Two Nouns #9 -- Counterculture and Commitment
Greetings from autumn, friends! I began September in recovery from my first experience at Burning Man. Trying to explain to my parents the basic concept, I found myself calling it a music festival. Which it is.
My definitions in the afterglow are contradictory: Burning Man is choreographed anarchy, an experiment in communal effort marked by its commitment to personalized individual experiences. You can have your tarot read or eat a cucumber sandwich, engage in silent meditation or dance through sunrise on an art car belching propane flames. Attendees are generous and largely open minded, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want.
It me!
This is all incredibly hard to pull off—mostly because it takes place once a year in the middle of a scorching alkaline desert. At the boundary between Burning Man as valuable sociological phenomenon and Burning Man as eye rolling indulgence lies nature. Yes, it’s performative, expensive, and still monochromatic. But more important—I thought—it’s hot, dusty, and completely inhospitable in many ways. Humility before nature is a huge forcing function. Everyone must contribute an astonishing amount of time and energy toward making sure that it is physically and psychologically safe. This then covers quite a few of the ten principles of Burning Man – civic responsibility, radical inclusion, radical self-reliance.
At a minimum, everyone should probably test their ability to survive in the desert for a week. But I appreciated the other forms of intentionality, and the values that anchor the project when it’s away from its temporary home. A friend of a friend spent one year importing the ten principles to the real world, and I think we could all probably do more on that front.
The thing I really want to be writing about this month is Wild, Wild Country. I can’t help drawing comparisons between Burning Man and the 1980s Rajneeshpuram settlement in Oregon—another experiment in communal living, and subject of the Netflix docuseries that premiered at Sundance and just won an Emmy.
First a little nerdery on execution: It’s so great. The archival footage, subject interviews, and reenactments are treated with great care. It helps that there are shocking crimes, wacky costumes, and that the landscape in that part of America is calming and beautiful, tailor made for large boom camera pans over the rugged horizon.
The documentary (really, watch it) covers about six years during which an India-based spiritualist collective attempts to establish a permanent commune in rural Oregon. More publicly termed a cult, the followers of an often-silent guru called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh flocked to a town called Antelope, and the promise of living in freedom. They ultimately numbered in the thousands and fashioned a functioning city at the edge of the American grid. The still living leadership was highly cooperative with the documentary. A compelling woman called Ma Sheela Anand is its intellectual and tactical heart.
I haven’t been able to summon the energy to cross-reference the underlying principles of the Rajneeshee community with those of Burning Man. Both projects help establish the rule that counterculture is hard to maintain. One primary difference is ambition. Emily Witt’s writing lands some clean shots against the well-behaved, well-rounded children of my generation, who flirt with counterculture while maintaining corporate citizenship, and blowing through takeout containers each week. We haven’t made the full-blown commitment to unconformity that marked the Pacific time zone of the 1960s, 70s and, hey looks like the 80s, too. If the charm of the playa comes from its ephemerality, the Rajneeshees earned my respect by committing to a permanent transformation of self and geography. Burners are not, in fact, interested in staying on the playa forever. The Rajneeshees wanted to give it a shot.
Perhaps the most instructive bit of WWC in today’s currency is the resistance to Rajneeshpuram from regional and national critics. The backlash presented on film is intense and sustained, highlighting major contemporary flash points like gun ownership, nativism, and voter suppression. Throughout, the Rajneeshees deploy the law to their advantage – electing members to local office, infiltrating the police department, stockpiling weapons and recruiting residents that could help them maintain political power.
Before it stopped being harmless (spoiler!) I had the strong instinct to defend Rajneeshpuram as an only-in-America triumph. Is there any better place to do and say as you like? Why shouldn’t they use our laws to protect their dream? I’m not even sure the concept was so countercultural; from the earliest pilgrims to the 2014 rancher standoff in Oregon, taking such liberties has been the American way.
But as contemporary politics remind us, not everyone is allowed to occupy political space, or co-opt the American way. I found the conservative, religiously-motivated antagonism from the original Antelope residents narrowminded, and in at least one case, unconstitutional. One civil servant is forever on camera touting her efforts to limit voter participation as a battle won again the forces of evil. More evidence that the political stories we tell ourselves matter.
Which is why I loved Michelle Alexander’s recent framing of progress and resistance. She reviews public protest against the Trump administration, and encourages us to view conservatism as the true "Resistance." Alexander suggests that change moves like a river, in trickles, gushes, and sometimes in stagnant pools, waiting for rain. This more expansive metaphor improves upon the “arc of justice” comment attributed to MLK, which has never brought me much comfort. She writes “The whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all and those who resisted.” William Buckley did boast about encouraging history to “stop.” And it did not.
The environment for new ideas, new cultures, new politics is both fertile (Internet!) and hostile (McConnell!). I suppose the thing is to be patient but not passive. To make everyday choices and to defend them, and to hold yourself accountable, and to wait. Rummaging around for voices from a politically tumultuous 1968, I stumbled upon the words of a Belgian philosopher Raoul Vanegeim: “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
Something to look at:
In the weeks after president Trump announced a ban on travel from countries with predominantly muslim populations, I began working with the organizers of a group called Hack the Ban to put together guides for New Yorkers in need of immigration legal services. We just launched a citywide campaign to encourage those with green cards to choose citizenship. They'll get free legal representation as well. The ads will run on Link NYC in Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Russian and Spanish through the end of this year.
Design by Shimeah Davis
What a delightful coda that Ana Maria Archila, one of the courageous women who shouted down senator Jeff Flake in a Capitol Hill elevator this week, chairs Make the Road--one of this project’s partner groups. Consider lending your support for their crucial work.
Something to read:
- Each week for the past seven years, Sweden has allowed one of its citizens to control the @Sweden Twitter account. The experiment is over.
- I am revisiting my firm anti-space stance after reading this superb profile of the pilot aiming to man Virgin's first commercial space flight.
More soon. If you're in the northern hemisphere: Enjoy leather weather.
Dayo