Let There Be Cupcakes

The New Yorker’s George Packer frets about people who aren’t the New Yorker’s George Packer:

At bottom, the invented rituals that proliferate in our culture signify a disenchantment with modernity. If, like millions of Americans, you’re secular and the traditions of a church or temple have no hold on you, or if you’re assimilated and ethnic identity has faded away, then what is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world?

Our response is, how you say, conflicted.

What compels the New Yorker’s George Packer to bemoan Modern Society is — wait for it — a cupcake party. Apparently you get the secret news about your prenatal baby’s gender from the doctor, slip the baker a gratuity to cook the (still secret) information into pink or blue confections, and then invite all your friends to share your joy by simultaneously chowing down. It’s a girl! And it’s delicious!

And here we heartily agree with the New Yorker’s George Packer: Oh my fucking god, why are you dragging me through this? And why didn’t you hold a party to reveal your pregnancy test?

Where we part ways with the New Yorker’s George Packer is bothering to make anything more of it. Invented traditions are nothing new in American society. Fraternities and sororities have pledged unwary freshmen for generations. The Flintstones’ Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes was a parody of the fraternal organizations of its era. American sports are chock full of Stupid Communal Tricks. If you date Modernity from on or about December 1910, we’ve been at it for more than a century.

Even if you accept the premise that invented traditions are a substitute for, um, traditional traditions, you run into a problem of priority: Who’s to say that the Lost Traditions were any better? What grants legitimacy to the traditions of church or temple except habit? (And if you answer God, we’re having a different conversation.) Might it simply be that we’re creatures of habit, and we’ll take tradition where we can find it, Modernity or not?

But let’s cut to the chase:

What is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world?

Creation, Mr. Packer. You, as a writer, should know that. You’re bringing meaning to nothingness, finding order in chaos, with every word. People you know do it with paint, or music, or engineering, or gardens, or handiwork. People you probably don’t know do it with programming. It’s happening all around us, every day. Culture doesn’t invent itself.

That’s why we like Genesis so much. We all create. We’re all God. The world is waste and void without us.

If that’s not enough to sustain you on your lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world, Mr. Packer, well, God help you. Have you considered cupcakes?

Narcissism in Pink and Blue [New Yorker, via Sully]