Depending on where you stand on Richard Dawkins, religion, plithy atheism, pop journalism, and one of many insurmountable cultural divides, “Happy Newton Day!” may or may not be your cup of tea. This New Statesmen piece, published less than two weeks ago, has fanned flames in both camps (the religious and the irreligious) and is loudly indicative of the new cyber-discourse heralded by the “blog”-style news site as public forum.
For those who can’t be bothered to read the piece, Dawkins writes an amusing memoir on his youth in which he variously encounters Christmas and its symbolic manifestations. From there, he launches into a semi-scholarly account of how the popular formulation of “Christmas” (the timing of the holiday, the actual history behind the messiah story, the geographic anchoring of the events, etc…) is more coincidental, convenient, and commercially tainted than strictly religious. The hallmarks of Dawkins-speak are all here: a nicely idiosyncratic style, some mean-spirited humor, lots of fact-mashing, and a few direct jibes at organized religion. Dawkins once again proves that he is the go-to face of pop secular humanism…it is fun, stylish, and really gets people’s mojo riled! The piece further parallels that omniscient second layer to each of his works, that nagging feeling that while what he is saying is all well, good, and probably right, it doesn’t quite add up to any life-defining path worth following. I was really happy to read his conceit that “I’d much rather wish you ‘Happy Christmas’ than ‘Happy Holiday Season’” - both phrases have lost much of their omph, so one might as well say the thing which sounds the least preposterous.
Dawkins has several fears in his piece, but none more “scary” than the idea that Christmas no longer allows for actual Christian and/or literary allusion, but rather for second or third order nods that further and further obscure the real roots, meanings, and rituals of our “holiday” season. I feel as if Dawkins is telling us all that Christmas these days is lamentable in a number of ways, but that if we are to bother putting so much stock (material, emotional, “spiritual,” temporal) into it, we might as well know what really lies at bottom (or even that some aspects of Christmas and the holidays “really lie” in the first place).
The “Happy Newton Day!” caveat at the end of the article is pretty boorish, though “LOL” funny. Taken as a whole Dawkins proves - as he has before - that he does have some useful things to teach us, each and every one, from the organized religious to the solitary secular. There could yet be hope for Christmas and Holiday discourse that offends less people, of various walks of life, and has more meaning for the long, the short, and the tall.
Beyond the holiday significance of this piece, it stands resplendent as perfectly illustrative of “blog banter.” Most major news sources and many bigger circulation magazines have begun to upload their pieces to blog-style news sites that appear simultaneous to their print periodicals (this is nothing new). However, what is fairly new, emergent in the last three or four years, is a type of public discourse attached to these sorts of pieces which provides a remarkable litmus test for the body politic at large. As of this writing, the Dawkins piece has over 100 “comments.” After a few posts, the whole business gets out of control. People begin to write in response to previous posts and in response to the article at large. After 50 or so of these posts, the discourse entirely shifts away from directly discussing the article and its contents and on toward the specific comments, beliefs, and tactics of the other posters. This opens a second-level discourse which starts to vacuum in a wide range of issues, branching into science, being, political ideology, and on. What I find so remarkable about this sort of back-and-forth, is that it almost always moves from the microcosmic/specific (the article and its direct contents) to the macrocosmic/broad (a lauchpad for sweepingly accepting or rejecting whole ways of life, a place for the wholesale dismissal of that which rubs the wrong way).
Thus, I comfortably sit in my chilled home on a moderately chilly Christmas eve, blasting Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, The El Daoud (1970), content with the knowledge that I will later listen to Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and eat cookies. It’s my own “re-mixed” Christmas tradition, influenced by the heated back and forth of the secular progressives and the religious vanguard, but ultimately about those fun, worthwhile values of smiling and laughing with family and friends, though not necessarily always under the banner of heaven.