Dancing in the Streets



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.

A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

The Industrial Revolution blew the lid off Pandora’s Box, releasing a poisonous whirlwind of evils into the world.  Millions of rural people were herded into vast, filthy, disease-ridden cities to live among hordes of strangers, perform miserable work, and die young.  It was pure hell, and many people snapped.  Insane asylums began popping up like mushrooms, and the psychotherapy industry was born. 

In Vienna, Freud kept busy treating hysterical Austrians, and Jung worked with “schizy” inmates at a Zürich asylum.  They launched an insurgency against European Puritanism, a mindset that drove many out of their minds — desire was bad, and punctual, robotic conformity to a system of pleasure-free maximum productivity was the compulsory objective.

So, the first wave of psychotherapy was radical and rebellious, but a second wave that emerged in the ‘50s has been regressive.  The new mode purported that newborns were pure, innocent, blank slates.  Once born, the beautiful, helpless “inner child” was vulnerable to abuse from others that could knock it off balance, sometimes permanently. 

In the therapy room, attention was focused on the patient’s past — a hunt for abuse that may have happened decades ago.  Mental illness was usually the result of a screwed up childhood, and it was believed to reside within the patient.  The endless bombardment of dark influences from the surrounding insane society was off the radar.  The goal of mainstream therapy was helping wounded patients adapt to living in an insane society.  Mainstream therapists now practice everywhere in America.

James Hillman (1926-2011) was a student of Jung, and once served as the director of the C. G. Jung Institute.  Over the years, he became a vocal critic of modern psychotherapy.  In his opinion, newborns were not blank slates, and they were not born whole and perfect — they were unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.  

He thought that mainstream therapy was turning the educated middle class into docile plebes, trained to “cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel) to… make it work for you (rather than refuse the unacceptable).”  He strongly believed that the therapy room should become a cell of revolution.  Patients needed to become involved in the insane world, and transform it into a healthier place for all life.  Aim at the core of the problem, not the side effects.

Michael Ventura (born 1945) was a popular journalist for the trendy L.A. Weekly.  He had abundant experience as a consumer of therapy.  Mental illness was a significant theme in his family history.  Most of the people he knew were either in therapy, practicing therapists, or both.  At the same time, he saw that most marriages and relationships around him were dysfunctional to varying degrees.  How could this be, at the zenith of human progress?

In 1990, he interviewed Hillman, and the article generated abundant buzz.  This inspired them to do a book: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse.  It’s a scrapbook of interviews, conversations, and written correspondence, an informal jam session of passionate ideas.  Their two minds soar and play, and the result is a stimulating duet.  The book was published prior to the Prozac Revolution.

According to Jung, “individuation” was the ideal destination — the lifelong process of becoming more and more who you are.  (He also said: “The most terrifying thing is to know yourself.”)  Individuation involved throwing overboard the stuff that was not who you are.  This shifted us from a realm of comfortable habits to unfamiliar territory, where growth was more likely to happen.  When we strayed onto a path where we didn’t belong, our inner life force sent us clear warning messages, “symptoms” (anxiety, depression, etc.).  Hillman said, “Only the unconscious can save us: in your pathology is your salvation.” 

It’s wacky to help people adjust to living in an insane society, to stifle their healthy resistance, and encourage their submission.  Hillman denounced “therapeutic Puritanism,” with its psychic numbing and sensual numbing.  America had been anaesthetized by the Puritan mindset.  “Just look at our land — this continent’s astonishing beauty — and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it.”

The authors linked the rise of mental illness to the rise of individualism and its shadows, alienation and oppression.  For them, the psyche did not live inside the individual, the individual dwelled within the vast timeless collective psyche, like a fish in the ocean.  In the good old days, life was tribal and communal.  Spirituality embraced all sacred beings, animate and inanimate.  Both feet were firmly planted in a stable sense of time and place.  Life was rich with meaning, power, and beauty.  Ventura suspected that “the quality of wholeness is not located in the individual but in a community that includes the environment.”

Christianism blindsided the ancient balance with its new concept of individual salvation.  Suddenly, the creator of the entire universe was paying around-the-clock attention to ME — watching everything I did, continuously reading my mind, and remembering all of my errors.

Following Columbus, the disintegration of ancient balance went into warp drive.  Europeans, their slaves, and the people they conquered were uprooted and scattered across the planet.  The social glue of ancient cultures dissolved.  “Nothing needed to be permanent anymore.”

In the last hundred years, life has gone totally crazy.  Our sense of time and place has vaporized.  Ventura called it “the avalanche.”  We lived in an era of “simultaneous, massive changes on every level of life everywhere, that have built up unstoppable momentum as they speed us toward God knows where.”  Obviously, we’re heading for disaster.  “You can’t negotiate with an avalanche.  Nothing, nothing, nothing is going to stop the shipwreck of this civilization.”

Understand that the world is not ending, just this pathological civilization.  We should not regret its passing, but honor its death with song.  The good news here is that “I” am not sick, my society is.  The good news is that the sick society is busy dying, setting the stage for rebirth and renewal.  Hillman: “Any major change requires a breakdown.”  The next century or two may be rough, but it won’t last forever.  “The only solution can come when the world is reanimated, when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.”

What should we do?  In a nutshell, two things are essential.  (1) We cannot move toward healing without the power of imagination.  Imagination allows us to break out of ruts, overcome barriers, and see farther, with greater clarity.  It strengthens our ability to envision a healthier future.  (2) Individualism is a toxic ball and chain, and we need to leave it behind, in the rubble of the past.  We must remember community living and rejoin the family of life.

Ventura said it like this: “You don’t %@&# around.  You don’t waste your life trying to find a secure place in the avalanche, ‘cause there ain’t no such animal.  You do the work of the soul.”  He told his son, “If you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for — trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse, Harper Collins, New York, 1992.  http://www.michaelventura.org/

The European and the Indian

About 400 years ago, several boatloads of rigidly righteous racist Puritans washed up on the shore, much to the detriment of the Indians of New England.  The two cultures could not have been more different.  Every schoolchild knows the sacred colonial myths, but what really happened is far more obscure, and far more interesting.  In search of a more accurate story, historian James Axtell plowed through mountains of old papers and summed up what he learned in his book The European and the Indian.

In 1600, Europe was near the peak of the Inquisition.  At that time, it was perfectly appropriate to torture and burn thousands and thousands of people who were accused of doing ridiculous and impossible things.  The Puritans were an offshoot of the new Protestant movement, which was obsessed with sin and evil, and terrified of sex and sensuality.  The natural world was the realm of Satan.  The Puritans were raised in a hell broth of mass hysteria.  They believed that the ideal life was one of back-breaking work.  They were rigorously trained to be obedient to their superiors, and their way of life was “almost slavery.”

The Indians blew their minds.  Native men spent their days hunting, fishing, and socializing, living like upper class English lords.  They wore their hair long, which was a shocking display of pride and independence (pride was the greatest sin of all).  They had contempt for all authority.  Their low-tech agriculture produced as much food as colonial farmers, using just primitive hand tools and far less labor — the women tended the fields!  They were impossible to predict and control, because they would suddenly pack up and move to an unknown location, as if they were noble aristocrats who could do whatever they wished.  The Indians were absolutely free people, and the Puritans were neurotic heavily-armed control freaks.

It was easy to control colonists who lived in established villages and towns, because the authorities could keep a careful eye on them, and promptly punish those who stepped out of line.  But some colonists drifted off into the wilderness, and lived far from church and law, where they were dangerously at risk of slipping into heathenish ignorance and barbarism.  These disgusting renegades were lazy and immoral people who lived in crude log cabins, dressed in animal skins, and lived by hunting.  There were small settlements in the Maine wilderness where Europeans lived in complete freedom, in a state of nature, as wild as the deer — a delicious idea to contemplate.  Imagine that. 

One thing in the old papers astounded Axtell.  Over and over the colonists wrote about the need to “reduce” the savage barbarians to civility, to “reduce” them to docility.  The word “reduce” was used many times, with just two exceptions (the exceptions were written in the eighteenth century, long after the settlement period).  “Reduce” is a word that has a clear, unambiguous meaning.  The colonial writers used it accurately, if you believe that freedom is good, as I do.

The number one stated purpose of settlement was to bring the gospel to the Indians and save them.  Because European society was so vastly superior, Indians would certainly fall over each other in the rush to be converted.  But this fantasy crashed head-on into reality.  Missionaries frequently alienated the Indians with their intolerant ethnocentricism.  And Christian settlers were too often greedy, brutal, dishonest hypocrites.  The foreign religion competed poorly with the traditional spirituality of the Indians, which worked perfectly well for them. 

The schools established for Indian children were miserable, and most students fled at the first opportunity.  The few Indians who managed to jump through all of the hoops, and successfully become educated Christians, discovered that they had no place in white society, because they were members of an inferior race.  Coerced conversion was a complete failure.  Later, the settlers discovered that the Indians could successfully be converted with “Powder & Ball.”  Dead Indians were easy to control, and offered no resistance to the seizure of their lands.

I was especially fascinated by Axtell’s discussion of the “white Indians” — colonists who voluntarily lived with the natives, and merged into native families and communities.  European diseases and bullets killed many Indians.  To replace them, the Indians adopted whites that they captured, mostly women and children.  Also, a number of whites deliberately ran away and were accepted into Indian tribes.  This happened so often that laws were passed to ban settlers from escaping to freedom — violators could be beaten, imprisoned, or hung for treason.

In 1782, Hector de Crèvecoeur was astounded to discover that “thousands” of Europeans had become Indians, but no Indians had become Europeans.  Other sources confirm that this was not a wild exaggeration.  Most white Indians preferred living with the natives, and made no effort to escape.  When relatives came to get them, and begged them to come home, they usually declined to return.  And those who did return often got disgusted and soon came back to their tribe. 

The Indians were moral and honest people, unlike the Puritans.  They were more Christian than the Christians, and they won the hearts of their former enemies with kindness and generosity.  They lovingly accepted the whites into their families as brothers and sisters.  They treated women with absolute dignity and respect.  Indian children enjoyed abundant love and attention, the complete opposite of the Puritan mode of severe discipline.  Some of the white Indians later became great chiefs.

A life of hunting and fishing was far more enjoyable than a life of plowing and reaping.  The Puritan colonists endured a life similar to slavery, fettered with cultural balls and chains.  White Indians discovered that freedom was divine — far more valuable than the cheap thrills of life in an oppressive society.  It’s no fun being reduced to docility and civility, and they gladly walked away to a better life.

James Axtell.  The European and the Indian.  Oxford University Press, New York, 1981.