Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

In his experience, a crowd is the raw material for festivity, and a large crowd is the making of more intense and creative festivity than anything that can be generated in his own band of a few dozen people. For a moment, the prevalence of face paint on the New Yorkers and—from our “savage’s” point of view—their universal “costuming” may fool him into thinking he has emerged into a similar kind of festivity, but the facial expressions of the people around him will immediately belie this supposition. The faces are closed, unsmiling, intent on unknown missions, wary of eye contact. Whatever these people are doing, they are not celebrating. And this will be the biggest shock to him: their refusal, or inability, to put this abundant convergence of humanity to use for some kind of celebration.

  In the at least three-thousand-year-old struggle between Pentheus and Dionysus—between popes and dancing peasants, between Puritans and carnival-goers, between missionaries and the practitioners of indigenous ecstatic danced religions—Pentheus and his allies seem to have finally prevailed. Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy—other people, including strangers—no longer holds much appeal. In today’s world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits. They impede our progress on urban streets and highways; they compete for parking spots and jobs; they drive up the price of housing and “ruin” our favorite vacation spots with their crass enjoyments and noisy presence; they may even be criminals or terrorists. We have evolved to be highly social animals and, more so than any other primate, capable of pleasurable bonding with people unrelated to ourselves. But on a planet populated by more than 6 billion of our fellow humans, all ultimately competing for the same dwindling supplies of land and oil and water, this innate sociality seems out of place, naive, and anachronistic.

  There is no powerful faction in our divided world committed to upholding the glories of the feast and dance. The Protestant fundamentalism of the United States and the Islamic radicalism of the Middle and Far East are both profoundly hostile to the ecstatic undertaking. Radical Islam cut its teeth on the suppression of ecstatic Sufism; it opposes music, dancing, and the public mixing of the sexes. American evangelical Protestantism may have its “born-again” moments of individual religious revelation, but it is, by and large, a cold and Calvinist business—urging hard work, sobriety, and meager forms of charity. As for the secular viewpoint represented by the scholars and intellectuals of the West, we have encountered their visceral disdain for the “primitive” excitement of the crowd throughout this book. Even communism, which might have been expected to celebrate human sociality, turned out—with the arguable exception of Cuba—to be a drab and joyless state of affairs, in which, as in the capitalist West, mass spectacles and military parades replaced long-standing festive traditions.

  It can be argued—as the enemies of festivity have done for centuries—that festivities and ecstatic rituals are incompatible with civilization, at least in its modern form. Even scholars who are relatively sympathetic to the festive tradition have tended to see it as an archaic remnant, unsuited to survive “as society becomes more complex and differentiated within classes and professions,” in the words of the anthropologist Alfred Métraux.1 Or as the French sociologist Jean Duvignaud put it, “Market economies and increasing industrialization are crystallizing the social conditions for eliminating such manifestations [festivities].”2 The incompatibility of festivity with industrialization, market economies, and a complex division of labor is simply assumed, just as Freud assumed—or posited—the incompatibility of civilization and unbridled sexual activity. If you want antibiotics and heated buildings and air travel, these scholars seem to be saying, you must abstain from taking hold of the hands of strangers and dancing in the streets.

  The presumed incompatibility of civilization and collective ecstatic traditions presents a kind of paradox: Civilization is good—right?—and builds on many fine human traits such as intelligence, self-sacrifice, and technological craftiness. But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity. So how can civilization be regarded as a form of progress if it precludes something as distinctively human, and deeply satisfying, as the collective joy of festivities and ecstatic rituals? In a remarkable essay titled “The Decline of the Choral Dance,” Paul Halmos wrote in 1952 that the ancient and universal tradition of the choral dance—meaning the group dance, as opposed to the relatively recent, European-derived practice of dancing in couples—was an expression of our “group-ward drives” and “biological sociality.” Hence its disappearance within complex societies, and especially within industrial civilization, can only represent a “decline of our biosocial life”—a painfully disturbing conclusion.3

  Perhaps the problem with civilization is simply a matter of scale: Ecstatic rituals and festivities seem to have evolved to bind people in groups of a few hundred at a time—a group size at which it is possible for each participant to hear the same (unamplified) music and see all the other participants at once. Civilizations, however, tend to involve many thousands—or in our time, millions—of people bound by economic interdependencies, military exigency, and law. In a large society, ancient or modern, an emotional sense of bonding is usually found in mass spectacles that can be witnessed by thousands or—with television, even billions—of people at a time.

  Ours is what the French theorist Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle,” which he described as occurring in “an epoch without festivals.”4 Instead of generating their own collective pleasures, people absorb, or consume, the spectacles of commercial entertainment, nationalist rituals, and the consumer culture, with its endless advertisements for the pleasure of individual ownership. Debord bemoaned the passivity engendered by constant spectatorship, announcing that “the spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.”5

  But there is no obvious reason why festivities and ecstatic rituals cannot survive within large-scale societies. Whole cities were swept up in the French Revolution’s Festival of Federation in 1790, with lines of dancers extending from the streets and out into the countryside. Rock events have sometimes drawn tens of thousands for days of peaceful dancing and socializing. Modern Brazil still celebrates carnaval; Trinidad preserves its carnival. Today’s nonviolent uprisings, like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, invariably feature rock or rap music, dancing in the streets, and “costuming” in the revolution-appropriate color. There is no apparent limit on the number of people who can celebrate together.

  Nor can the growing size of human societies explain the long hostility of elites to their people’s festivities and ecstatic rituals—a hostility that goes back at least to the city-states of ancient Greece, which contained only a few tens of thousands of people each. It was not a concern about crowd size that led to Pentheus’s crackdown on the maenads or Rome’s massacre of its Dionysian cult. No, the repression of festivities and ecstatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of men, and occasionally women too, who saw in them a real and urgent threat. The aspect of “civilization” that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism—both of which are fairly recent innovations—but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.

  We saw how this worked in late medieval Europe, and later the Caribbean: First the elite withdraws from the festivities, whether out of fear or in an effort to maintain its dignity and distance from the hoi polloi. The festivities continue for a while without them and continue to serve their ancient function of building group unity among the participants. But since the participants are now solely, or almost solely, members of the subordinate group or groups, their unity inevitably presents a
challenge to the ruling parties, a challenge that may be articulated in carnival rituals that mock the king and Church. In much of the world, it was the conquering elite of European colonizers that imposed itself on native cultures and saw their rituals as “savage” and menacing from the start. This is the real bone of contention between civilization and collective ecstasy: Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when they build it among subordinates—peasants, slaves, women, colonized people—the elite calls out its troops.

  In one way, the musically driven celebrations of subordinates may be more threatening to elites than overt political threats from below. Even kings and colonizers can feel the invitational power of the music. Pentheus could not resist; he finally put on women’s clothing and joined the maenads—only to die hideously, torn limb from limb by his own mother. And why did nineteenth-century European colonizers so often describe the dancing natives as “out of control”? The ritual participants hadn’t lost control of their actions and were in fact usually performing carefully rehearsed rituals. The “loss of control” is what the colonizers feared would happen to themselves. In some cases, the temptation might be projected onto others, especially the young. The Romans feared the effect of Bacchic worship on their young men. In the fairy tale, the Pied Piper used his pipe to lure away the children from a German town. Rock ‘n’ roll might have been more acceptable to adults in the 1950s if it could have been contained within the black population, instead of percolating out to a generation of young whites.

  But elite hostility to Dionysian festivities goes beyond pragmatic concerns about the possibility of uprisings or the seduction of the young. Philosophically, too, elites cringe from the spectacle of disorderly public joy. Hierarchy, by its nature, establishes boundaries between people—who can go where, who can approach whom, who is welcome, and who is not. Festivity breaks the boundaries down. The classicist Charles Segal put it this way: “As Apollo imposes limits and reinforces boundaries, Dionysus, his opposite and complement, dissolves them.”6

  While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but, to the extent that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to the carnival challenge; cross-dressers defy gender just as those who costume as priests and kings mock power and rank. At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric human groups, and this is what still beckons us today.

  So civilization, as humans have known it for thousands of years, has this fundamental flaw: It tends to be hierarchical, with some class or group wielding power over the majority,r and hierarchy is antagonistic to the festive and ecstatic tradition. This leaves hierarchical societies with no means of holding people together except for mass spectacles—and force. Contemporary civilization, which—for all its democratic pretensions—is egregiously hierarchical along lines of class and race and gender, may unite millions in economic interdependency, but it “unites” them with no strong affective ties. We who inhabit the wealthier parts of the world may be aware of our dependence on Chinese factory workers, Indian tech workers, and immigrant janitors, but we do not know these people or, for the most part, have any interest in them. We barely know our neighbors and, all too often, see our fellow workers as competitors. If civilization offers few forms of communal emotional connection other than those provided by the occasional televised war or celebrity funeral, it would seem to be a rather hollow business.

  We pay a high price for this emotional emptiness. Individually, we suffer from social isolation and depression, which, while usually not fatal on their own, are risk factors for cardiovascular and a host of other diseases. Collectively, we seem to have trouble coming to terms with our situation, which grows more ominous every day. Half the world’s people live in debilitating poverty. Epidemics devastate whole nations. The ice caps melt, and natural disasters multiply. But we remain for the most part paralyzed, lacking the means or will to organize for our survival. In fact the very notion of the “collective,” of the common good, has been eroded by the self-serving agendas of the powerful—their greed and hunger for still more power. Throughout the world (capitalist and postcommunist), decades of conservative social policy have undermined any sense of mutual responsibility and placed the burden of risk squarely on the individual or the family.

  The family is all we need, America’s ostensibly Christian evangelicists tell us—a fit container for all our social loyalties and yearnings. But if anything represents a kind of evolutionary regression, it is this. Insofar as we compress our sociality into the limits of the family, we do not so much resemble our Paleolithic human ancestors as we do those far earlier prehuman primates who had not yet discovered the danced ritual as a “biotechnology” for the formation of larger groups. Humans had the wit and generosity to reach out to unrelated others; hominids huddled with their kin.

  Our civilization has its compensatory pleasures of course. Most often cited is the consumer culture, which encourages us to deflect our desires into the acquisition and display of things: the new car, or shoes, or face-lift, which will enhance our status and make us less lonely, or so we are promised. The mall may be a dreary place compared to a late medieval English fair, but it offers goods undreamed of in that humbler setting—conveniences and temptations from around the globe. We have “entertainment” too, in the form of movies; ever-available, iPod-delivered music for solitary enjoyment; computer games; and, possibly, coming soon, experiences in virtual reality. And we have drugs, both legal and illegal, to lift the depression, calm the anxiety, and bolster our self-confidence. It is a measure of our general deprivation that the most common referent for ecstasy in usage today is not an experience but a drug, MDMA, that offers fleeting feelings of euphoria and connectedness.

  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 alia’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 or 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.

  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.