The popular four-day annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has been taking place on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee since 2002 and averages anywhere from 70,000 to 90,000 attendees. A small part of the festival is the Soberoo encampment, a meeting of alcoholics who pledge to stay sober during the four days amid a sea of users of hallucinogenic drugs and any and all kinds of alcohol.
Journalist Barrett Swanson, writing a very lengthy article for Harper’s Magazine (and supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation), composed a deep dive into lives, struggles, hopes and failures as he rubbed shoulders with the group for the entirety of the festival. He has noticed a new trend in some festivals and mass gatherings:
“And so it may well be that our endless sacraments of self-care and communal transformation are nothing more than the symptoms of a deeply noxious culture, one that is desperately trying to heal itself through the ablutions of mass catharsis.”
The Soberoo attendees he gets to know are searching for something “special” that can only be found in mass jubilation. A kind of transcendence. Many of the other attendees are possibly searching for the same thing. Swanson is skeptical:
“Transcendence, in the end, is not the festival’s ambition. Instead, it is to profit off a national attitude of paralytic disenchantment, an accretive, widespread feeling that late-capitalist life in this country is vacuous and without meaning, and that for reasons that pass understanding we have all come gradually to believe that our ultimate spiritual undertaking is not the cultivation of personal integrity or a system of other-directed ethics but the attainment of weekend frivolities and a glitzy, remunerative profession. It is a tacit but profound sadness—a national epidemic—one you can see in all the intoxicated faces that are roaming around this campus. It is a humiliation of consciousness in which we see ourselves as nothing more than a herd of citizen-consumers….”
The Soberoo group members have found no epiphany by the festival’s end. Swanson thinks of his own former struggles as he observes many of those at the festival who, not of the Soberoo group, freely imbibe. Two drunken kids are:
“….. staggering around the vendor tents like just-debarked seamen. They are mumbling nonsense to each other that will elude their memories later. What were we even talking about, man? And, weirdly, it’s my annoyance with these kids that ends up preserving my sobriety, because in a flash of insight, I am struck by a paradox that feels like a revelation—namely, that it is the escapism of the festivalgoers themselves that is causing me to escape them, that their intoxication is making me so sad that what now seems like a spiritual solution to the problem of disenchantment would only end up being a self-defeating intoxication.
“This is how it was when I was still drinking. Alcohol felt like a trapdoor out of the meaninglessness of existence, but in my drinking the way I did, at the expense of family and friends, I had ensured that my life had lacked any enduring significance. Out of cowardice disguised as contempt, I’d thought I had escaped the disappointments of the world when in reality I had become a part of the world’s disappointments.”
