Religion
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Imagine
Ever since the turn of the millennium, each New Year’s Day has felt like a leap into the future. Here it is: January 7, 2004— already seven days into the third year since 2001: A Space Odyssey became alternate history rather than a possible future. We still have no monoliths, aliens, or crazy space stuff. There’s plenty of crazy people stuff though—but we’ve been living with our own craziness for so many centuries that now it seems almost normal.
As you already know, I’ve enjoyed science fiction since I was a kid. It’s filled with imagination, creativity, and it has often been the spark that pushes real science in new and interesting directions. It discusses problematic issues of technology and philosophy before they even become real issues. For example, when the news first started talking about the cloning controversy, many people familiar with science fiction felt like they’ve been down that road already, and long ago formed an educated opinion about cloning, wether for or against it.
In many ways, it is just as important to look into our future as it is to look into our past. Making sense of history has always been a way to make sense of ourselves, and learning where we’ve been, it is said, can tell us the most about where we are going. Yet it is the art of imagination that actually dares to directly ask the question of what we are going to do with our future, and it’s myriad answers provide us with a myriad possibilities to dream of.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Christmas Changes
The history of Christmas has been something like the “telephone game” we played as children, whispering a sentence from ear to ear and finally ending up with something quite different at the end of the line. Millennia before Christ was even born, people had already been celebrating the winter solstice in late December, as the long nights finally started getting shorter and warmth began to return to the world. The Romans, for example, celebrated this as a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture.
Later, when the leaders of the church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first time (more than three hundred years after the fact), they decided to hold it very close to the date of the Roman “Saturnalia Festival”. Yet while “Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion” by the Middle Ages, the original form for celebrating Christmas remained very much the same:
“On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today’s Mardi Gras… The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined “debt” to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens1”
In fact, the modern form of Christmas (in the spirit of Silent Night) was very much an invention of the American upper class in the mid-nineteenth century. It sought to put out the raucousness of the event and prevent additional “Christmas riots”.
Now that another hundred years have gone by, the winter solstice is no longer immediately relevant to modern life and the old form of celebration is well forgotten. Yet America’s economic growth spurt of the twentieth century has consolidated another change: the commemoration of the birth of Christ has become the most significant incentive to go shopping that mankind has ever known. A culture has sprung up where gift-giving (and lots of it) is both a pivotal way to show your love for friends and family as well as a massive influx of fuel to the international money machine2.
Here in China, the youth may give each other small gifts, but there is nothing on the scale of America’s massive shopping spree. Instead, Christmas in China feels like a low-key version of America’s New Year’s Day. People use it as an reason to go do something fun, to whatever extent is within their means.
On Christmas eve for example, my high school students have a regular day of classes and then arrange for parties to be held in each classroom in the evening. A wealthier friend of mine goes out with her family to a karaoke restaurant, where they can spend the whole night eating, drinking and singing. Chinese may or may not know something about Jesus, but generally, their Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.
A faithful Christian may be saddened by all this, and sincerely protest that Jesus is supposed to be at the center of Christmas. Yet, since Jesus’s birth was actually put into this holiday long after it was established, is it wrong for other cultures to take him out of it again? Indeed—how might Jesus have celebrated his own birthday, and how would he have asked us to celebrate it today?
1 From the “History Channel” web-feature devoted to Christmas.
2 See also this article on the history of Christmas (archived at Looksmart.com’s “Find Articles”
, with a specific reference to the “Christmas economy.”
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