The last few days have been eventful, and in my part of the world somber in a way that echoed the events. A week out from the changing of the clocks, both the mornings and the evenings are unpleasantly dark, with chill winds and a fair amount of drizzle. I have finally had to face up to how much I am dreading the approach of real winter. The three immediately preceding days have seen Hallowe’en, the opening of the global climate conference in Glasgow, and then yesterday a couple of harbinger gubernatorial elections. Each of these I found disconcerting in various ways.
The evolution of Hallowe’en in this country is particularly interesting. All the world’s great religions are ritually respectful of the dead; and some students of comparative religion find in the commemoration of the dead and various concepts of spiritual afterlife or material reincarnation the principal and original impulses behind all religions. In the old religious calendar of Christian Europe there were two adjacent holy days (falling on November first and second) devoted to the commemoration of the dead. All Saints’ Day was a general celebration of all those who had formally or informally been declared to have been conspicuously holy. All Souls’ Day remembered the far larger number of the ordinary “faithful” (i.e., believing) dead. The distinction is between commissioned general officers and the rank-and-file enlisted, so to speak. Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve) denotes explicitly the night before All Saints’ Day, i.e., October 31. In centuries past the two festival days made a kind of pre-winter double-header, often featuring various local and to our minds secular jollifications and pranks.
The Puritans who came to New England, highly principled killjoys, were hostile toward many of the old religious holidays. Offering prayers for the dead, as though the agency of living petitioners could influence the divine judgment passed upon the souls of the defunct, was a “popish” notion deeply abhorred by the Reformers and connected with the doctrine of a temporal Purgatory they rejected. While nothing of the religious meaning of Hallowe’en survived in American Protestantism, some of its rich European folkloristic associations did—especially those having to do with actual mortuary customs. Hence all the tomb-crypt-skeleton-skull side of things. These associations proved sufficient for the creation of our strange secular rituals in honor of—what? In many old European countries there had been mellow family “reunions” across the Great Divide held in the churchyards, the most common burial sites. What might be macabre was not always spooky or sinister. Some of the strange bond of jollity linking the quick and the dead on All Souls’ Day survives in the Mexican “Day of the Dead,” in which there is a fusion of late medieval European and Amerindian traditions. Unfortunately I can tell you nothing interesting about our Hallowe’en beyond the historical backgrounds. We live in a neighborhood with too few young children. It is not officially a “senior community,” but seems to aspire to that status. We did as usual put out a minimalist jack o’ lantern, but there were no little ghosties or ghoulies who visited our street. The chances of rowdy teenagers soaping our car windows are zilch, and that’s a little sad, strangely.
This brings us to day two: Glasgow. There is not much reason to believe that the results of the global climate conference just beginning will differ significantly from those of twenty-some earlier meetings. The journalistic preparation for the meeting has been apocalyptic. By first reports its opening discussions have been recriminatory (“Rifts and Finger-Pointing,” says the Times.) The global warming formulary, like the religious formularies it increasingly resembles, is faith-based, faith being “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The problems as they are described to us are of an enormity and an urgency demanding from the nations of the world a level of earnest engagement and cooperation unprecedented in all previous history. The master-builders of the medieval cathedrals might work for a lifetime with no expectation even of approaching the completion of their vision, but the long haul is not a framework democratic politicians find congenial. They need evidence of things seen, such as “tax cuts,” “programs,” and “jobs”. The tyranny of short-term thinking is everywhere to be seen in our politics. How could that not be the reality in a system in which elected officials must spend so much of their time worrying about being re-elected. Our Congress has been struggling with proposed legislation of allegedly existential import and certainly unprecedented expense. Once you move beyond a few broad categories (family leave, free education, “human infrastructure,” “green projects,” etc.) who actually knows what is in or out of the proposed bills? How in fact do you “debate” the contents of proposed legislation requiring some thousands of pages for its description? Yet most of the public talk was about how things might be arranged to give President Biden an apparent “win” or two to take to Glasgow as talismans of his capacity to show “leadership” in the Climate Struggle to save our world.
Thus we arrive at Day Three, yesterday, with its two “bellwether” gubernatorial elections, one of them in my own state of New Jersey. I have delayed mounting this post by several hours in the vain hope of securing the advantage of knowing the definitive results. We began the day early in a nearly empty polling site, but as of now, things are still too much up in the air. Whatever the final result in New Jersey, it will be very close. In this state, that fact alone would be an eloquent gauge of the level of enthusiasm propelling the Democratic incumbent, Phil Murphy. The Republican victory in Virginia needs some big adjective like stunning. At least it stunned me. I’ve been reading the New York Times and the New Yorker. Obviously, I had my preferences, which I was able to express as a voter. But I already knew that I was unhappy with the election before the voting had begun. The cause of my unease was less with the possible outcomes of the elections than with the mode in which they were conducted. So far as I can judge the competitors in Virginia were two honorable, intelligent, and capable men of proven capacity. Mr. McAuliffe, the Democrat, is a kind of new model Clintonian politician who had already competently served a term as governor. Mr. Youngkin, the victorious Republican was a big success in “private equity”—a background becoming not uncommon among first-time political aspirants. So Youngkin is filthy rich, as opposed to McAuliffe, who is merely rich. God knows that the world, and our own dear nation within it, face problems worthy of serious and nuanced discussion by thoughtful people. But the debate, such as it was, was mainly about Donald Trump. McAuliffe did his best to prove that Youngkin was Trump redivivus. Youngkin did all he could to distance himself from Trump without offending those who would be happy if he were Trump. One can say of these performances that they exhibited considerable political dexterity, but hardly any political vision commensurate with the challenges we face. But I must end this literary display of my seasonal affective disorder, Each year I react to the prospect of winter with increasing glumness; but I do hope the next three days of November will offer more encouragement than the first three.
