Simon Winchester complains the typical New Year’s celebration has reduced to little more than an excuse for unrestrained drunkenness and revelry. He lays blame for this woeful development partly on the example of the Scottish who have long treated the occasion as an opportunity for drinking themselves into a state of “catatonic incapacity”. Also, some culpability lies with the creation and popularization of modern public clocks that have allowed us to meticulously track and therefore exaggerate and fetishize the grand drama of the exact moment. The combination of chronological exactitude and Scottish bacchanalia gives us the now generally expected annual ritual of “midnight debauchery”.
Winchester, though, makes it really clear that the real culprit isn’t so much the Scots as it is the introduction of the technology that makes precise timekeeping possible, meaning Galileo is just as much to blame. As Winchester sees it, the “whole notion of bidding formal and raucous farewell to the Old” presupposes that we can discern the exact moment the old year passes and the new year begins, creating a kind of contrived euphoria over a largely artificial demarcation in time. So what was once a more temperate affair, an opportunity for quiet and reposeful consideration of the year soon to be behind us, has become incentive for meaningless insobriety and grotesquely inarticulate celebration. Winchester is basically arguing that a technological innovation, something we have consciously made, has become an obstacle to serious reflection on the truth about who we are. To make matters worse, what was once a matter of peculiarly Western customs has expanded well beyond its cultural borders and “are fast easing their way into the fabric everywhere”. Still, Winchester concedes that a few places largely insulated from Western influence, like the Kingdom of Tonga, still approach the coming of the new year with the right tone of respectful piety.
It’s hard to argue with Winchester on the obvious and banal point that New Year’s celebrations are often marred by a stupid, thoughtless fraternity style immoderation. Also, there really is something to the notion that the way we ring in the New Year, literally documenting the last seconds of the old one, is an exemplary expression of the typically modern anxiety regarding the passage of time. This obsessive-compulsive preoccupation is a sort of suppressed or sublimated version of our awareness of our mortality, of the way in which we necessarily confront and are moved by the specter of our own death. This means that there is often something morbid about New Year’s celebrations, for all their apparent celebratory spiritedness.
Still, even when we fall pretty far sort of Winchester’s ideal, “ceremonies of dignified moderation and temporal respect” (try putting that on your party’s invitations), it’s hard to miss the way Dick Clark style events are not entirely disconnected from the two main dispositions that properly characterize our greeting of another year: gratitude and hope. Looking back at the year we just had, we’re grateful for all the glad tidings we enjoyed, and even when we’ve suffered through a difficult time, we’re grateful we managed to make it to its end and start anew. Looking forward, we’re hopeful that the year will bring more of the same or better. And even at the ugliest of celebrations (and I’ve been to more than a few in my misspent youth), the reflexive inclination when the ball drops is to cling to a loved one or find one to love (or some less romantic version of that). So there are certainly perversions of our capacity for gratitude and hope, just as there are, as Rousseau famously points out so often, perversions of our awareness of the passage of time and our finitude. But it often seems to me that even these perversions point to the proper posture for human beings, the only beings who can look forward and backward with joy and regret. It also seems to me that this is still just as possible in the middle of Times Square as it is in Tonga.
December 27th, 2009 | 7:35 pm
Ivan, isn’t there something very wistful about auld lang syne? Something that reminds us of our mortality and the trasience of not only ourselves, but of those we love?
December 27th, 2009 | 7:38 pm
I submit that what’s being fetishized in the modern celebration isn’t the technological demarcation of time, but the synchronized spasm of collective emotion. The thrill of knowing that when you squeal at 12:00:00, your whole time zone squeals along with you.
December 27th, 2009 | 9:43 pm
That squeal marks the Kissing Time, around which the entire New Year’s holiday is based. Kissing Time is a moment for those too sociable to be alone, but too democratic not to be lonely. New Year’s gets a lot of hate as the anticlimactic holiday of hollow cheers and empty drunkenness, but there’s something in the Kissing Time that captures, and seeks to honor, something hauntingly human about our mortal condition.
December 28th, 2009 | 2:32 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Walter Levin, Mia Rodriguez. Mia Rodriguez said: Happy (or Distracted) New Year! » Postmodern Conservative | A … http://bit.ly/6V72Tp [...]
December 28th, 2009 | 4:04 am
Would it be that New Year’s celebrations truly commemorated a time span of the last year with meaning, one that could be reckoned with, and turned over with new promises, nay resolutions, to make one’s life better. In my experience, New Years eve and day is something beside the point. After the joy of Christmas day, we’re expected to give another joyous paean to the non-liturgical calendar. I’m all for a party, but now we are required to recollect the events of the past twelve months– sifting through the remains in order to pick gems from the detritus, and make solemn promises to make things better.
This is all good, but apart from the Bacchanalia, it always seemed too forced–even with the wistfulness of Auld Langs Syne.
My alcoholic friends–i do not consider myself in that company except on occasion–call New Years Eve “amateur night”–like Mardis Gras and St. Patrick’s Day. It is a shame to view these noble holidays-including New year’s Eve–as nothing but an excuse to get s**tfaced, but such is the way of things.
That being said, this year I resolve to take seriously my own profession and fulfill the most bureaucratic explanations of my profession with the seriousness that it requires. My resolution is to sop being so temperamental, and deal with the paperwork as it presents itself to me. It is hard to motivate oneself to do what one hates, but one can always remember the adage that there is nobody here but us chickens. As a fox in the henhouse, I’m penned in, and I hate to play the game, but I must. This New Year, I promise to to fulfill my onerous obligation with less bitching.
But I fear that if I no longer complain then the technocratic efficiocrats will have their day. So the web manager must redact everything I just said.
Happy New Year!
And in all seriousness, this must be a time when we should all reckon with our shortcomings, and make an attempt to make the best with what we have been given.
December 28th, 2009 | 11:28 am
Pete: it is a touching song about the great human virtue of remembrance–that amidst pain it brings comfort, even when the remembrance itself is bittersweet. Rousseau largely discusses the temporal dimension of human consciousness as a curse that introduces an alientation from nature that we can never recover from; for him, oneness with nature is identical to happiness and so the awareness of our disticntness must be a source of psychic pain. However , its also the case that the happiness of the noble savage is more savage than noble–the purely natural happiness excludes both morality and real human awareness, and as Rousseau makes very clear, real awareness of the past and the present, and so of hope and gratitude.
James: I thnk that’s right but its not just about kissing per se–the physical affection, and the longing for it, says alot about the gregaruiousness of our natures.
Matt: you’re right and that’s part of the excitement, on a lesser scale, of seeing a ball game or concert live too. But we’re not just squealing in unisin randomly but for the sake of the something and that something is largely what I’m talking about. Still, there really is something important to your commment–I’m reminded of the New Year’s address the Pope gave last year-it was devoted to the family and the unity of the entire human race as one big family. The experience of time and all that it emails is a universal one, even if it finds rather disparate cultural expressions, as Winchester points out. The incredible experience of mass celebration seems to emphasize this great unity somehow
December 28th, 2009 | 12:05 pm
Well, there is something Tocquevillian/American about the mixture of intoxication and precision. All and all, though, New Year’s Eve is annoying and anti-climatic..
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact