I am not a Christmas person. Basically
I am a religious agnostic - someone who just does not feel a strong
urge to believe in what I cannot know. I find religions sometimes
fascinating and sometimes just disgusting. Of course, I enjoy
Christmas traditions in the family - up to a point. But it may be
worth pondering that the Mass for Christ is not only a great
celebration for the Christian church and a wonderful experience for
our children and family, it is also part of a loosely spun structure
that gently controls the Western world, just like other invisible
behavior codes control other civilizations.
I am not talking about the Christian
religion, because the church and its many denominations and sects is
a narrower set. My reference is to all the people who tend to follow
patterns of behavior typical of the Western world. That is most of
those born into it. They – we - follow these patterns because we
have learned that this is what you should do and how you do it. In
the widest sense, traditions and social habits – or culture - are
what Clifford Geertz called “sets of control mechanisms” (1973).
Instead of instinct, which humans hardly possess, Geertz argues that
culture serves that function for us. To keep us from becoming
unpredictable and even dangerous to each other we need simple, basic
guidelines in all of our daily lives that nudge us back onto the
beaten path whenever we are apt to wander. The church and other
religions have those rules written down, and usually have a long list
of sanctions for transgressions (“sins”), but many other cultures
do not work that way. The unwritten rules of a culture – whether
religious or just social - are much less explicit than the law, but
often there are social sanctions instead of courts, such as being
frozen out.
Among the many social control
mechanisms in the Western world there is Christmas. Ideas about how
to celebrate Christmas guide your doings from Christmas Eve (or even
from the beginning of the Advent season) until January 6 – or
perhaps even January 13. You do not just do things haphazardly. You
follow tradition, although tradition has otherwise mostly seemed to
have vanished from our lives. Within the traditions there are
sub-traditions, and these can be like worlds apart. Christmas in my
home country, Norway, for example, is strongly defined by what you
eat for dinner on Christmas eve. I grew up with fresh boiled cod,
which is a strong coastal tradition. But other parts of the coast eat
mutton (“pinnekjøtt”) and inland they eat “lutefisk”. To
move from one of these cultures to another (as when people marry) can
be a painful experience. You lose your bearings, somehow.
All of this is a matter of course, just
something we don't think that much about. But shift it to the more
general level of rules, not for a holiday season or a religious
feast, but rules for living as it is during the rest of the year for
most people – and you see the outline of something much more
consequential. Geertz insisted that humanity is not one global
entity, it is multiple. There is no underlying global humanity, he
argued. There is just this large number of different cultures –
different sets of control mechanisms – that we find coexisting
around the world.
Or better, they need to coexist, to
find ways of living with each other. But they have a hard time of it,
the more they meet the more they quarrel. Fanatics seem to win out.
What puzzles me under these circumstances is the curious lack of
influence of Geertz' notion of culture in later writings on that
subject. I suspect it is because Geertz rises above them all, he
makes each of them just one among many, and that is an offense to
most of their adherents. He even refuses to recognize western liberal
humanism as unique or as a standard for all.
I find his thinking refreshing even
forty years later, when the ability of cultures to get along is much
more on trial than it used to be.
