I was intrigued when our book group selected Dancing in the Streets
by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a history of
collective joy and ecstatic ritual — stuff that’s pretty rare in the land of
the glowing screen people. Studying humankind’s
long transition from wild and free to robo-consumers, it’s easy to perceive gradually
advancing emotional decay. Cultures slid
further away from intimate connections to the family of life, and human
societies grew from small clans of friends and family into sprawling
megalopolises inhabited by millions of strangers.
In Colin Turnbull’s lovely book, The Forest People, the Mbuti
Pygmies were beautiful people who thrived in a Congo rainforest. They did not worship invisible deities, because
that required a vivid imagination. Instead,
they had profound reverence and respect for their forest, which was not
invisible, and gave them everything they needed. This love often inspired song, dance, and
jubilation. Paradise was where their
feet were standing. Turnbull wrote that
the Pygmy “likes to laugh until tears come to his eyes and he is too weak to
stand. He then sits down or lies on the
ground and laughs still louder.”
In The
Mbuti Pygmies, Turnbull spoke fondly of Father Longo, a Catholic
missionary. Pygmies had no word for
evil. “In order to convert them, then,
he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not
prepared to do.” He left them unmolested.
I had great hopes for Ehrenreich’s book, because it was a
very neat idea. I imagined a book to
help us remember how essential it was, for health and sanity, to spend our
lives in intimate daily contact with the family of life, in a thriving
undefiled ecosystem — the mode of living for which we evolved. The book didn’t quite do this. Its time window was the era of civilization,
beginning with brief glimpses of Canaanite orgies, and the lusty Dionysian cults
of Greece. The main focus was on Europe
in the last 500 years.
For most, life in medieval times majored in backbreaking
drudgery and poverty. Folks avoided
insanity by taking breaks for festive gatherings — carnivals where people wore
costumes and masks. There was singing,
dancing, drinking, and good-natured mockery of their superiors. The struggles of daily life were left behind,
as peasants and nobles joined together, rolled down their socks, and dissolved
into a sweet whirlwind of joyful noise and ecstatic celebration.
There were big cultural changes when puritanical cults
appeared on the stage, with their fanatical intolerance. Calvinism descended like a hard frost on fun. Pleasure was of the devil. Festivities were banned. The music stopped. Get back to work! Naturally, this led to an epidemic of morbid
melancholy (depression).
Over time, multinational salvation-oriented religions drove
wedges into cohesive social relationships.
Believers were encouraged to regularly contemplate their shortcomings,
and worry about where their souls would reside in the afterlife. There was increased focus on “me,” the
individual, and less on “us,” our community.
With the rise of individualism came “isolation, loneliness, a sense of
disengagement, loss of vitality, and a feeling of burden because reality had no
clear meaning.”
Then came the age of colonization, when this injured mindset
spread to distant lands, forced its beliefs on others, and destroyed their
cultures. Missionaries were rigid,
racist, domineering, and intolerant — dour and cheerless people who never
laughed. Savages were no longer allowed
to practice their traditional ecstatic rituals, because they were devil
worship. Joy became a mental illness.
Ehrenreich wrote in 2007, but her chapter on the rise of
fascist nationalism could have been written this morning. Following their defeat in 1918, Germans were
down and out. Hitler revived their
spirits with mysticism, color, and pageantry.
Hitler was a masterful performer and bullshit artist who entranced vast
crowds with his highly animated oratory, repeatedly shouting slogan after
slogan. Thousands roared back, “Sieg
heil!” [LOOK]
The Nazis built an enormous stadium at Nuremberg, and held
annual gatherings in it. Around the perimeter,
130 antiaircraft searchlights were aimed straight up into the night, creating
an awe-inspiring circular colonnade of light beams. Folks were spellbound by
the sight of thousands of soldiers, in crisp new uniforms, goose-stepping with
astonishing precision, to the thundering drumbeats.
Like the Pied Piper, Hitler tried to unify and lead all good
Germans to a heroic racially pure Teutonic utopia. On the streets, gangs of roughneck brown
shirts with swastika armbands aggressively harassed the socialists, Jews, and
other undesirables. The swing music of
racially inferior Negroes was banned. Radio
and cinema reinforced the Third Reich’s message — make the Fatherland great
again.
Military spectacles were a powerful way to manipulate crowds. The barrage of high energy nationalism
whipped them up. But being orderly spectators
was far less interesting than enthusiastically participating in singing,
dancing, and merrymaking. Nazi events
were heavily policed. Eventually, the parades
and speeches got boring.
After the Hitler show was reduced to rubble, Ehrenreich
discussed two new fads that seemed like modern attempts to revive ecstatic
rituals — rock music, and sporting events.
In the ’60s, the Western world seemed to snap out of its brittle Puritan
trance, get up, and dance. White kids
discovered what black folks had known for a long time — tune into the beat and
shake those hips. Letting yourself go
led to ecstatic experiences. At Beatles
concerts, the music was often drowned out by the intense screaming and
shrieking of thousands of girls.
At football and soccer games, crowds quit being passive
spectators. Events took on carnival
characteristics. They put on costumes
with their team colors, and painted their faces. There were synchronized crowd movements,
chants, dancing, feasting, and singing.
Eventually, the crowds got so loud and distracting that the players on
the field complained. Over time, games began
to increasingly take on aspects of nationalistic military spectacles. There were marching bands, precision drill
teams, celebrities, loud music, flag waving, national anthems, and fireworks.
Modern psychology is focused on self-control, being a
dependable human resource in an industrial society. Old fashioned communal festivities were
focused on escape from routines, losing the self, and becoming one with the
soaring ecstasy of big joy. I wish that
Ehrenreich had invited Jacob Grimm into her story. Long, long before the plague of Puritans,
Europeans had deep roots in their ancestral lands, places that were spiritually
alive with sacred groves, streams, mountains, animals, and fairies. In Teutonic
Mythology, Grimm described annual German bonfires:
“At all the cities, towns, and villages of a country, towards
evening on the first (or third) day of Easter, there is lighted every year on
mountain and hill a great fire of straw, turf, and wood, amidst a concourse and
jubilation, not only of the young, but of many grown up peoples. …Men and maids, and all who come, dance
exulting and singing, hats are waved, handkerchiefs thrown into the fire. The mountains all round are lighted up, and
it is an elevating spectacle, scarcely paralleled by anything else, to survey
the country for many miles round from one of the higher points, and in every
direction at once to see a vast number of these bonfires, brighter or fainter,
blazing up to heaven.”
At Midsummer, there were wheels of fire rituals. “A huge wheel is wrapt around with straw, so
that none of the wood is left in sight, a strong pole is passed through the
middle, and is grasped by the guiders of the wheel. At a signal… the wheel is lighted with a
torch, and set rapidly in motion, a shout of joy is raised, and all wave their
torches on high, part of the men stay on the hill, part follow the rolling
globe of fire as it is guided downhill to the Moselle. …Whilst the wheel is rushing past the women
and girls, they break out into cries of joy, answered by the men on the hill;
and inhabitants of neighboring villages, who have flocked to the river side,
mingle their voices in the universal rejoicing.”
In the old days, white folks still knew how to party like
Pygmies.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Dancing
in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Metropolitan Books,
New York, 2007.
Grimm, Jacob, Teutonic Mythology, 4 vols, 1883, Reprint,
Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1976.
