Con Drop

It is not every professional training that culminates in a warning not to immediately sleep with your fellow participants, but that is what happened on the occasion I have in mind today. We had reached the end of a two-day course for ministers in how to teach a sex-ed curriculum. I suppose the topic was therefore sufficiently in the air that our facilitator felt the need to address it. 

"Now, we've been through an intense experience together over the last few days," I recall her saying. "You may be having strong feelings for each other. I advise you to wait it out and not act on those impulses immediately."

I didn't need to be told twice. Or once, for that matter. At the end of two days with a roomful of ministers, many of them a good two generations older than me, this was the last thing I wanted to do. It was, to borrow a phrase from Jeremiah, "something I neither commanded nor spoke of, nor did it even enter my mind."

As the facilitator went on, however, I began to understand the point she was making. She called it "con drop"—con here being short for "convention." This is what happens, she said, when a group of people assemble together and seal off contact with the outside world for a few days. 

Within this enclosed space, an intense feeling of collective solidarity is born. The people around you are suddenly the most important people in the world. With them, you have discovered a new life. Everything that came before is empty and hollow by comparison. It belongs to the old you. 

It is something of this phenomenon that pulls people into cults. This is why all those people who spent a week in a meditation and yoga retreat with the Baghwan in India were suddenly ready to devote the rest of their lives to the Rajneeshee cause—even to the point of committing bioterrorism. 

If Durkheim is right that the religious impulse is nothing other than the consciousness of society within us, here we are perhaps best positioned to see his point. As the great founder of sociology described it, in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the social aspect of a religious rite can account for a great deal of the emotional and spiritual importance we attribute to it. 

Sharing with other people an intense experience of group bonding can supply both the sense that religion is coming from "without," that is to say, as well as the reason it makes people feel they have been "born again."

Secular ideologies are sometimes accused of trying to replace the gods by making an idol of socialism, of nationhood, of the flag, or of some other conceptual representation of the social organism. If Durkheim is right, however (and to many that will be a big "if"), then this is essentially getting it backward. It is religion that has made an idol of a set of mythical personalities who—in their true form—were nothing other than a symbolic representation of society. 

Our facilitator at the training was alluding —I take it—to the Durkheimian experience of intense collective awakening—this force that births religions and movements and great causes—while also explaining that it has a downside. The cost that comes with the intense feeling of solidarity is that it does not last forever. Eventually, you return to your dull individual life, and you are filled with depression. 

That is when you may resort to desperate measures—such as ill-advised flings—to try to recapture the lost magic. "It's called 'con drop,'" the facilitator said. And she provided an example. 

"You know how when you were a teenager, and you went off to a convention and had this amazing time, and then your parents came to pick you up. And while they're driving you home, the oxytocin floods out of you, and suddenly you start crying, and then you're mad at your parents for not understanding what an incredible time you had and why it was so important."

Durkheim has sometimes been accused of being a reductionist, but in truth he didn't have half the tools for reducing idealistic concepts to material causes that we have at our disposal today. He still thought that religion was the product of such an abstract concept as "society." With our facilitator's words in hand, though, he might have gone one better, and said that religion is really the product of oxytocin. 

Of course, Durkheim did not in fact know about neurochemistry; nevertheless, he seems to have been acquainted with con drop. He discusses the experiences of people in an assembly listening to an orator. It is as if they are carried beyond and outside of themselves, he says. They are—in a literal sense—ecstatic, and it is because they have ceased to feel only as an individual and have begun to feel as a group. 

When they go home, and the experience is over, they are overwhelmed by the relative lonesomeness of their profane life. "[W]hen the assembly is dissolved," he writes, "and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves." (Swain trans.)

I read this passage the same week—this past one—when my sister and her husband came back from the hospital, carrying their newborn child—my nephew—in their arms. The first night back in the house, everyone was smiling, relaxed, and triumphant. The baby and parents seemed happy and healthy. Shortly thereafter, they all disappeared upstairs. 

Then we heard crying. And it wasn't the baby. It was the parents. 

Uh-oh, I thought. Every horrible thing I'd ever heard about postpartum depression came back into my mind. I recalled an unforgettable phrase from a story by Caroline Blackwood. A new mother describes her sensations in the following terms: "I feel as if an ink-fish has squirted black poisons into my brain."

The next morning, though, everyone was fine again. I asked my sister what she had gone through, emotionally, the previous night. "You know how it's always the aftermath of the difficult experience that's harder than the thing itself?" she observed. "You come home, and everything's fine, and then the emotions catch up with you?"

I did know. We were in the presence, it occurred to me, of con drop once again. I was reminded of an observation Richard Nixon once made (not exactly a personal hero of mine, but hey, he makes a good point here). As quoted in John Farrell's biography of one of the nation's least-beloved presidents (which I was savoring over Audible on morning commutes in my pre-coronavirus days), Nixon once wrote: 

"The point of greatest danger for an individual who is confronted with a great crisis is not in the period when he is preparing for battle or actually fighting the battle but in the period immediately after the battle is over. Then, at that time he will find himself emotionally and mentally and physically exhausted and it is then that the decisions he makes must be watched most carefully."

This is what the facilitator was warning us against. This is why she thought it would be a good idea for people to wait a bit before sleeping with any of their fellow students (perhaps for others in the room this was a live possibility or temptation). It is in such a state of con drop, after all, when the most regrettable decisions are made. When the wrong partner is chosen. When cults are joined—or formed. 

But con drop—this moment of great danger— is simply the necessary price we pay for the intense states of heightened social consciousness that give rise to it. The moments of collective effort and struggle that give birth to the most important social aspirations of which our species is capable. Or the romantic encounters that give birth—in the more literal sense—to the new lives and new generations without whom the social organism would, by definition, cease to exist. 

Cults and bad sex are simply the inverse side of religion and good sex. The answer is not to swear off all of the above. But—and perhaps this was the facilitator's point—to choose our steps cautiously in their midst. For we are in the presence of the sacred.