My first Burning Man was eight years ago. Arriving at the gate late on the second night with my then girlfriend, a fastidious professional model, we were ready for almost anything, but not the manic clown-police at the entrance gate who, with a deft hand and an inch-wide white marker drew a giant ejaculating penis on our windshield and demanded (tongue-in-cheek) all our drugs.
My girlfriend left the gate in tears but recovered quickly, falling in love with the scene and especially hula-hooping which she’s done ever since.
I took the gate as a bit of social engineering, as if to say, “Welcome. Be audacious. Shine as weird as you want, but know that we can out-weird you, so don’t get too full of yourself. We’ve got you covered.”
I too fell in love with the scene, and have been back twice since, just last week with my 24-year-old daughter. I love the invitation audacity but also the easy reliable benevolence toward anyone including me, now a middle-aged duff, no longer as audacious as I once was.
Every time I’m back, that uplifting humbling line from the Beatle’s “All you need is love” comes back to me: “Nothing you can do that can’t be done.” Burning Man is crawling with talent and ingenuity. It’s a place to stand out in the midst of everyone else standing out, a place to both elevate and get over yourself, and in the process to reflect on the tension between aspiring to be more than you are and being OK with what you are.
I know a bit about gate-keeping at freak gatherings. For seven years in my 20’s I lived on The Farm, America’s largest and longest-lasting hippie commune. Burning Man is 60,000 freaks living together for a week (and then some—tons of pre-event set-up and post-event break-down). The Farm was 1400 who planned to stay forever, and on top of it, 20,000 visitors a year all streaming through our gate day and night, unscheduled, unannounced to stay a few days for free at what, in the 70’s was something of a hippie mecca.
An elected elder of the Farm by my daughter’s age, I ran our gate often, meeting and managing whomever arrived. Most of the people came with great intentions and good vibes. Some were more trouble than that.
Running gate gave me lots of time to think about what it takes to invent an alternative bubble society within the larger society and how to handle the bubble’s semi-permeable membrane, a question that now, as an evolutionary philosophy and social psychology professor still keeps me busy.
To create a new and distinct society you need focus and a degree of purity lest it get diluted. But to survive you need flowing interaction with the outside. Getting the permeability right is the challenge, what to tolerate and what not too.
The challenge runs deeper than social change. Evolutionary Biologists Terrence Deacon calls it “the paradox of individuality.” No man is an island and yet again he is, since an individual can only survive as a separate being by interacting with the world outside. The challenge goes back to the earliest life forms with their semi-permeable cell walls, what to join; what not to join.
Luck of the draw, this visit, my daughter weren’t met by cock-drawing clown police, but my daughter could have handled it. Many in her generation, the generation best represented at Burning Man have already seen a lot, and don’t harbor purist, dogmatic visions of social change, that on the Farm we disdainfully called “High Brahman.” The farm was more pragmatic than dogmatic.
We were neither free-love nor anti-junk food and for similar reasons. We had work to do and for the most part picked our priority battles with an eye to what would keep us going. Casual sex would cut into our work lives and create more drama that the commune could sustain. And hand-wringing over bags of chips or sodas wasn’t our thing either. We had higher priorities, and chose carefully where to allocate our intolerances. We cultivated an easy give and take with our rural Tennessee neighbors. I was the Farm’s fire chief for a while which meant showing up at neighbor’s fires. We hung with the neighbors and though they saw us as weird outsiders, in a way they were outsiders too. And anyway there was an Amish community nearby, so there was precedent for weirdos in the hood. They called us the Technicolor Amish, what with our tie-died everything.
In retrospect, I think our disdain for High Brahman hippies was our unsuccessful bulwark against the New Age purism that was already taking root in the 1970’s, a
moral absolutism that still dominates in Berkeley where I now live and is, to my mind as much of a problem as kudzu was on the Farm in Tennessee. Kudzu stunts tree growth, and moral absolutes whether from the Far Right, Far Left or Far Out New Age stunts human growth.
I’m astonished by how strong and resilient New Age purism remains here in Berkeley, how many people, especially of my generation have gotten good at turning up their noses by means of spiritual correctness.
“Yintimidation” I call it, the sweeping final-word pontifications of the self-proclaimed yin and spiritual who counsel hypocritically that you shouldn’t be judgmental (a judgment) that negativity is bad (a negativity), that you should be closed-minded to closed-mindedness and intolerant of intolerance. As the hypocritically spiritual demonstrate, you can’t live by these principles. Instead the principles stunt our growth by keeping us from better questions like when to judge, be negative, be closed-minded and intolerant.
No doubt these spiritual principles are a reaction to old moral certainties that pointed the opposite direction, the self-glorifying negativity of the far right and far left, for example. All moral absolutes, once they became culturally dominant, can and will be abused in the human race to outshine each other, boss each other around, act like the pope and win at “shutupsmanship.” Absolute morality is absolute power, which corrupts absolutely.
I’m awestruck and humbled by how Burning Man culture extends hippie philosophy in a healthier direction, an alternative to the New Age spirituality which has become just another route to standard-issue human self-certainty.
Burning Man culture doesn't take itself too seriously. There's much more self-effacing irony to it, that strange and wondrous balance between elevating, and getting over oneself. It was folk art at its best, everyone gifted and talented at something, often something majestic in its triviality like hula hooping, just a celebration of what bodies can do.
Not only are there no corporate logos at Burning Man, there are no famous names there. No founder, or philosophical leader, the bands, the music, the camps, all with transient names, meaningful, playful, but not really mattering. Everyone shines and no one is blinded or over-shadowed by the shiners' light. Not only is there no commerce there, there’s hardly any promotion of anything, no glad-handing, no campaigning--hippy, progressive, or otherwise.
Will Burning Man save the world? Certainly not. Is it sustainable? Not year-round the way the Farm was for its 14 years, with a community of 200 still living there today.
And not, perhaps in the environmental sense. It’s energy intensive--all that driving and burning. Still, though my priority issue is Global Warming, I’m not a purist about it. While, I don’t fly to vacations in far-flung lands because carbon footprint is too large. I’ll burn a tank of gas to be part of the Burning Man circus. I’m glad I live five hours from this best exotic culture bang for the carbon-footprint buck.
As an annual mecca, Burning Man is sustainable. It’s resilience I think stems from its low ideological aspirations. I think it’s got longer legs that the Occupy movement, in part because it’s not tilting at the towering windmills of commerce but also because, like my daughter’s generation it doesn’t aspire to ideological or spiritual purity, and so has some built-in resilience. I didn’t detect discouraging trends from my first visit eight years ago to my visit last week. The only trend I spotted was a delightful one, to my ears. Dubstep seems to have replaced Industrial and House music as the dominant musical form. Dubstep has more soul.
As a mecca it’s got something substantial to offer. It reminds you what humans can do when they decide to. And it’s a harmonious dissonance, the cacophonous music that comes of the culmanating collision between the hippie’s and indeed humankind’s two opposing truths: We are all one, and do you own thing, the paradox of individuality lived large for a week in the desert.