Taking Hold Of The Hands Of Strangers And Dancing In The Streets -- Who Would Lose Power If We Did?

Several days ago, in comments, Nora reminded me of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book. Then, just this week, Sara Sutterfield Winn directed me to this amazing article by Ehrenreich. Being able to recognize what Winn calls a clue-by-four when the universe begins to wave one in my general direction, I headed off to read Ehrenreich. Her entire article is so well-reasoned and well-written that you really, really should go read the whole thing. Here's a small taste.

Ehrenreich begins: 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."

She continues: 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 19th 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.

She points out that: 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.

You know the fish who discovered that she'd been swimming in WATER alll this time? The man who was delighted to learn that, all unknowing, he'd been writing PROSE his entire adult life? That's how I feel having a name to give to this, this, this, this THING that I've always known was wrong but couldn't name. I've been living for 51 years in the the "Society of the Spectacle," while longing for communal festivals. I hate the fact that, as Ehrenreich says, we "absorb, or consume, the spectacles of commercial entertainment, nationalist rituals and the consumer culture, with its endless advertisements for the pleasure of individual ownership." As she notes, it leads to an incredible "passivity engendered by constant spectatorship." It also leads to credit card bills with no hope of ever being paid off, no savings, overconsumption of the Earth's resources, and the inability to ever question the power structure for fear that your own financial situation will come crashing down -- and you'll be all alone.

I think one of the joys that I find in Wiccan ritual is the chance to break out of the Society of Spectacle and back into the Society of Communal Festivals. Celebrating the 8 Sabbats and the 13 Moons each year allows me to be active, to be in community, to touch something that my great, great, great, many-times-great grandmothers may have touched, to be an active part of my world. I don't think it's possible to do magic with someone and not care about her, not be connected to her. Maybe it is, but I don't see how.