The Possibility of Revival
As we saw at the beginning of this book, nineteenth-century Protestant reformers sometimes sought to shame European carnival-goers by imagining the reaction of a converted “Hottentot” to such unseemly goings-on. The converted “savage” would, in these fanciful accounts, be disgusted to find supposedly civilized Christians dancing, masking, and cavorting in public exactly like his unconverted brethren at home. But the more interesting case would be that of an
un
converted “savage” plopped down in the modern urban worldâsay, an eighteenth-century indigenous Australian, Plains Indian, or resident of New Guineaâtransported into midtown Manhattan just as the lunch-hour crowds are hitting the street.
He will necessarily be dumbfounded by flashing lights, automobiles, and the near-complete replacement of trees and grass by a built environment. But leaving aside the technological futureshock, with all its comic possibilities, what will amaze him most is the size of the crowd he finds himself in: as many people, within a block or so, as he has ever seen together in his life, and then only at the annual gatherings of his tribe, where several hundred people
might come together at a time, for days of dancing, feasting, and other carnival-like activities.
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 andâfrom our “savage's” point of viewâtheir 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 Dionysusâbetween popes and dancing peasants, between Puritans and carnival-goers, between missionaries and the practitioners of indigenous ecstatic danced religionsâPentheus 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 joyâother people, including strangersâno 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 businessâurging 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 outâwith the arguable exception of Cubaâto 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 arguedâas the enemies of festivity have done for centuriesâthat 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.
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Or as the French sociologist Jean Duvignaud put it, “Market economies and increasing industrialization are crystallizing the social conditions for eliminating such manifestations [festivities].”
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The incompatibility of festivity with industrialization, market economies, and a complex division of labor is simply assumed, just as Freud assumedâor positedâthe 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 goodâright?âand 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 danceâmeaning the group dance, as opposed to the relatively recent, European-derived practice of dancing in couplesâwas 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”âa painfully disturbing conclusion.
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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 timeâa 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 thousandsâor in our time, millionsâof 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 orâwith television, even billionsâof 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.”
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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.”
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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 ritualsâa 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 industrialismâboth of which are fairly recent innovationsâbut 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 subordinatesâpeasants, slaves, women, colonized peopleâthe 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 maenadsâonly 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 ân' 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 peopleâwho 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.”
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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 statusesâof gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rankâand 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 spectaclesâand force. Contemporary civilization, whichâfor all its democratic pretensionsâis 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.