In the modern world, as in the ancient one, worshiping the wrong things can leave us stranded.
In the modern world, as in the ancient one, worshiping the wrong things can leave us stranded.
‘ Some fools in the desert with nothing else to do, so scared of the dark they didn’t know if they were coming or going — so they invented me, and they invented you, and other fools, to keep it all going,” so says the Devil while addressing God in Randy Newman’s musical album Faust.
Naturally, God’s telling of the story is rather different. In the Book of Exodus, Moses returns from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments to find the Israelites worshiping man-made gods, idols. Later, as punishment for their disobedience and lack of faith, God confines them to the desert for 40 years, until the unbelieving generation is dead.
Last week brought its own troubling scenes from the desert.
The Burning Man festival began 40 years ago as a small ritual on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It’s a combination of countercultural spectacle, partying, and New Age spirituality. In 2014, a writer for the New York Times described it as “a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.” That’s still accurate, though this year there were around 70,000 attendees (known as “burners”).
At Burning Man, the idol is not a golden calf but a wooden effigy, referred to as the “Man.” During the festivities, the Man is burned in what burners say is a celebration of “community, art, self-expression and self-reliance.”
Since 1991, the event has been held in Black Rock Desert in Pershing County, Nev. The desert is 70 miles long and 20 miles wide. The former home of Lake Lahontan, Black Rock Desert is impassable when wet. This presents significant logistical challenges for organizing the event, which relies on good weather. In 2018, dust storms forced organizers to temporarily close entrances. Last Friday, more than a half inch of rain flooded the desert floor, causing foot-deep mud and leaving tens of thousands of burners temporarily stranded.
Burning Man has its own version of the Ten Commandments, known as “principles.” They are (1) radical inclusion, (2) gifting, (3) decommodification (i.e., no commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising), (4) radical self-reliance, (5) radical self-expression, (6) communal effort, which means striving to “produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support cooperation and collaboration,” (7) civic responsibility, (8) leaving no trace, i.e., cleaning up after oneself, (9) participation, and (10) immediacy, which means overcoming “barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves.”
At the best of times, the wisdom of these principles is unclear. A blogger who previously attended a Burning Man event wrote that while she “embraced radical inclusion and [the idea] that everyone’s burn was as important as mine,” she sometimes felt “the principle of radical inclusion was being taken advantage of.” For instance, she and some friends were walking late at night when they were approached by a young man. They offered him a gift, in accordance with the principles. But his conversation soon turned “more leering.”
She explained her dilemma:
Had I been home in New York I would have turned on my heel and walked away without another word. But it was Burning Man, and so we kept smiling. Part of me felt he was enjoying watching us struggle to maintain radical inclusion while also sending clear social signals that we were uncomfortable. It devolved to him screaming graphic sexual threats at us as we finally walked away.
At the worst of times, the Burning Man principles are ignored entirely. When tensions run high, fights break out. A local sheriff complained this year that burners were “lashing out at each other,” a violation of principles six and seven, and leaving their trash behind, a violation of principle eight. “This behavior definitely does not fall within the ten principles of Burning Man, but that is not the fault of [Burning Man Project] either, but is a societal issue,” the sheriff said.
But the principle of “radical self-reliance” is faulty. And societal issues are not caused by invisible power structures but by human nature itself — which is weak, easily corruptible, and utterly at the mercy of forces beyond our control. The religious impulse exists to help us make sense of that fact. In the modern world, as in the ancient one, worshiping the wrong things can leave us stranded in the desert.