Bonfire Night

Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.

Britain has been and remains today under a sort of cultural assault. It reminds me a little bit of one of the ways that you can win Civilization 5, which is a cultural victory. The idea is to amass cultural value or cultural meaning in such incredible volume that it overwhelms the output of the other civilizations in the world, and so you effectively homogenise the other players by overwhelming their culture with your own. I think I’m living through it in a very real sense. In the UK, Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) was a relatively minor event. The bigger thing was fireworks night which was the 5th of November and was a celebration or a remembering of the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament perpetrated by Guy Fawkes and his companions.

I quite like the story because it has so many little things in it. The plan was for Guy and his companions to rent one of the rooms underneath the Houses of Parliament and fill it full of gunpowder and then wait until the king was in session and then detonate the gunpowder, killing the king and as much of his government as possible.

Not the dumbest plan, but what’s stands out is everything around it. So first of all, the idea you could just rent a room under Parliament. That the sort of level of security which existed back then, the Palace of Westminster was more just a building used by people rather than a sort of institutional location that only a very small number of people could have access to.

There’s also this sort of weird dual direction thing going on where it’s not just a celebration of the government catching a person and preventing them from committing a very serious crime. There’s this sort of b-side version of it, which is, hey, government, you should be careful because, you know, if you don’t behave yourself well enough, well, then someone like Guy Fawkes might come along and do something about it. The British version of the second amendment threat in the US.

There is a real changing of the times here also reminiscent of the Second Amendment, where something initially intended as a balance of power mechanism. So the notion the government couldn’t unjustly exert itself over its citizens because they also had firearms which is now completely redundant because the government has drones and helicopters and tanks and planes and battleships. It doesn’t matter what firearms individual citizens have, they can’t possibly stand up to their government.

The same is also true of the Guy Fawkes style plot. Government today is vast and one explosion wouldn’t have any meaningful impact on our parliamentary democracy. If some person did blow up the majority of our sitting MPs during a session, then the government institutions themselves are sufficiently clear and firm. There are enough other departments and bodies and pieces of organisation around it that even if you succeeded in doing something like that the government would be sufficiently resilient to appoint more people and to prosecute you and bring an end to the thing. It would be horrendous and very tragic, but it wouldn’t be a sort of regime-ending problem.

The scale has changed, which is a good thing. It’s not just the security which prevents a modern Guy, it’s the pointlessness of this sort of attack.

It does highlight that governments learn from things. If the people riot eventually the government gets really good at managing riots. You protest and eventually the government gets really good at managing protest. The challenge is that as all the doors to resistance and protest are closed the sentiment goes unmanaged and the pressure will eventually find some new way to express itself.

So yeah, a little bit of chagrin to have watched over my lifetime, just the last 30 years really, Halloween becoming this sort of willingly naturalised celebration and the loss of both All Hallows and Bonfire Night. Costumes are just costumes. They’re not scary. There’s no creepiness. There’s no sort of sense of evil in the thing. It’s just like people wear Superman costumes trick or treating like lost any sense of what that was. And I don’t know why I’m being very defensive about trick or treating. I’m not. I don’t care about trick or treating. It’s a fun little thing for the kids to do, but it’s just so alien, like it doesn’t connect to anything else. I don’t really understand how it works.

So yes, this British guy feels a little bit stepped upon. And there’s something about the inevitability of cultural change that you just, there’s nothing you can do about it. How, how do you get Guy Fawkes Night to fight back in a world which is against fireworks, and bonfires?