renascence of life. Ritual death promotes a rebirth; vomiting increases the appetite; the orgy, sterile in itself, renews the fertility of the mother or of the earth. The fiesta is a return to a remote and undifferentiated state, prenatal or presocial. It is a return that is also a beginning, in accordance with the dialectic[286] that is inherent in social processes.
The group emerges purified and strengthened from this plunge into chaos. It has immersed itself in its own origins, in the womb from which it came. To express it in another way, the fiesta denies society as an organic system of differentiated forms and principles, but affirms it as a source of creative energy. It is a true "re-creation," the opposite of the "recreation" characterizing modern vacations, which do not entail any rites or ceremonies whatever and are as individualistic and sterile as the world that invented them.
Society communes with itself during the fiesta. Its members return to original chaos and freedom. Social structures break down and new relationships, unexpected rules, capricious hierarchies are created. In the general disorder everybody forgets himself and enters into otherwise forbidden situations and places. The bounds between audience and actors, officials and servants, are erased. Everybody takes part in the fiesta, everybody is caught up in its whirlwind. Whatever its mood, its character, its meaning, the fiesta is participation, and this trait distinguishes it from all other ceremonies and social phenomena. Lay or religious, orgy or saturnalia,[287] the fiesta is a social act based on the full participation of all its celebrants.
Thanks to the fiesta the Mexican opens out, participates, communes with his fellows and with the values that give meaning to his religious or political existence. And it is significant that a country as sorrowful as ours should have so many and such joyous fiestas. Their frequency, their brilliance and excitement, the enthusiasm with which we take part, all suggest that without them we would explode. They free us, if only momentarily, from the thwarted impulses, the inflammable desires that we carry within us. But the Mexican fiesta is not merely a return to an original state of formless and normless liberty: the Mexican is not seeking to return, but to escape from himself, to exceed himself. Our fiestas are explosions. Life and death, joy and sorrow, music and mere noise are united, not to re-create or recognize themselves, but to swallow each other up. There is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is also a night of mourning.
If we hide within ourselves in our daily lives, we discharge ourselves in the whirlwind of the fiesta. It is more than an opening out: we rend ourselves open. Everything—music, love, friendship—ends in tumult and violence. The frenzy of our festivals shows the extent to which our solitude closes us off from communication with the world. We are familiar with delirium, with songs and shouts, with the
6. Saturnalia: a riotous, unrestrained celebration, named after the ancient Roman festival of Saturn.
monologue . . . but not with the dialogue. Our fiestas, like our confidences, our loves, our attempts to reorder our society, are violent breaks with the old or the established. Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves. And the fiesta is only one example, perhaps the most typical, of this violent break. It is not difficult to name others, equally revealing: our games, which are always a going to extremes, often mortal; our profligate spending, the reverse of our timid investments and business enterprises; our confessions. The somber Mexican, closed up in himself, suddenly explodes, tears open his breast and reveals himself, though not without a certain complacency, and not without a stopping place in the shameful or terrible mazes of his intimacy. We are not frank, but our sincerity can reach extremes that horrify a European. The explosive, dramatic, sometimes even suicidal manner in which we strip ourselves, surrender ourselves, is evidence that something inhibits and suffocates us. Something impedes us from being. And since we cannot or dare not confront our own selves, we resort to the fiesta. It fires us into the void; it is a drunken rapture that burns itself out, a pistol shot in the air, a skyrocket.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
In what ways is a Mexican fiesta a form of ritual?
Why, according to Octavio Paz, do people in poor nations have a greater desire for elaborate celebrations than do people in wealthy nations?
Why do celebrations occasionally result in "quarrels, insults, pistol shots, stabbings"? What aspect of the fiesta encourages these extreme elements? Are they a natural outgrowth of the fiesta?
Why does Paz cite the opinion of French sociologists that the fiesta represents "an excess" designed to protect a community "against the envy of the gods"? Does he accept this theory? How does he incorporate it into his own ideas (p. 577)?
How do fiestas relate to the established social order in Mexico? Why does Paz call the fiesta a "revolution"? How might the fiesta's short duration relate to its revolutionary nature?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How might Paz respond to Po-Chu-i's "The Flower Market" (p. 545)? Are the expenditures that Mexican villages make on fiestas comparable to the money wealthy people spend on flowers? Why or why not?
How does Paz's view of the regulated lawlessness of the fiesta compare with other views of law and disobedience, such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (p. 425) or Aung San Suu Kyi's "In Quest of Democracy" (p. 442)? How might a brief period of controlled chaos be a way to preserve order?
3. How do the drunken revelers in Hogarth's Gin Lane (p. 548) compare with the celebrants Paz describes in this selection? What are their key similarities and differences?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
In light of Paz's view of the fiesta, examine a party or cultural celebration you have attended. How does Paz's model work as a way to interpret your own experiences?
Write an essay criticizing or defending the mayor of a small town for spending all of the town's money on an elaborate celebration when many townspeople lack adequate food, clothing, and shelter.
Explore the connection between celebration and revolution. Research not only Mexican fiestas but also different kinds of carnivals, festivities, and other parties in which social orders and categories are, at least for a time, reversed or made unstable.
garrett hardin
Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor
[1974]
FOR THE LAST THREE DECADES of the twentieth century, Garrett Hardin (1915-2003), professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was the most famous American representative of the neo-Malthusian school of thought. Using Thomas Malthus's basic formulation that population increases geometrically while resources increase arithmetically, Hardin insisted that it is ethically imperative for human beings to understand and respect the "carrying capacity" of the earth, and that failure to do so will invite human catastrophe on the largest scale.
In his famous 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin uses a common grazing area, "the commons," as a metaphor for all nonproprietary resources. Because nobody owns a common pasture, everyone may use it for grazing cattle. When the population of cattle using the commons exceeds the commons' carrying capacity, it is in everybody's collective interest to decrease the number of cattle. However, since each individual has an interest in grazing as many cattle as possible on the commons, people will inevitably destroy the pasture by overgrazing it. The tragedy of the commons, then, is that what serves the best interests of everybody collectively usually does not serve the best interests of anybody specifically. Thus, individuals making hundreds of rational economic decisions about the use of a common resource will lead, inevitably, to the completely irrational destruction of that resource. The tragedy of the commons explains such phenomena as air and water pollution, overfishing, public parking problems, and, most of all, the overpopulation of the earth.