Orion Quin
Orion Quin  ·  Inquiry  ·  The Everyday Ubuntu 11/12

Joy as Something You Do Together

The shortest essay in the ring, because the point is small and the research behind it is more compromised than most people know.

Joy · Ritual  ·  ~5 min read

Injabulo.isiZulu: joy, gladness — an ordinary noun, not a technical term

§ 01A Communal Verb

Rather than a private state

The observation is simple: in a good deal of the world, joy is something people do together — sung, danced, marked — rather than a private feeling that happens inside individuals and is occasionally reported to others.

I want to state that carefully, because the comparison invites a caricature: the warm communal South versus the cold individual North. That contrast is a staple of writing like this and it flatters nobody. Communal celebration exists everywhere, and privatized joy is a feature of particular modern arrangements rather than of an entire hemisphere.

What is worth taking is the reframe: celebration as a thing a group does deliberately, and as maintenance rather than decoration.

§ 02A Retraction Worth Knowing About

Because this literature is usually cited without it

The standard research move here is broaden-and-build — the theory that positive emotions widen attention and build durable resources.3 It is a serious body of work and it is reasonably regarded.

What is less well known is what happened to its most famous offshoot. The claim that flourishing has a mathematical tipping point at a positivity ratio of about 2.9 to 1 was published, widely popularized, and then shown to rest on a misapplication of fluid-dynamics mathematics with no bearing on human emotion. The mathematical portion was formally retracted in 2013.7

That entry is still in the source list for this essay, which is why I am pointing at it rather than quietly dropping it. If you see a positivity ratio quoted anywhere, that is where it came from and it does not stand.

What survives: the capitalization research — that telling someone about a good event, and being met with interest, is associated with more benefit than the event alone.5 Small, replicated reasonably, and the practical core of this essay for the second time in the ring.

§ 03Doing It

Mark things, deliberately

A short list, because the idea does not need elaborating.

01
Mark the thing when it happens not later
Deferred celebration mostly does not happen. The window is narrow and closes quietly.
02
Do it together, in person if possible it is a group act here
A private note of satisfaction is a different thing and does less. The point of this essay is the together part.
03
Respond with interest when told the capitalization finding
Somebody telling you good news is handing you the easiest available opportunity to do something useful. Most people waste it.
04
Celebrate the ordinary milestone not only the outcomes
A group that only marks wins gets very few occasions, and the occasions it gets arrive when morale is already high.
05
Distrust the positivity ratio and anything quoting it
The mathematics behind that number was retracted. It still circulates constantly.

§ 04Sources

Ubuntu is a living idea belonging to living peoples, not a closed corpus, and the terms used here come from several distinct languages — Nguni (isiZulu, isiXhosa), Sotho-Tswana and others. Where a word is an ordinary word in its language rather than a technical term, the essay says so; where a phrase’s provenance is uncertain or its popular gloss is a later Western elaboration, the essay says that too. African scholarship on ubuntu is cited in preference to Western commentary wherever it bears on the point. Links are given where a stable public page exists.

  1. Ubuntu and communal joy — the celebration, song, and dance woven through Southern African communal life; injabulo, joy/gladness in the Nguni languages.
  2. Tutu, Desmond — on the joy and celebration of the interconnected community, in God Has a Dream (2004).
  3. Fredrickson, Barbara — the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, American Psychologist (2001). Joy as functional, building resource and resilience.
  4. Bryant, F. & Veroff, J. — Savoring (2007). The amplifying power of marking and sharing joy.
  5. Gable, S. et al. — capitalization on positive events, JPSP 87 (2004). Shared celebration multiplying joy and building bonds.
  6. Collins, Randall — Interaction Ritual Chains (2004). Collective celebratory ritual as a builder of bonds and energy.
  7. Fredrickson, B. & Losada, M. — “Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing,” American Psychologist 60(7) (2005). The source of the “positivity ratio”; its mathematical portion was formally retracted in 2013 after Brown, Sokal & Friedman showed the modelling had no bearing on human emotion. Listed here as the claim this essay corrects.
  8. Keltner, D. — Born to Be Good (2009) and the science of shared positive emotion. Joy as social glue.
§   T H E   T A K E A W A Y

Celebration as a group act and as maintenance rather than decoration — with the caricature of the warm South and the cold North left out, since it flatters nobody.

And the famous positivity ratio was formally retracted after its mathematics turned out to have no bearing on human emotion. It is still quoted everywhere, including in this essay’s inherited source list.

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