turns out that the Son of Rosemary - Wikipedia was written well after Earth Day got started though… So it’s not really life imitating art.
Anyway, so are there other such mass rituals out there? Something along the lines of “let’s get everybody do a ritual action at the same time to achieve global something or other”?
To what mass ritual are you referring? A book isn’t a ritual at all, and Earth Day isn’t any more of a ritual than any other day that gets marked on the calendar. Is there some ritual referenced in the book that we should know about?
I may be wrong, Chronos, but I had the impression that the Earth Day called upon people to ritually turn off electricity and not use certain kinds of machines. That’s what I seem to remember from internet discussions, although Wikipedia article does not mention this.
The book, of course, depicts a mass ritual involving people all over the world lighting candles at the same time.
You are wrong. Turning off your computer is Earth hour, a recent fad and good example of slacktivism: that is, a feel-good measure that doesn’t achieve anything worthwhile, but doesn’t cost anything much, either, so slackers can feel good while not changing anything substantial. Google going black -which doesn’t save power at all on normal monitors - or people turning off the lights while continuing to watch TV are examples of this, made for idiots.
Earth day is not about candles or electricity, but about raising awareness and trying to change your lifestyle to the betterment of the enviroment. On schools in the US, this often translates into “Let’s plant a few trees”, and again, with little effort, everybody feels happy, while things stay the same (if the whole school switched over to recycled paper, or if they adopted behaviour that saved 10% of heating energy, that would be worth much more than a few trees).
Which is more reminiscent of the Lichterketten (Candle demonstration), where groups of citizens gather silently with candles to protest for/ against something or remind of an event - against communism, against racism and for living together, to remind of Tschernobyl, etc.
“earth hour”, right, got it. And here I was thinking what was wrong with wikipedia.
The problem I see is your use of the word “ritually”, which means that hundreds of thousands of people would have to do something for a religious reason. International ____ Days are about raising awareness and/ or doing activities either for worthwile political/ social/ enviromental reason (Earth Day, International Day against FGM, the International Days set by the UN) or for fun (Talk like a pirate Day, as mentioned above).
Even if objectivly, Earth hour doesn’t achieve anything, the people who turn off the lights aren’t doing it for a ritual reason, but because they believe that doing so will change something. A ritual would be lighting a candle because people believe that is necessary to bring the sun over the winter solistice and start a new year, and if not everybody participates, the sun won’t come up again, and it will stay winter.
From the wikipedia article about Rosemary’s Son you linked to, it sounds as if the people are lighting the candles as a political statement about the peace iniative he has started, and that the ritual effect this might have on the supernatural plane is unknown to them. (Which would be a better idea to make a plan like this work then tell people outright that you want to achieve something supernatural / religious).
I think the point is arguable. I’m pretty sure many people who participate in Earth Hour are aware that the amount of power they’ll save is negligible, and they participate anyway, out of a sense of symbolic value, something which borders on the ritual.