Dancing in the Streets Read Free Page A

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.
    The 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 “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 postwar America and generated an entire