I have never been to Burning Man. Twenty years ago I went camping in the Arizona desert with some hippy friends, and have always pictured Burning Man as being close to the experience of that week. But after reading Seth Stevenson’s recent series in Slate, I am aware that Burning Man is nothing like any collegiate camping experience I ever had. This year, more than fifty thousand people attended the Burning Man festival. For the week in which it existed, the community of tents and camping trailers that sprang up in the Nevada desert became one of that state’s largest cities. A weird city, in which normal societal rules are set aside, and people pretty much do whatever they want. Except that they’re guided by ten principals, which Burning Man founder Larry Harvey says are descriptive, rather than proscriptive. Attendees at Burning Man are committed to radical inclusiveness, which means that nobody is exluded, although it does cost $300 to go to the festival, so there is a kind of ticket-price exlusivity built-in to the event. But once you’re there, you can approach any campfire and have a seat waiting for you. You can also expect aging hippies to bring you carmel rolls, because Burning Man attendees are devoted to acts of giving. You won’t see any coke cans or bottles at Burning Man, because the festival is committed to de-commodification, meaning that they want to free people from labels and consumer goods, and you also won’t see any trash, because one of their principals is to “leave no trace,” which means that every festival participant is responsible for hauling his or her own trash out of the state park where Burning Man is held.
At one time of my life, this was exactly the ethic I wanted to live by, and some parts of it are still very attractive to me. But there are other principals to consider. Burning Man is about radical self-reliance, which means that each festival particpant is encouraged to “discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” The result is that there’s a lot of drug use and dangerous hook-ups. Burning Man encourages radical self-expressions, which means that people put on public shows, and let’s just say that the contents of a lot of those shows wouldn’t be appropriate for children or, well, me. In fact, Burning Man warns festival goers when they purchase their ticket that it’s possible that they will die, and that the festival is not responsible for them. Here’s Seth Stevenson’s description of the Burning Man festival at night:
Out in the open desert, beyond the tents and cars, we encountered the most bizarre, most visually stimulating environment I’ve ever seen. A giant metal octopus rolling across the sand, with actual hot flames spewing out of its tentacles. A pirate ship blasting eardrum-crushing hip-hop music…[a] full-scale Thunderdome, complete with shrieking spectators rattling in its rafters, and a pair of gladiators in animal costumes attacking each other with Nerf bats. Lasers careened across the sky. Choking dust storms howled into our eyes and noses. Everyone was in aviator goggles, and knee-high leather boots, and fur vests.
I don’t think I would enjoy this, but I also have to admit that, although you might die by being accidently run over by a flame-spewing metal octopus, there doesn’t seem to be any violent crime at Burning Man. There’s no police force or festival security, but there is a medical tent, set-up by festival attendees who just want to make sure that everyone is all right. In the free-flowing carnival atmosphere of the festival, human nature is tested and found to be generally open, free, and compassionate. It doesn’t sound like a place for a prude like me, but after reading about it, I don’t find myself condemning it, either.
Let’s compare it to a very different way of creating a society and a different view of human nature – that of the household that John Wesley grew up in. John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church and was, therefore, the forefather of the Nazarene Church and other holiness churches, was one of nine children. His mother, Susanna, had given birth to between seventeen and nineteen children, so many in fact that she lost count. Or maybe she lost count because so many of them died. Ten dead babies and nine living ones. It must have taken a tremendous amount of fortitude to accept so much death, and for her to fix her attention so unwaveringly on the living. Because those nine children were submitted to a program of rigid, unrelenting discipline.
Susanna believed that children were born in sin, and that the chief cause of that sin was their own rebellious will-power. She wasn’t alone in this. When Saint Augustine looked at infants and saw them crying for milk, he also chalked this up to their disobendient will. But Saint Augustine had only one son. Susanna had nine boys and girls, was married to a country priest, and lived in a thatch-roofed rectory that the family could barely fit into. To break the wills of her children and, perhaps, to maintain an orderly life, Susanna enforced a set of unbreakable rules. When her children turned a year old, she would teach them not to cry or to cry softly rather than loudly by beating them. She later bragged that the “most odious noise of the crying of children was never heard in the house.” After their first year, the children had to sit still during family prayers. They ate their meals at a separate table, and they could eat and drink as much as they wanted, but they weren’t allowed to ask for seconds, or in fact request anything at all. When they were done eating, they were to go to their father, who was sitting at the main table, and kneel before him so that they could receive a blessing. They weren’t allowed to eat or drink between meals, and if Susanna learned that they had begged a snack from the family’s cook, she would beat them. Susanna insisted on all of this because she was trying to teach them to set their own wills aside and submit to the will of God. “Break the will,” Susanna said, “if you will not damn the child.”
When they learned to speak, the children were taught to say the Lord’s Prayer in the morning and in the evening. They memorized large sections of the Bible. Susanna taught all of them at home. Each child began taking lessons from her as soon as he or she turned five years old. They were expected to learn the alphabet completely on the first day. Then they were given the Bible. They learned to read by starting with Genesis, chapter one, verse one, laboriously forming each of the words and sounding them out, using the alphabet that they’d just been taught. The girls in the Wesley house received as much education as the boys, until they turned ten and the boys got sent away to school, while the girls became responsible for household tasks. None of the children were allowed to speak or consort with children from outside of the household, and none of them was ever allowed to play. Susanna allowed “no such thing as loud talking or playing.”
I would be as uncomfortable and unhappy in the Wesley’s house as I would be at Burning Man. The Wesley’s house was a place of stern and unbending discipline. Burning Man is a place with almost no discipline at all. Yet the two places have one thing in common. Both places were, as all human places are, subject to someone’s authority. At Burning Man, the authority comes from Larry Harvey and his ten guiding principals. In the Wesley’s house, the authority came from Susanna, and her child-rearing system. No matter whether you’re a crazy twenty-first century hippy camping out in the desert or a small child in a stern and unbending eighteenth century household, chances are that you’re living under somebody’s authority. Even Susanna was under the authority of her husband Samuel. Most importantly in her eyes, she was under the authority of God.
The Bible has many different ways of thinking about authority. Sometimes, as we see in Exodus 17, the authority comes straight from God. We could read this chapter as a story about Moses having some trouble with his followers, except that we are told in the final verse that “the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord.” If Moses has led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness, it’s because he’s doing God’s will, and submitting to God’s authority. Yet it should be noted that his method of dealing with their grumbling and complaining is much gentler than Susanna Wesley’s. Instead of denying them drink between meals, he helps God perform a miracle out there in the desert. His first recourse isn’t to break their wills by imposing an iron discipline. His first recourse is to give them what they need. Later, when the people seem unresponsive even to miracles, he’ll give them the law on stone tablets, and still later a long elaboration of that law. But for the moment he doesn’t blame them for the fact that they’re thirsty, although he’s probably annoyed with the tone of their complaining. He listens to God, who tells him, in essense, that the first duty of any authority is to take care of the people, to give them food and drink.
Thousands of years later, the chief priests and elders came to Jesus as he was walking in the temple. They were people who had forgotten about Moses’s first miraculous acts on behalf of their ancestors, and who concentrated instead on what came later, on the giving of laws and the imposing of punishments for those who failed to obey them. They saw Jesus as a nonentity, a person who wasn’t licensed to preach and perform miracles. And so they asked him, “who told you that you can do this?” Jesus knew that he didn’t need their permission to be the son of God, and he knew that other people didn’t need permission to be godly. So he quoted precedence, just like you would in a legal case. His cousin John had baptized people in the Jordan River without a license. Why did Jesus need a license to teach? We only need to be concerned about God’s authority, not about the authority of the chief priests and the elders. We don’t need a license to speak the truth or perform acts of charity. In a way, Jesus was anticipating the ethic of Burning Man. Give people a chance to act charitably and kindly, and chances are they will act charitably and kindly. Don’t gird them about by unnecessary rules and laws.
But if you leave people without any rules at all, there’s nothing to stop them from going off a cliff. They might become slightly crazed in their behavior, like the people who go to Burning Man. Or they might do nothing but complain, like the people who followed Moses into the wilderness. Susanna Wesley wasn’t entirely wrong. People do need guidance. We need structure. It’s a question of what kind of structure is best for us.
Which is why I’m so grateful to Saint Paul. In his letter to the Philippians, he provides a structure – an intuitive, beautiful one. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” This is not the same ethic of radical self-expression that you’ll find at Burning Man. No one is driving a steel octopus without regard to who gets burnt when it shoots out its flames. It is an ethic of radical other-expression. Be so compassionate, so empathetic, so attuned to the people around you, that you can feel what they feel and know why they act in the ways that they do. Imagine the Wesley house if Susanna was capable of this, if she understood the thirst or gnawing hunger that would lead her children to seek snacks between meals. Imagine her learning to spare the rod because she knew that to strike her children was to strike herself.
Christ did give a rule and a law. A necessary rule, and a necessary law. He was the rule and the law. Be like him, Paul says. Empty yourself. Humble yourself. Let God work through you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
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