Hi, everyone. Just out of curiosity, raise your hands: how many people have been to a Solstice before?
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And how many have not?
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Welcome to the new folks. And re-welcome to folks who have been here before. As an introduction for the new people, and a reminder to everyone else, I’m going to talk a bit about the history of Solstice and why we celebrate it the way we do.
My own first experience with Secular Solstice songs was not an actual Solstice, but an East Coast rationalist megameetup in New York City in early 2012. The first-ever Solstice was a gathering at Ray Arnold’s house in 2011, but the first official event was in 2013, two years later. In between those two events, Ray took the songs he was working on for this new Secular Solstice holiday he was creating, and he brought them to the megameetup, and we all sang them together. Basically, he was testing them out on us.
He explained to us what he was trying to do: to make a holiday that resembled his family holiday celebrations, but actually reflected his deep values and up-to-date beliefs. A more accurate holiday was necessarily more depressing, because there are some depressing truths to confront in this world: We humans are out here alone. Nihil supernum. Only nothingness above. Yet, it’s worth looking down, too. We’re alone with ourselves, but that’s not actually the same thing as alone. We have each other. And through the long dark of winter, we can help each other. We can make the world better.
We sang “Brighter than Today” together, the song that started it all, and it was exciting. I was eighteen, and it felt like I was part of an unstoppable movement toward a better world.
… Solstice has changed a lot since then.
We used to have a lot more songs lifted from other communities, traditions, and places. Over time more and more of them have come from our community, arranged or rewritten or fully originally composed by us.
Some basic ideas have stuck around. Striving for truth– to the point where we argue over edits to songs and speeches each year, because accuracy is important, dammit! Human struggle in a harsh universe, and the desire to make that universe a kinder place.
But the world has changed, and that has changed Solstice.
For many of us, every year since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, it’s looked more like the world might end soon. And that’s affected what we put into this yearly ritual.
There are more pieces, now, about making meaning with limited time. About being glad with what we have, even if we wish desperately for more.
I would never want our Solstice to glorify involuntary death, or the extinction of the human race. Those things are bad. We do not want them to happen. And whenever possible, we want people to put everything they have into stopping them.
And at the same time, it can be worth appreciating what we do have, for as long as we have it.
This is one reason we decided to make this year’s theme “coordination”. Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about a fictional world called “dath ilan” that coordinates better than ours. When they discover an existential risk that threatens the whole world, that has an increased risk the more people know about it, they take the drastic step of literally sealing off their world’s history, so that the information hazard can’t spread any further. They embody the virtue of what he calls “Doing Something Else Which Is Not That.” You see something bad that could happen, you see it being totally inevitably bad because each person acts within an incentive framework that makes everyone worse off, and you just decide: what if we did something different? Something which is not that thing?
Earth is never going to be quite like dath ilan. Which is why a lot of this program is about making meaning out of a limited lifetime for ourselves and possibly the human race. But some of it is about coordinating with each other to make a better world– when we can– in pieces. And when we can’t, well. Some of our songs are about that too.
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