to overcome the effects of that sin and to re-open the gates of Heaven, and that is why the Son of God came to live among us and to die for us.

Whatever your theological position on this story, it is undeniably, as Fulton Oursler put it, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

So Christmas --- the Mass of the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah --- is the remembrance, the celebration of what believing Christians see as the most auspicious event in the history of the world. (It is no accident the world of Christendom saw history as separated into the time before the coming of the Christ and the time after the coming of the Christ.)

In this way of thinking about Christmas, the giving of gifts to one another is a small, symbolic representation of the great gift of Salvation given by God to His creatures. And it is supposed to be a reminder that, to put it crudely, we are all in this together, that God came to be with all of us so that we all could be redeemed, that we are all eternally loved creatures of an eternally and infinitely loving God. So gathering in some kind of communion is also a way to symbolize the great truths of our existence and of history.

I think it's obvious that the emphasis on material and emotional vanities has very little to do with Christmas as understood in this orthodox way. On this understanding, Christmas is a formalized opportunity for us to remember and to affirm the greatest truth of our existence.

The second is a pagan understanding. Our reptilian hind brain is still at work and one of the things it registers is that the sun, immediately after the summer solstice, begins to head south with no guarantee that it will ever come back. Try to imagine our most ancient ancestors, aware enough of natural changes to pay attention to the shortening days and lengthening nights and dropping temperatures, but not sophisticated enough to be sure that the process would reverse itself and that the sun would come back north, the days would get longer, and the temperatures would rise.

So historically there are pre-Christian and non-Christian celebrations that come only days after the winter solstice, as the sun starts to come back and the days get a little longer, because once again we have been spared the catastrophe that the sun's dropping off to the south and disappearing from our lives would bring.

What is common to both understandings is that we have been saved, and what is called for is humble and celebratory gratitude. Whether in the sacramental tradition of Christianity or the feasting tradition of paganism, what is appropriate is celebratory thanksgiving.

"The Holidays" are not meant to be a time that we celebrate getting together but a time when we get together to celebrate our salvation, however we define that.

If you want to fight back against the "corporate fat cats," re-claiming the end-of-year celebrations as meaningful rather than materialistic would be great way to do it.