Super Bowl LIX and communitas. What 80,000 people together teaches children.

My daughter asked: 'Do they all know each other?' We were watching the Super Bowl pregame — 80,000 people in the stadium visible in the wide shot. Do they all know each other? I said: no. Most of them have never met. She said: then why are they all doing the same thing?

This is the question that Victor Turner spent a career trying to answer. Turner called it communitas: the social bond that forms between people who don't know each other but are sharing the same experience at the same moment. It is the feeling in the stadium, at the concert, in the protest march. The person next to you is a stranger. They are also, for this moment, on your side.

The eighty-four delegations on the Seine. The answer to my daughter's question — 'why do they wave?' — is the answer that Victor Turner spent a career building toward: they wave because for this moment, they are all the same kind of thing. The wave is the recognition of sameness-within-difference. This is the specific thing that produces the change. The change comes from the practice. The practice comes from the decision to try it once, this week, in the ordinary moment that is already available.