Features > March 9, 2007
Reclaiming What Makes Us Human (cont’d)
But these compensatory pleasures do not satisfy our longings. Anyone who can resist addiction to the consumer culture, the entertainments, and the drugs arrives sooner or later at the conclusion that “something’s missing.” What that might be is hard to pin down and finds expression in vague formulations such as “spirituality” or “community.” Intellectuals regularly issue thoughtful screeds on the missing glue in our society, the absence of strong bonds connecting us to those outside our families. In 1985, Robert Bellah et al.’s book Habits of the Heart: Individuals and Commitment in American Life found Americans caught up in their personal ambitions, unable to imagine any larger sense of community. In 2000, Robert D. Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, in which he reported a decline not just in civic participation but in any kind of group activity. There is even an intellectual current called communitarianism, which aims to somehow restore the social cohesion characteristic of smaller, less divided societies, and its adherents have included such notables as Bill and Hillary Clinton.
For most people, though, the “something” that’s missing is most readily replaced by religion. Far from withering away, as Marx predicted, religion has undergone a spectacular revival, especially in the largely Christian United States and the Muslim parts of the world. People find many things in their religions—a sense of purpose and metaphysical explanations for human suffering, for example. They may also find a sense of community—the umma of Islam or the neighborliness of a small-town church. The anthropomorphized God of Christianity, in particular, is himself a kind of substitute for human solidarity, an invisible loving companion who counsels and consoles. Like a genuinely caring community, he is said to be a cure for depression, alienation, loneliness, and even mundane, all-too-common addictions to alcohol and drugs.
But compared to the danced religions of the past, today’s “faiths” are often pallid affairs—if only by virtue of the very fact that they are “faiths,” dependent on, and requiring, belief as opposed to direct knowledge. The prehistoric ritual dancer, the maenad of ancient Greece or the Caribbean practitioner of Vodou, did not believe in her god or gods; she knew them, because, at the height of group ecstasy, they filled her with their presence. Modern Christians may have similar experiences, but the primary requirement of their religion is belief, meaning an effort of the imagination. Dionysus, in contrast, did not ask his followers for their belief or faith; he called on them to apprehend him directly, to let him enter, in all his madness and glory, their bodies and their minds.
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For all kinds of reasons, then, our imaginary “unconverted savage” might despair over what civilization has wrought. He would bemoan the absence of the gods, which is manifested by the new requirement that they be summoned by the imagination, through interior faith rather than through shared ritual. He would be baffled by the fact that our great reproductive achievement as a species—the huge population, even overpopulation, of the earth—routinely leads to frustration and hostility, rather than to an enrichment of individual experience. He would cringe from the misery around him—the poverty and disease that our technological cunning has proved incapable of relieving. Above all, he would be stricken to find his species on what may be the verge of extinction—through pandemics, global warming, the nuclear threat and the exhaustion of resources—yet too isolated from one another to stand together, as early Homo sapiens once learned to do, and mount any sort of mutual defense.
We try, of course. Many millions of people around the world are engaged in movements for economic justice, peace, equality and environmental reclamation, and these movements are often incubators for the solidarity and celebration so missing in our usual state of passive acquiescence. Yet there appears to be no constituency today for collective joy itself. In fact, the very term collective joy is largely unfamiliar and exotic.
This silence demands some sort of explanation, so let us give the enemies of festivity—or at least the revolutionaries among them, like Robespierre and Lenin—their due. What is lost is not that important, they would argue, should they be good-humored enough to even entertain the argument. And indeed you would have to be a fool, or a drug-addled hippie, to imagine that a restoration of festivity and ecstatic ritual would get us out of our current crisis, or even to imagine that such activities could be restored in our world today, with anything like their original warmth and meaningfulness. No amount of hand-holding or choral dancing will bring world peace and environmental healing.
In fact, festivities have served at times to befuddle or becalm their celebrants. European carnival coexisted with tyranny for centuries, hence the common “safety valve” theory of their social function. Native American Ghost Dancers could not reverse genocide with their ecstatic rituals; nor could colonized Africans render themselves bulletproof by dancing into a trance. In the face of desperately serious threats to group survival, the ecstatic ritual can be a waste of energy—or worse. The Haitian dictator Fançois “Papa Doc” Duvalier actually encouraged Vodou as a means of strengthening his grip on the population.
My own Calvinist impulses—inherited in part from those of my ancestors who were genuine Calvinists, Presbyterian Scots—tell me insistently to get the work done, save the world and then maybe there’ll be time for celebration. In the face of poverty, misery, and possible extinction, there is no time, or justification, for the contemplation of pleasure of any kind, these inner voices say. Close your ears to the ever-fainter sound of drums or pipes; the wild carnival and danced ritual belong to a distant time. The maenads are long dead, a curiosity for the classicists; the global “natives” have been subdued. Forget the past, which is half imagined anyway, and get to work.
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And yet … It does not go away, this ecstatic possibility. Despite centuries of repression, despite the competing allure of spectacles, festivity keeps bubbling up, and in the most unlikely places. The rock rebellion broke through the anxious conformity of post-war America and generated an entire counterculture. Then, at the other end of the cultural spectrum, where the spectacle of athleticism merged with nationalism, people undertook to carnivalize sports events, reclaiming them as occasions for individual creativity and collective joy. Religions, too, still generate ecstatic undertakings, like the annual Hasidic pilgrimage to the Ukrainian town of Uman, which has sprung up just since the fall of communism and features thousands of Hasidic men, dressed entirely in white, dancing and singing in the streets in honor of their dead rebbe. The impulse to public celebration lives on, seizing its opportunities as they come. When Iran, which is surely one of the world’s more repressive states, qualified for the World Cup in 1997, “celebrations paralyzed Tehran,” according to Newsweek. “Women ripped off their government-mandated veils; men gave out paper cups of strictly forbidden vodka as teenagers danced in the streets.”
There are also cases of people coming together and creating festivity out of nothing, or at least without the excuse of a commercial concert or athletic event. Thousands of women gather every summer for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, described on its Web site as “the best party on the planet.” Gay male culture features “circuit parties,” involving dancing and some times costuming, and, with some help from chemical stimulants, these can go on for days. It was gay culture, too, that first appropriated Halloween as an adult holiday, now celebrated with parades of costumed people of all sexual inclinations.
We might also note such recently invented festivities as the Berlin Love parade, an outdoor dance party that has attracted more than a million people at a time, or the annual Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where thousands of people of all ages gather annually to create art, to dance and to paint and costume themselves.
And whatever its shortcomings as a means to social change, protest movements keep reinventing carnival. Almost every demonstration I have been to over the years—antiwar, feminist or for economic justice—has featured some element of the carnivalesque: costumes, music, impromptu dancing, the sharing of food and drink. The media often deride the carnival spirit of such protests, as if it were a self-indulgent distraction from the serious political point. But seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after “the revolution.” The Texas populist Jim Hightower, for example, launched a series of “Rolling Thunder” events around the country in the early 2000s, offering music, food, and plenty of conviviality, and with the stated aim of “putting the party back in politics.” People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.
In fact, there has been, in the last few years, a growing carnivalization of protest demonstrations, perhaps especially among young “antiglobalization” activists in Europe, Latin America, Canada and the United States. They wear costumes—most famously, the turtle suits symbolizing environmental concerns at the huge Seattle protest of 1999. They put on masks or paint their faces; they bring drums to their demonstrations and sometimes dance through the streets; they send up the authorities with street theater and effigies. A Seattle newspaper reported of the 1999 demonstrations: “The scene … resembled a New Year’s Eve party: People banged on drums, blew horns and tossed flying discs through the air. One landed at the foot of a police officer, who threw it back to the crowd amid cheers.” The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.
And why, in the end, would anyone want to? The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting and dance?
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