A holiday about covid and connection?

[Raymond Arnold]

Surprising hopefully no one, Ray responds to a global pandemic with "hmm, might this situation be improved by inventing a new holiday?"

I just wrote a crazy long manifesto on LessWrong. Here's the intro:

...

Recently, I awoke in the middle of the night with a thought:

There should be a holiday designed, from the ground up, to be telepresent. Once a year, you should gather – not with the family who are geographically close, but those who are emotionally central to you, no matter the distance.

What should you gather to celebrate about? One possible answer is “your connection and closeness is reason enough. You don’t need an excuse.” But I think holidays work best when they do provide an excuse – some event to commemorate, around which the whole thing coalesces.

Two seconds later, I thought: geez, the coronavirus is just… actually a mythic level event, which is affecting all of humanity. We are forced to endure hardship, to rework our lives, to coordinate in challenging times… and to find new ways to remain connected despite physical isolation. The story of COVID-19 is actually comparable to the events that most holidays are founded to commemorate. It’s also a very weird event, which gives a holiday lots of little narrative hooks for unique things that help it stand out.

I think a holiday focused on that would have a lot of narrative power, and it would fill an actual important need. I think there are concrete reasons people may benefit from a telepresent right now, but I also predict that coronavirus will have long-lasting impacts that will make it reasonable to commemorate in future years (Although the narrative may need to change over time to account for new facts coming to light. We’re living through history right now)

It’s the 21st century, and we should be expecting holidays and traditions to adapt to changing technology. There should be at least one holiday where “skyping in to see your family” is not awkwardly bolted on afterwards, but deeply interwoven into the central traditions.

...

If this seems interesting, you can read a ton more thoughts about it here.

[kech...@comcast.net]

So one thing that comes to mind is that it might be meaningful to
associate a holiday like this with the date of the *peak* of the
COVID-19 pandemic, and set it up to be akin to winter solstice
celebrations in which people gather to ward off the darkness — except
that this time they're gathering in a way that's explicitly proven to
help "ward off" viruses.

Obviously, it won't be possible to pick a date until everything starts to die
down, but this is a long-range plan anyway.

Part of the ritual could also be refraining from *any* physical or in-person
contact with other humans — to the extent that one's situation allows, of
course, and not done in such a way as to endanger anyone's health
unnecessarily — as a reminder of what many people, especially those of us
living alone, are going through right now. You could encourage people who have
enough rooms in the their home to designate a room for each person, where
they're expected to stay (outside of bathroom breaks and things like that) and
communicate with the rest of the family only through the group skype call that
would also be shared with other relatives on the other side of the world.

(Or you could just barricade the door with toilet paper.)

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[Raymond Arnold]

> Obviously, it won't be possible to pick a date until everything starts to die
down, but this is a long-range plan anyway.

Yeah. One of the weird things here is that my conception of the ideal holiday might rapidly evolve over the next year.

> Part of the ritual could also be refraining from *any* physical or in-person
contact with other humans — to the extent that one's situation allows, of
course, and not done in such a way as to endanger anyone's health
unnecessarily — as a reminder of what many people, especially those of us
living alone, are going through right now. 

Another person had mentioned "Holidays of Deprivation are a thing" (Ramadan, Lent), and focusing on that angle may be good. I'm not 100% sure I understand the work that holidays of deprivation are doing, and would want to understand that better before leaning into it.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rational-ritual/20200427103016.GA193881%40eriophora.localdomain.

[J. Kopczynski]

I don't think a COVID holiday is a worthwhile project. A core principle of good holidays is that they are to some degree timeless. A holiday is a time capsule which will, if it works, carry values and culture across generations. So the second* filter I test my holiday ideas against is "Will this be strange and foreign to the grandchildren of the current community?"

This fails that test, hard; it will be strange and foreign to the children of the current community. (Barring the children currently alive and old enough to remember, of course.) We are not like ancient cultures who mythologized their history and told it to their children as a core part of their culture; we don't have much connection to our parent's and grandparent's lives. Barring the big epochal shifts like the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and (arguably) John Lennon, 9/11, maybe Nixon's resignation, we barely try to have a connection.

So I strongly expect that this will be a dead letter in the long run.

* The first is "Is the message of this holiday something I'm sure will still be a good message to the grandchildren of the current community?" Because the message will keep being received and internalized even if it's no longer a good message.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rational-ritual/CALmO78pSwf8XEHi-bKS%2B4fMsybQtbqNi0iDP3ra94iayx7aU9w%40mail.gmail.com.