Barbara Ehrenreich: Reclaiming What Makes Us Human

The enemies of festivity have argued for centuries that festivities and ecstatic rituals are incompatible with civilization. In our own time, the incompatibility of festivity with industrialization, market economies and a complex division of labor is usually simply assumed, in the same way that Freud assumed – or posited – the incompatibility of civilization and unbridled sexual activity. In other words, if you want antibiotics and heated buildings and air travel, 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 1952 essay titled ​“The Decline of the Choral Dance,” Paul Halmos wrote 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.

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.” 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.”

But there is no obvious reason why festivities and ecstatic rituals can’t 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 and Trinidad preserves its Carnival. Recent 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. No, the repression of festivities and ecstatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of men, and occasionally women, 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.

For example, in late medieval Europe, and later the Caribbean, first the elite withdrew from the festivities, whether out of fear or in an effort to maintain its dignity and distance from the hoi polloi. The festivities continued for a while without them and continued 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 presented 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. Even kings and colonizers can feel the invitational power of the music. Why did 19^th 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. 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 ​’50s 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.

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, and hierarchy is antagonistic to the festive and ecstatic tradition. (Whether this is an inherent feature of civilization, we do not know, though advocates of genuine democracy can only hope that this is not the case. Contemporary anarchists and socialists differ on this point, with some proposing complex methods of grassroots democratic planning that would presumably abolish hierarchy of all kinds while preserving modern means of production. Michael Albert proposes such a system in his 2003 book Parecon. Others, most notably the anarchist thinker John Zerzan, argue that the problem goes much deeper, and that we cannot achieve true democracy without eliminating industrialization and possibly the entire division of labor.) 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 icecaps 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 this, if anything, represents a kind of evolutionary regression. 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 wisdom, 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 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.

— —  —  —  —  —  — –

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.

— —  —  —  —  —  — –

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?