During my week at Burning Man, I was obsessed with the question of whether the event has any aesthetic or cultural worth
[Note, I wrote most of this note while I was physically at Burning Man]
I’m sitting in my car right now, which smells like wet organic garbage because we had a huge dust storm, and I needed to hurriedly stash the garbage somewhere it wouldn’t blow away.
Burning Man is basically the world’s largest carnival. Everywhere there are camps where people offer experiences: dance parties, sex stuff, AA meetings, silent meditation, bumper cars…
I’m still not sure what to think about it. The thing about Burning Man is that it’s awe-inspiring — some group of people erected a bumper car place in the desert in the course of just a few weeks!— but it’s not beautiful. Everything looks knocked together out of plywood and fabric. Everything is dusty and low-rent — it all rather resembles a Mumbai slum.
I wonder what the appeal is. Every experience here is something you can find in the Bay Area. Admittedly, there’s a sense of discovery and of adventure, you don’t know what will happen when you walk down the street and venture forth.
But…you do know that it will be fairly prosaic. When you strip away the clothes and the drugs, a dance party is a dance party, a huge statue is a huge statue, and a karaoke tent is a karaoke tent.
It feels like there’s a great emptiness at the center of all this. It’s like a story that’s humming along and is well-structured, but has no theme. What’s the theme of Burning Man? What does it mean to go out into the desert and create a bumper car arena?
The only thing I can think of is that Burning Man represents a people and a society who feel radically alienated from the concrete realities of modern civilization.
To these people, bumper car arenas and dance halls seem, out in the ‘default world,” to be strange, alienating places. A bumper car arena in San Francisco is a business. It was created through hard, practical means — a bank loan, incorporation papers, construction crews, and payrolls — that are no less (in fact, rather more) impressive than the plywood and verve that people use as a building material here. But, to the average upper middle class Californian, these processes — the ones by which experiences are created in the modern world — are a mystery. We are born into a world that contains things, and we have no sense of how or why these things came about, because we do not create these things. We do not own bars. We do not build structures. We do not create concrete objects.
Instead, everything we use seems to have arisen through vaguely hostile motives — the desire to extract money from us. And every moment in every day contains an element of warfare.
In the real world, when we walk into a store in order to purchase a product, we do not feel in an sense like we are participating in this experience. Rather, we sense we are just another input into the process. Corporations treat us like numbers, modeling traffic flow and eyeballs, and we know that we are seen dispassionately, as something to be used and placated.
Seen this way, the point of Burning Man IS that it’s so prosaic. “This isn’t a statue — it’s a statue that WE made. It isn’t a bumper car arena — it’s a bumper car arena that WE made.”
In the first part of the essay, I feel like I was very hard on Burning Man. After all, this is a place I am at, and it’s one that literally more than a hundred at my friends are or have attended.
I think it’s a worthwhile place. All criticism of Burning Man centers around the, “Well..,if they put that much effort into doing something more socially responsible, then they could impact real change” argument, but to me that argument is flawed, because that is never the decision. It’s rarely “If not this, then that…” Instead, it’s usually “If not this, then nothing…”
It’s hard to find the thing that excites and energizes you, and I think that excitement is valuable in and of itself. If people are turned on, then that’s great. They definitely shouldn’t stop.
But why are they turned on? That seems to be a question that human beings are loathe to ask: Why are we turned on by what turns us on?
We no longer try to answer. We’re strictly hands-off now: if it doesn’t hurt anyone, then do it!
We treat the psyche like a black box: a source of nameless, voiceless impulses. And we are taught not to question those impulses unless they happen to be anti-social.
We’re tired of psychology. It’s not believable. It’s not falsifiable. For years, people thought homosexuals had strong relations with their mothers. They were called ‘introverts’ because their desire was said to be ‘inverted’. That is the fruit of psychology— meaningless nonsense.
We don’t ‘search’ for meaning anymore. Instead, we pray for it, (“Please God,” we say, “Let this activity satisfy me”) because we know that life is absurd. The existentialists won. We realize now that life is all about choosing what you want to believe in.
Or, well, not exactly. There are only two philosophical systems at work in the upper classes now: utilitarianism and existentialism.
Utilitarianism flows, loosely, from English philosophy. It’s rough and logical and contains one core postulate: “The greatest good for the greatest number.”
Under this philosophy, the purpose of life is, in some sense, to help others.
The other, already discussed, is existentialism — self-fulfillment.
(There are others, too. Quietism — the annihilation of the self. Hedonism — the pursuit of pleasure. Stoicism — the relentless refusal to look away from life’s meaninglessness. But to my eyes it is existentialism and utilitarianism that are advanced by most thinkers and media today.)
The pull between these two systems underlies many of mankind’s conflicts. Religion is existentialist (very loosely speaking) while secular humanism is utilitarianism. Fascism is existential while communism is utilitarian. The right is existential while the left is utilitarian.
Both philosophies are shaky and ultimately illogical, of course, but that’s not important — what IS important is that both philosophies are strong enough to support a human life.
However, the two have very different problems. The issue with utilitarianism is that it’s chilly and cold and has no room for the self. If the purpose of life is to help others, then, well, what about yourself? Your emotions? Your own sense of happiness? How do you negotiate the boundary between selfishness and selflessness? The problem here is guilt. The more you believe in helping others, the more guilt you feel.
The problem with existentialism is that it is confusing. It is too inwardly-directed. It’s the search for a FEELING. What does that feeling feel like? What happens when it wanes?
The classical solution here is to turn the object into an end in itself. We don’t create bumper car arenas because it satisfies us, we do it because bumper car arenas are beautiful and awesome.
That then leads to the problem I’ve been facing all week. What if bumper car arenas aren’t beautiful? What if they’re not awesome?
Thus we are confronted with the absurdity of what we are doing. Satisfaction is hard to aim for, because the feeling ebbs and flows. We need something to carry us through the points where we feel no satisfaction with our lives.
As far as I can see, when we do something absurd, we need to assign one of three meanings to it: this will make me a better person; this will help to change the world for the better; or this is art (i.e. good in and of itself). Here at BM, all three meanings get trotted out, but I’m not sure any of them is particularly defensible.
I’ve written more than a thousand words so far, and I’m not certain I’ve even approached the question of “Why should a person criticize Burning an?”
I am at war with myself over this, because, to me, Burning Man, is both praiseworthy and detestable. And I understand exactly why it is praiseworthy — there is something awe-inspiring about the level of purpose that is on display — and why it is detestable — Burning Man is aesthetically empty — it’s effort put into the service of an end that isn’t particularly beautiful or interesting. But somehow that doesn’t seem like enough. It feels like I ought to be less dismissive about something that means so much to so many people (including many people whom I love).
But maybe there isn’t.
Perhaps what I can see is the absurdity of all human action, laid bare. It’s the same with business: McDonalds is a precise, beautiful, brilliant corporation that creates a singular aesthetic experience — but it also serves food that is ultimately unappetizing. And just as with Burning Man, what is objectionable about McDonalds is its insistence that it matters and deserves to exist.
Knitting circles and bird watchers are equally absurd, but they’re not detestable, because they don’t demand to be taken seriously (wonder if there’s something gendered there — Burning Man is 60% male, while knitting circles and bird watching groups are the opposite).
I guess the strangest thing, to me, about Burning Man is how much of the hype is true. It’s not corporate. It is run by volunteers. People do believe in radical self-reliance and radical inclusion and all those ideals. There really is a gift economy. People really are friendly and open-hearted.
But, at the same time, it’s strange that all of those ideals and all of those passions have been channeled into something that is, in the end, just another big festival — a place for people to party in the desert. How is it different from Coachella (to name a festival that’s owned and operated by a huge multinational corporation)?
It strikes me that no one could have set out to create Burning Man, at least in its current form, because no one would ever choose to expend so much collective effort on a result that really isn’t that different from events that are corporate and are profit-oriented. It’s a real triumph of capitalism that even when we’re left free to exercise our wildest imaginations, we still end up recreating capitalist structures.
