Culture and Christmas

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.