Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Maximov and YouTube. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what's our topic today?

Well, today is a very special episode because it's our one year anniversary of Russia. Did you get me anything? No, sorry.

Next year I would have been so that the official one year anniversary gift is paper. So that really, really would have been so easy for you.

You're in the doghouse now. Yeah.

Interestingly, today is also another special holiday. It's perihelion box, which if our listeners haven't heard of it, that's because our producer Beny made it up. It's the day that the Earth is closest to the sun.

So we decided we didn't make that one up, but it made that holiday. Right, exactly. On a personal quest to get this holiday wider renown.

And I'm told that there is exactly one Google hit on the word for now.

So that is it from our toother, I believe. Yes. All right, then. So he's got his work cut out for him anyway. So we were going to take advantage of this double anniversary today to talk about anniversaries and about holidays in general, whether they're arbitrary or not and what significance they have, what role they've played in history and culture. And joining us to help explore that question is a special guest, Professor Timothy Albon. Timothy earned his Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard and taught history of social studies at Harvard for eight years, then joined the city of University of New York in 1999 and became chair of the Department of History at Lehman College, where he's now the dean of Arts and Humanities.

He specializes in British history, in particular in the intersection between big business and culture in the 19th century. And he's published the book Conceiving Companies Joint Stock Politics in Victorian England in 1998 and Regulated Lives Life Insurance in British Society 800 in 1914.

And that came out in 2009. And he also happens to be Massimo's boss.

That's right. I'm sure that that particular person needs to be because it must be very difficult to do anyway.

You thanks for joining us. You're very welcome. So what's the historian's perspective on anniversaries then? Well, I thought I'd start by talking about the way I first confronted such things, which is I do the history of business. And one of the main sources I use reading about business are histories of companies which almost always are published as centenaries or by centenaries or whatever. The one hundred and fifty or fifty are called. The one book I found that talks about company histories has referred to them as, quote, one of the most unread of all history books.

And that would be a literary fiasco's, corporate white elephants and so on and so forth. But there are many, many, many of them. Germany is especially popular. 500 company histories a year are published in Germany. BASF published its centenary in 1984. Three hundred and thirteen thousand copies, most of which were given to its employees as a way to uphold company spirit. I interestingly, this also is a great example of the laws of supply and demand not working.

I looked it up and the cheapest copy you can get used is seventy seven dollars for a paperback. Wow. Proving, I think again the the the great unread theory. And there I mean, and as I look into looked into the way companies established their own identity and their own longevity in this way. I also started noticing as the companies I studied when the Centennial Centenary came along and Centennial or whatever, they would also celebrate it by giving extra share, extra dividends to their shareholders, by giving bonuses to their workers and all the rest.

So it really ended up being a ritual in the in the in the social life of the business. But then, as you know, as I kind of as I as a kind of step back as a historian, I also noticed that anniversaries are, you know, really part and parcel of of what we do as historians. They are tremendous opportunities for us to get people to pay attention to our corner of the world. As long as we're fortunate to be around when our corner of the world happens to have an important year, we'll be some example of, well, the best example I came up with I did a little research on this this afternoon is the French Revolution, 1989.

And I was very unscientifically looked up how many hits, different events got in titles of books in World Cup, which is a catalogue essentially collecting all English, all books held in English language libraries in America and England. French Revolution in 1987 had 144 hits in 1988, had 286 hits in 1989, had seven thousand eighty two hits. Wow, that's orders of magnitude more. Yeah.

And and then it kept going because the French Revolution kept going. So it had five to two thousand hits in 1990, one five five thousand seven hundred in nineteen eighty two thousand seven hundred and nineteen ninety three and then back down to two hundred in 1994 thereafter. So there's, there's a code of fact and then it tapers off. Yeah. Well and well because the French Revolution did continue so historians could continue to milk it for another four years.

In contrast, the American Revolution only had 700 some hits in 1974, went up to twelve hundred and nineteen seventy six. And then right back down. And these are you know, these are libraries in America. And these you know, these are not French libraries. Right. I would think that I have no idea why that's the case, why the French Revolution ends up being a maybe it's inversely proportional to how many people pay attention to the French Revolution.

So the French Revolution historians kind of jump on this opportunity and I'll circle around it. Whereas the Americans, you know, they write about the American Revolution all the time because people will always buy books about that. And it could be that there might be an interesting explanation for. Well, I was noticing, for instance, you know, last year, as you know well, at this point, two years ago, 2009 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

And accordingly, as you might imagine, a lot of scientists and science historians and philosophers of science wrote about Darwin. In fact, by the end of the year, frankly, I couldn't hear the word Darwin without having some kind of allergic reaction. But it was also interesting to me what was not celebrated. As it turns out, for instance, it was also the 200 anniversary of the publication of Lamark seminal book. Absolutely. Which arguably you would you might you may actually study the whole evolution thing to begin with.

Yes, you had the wrong theory, but nonetheless, it's strictly historical. It was very important in a different field. But also 150 year anniversary was the 150 of John Stuart Mill on Liberty. And I saw maybe one article in The New York Times about it at some point during the year, which struck me as bizarre. And considering that liberty is foundational to the structure of modern democracy, which one might argue is actually more important to most people's lives than Darwin's discoveries, as as important as they were scientifically.

So it's kind of interesting to me. I have no idea why it is that Darwin got so much attention across the Western world, at least I don't know outside of it. And things like John Stewart Mills and Liberty and a little less surprising, I guess, in America did absolutely nothing of the sort. I wonder if it is a reflection of sort of the psychology of the profession. Yeah, I think it's I mean, I thought about that a little because you were talking about a previous conversation with me.

And I think it has something to do with the way historians of science market their work and market themselves. It's very much a great man, discipline. And I think I mean, there is also a well oiled Darwin industry, so-called and so-called, primarily because it is a colossal project to collect everything Darwin ever wrote, every letter he ever signed. And that industry was, you know, essentially coming close to to its culmination by the end of the last decade.

So this last decade or so, in other words, everything was primed to to to have all this material ready to go. And, well, it wasn't kind of priede. It wasn't predetermined. It wasn't calculated 20 years ago to start collecting everything Darwin ever wrote so that by one hundred and fifty years after the Origin of Species, that would all be ready. I think it was it was a convenient coincidence that that this was you know, this was just available this this vast amount of material of information.

I mean, there are 30 or 40 people in Cambridge, England, who spend all of their who have spent their last twenty five years of their professional lives collecting information about Darwin, in a sense for this moment, which right there it's an interesting statistic. Before we leave Darwin, I have another little comment to make about this. So for the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1959, that was a big one because, well, of course, because it was 100, but it happened to coincide with the sort of solidification within the field of a significant set of advances in evolutionary biology.

So there was a famous conference that was held at the University of Chicago. And the proceedings from that conference are still today considered a classic in the field because almost everybody who was a who's who in evolutionary biology at the time, which was, of course, a much smaller field. To begin with was there and so the proceedings recorded not just the presentations and the meetings, but also even the discussion, transcriptions of the discussions and on and so on and so forth.

And so it happened that that particular anniversary coincided with a fairly big moment in the history of the field. And that book is still tied in history of science courses today. Right now, as a consequence, of course, knowing that of that experience, several people try to repeat this in the first 150 anniversary. So several conferences were organized that were pretty much the same idea of sort of let's see where the field is at this point. And the university Chicago Press, for instance, published or it's supposed to publish the proceedings in one of these.

But of course, it didn't work this time because although evolution, biology has in fact been going arguably to just as much change over the last 50 years than it had been by the time of the first 100 years, they have not congeal. They have not actually solidified into something that everybody or most people in the community agree on. There is a lot of disagreement about where exactly certain areas of evolutionary biology are going. So we're going to have all these records printed records of how much disagreement actually there in this field at the moment.

And I suppose from point of view of historians of science, that's just as interesting, if not more possibly than the previous one. But it was interesting to me that the countries just didn't work the second time around because the field, of course, doesn't respect the arbitrary anniversary. Yeah, well, on the other hand, that's a it leads to the question of it might be just as useful to direct everyone's attention to one thing at a point where there isn't it isn't the right time for agreement.

It's a good story. It's a good time to to explore something that perhaps has not been you know, there's not been much focus on precisely because because I mean, what you're basically saying is that a huge number of questions are being generated as a result of these conferences and so forth. And, you know, whenever you get people together for a conference, it doesn't really matter the excuse. Your smart people, they're going to come up with interesting questions and interesting ideas.

I went to a conference nineteen ninety two to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of a fairly obscure philosopher named William Whewell.

Yes, I know of him. I would think that you would.

And there was really no point in me. There was at Trinity College where he was master and so forth. But it was just a very good conference because there were a lot of smart people who had come across him in their in their lives. And we all got together and had a lot to drink and talked about William Hill for three days.

And, you know, I didn't know about you until fairly recently. And it turns out that he has a couple of interesting reasons why he should be remembered. First of all, he actually got involved in a debate with Darwin, as a matter of fact, about the role of induction in in science. And he thought that Darwin wasn't doing science because he wasn't using the inductive method. Right. And and Darwin was very upset about this whole thing because on the other hand, he thought that what he was doing was exactly what we were suggesting one should.

So that that led to an interesting discussion with something of a Platonist. And so which Darwin was was not nothing. I mean, he was idea of the inductive method was rather odd from the point of view of people who identify that with empiricism. Right. And the other reason I think Will should be remembered is because he actually coined, from what I understand the word, the term scientists, the term scientist was not in use until the early to middle part of the of the 19th century, and it was coined by Wheelerville in analogy with artist.

And so I think that it's interesting for the science inclined listener among. Well, and that whole episode accompanied the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in nineteen thirty two, which, you know, where we're coming. And, you know, it was very much in Britain, you know, out of the time, a moment when science was moving from being an amateur to a so-called professional occupation, which didn't really mean anything because these were still mostly gentlemen and propertied individual like Darwin was.

But in terms of the way they looked at their discipline, and I think that in that in turn helps to account for the proliferation of anniversaries in the sciences in particular, you know, because that that accompanies, for instance, the increasing amount of creative use of a part of me. So there's Goussis law and there's this law and that law and the other law. Well, whenever someone has a scientific law named after them, you can be rest assured that when some sort of Centenario or whatever comes along, people are going to maybe sit down and have a conference or something because the peop the practising scientist as well as the historians use that person's name in their daily work.

Right.

So it sounds like you were saying you're implying earlier that there isn't necessarily that much of a correlation between how important an event was in our history or was to people and. How big of a deal it's anniversary is. Have you noticed any other factors that influence what anniversaries become, big deals?

Well, there's not a necessary correlation. I mean, there's obviously it's very rare that you're going to get people to buy a lot of books about something that no one's ever heard of. But I think it it's interesting that I think it's partly a question of how well developed the marketing machine is among the historians or those who have some sort of investment in the event. And as I suggest with the American Revolution example, it might also have something to do with how pervasive people's interests in the event is.

Consequently, we might not need to be reminded of it. That was I mean, that was I mean, that was actually kind of surprising to me that the American Revolution had so many fewer hits on the French Revolution. But I would be I think it also has something to do with how current or how relevant it seems to be to remember an event. So I would be very interested to see what what the play is for the centenary of the Russian Revolution in five years or so.

Seven years. Right. His professional historians obviously will be interested in it. But will it have this explosion of popular books that the French Revolution had? And why did the French Revolution have that explosion? I think it had partly it was along the lines of what you were saying about Darwin. And in 1959, the field of French history at that point in time was right in the middle of everyone was rethinking the French Revolution. And so everyone had a lot to say about it.

At that point in time, they might not have had as much to say about it if the centenary of the bicentennial had been 10 years earlier or later. So you were pointing to me before the podcast about the fact that some of these celebrations can actually become rather odd, particularly from a political perspective. If you're thinking about the 1992 celebration of the 500 anniversary of what exactly?

Well, exactly. Christopher Columbus, quote unquote, discovered America in 1992. There were movies. There were there were there were since honest to God, you know, Quynh centennial celebrations with people going on parades, a lot of Italians in particular were quite pleased about this event. On the other hand, there were there was a significant, if not majority of events were quite in the contrary, remembering it as genocide, remembering it as the the the beginning of the end for the native populations of the new world.

And and it created a very interesting kind of what we would call in academia that teaching moments. I mean, my wife teaches Western civ and the availability of teaching materials on the conquest skyrocketed in nineteen ninety two. Whether you're talking about films or whether you're talking about textbooks or scholarly articles all of a sudden, and this is because it happened to be five hundred years later at a time when multiculturalism was firmly entrenched in academia, all of a sudden you had all sorts of resources at your disposal for how to talk about fourteen ninety two in a much, much more complicated way than people would have talked about it twenty years earlier.

And they were already doing that in academia. But just in terms of the amount of material that was generated to allow historians and teachers from grade school on up really to start thinking critically about that event, I think had everything to do with 1992.

And do you feel like governments tend to try to control the way that these anniversary discussions go?

I mean, isn't that well, either commemorations or or opportunities for criticism?

It is very complicated because there's no one government has, you know, who who would want to take or need to take credit for that for for a national centennials and bicentennials. Absolutely. I mean, this would be a it's a no brainer for a government not to try to turn this into a propaganda opportunity. You know, we were all around in 1976 with the bicentennial and it was you know, I was only, you know, I was 12 years old, but I was even I could see what was going on around me in terms of the mass.

I managed to land the Viking Vikings on Mars for precisely for the anniversary on July 17, 1976, and it was a big deal. So, yeah, I think, you know, you're absolutely right. On the other hand, I think Centennial and bicentennial celebrations are are are opportunities for subversion as well, precisely because everyone is supposed to to be celebrating it.

It's available for people to to define why. It's why it's an important event from any number of perspectives. And of course, we talk about politics. We cannot talk about anniversaries without talking about religion. And particularly when we were taping this episode, of course, around the beginning of a new year. So we just went through the usual standard around Christmas celebrations. And it's to me that the whole Christmas thing is, in fact very interesting, particularly the way it's often presented as, you know, what the remember, what is the real reason for the season?

What really what was the real reason for the season? Because the history is pretty complicated there, right? I mean, we know, for instance, that there is nothing in the Gospels that that tells us anything about the birth date of Jesus. December 25th is certainly, at the very least, arbitrary. But in fact, we know better than that. Historians are pretty clear on the fact that it's not arbitrary. It's it was a decision made actually over the particular date.

And pope who made that decision, it was made by Pope Liberia's who declared the December 25th, the birth of Jesus in the year 354. So this was a few hundred years after after the fact. And the reason he did it is because the Catholic Church had realized that they better take over the original celebration, the Saturnalia that was celebrated by the Romans, as obviously was a pagan celebration. But it was very popular, probably in part because it involved orgies and all sorts of back announced.

That never hurts that never the celebration. And of course, the Catholic Church first tried to stop it. And then when they realized that they couldn't, they simply took it over, which is actually a fairly standard way for a new culture. A new religion to do unfolds in a similar fashion. Exactly. Easter is this similar idea. Now, we mentioned earlier actually doing the pick for another podcast that however, a lot of people still today, even in the second humanist community, tend to be confused about exactly what what the relationship is between December 25th and, for instance, the Saturnalia.

It turns out that the Saturnalia was celebrated from the 17th to the 24th of December and the 25th was actually a different occasion for the Romans. It was the birth of the son. And since the Sol Invictus, the invincible sun was the symbol of the Roman legions. So the sun was was obviously an important the God. Apollo was an important celebrity divinity for Romans. So the 25th was supposed to be E birthday. And that's how we got, of course, the direct superimposition with the star on top of the Christmas tree.

Exactly.

And it all fits very nicely at this point. But we have more recent examples of the same thing. So, you know, for instance, the Kwanzaa celebration, that's also it taking over or associating with a pre-existing idea. It's not really a takeover, but its association with a previous holiday for entirely arbitrary reasons other than the only reason is because it is, in fact an odd holiday that is already being celebrated. When I looked it up, the basic history of Kwanzaa is celebrated from December 26th to January 1st.

So I guess technically they skipped the 25th, but they started the day after. So it's not that far. It was created by Maulana Karenga and was first celebrated in 1966. And the original idea was, and I quote, to give blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society. The word Kwanzaa derives from Swahili phrase, which means first fruits of the harvest.

But the interesting thing is perhaps very few people actually realize today is that the originator, Mr. Karenga, had some very strong ideas about Christmas. He said to. That the cancer was meant as an alternative Christmas because Jesus was psychotic and Christianity was a white religion that black people should shun and then apparently worked for a little while.

I mean, we're talking about the 60s and the 70s. So the time that the apex of black power. Yeah. And then statistically, Kwanzaa is now essentially leveled off. I think it's the statistics are that it's celebrated by one point six percent of Americans or something like that. So there's a fairly low thing.

And presumably because we live in now in a post black liberation time, you know, it's actually to the extent that Kwanzaa is a is a is a celebration of an or an anniversary of the black power movement, it would be interesting to kind of track that alongside other. Well, you know what? I'm just thinking about this out loud. But there is there are these these epochal moments in the civil rights movement. There aren't really epochal moments in the black power movement.

They don't have an opportunity to to kind of identify dates to to say this is when this happened, as opposed to the I Have a Dream speech or something like that. And, you know, we see that on TV every every anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech. We see Martin Luther King on TV. We don't really have that equivalent of black power in America. So I wonder if in some subliminal fashion, Kwanzaa is kind of feeling that feeling that I don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

I actually think Kwanzaa is a good example of why it works better to adopt older holidays than create new ones, because from everything that I've read about Kwanzaa, it sounds like it is trying really hard to to give the sense of of traditions that have this long root in history. You do things like lighting candles and and pouring water from Earth and bowls into your hands and reciting the of the word invented tradition.

Right. But I mean, it's like I can see what they were going for. Those are the sorts of things that traditions of centuries and millennia ago have done. But but it was all sort of created out of nothing in the 60s. And I think it's really hard to to get that that old antique feeling. Yeah. When you create something out of it, out of nothing, it's fine.

It's interesting you say that, you know, in one case, it's entirely artificial and sort of created with a conscious model in mind. Of course, all cultural traditions are in some sense artificial.

But I guess the difference that is that really works the magic and probably to some extent it's sort of the organic of it, for lack of a better word. I mean, some some sort of vision, for instance, of celebrations and celebrations of harvest. That's natural. As in, you know, there is a reason why people celebrate that particular moment during the year. And you can see that people probably had did the obvious eating and drinking and that sort of thing.

It's very different if you actually consciously sit down and plan a thing and say, OK, well, I want to have a celebration. And, you know, what kind of what kind of elements I bring together that inevitably it's not just that it's recent, it's that inevitably brings the brings up a flavor of artificiality that did the study that it's a little bit like saying, OK, guys, here's what our inside joke is going to be.

It just doesn't stick. It has to arise organically.

The other issue is that the African-American community in America is one of the most Christian communities in the country. Right? Oh, right. Exactly what kind of alternative are we? Are we engaging in here? A more interesting comparison in many ways as Hanukkah, which is by all accounts, not an extraordinarily important holiday in the Jewish religious calendar, yet it gets more and more and more play and in effect is bought into by more and more Jews entirely because of when it happens to be right.

In fact, the fact that Jewish kids really hated the fact that their friends were getting presents at this time and they were, as Jon Stewart often often points out, that it doesn't get many presents because we wish to be Christian and wish to be Christian when he was in the way people really celebrate Christmas. That's the real reason for the season. That's right. It's the it's the food and drink which goes back to the Saturnalia, of course.

Yeah. At at Decepticon three, a skeptic humanist conference in November, Rebecca Watson, the skeptic of skeptic fame, gave a really funny, really insightful lecture about it was called How to Ruin Christmas. And she was talking about some of the complaints from Christians in the U.S. about the so-called war on Christmas that atheists and secularists are waging, trying to get Crash's removed and removing any any reference Marielitos.

That's right. Exactly. It is a little farcical, but she made a really good point, that if we really wanted to win the war on Christmas and sort of take the meaning, the Christian meaning out of out of the holiday, we wouldn't do it by by going on the offensive in such an explicit way, we would do it. Well, she made the analogy to Thanksgiving.

Which was originally, I believe, a had religious undertones. I mean, people were giving thanks to God and now there's pretty much no religious connotation at all. In fact, I'd forgotten it had just become one word in my mind. I forgot about that. It was about giving thanks. Thanksgiving was just one word.

It depends on where you and your upbringing, I think. Oh, that may be true. I'm sure. My father was a little Bible study of praying on Thanksgiving where I grew up. Oh, OK.

Well, but at least when you look at the way it's portrayed in just decorations in popular culture, it's just completely a religious.

And I guess that happened because it just got adopted by the general culture and and turned into sort of just a time to feel grateful for things and eat food and get together with family. And so that that is already happening with Christmas.

I mean, the analogy to the war on Christmas, I think is clearly the war on marriage with the gate, with the gay you know, the gay marriage issue. It's the same thing is since when was marriage a Christian event? Right. Right. It's a civil union. And so I think the same strategy is going on right. In that campaign. And that might be a good situation to wedding anniversaries. That's right. Right. So so why do we celebrate anniversaries?

I have to bring in the the my pet peeve, which is since I moved to the United States, I cringe every time that I hear somebody using the word anniversary for something that is not a yearly thing. You know, you hear about the first three months or. And of course, in Latin and the unknown means ear. And so it really it's something that rubs me the wrong way. But at any rate, a year, of course, it's an arbitrary period of time anyway.

Yes, we do get this this trip around the sun, obviously, that that is completed. But since it's an ellipse, it really doesn't matter where you start that trip.

I think you're splitting the romantic. Mossimo is very romantic, isn't it, before it. So, you know, next week I'm going to celebrate my birthday. And yes, it is arbitrary, but should I not celebrate? Is there is a rational reason not to celebrate it?

Well, I mean, if you start looking too hard at the rational reasons we do anything precisely that way, madness lies.

I think I would say it makes a lot more sense to celebrate a wedding anniversary than a birthday, than a birthday, because it's a choice as opposed to it, because it was a choice. I wasn't I didn't choose to be born. I chose to get married. And I you know, I've been married for 20 some years. And I think it's a nice thing every year to, again, like with conferences on Darwin to just sit down and think about each other and and nothing else right now.

In that sense, that is, in fact, a general reason to have an anniversary, to refocus people's attention at least once every once in a while and things that they should probably be thinking from time to time in. But they don't put pressure on the husband. Actually, remember that once a year. Oh, you think that otherwise you're going to forget it. Well, isn't that the stereotype is is the husband doesn't remember the anniversary date and like the day before and then he scrambles around.

Right.

I have a question for both of you regarding manufacturing holidays or significant dates out of thin air. So there's been some effort in the skeptic and humanist communities to try to find a replacement for Christmas. I mean, perihelion, because it's kind of it's kind of along those lines. Right. And so I guess I'm wondering, given our discussion of Kwanzaa, whether these approaches are doomed to failure because they're new and they you know, is there anything that we can do to make something stick if it doesn't have its roots and, you know, a longstanding tradition in our society?

Well, what I notice is less I don't I don't think any kind of full frontal attack like that would possibly work, especially in this day and age. But what I've seen that is effective is there's a there's an annual event that started in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it spread throughout the country called Christmas, or I used to be in that.

Well, you know, Washington represents what I see with Revel's.

I mean, my wife is a very big fan. And we went actually to two different ones this year, one in New York and one in Cambridge. What I see with that is this, you know, kind of kinder, gentler way of of of kind of bringing religion not completely out of the picture, but but sharing space with religion in the celebration of Christmas, with pagan rituals, with solstice, with, you know, in a way that I think is, you know, acceptable to to Christians in the audience.

But but getting the job done in terms of making a statement that this is an inclusive holiday, you don't have to be Christian to celebrate it. You have to value community.

You have to value, you know, the spirit of Christmas, as it were. Right now, I tend to agree in answer to your question, I don't think. That any I agree with them that no frontal attack is going to work. It usually doesn't work historically.

Well, I didn't interpret these efforts as attacks, at least that was my take. I interpreted them as providing an alternative.

True. But well, actually, that depends actually on the organization that that that is in charge of it. Some organizations tend to be more confrontational, as you know, and within the humanist and atheist community than others. And some of them do mean definitely more confrontational than others. But even when it's not meant confrontation, I mean, it's such an artificial alternative. And the Kwanzaa problem, I think, will always. Right? Yeah, that's right.

We just kind of. Exactly.

The problem today is the Kwanzaa problem that refers to the attempt to create consciously create an artificial holiday and which is bound to fail. So I agree. Now, you know, it's a matter of personal choice. What do you do? So I don't celebrate Christmas with my daughter, for instance. I do celebrate the solstice, but we do it on the same day. We do it on, you know, pretty much the same in the same general general way.

And I simply want to make the point that I did. I believe in something different. But she celebrates, however, Christmas with her friends and other relatives. And so it more it's more along the lines of what he was saying as sort of an inclusive, you know, expanded version of the holiday rather than, OK, here's what I do and here's what the rest of the world does. I think it is coming full circle, right? I mean, if the Christians came along and said, we're going to.

All right, Saturnalia. And this is just kind of borrowing back.

That's right. The word against other Winnaleah, they want the original one, but we might be able to bring it back.

Oh, I wanted to ask you to to tell the story of the adaptation of Easter, because I guess Musoma, you know, but I didn't. How did that happen?

I don't know. Well, the story, the of history, I mean, that was also that's also a completely arbitrary I mean, we don't know, again, from the Gospels when Jesus was actually crucified that there is no there's no date in there. It's a takeover, of course, of of the spring, the beginning of the spring in celebration of the spring season. That's been that's popular in a lot of cultures across across the world. It was certainly present in the in the Roman Empire.

And so it's yet another example of a almost identical to the situation with Christmas, where the new newly established Catholic Church once said it got the advantage of being able to spread its its creed, as in official, the official creed of the Roman Empire, which meant that, of course, they had the Roman army at their disposal to do it. Then they were able essentially to take over and sort of re-adapt the local celebration, pre-existent celebrations. Now, that model isn't actually that different from what the Roman themselves used to do.

I mean, one of the reasons the Romans were successful for a long period of time in holding such a large empire is because they actually let that quite a bit of autonomy to the local populations as long as they paid the taxes and and bowed formally to the power of the Roman Empire. That was about it. And they could they could then do whatever they wanted and they were not obliged to worship Roman gods. In fact, the Romans have a long tradition of essentially finding equivalence between the local gods and their own.

So, OK, well, you call it Zulu's. We'll call it jubilate. It's the same thing. And you can say the same thing about the spread of Islam. Actually, that's right.

A similar argument can be made for Islam. Now, for Christianity, it was a little more difficult because, of course, it's supposed to be a minority religion. And so it's hard to make that same argument of, OK, we're going to just absorb your divinities, but we can certainly still absorb your your festivities. And that seems to have worked just just as well. I mean, it does make more sense. It makes a certain amount of sense to celebrate Easter in the spring because the symbols are surrounding Easter, are about rebirth and are about, you know, all of the things that spring might otherwise stand for.

I mean, the other interesting difference between Easter and Christmas is that Easter more or less coincides with a very, very important Jewish holiday. And that I think and not only that, a Jewish holiday that is, you know, pitched in a way that is quite the contrary to Easter.

So it's it creates I mean, my Jewish friends, when I talk to them about Passover in the context of Easter, that can get a bit of a turn into a bit of a touchy conversation. Yeah, I can imagine the the part of the issue with Passover, Passover, from what I understand, I don't know much about it. So correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand is that actually there is not much, if any, archaeological evidence of any of the events that are supposed to be celebrated.

I mean, they're not even, in fact, of a large presence of Jewish populations in Egypt. Judaism is largely a textual religious site, that archaeology is going to be a very important category for which which brings up the question of, you know, well, is it a celebration of what?

It's a celebration of an idea, then, not an. Out of an actual historical it's not Easter is entirely a celebration or an idea, and that in that regard, right, if you don't believe in the actual fact of what happened.

So we talked about the nineteen seventy six anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the American Revolution. How does that kind of sort of politically charged anniversary compare on the other side of the pond and the British Isles? Well, last chance had in 1976 was the year before the Silver Jubilee of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth in 1977, since she was crowned in 1952. And was interesting to me about that is, you know, I was I was in America. It was despite the fact that it was four years after Watergate.

It was it was breast beating occasion. There wasn't a whole lot of self-doubt. There was the, you know, a Robert Altman film here and there. But it was, generally speaking, at least from the point of view of the 12 year old I was everyone was on the same page. You know, this was a great country. And I think part of that was because it was a celebration of an idea very much. It was a celebration of American freedom, of, you know, of you could you could celebrate the holiday without celebrating the people who were in charge of the country.

The Jubilee for queen. The Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, was very much a celebration of an individual. By definition, it was a celebration of a symbol. And it was going on at a point in time when England was falling apart at the seams, economically, socially, all the rest. So 1977, I mean, what strikes out in my mind about the celebration of Queen Elizabeth's jubilee that year was the Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen, which was a number one hit record, unless you believe the BBC, which banned its being played and that Rod Stewart was actually number one that year.

But and it was a slap in the face, the very idea of monarchy at the very time timed to coincide with the actual jubilee in June of 1977, that Elizabeth was in theory, being carted around the country as as the symbol of British greatness. This was four years, five years before the Falkland Wars, Falklands War. It was essentially a point in time when Britain had almost nothing to to to boast of. And it didn't have Margaret Thatcher lying to them about how much they did still have the votes.

She was two years later. Compare that to 2002, the Golden Jubilee Queen minus Freddie Mercury played at Buckingham Palace. I was in London the day before that. This all unfolded. I saw the whole thing on TV, as they say, and it was the country had become much more complacent. It was twelve years into Tony Blair. It was, you know, it was a or, you know, five years under Tony Blair. It was a completely different climate.

And the monarchy, despite some of the trials and tribulations that had gone through in the interim period, was no longer something that people felt terribly inclined to to castigate. And that's that was the case. Looking back to the early 19th century and the celebrations of monarchs, Queen Victoria, her 25th Jubilee went unnoticed. Her fiftieth was a world war, you know, literally a worldwide celebration. All around the British Empire, people celebrated Queen Victoria's jubilee and then she lasted 10 more years and the diamond jubilee was even greater.

I think it'll be interesting, again to think of what will happen, assuming Queen Elizabeth survives three more years in her diamond jubilee. I mean, and again, the longer you stay around, the more people tend to think fondly of you.

But I am so glad that we managed to bring in the Sex Pistols in the podcast.

Well, the lessons that I've drawn from this conversation for perihelion talks are helps to have a great man or great person to associate your your anniversary, your holiday with.

So maybe we need to just crown a, you know, king or queen of skepticism or something that we can celebrate tonight. Mossimo.

Yeah, that's going to be a hard one. All right.

Well, at least hopefully this podcast will well bring our number of Google hits for you. Hemlocks above one. So we are we're out of time for the section of the podcast. Let's wrap it up and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion for our listeners that has tickled our rational fancy. This time we ask our guest, Timothy Huben, for his suggestions Tim. Well, my suggestion was the president got for Christmas, fittingly enough, by Mike Brown book by Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. Mike Brown was the astronomer at Caltech who discovered a planet which he thought was a planet at the time that was orbiting out beyond Pluto, went by the name of Xena for a while.

And his discovery of that planet led people to rethink whether Pluto was should be qualified as a planet. This was around twenty five or so with the ultimate result that both his planet, Xena and Pluto were expelled from the solar system, not physically, but categorically. And I thought it was especially suitable to mention this book because this last year that we just finished, 2010 would have been the 80th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. And it's also this year is the fifth anniversary of the death of Pluto as a planet.

And I am still upset about Pluto being demoted into planetary or whatever it is that they call it now, because I was very fond of the whole history of the discovery. Pluto 1930.

Oh, well, we don't we don't have enough holidays about the deaths of planets. I like that. That's a good point. I get better than the deaths of religious figures. That's true.

Actually, it would be we could have an Easter Pluto because who knows?

It might rise up again. That's become a planet again someday.

Thanks to I'll put that on my on my reading list. OK, good. Are we are we are now officially out of time.

So this concludes another episode of the rationally speaking podcast. Before we leave you, I want to encourage everyone to sign up for our conference, the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, which the New York City skeptics and the New England Skeptical Society are putting on in New York City in April, on April 9th and 10th, you can check out the evolving speaker list and topics for the conference at our website, which is next is König. That's w w an e c s s c o n dog.

Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.