If I Can't Dance In Your Revolution

Barbara Ehrenreich has some fascinating things to say in her book about communal ecstasy: Dancing in the Streets. Discussing the fact that, in the wake of colonial destruction of native religious practices, many native groups, rather than becoming good Puritans or Catholics or whatever, developed "new and often defiant ecstatic religious cults," including African Independent Churches, Native American Dream Dance and Ghost Dance, Maori Hau-hau, etc. Ehrenreich notes that Europeans and Americans viewed "such rites with impatience, if not disgust. Dancing in circles does not, after all, as was claimed in some cases, make men immune to bullets or cause colonizers to depart in their ships. . . . But it is this smug Western vantage point, rather than the rituals of 'simpler peoples' that cries out for psychological interpretation." She continues:

The historian Michale Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for the kind of ascetic, single-minded, self-denying personality that Calvinism sought to inculcate, and certainly some of the successful revolutionaries of the West would seem to fill the bill. [T]he English revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist himself, railed perpetually against the festive inclinations of his troops. The Jacobin leader Robespierre despised disorderly gatherings, including 'any group in which there is a tumult' -- a hard thing to avoid during the French Revolution, one might think. . . . Lenin inveighed against 'slovenliness . . . carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality' as well as 'dissoluteness in sexual life,' seeing himself as a 'manager' and 'controller' as well as a leader. For men like Robespierre and Lenin, the central revolutionary rite was the meeting -- experienced in a sitting position, requiring no form of participation other than an occasional speech, and conducted according to strict rules of procedure. Dancing, singing, trances -- these could only be distractions from the weighty business at hand.

Yet, as Ehrenreich points out: What is achieved through such rituals, in a purely functional sense, is an intense feeling of solidarity among the participants -- at least all accounts suggest as much -- and solidarity is the basis of effective political action from below. Even the 'fantasies' entertained by participants, or apprehended in trance, surely have an empowering effect. The filed hand who achieves unity with a [G]od through a Vodou possession trance, and the market woman who leads a second life as a priestess -- these are formidable adversaries.

I'd argue, of course, that dancing in a circle can indeed produce dramatic results, but Ehrenreich is right. We err when we only consider the value of a practice from our own Calvinistic view. I think that may be an error that today's peace movement makes. We need to reevaluate what a revolution would look like from views other than our own. Audre Lord may not have been completely correct when she opined that the master's tools will never destroy the master's house, but that's no reason not to explore other tools, as well.