Strong cultures ritualize their own disruption

Or, why we must enshrine the clown

“Jester” (2001) by John August Swanson. Buy his art here.

A culture must accommodate its own disruption or be destroyed by it

Once upon a time, the leftists were the edgy ones, peeing on crosses or mocking American flags to make the conservatives squirm. Then the left became not only puritanical but began advocating for an internal police state where you can’t even think the word “retard” without being a bad person. Now it’s the alt-right who plays the disrupter, and it’s hard not to laugh, despite ourselves, as we watch them “own the libs. ”

As the pendulum swings back and forth, it will become increasingly like a wrecking ball until we don’t have a society anymore, just a pile of debris

Successful societies ritualize their own disruption. See:
- Native American sacred clowns
- The Christian Feast of Fools & Carnival
- The Greek & Roman festivals of Dionysus
- The European court jester
- Halloween, Purim, April Fools’ Day

Zuni sacred clowns who have the role of violating social norms. During ceremony they might make fun of the seriousness of the ritual and make poop jokes

When we try to excise the irreverent or the inappropriate or the “problematic” from society entirely, it will come back to bite us in the ass. Cultures which do not enshrine The Trickster become vulnerable to its chaotic force. This is true of the culture of one’s mind too. Ask yourself: Are you often able to laugh at yourself? If not, you might be in for a rough time

The Trickster might mock my grammatical errors here

In art

There’s this bad idea that keeps returning through history that good aesthetics are about order & harmony

But a cultural preference for chaos & dissonance amongst the aesthetics of order is not just a postmodern invention. It’s a time-honored tradition

In our time this looks like John Cage’s 4’33” or Duchamp’s “Fountain”

From the BBC article “The urinal that changed how we think” feat. “Fountain” (1917) by Marcel Duchamp

As mentioned above, in former times you saw the inviting-in of chaos in the Native American enshrining of the sacred clown, whose role it is to bring irreverence to ossified rituals. It was present in the Feast of Fools, a medieval tradition born of the solemn church itself. You found it in the presence of Dionysus, who brought divine madness to several of the most refined societies of all time

“But predictive processing implies that minds want to reduce prediction error”

It seems to me that even if you take a predictive processing lens, the meta-predictive apparatus “knows” that it requires occasional chaos and dissonance to dislodge stuck priors. Training the ability to absorb system shocks through microdosing system shocks is critical to survival

via @ancestralhabits

Every system that endures – from minds to ecosystems, to societies – must embrace an element of chaos or else be destroyed by it

However:

That said, Western culture has now gone too far. We need more harmony and ordinary beauty, less disruption for disruption’s sake. It’s now a pretentious belief amongst artists that dissonance is more sophisticated and harmony is naive. These artists are out of touch with not only broader society, but also the necessities of their own souls