You have to elevate something. That’s just a fact. If you don’t elevate anything how will you have an excuse to throw a big party?
I mean really after yearly birth day parties, anniversaries, graduations, Christmas, New Years’s, Valentine’s Day, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Olympics, various sports playoffs, the occasional promotion, and family and friend weddings, funerals, births, graduations and reunions, people quickly realize that there just aren’t enough excuses to throw a party in one’s life.
When you’re young you don’t have to worry about this. Everybody expects you to occasionally throw or attend completely random parties thrown for no apparent reason whatsoever. Indeed many a school encourages it by orchestrating such random and arbitrary party throwing (though I suspect that is done as much for the teachers and administrators than for the students).
But when you’re an adult well you aren’t supposed to party just willy nilly. You have to have a reason. It’s gotta be a holiday, a religious ceremony, or a sporting event. Or something directly related to family. Those are pretty much the only acceptable partying excuses for adults. Sometimes an adult will step out of line and celebrate something unorthodox like the quitting of a much hated job or retirement, or maybe moving into a new home, or Friday night poker night, or getting that fancy piece of furniture you always wanted… but these are quite clearly looked down upon as an indulgence. You can do it once in a while but too often and people will start to look at you funny and ask questions. What’s the matter with you? Stop acting like a kid! Grow up already!
Yes being an adult is just hard. You just can’t party as much as you’d like. So many of us live in this prison of unfulfilled partying desires. What are we to do?
The answer, ELEVATE something! Look you can’t just celebrate some random arbitrary person’s wedding or birthday. Everybody would know then that you were just using it as an excuse to party. But if you ELEVATE someone to a position of pre-eminence and importance than that’s different. Then well, everybody knows that when something significant happens to THEM it’s an event of momentous historic proportions. We can’t let such a big opportunity go to waste right? We have to throw a REALLY BIG PARTY! In fact we better make it a MONSTROUS GARGANTUAN PARTY to make up for all the missing party opportunities we’ve been lacking. And you don’t even have to worry about making sure enough people show up. The whole WORLD is invited!
The British people know this well, as this morning they engaged in their regular ritual of elevating some people of a particular blood line to a level of great significance so as to give the people an excuse to hold a monstrous gargantuan once in a life time party! And by all accounts it went well. People who cared had fun and enjoyed themselves. People who wanted something to gripe about got something to gripe about. It was a win for all around.
Though some party poopers brought up some sort of weird meta-philosophical issues. Cuz of course party time is always the best place for deep questions of social and philosophical significance as everyone knows. They asked such questions as does it really make sense to elevate people into such fame and significance solely on the basis of their bloodline? Is this moral or just? And what about the wealth factor? What about the dark and dreaded history of the British Empire. yadda yadda yadda.
To be sure the answer to these questions is of course no. We SHOULDN’T be elevating people based on solely who their parents are. That’s dumb. Everybody knows it’s dumb. Big fricking deal. You aren’t a genius wise man in a sea of fools for pointing out this one apparent obvious fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can figure out. What you are is being annoying. Don’t you get it? People want to PARTY. It’s that simple really. And geez can’t they party for once without your damn morality and ethics getting in the way of every little decision they make?
I mean think about it, it COULD be worse. In fact, it IS worse. Take a look at the United States. We elevate all KINDS of people here for oh so many bad reasons. We elevate the President elect every 4 years giving them a totally full head that can’t possibly help them govern well so that we can hold a gigantic party on the national mall in honor of winning or swindling a voting contest. We elevate NUMEROUS people every year for being good at pretending to be people we think we’d like in television and movie and we hold nice parties to give them shiny trophies in honor of how good pretenders they are. We elevate people whose job it is to give us the news so they can have a yearly party with the other elevated elites heedless of how much this association undoubtedly influences and corrupts their ability to do the news. We elevate people for being good singers. We elevate people for being good at sports. We elevate people for earning millions by being brutal exploiters of workers. We even elevate those of us must skilled in presenting strategies to conquer and control the masses.
Perhaps worst of all we elevate some people out of pure morbid fascination and unremarkable curiosity. We elevate some ‘reality stars’ for no apparent reason other than that we find them mock worthy and ridiculous. Heck we elevate buffoons like Donald Trump just because they are loud and obnoxious enough to say patently false things that shock us.
In short we have our own aristocracy nearly as arbitrary in its construction as that of birthright and in some ways worse since qualification oft entails anti-virtues like greed, intolerance, stubbornness, and relentless aggression. This hardly matters. They often still serve as excellent excuses for party throwing, take for example Glenn Beck’s rally on the national mall. Quite a nice party that. Or for that matter, Jon Stewart’s.
This happens everywhere. It’s not just us thank god. Make no mistake there’s plenty of elevation of dictators and demagogues throughout the world. Dear Leaders are praised and worshiped by their people who are oft even more starved of opportunity to party than those of us in the West. Is it any surprise that they jump at the opportunity to celebrate their dictator’s every major pronouncement?
Now the philosophers amongst you might put for a theoretical concept that even if we do have to elevate something it doesn’t mean we have to elevate things so arbitrarily and often badly. And you’re right. There’s at least two clear as day better ways to go about it.
One is we could elevate people based on virtues. That is we would eschew the normal elevation of people based on blood, money, success, power, celebrity, anti-virtue, or morbid fascination and instead substitute things we as a people decide we really care about. You know, things like honor and courage and justice and wisdom and reason. Or how about elevating people on the basis of compassion and tolerance and the desire to help people? How about elevating people who exhibit the most selflessness and the greatest willingness to sacrifice for others and for the furthering of virtues and the greater Good? We could you know. In theory.
We even do do a little bit of this. We elevate Martin Luther King and give him a holiday. We don’t hold very much of a party on his birthday, so it kinda goes to show how small the elevation is compared to sports stars and princess marriages, but it is at least SOME elevation on the grounds that he was a virtuous and deserving person. We COULD do a lot more like this. Maybe we don’t celebrate when “the Prince” gets married, but we celebrate when someone of extreme virtue who sacrificed a lot to bring peace and to help people, gets married. That person could be the Prince… or it could be a random dude in a town in the middle of nowhere. Identification remains a problem but hardly an insurmountable one.
The other idea is to eschew the idea of elevating people altogether and elevate ideas and concepts that matter. There’s no reason why we can’t elevate say Evolution to a celebratory thing or the theory of Gravity or the Internet. We could even elevate the ideas of the virtues themselves. Why not have a Generosity day? Or an honesty day? We could elevate events as well, like the day we first achieved flight or the amazing accomplishment of reaching the moon.
We do do a little bit of these non-people elevations now. But they seem particularly small and drowned out by the elevation of celebrity and stardom. We hardly pay a lick of attention to the anniversary of the end of world war II even though to be sure it was an event worth elevating.
Of course there’s another idea too but it requires a drastic sacrifice on people’s part. So much a sacrifice that I don’t think it all likely. That is we could just stop elevating everything. The result, much fewer excuses to party. This is so far beyond the realms of likelihood it’s hardly worth mentioning. But it COULD happen. We could all become the types of people who wear all black and write poetry about how nothing matters and nothing is real and believe unitedly that there’s no point in elevating anything ever.
But… although I don’t like parties, most humans do enjoy their parties a great deal. I think it must be some sort of genetic disposition ingrained in many of us (though don’t ask what that says about me). And but so.. I don’t really think it likely that we’ll abandon our chance at eking out a few extra parties in our life and stop elevating things altogether.
So given that I’d say fine. Let’s go ahead and enjoy our parties and keep on elevating as we’ve been doing. But slowly let’s try, TRY to transition to a world where we start elevating people on the basis of virtues and then eventually to a world where we elevate the virtues themselves without the need of a human symbol attached to them. Then one day we’ll reach a point where we can party all the time and never feel an ounce of guilt.
We’ll all be Kings and Queens of our destiny! To the future! Cheers!
