Dancing in the Streets

In an interview on Happiness

On to your last book, Dancing in The Streets.

This is one of the most original and interesting books I’ve read in the last five years. Barbara Ehrenreich had written a book on war and got intrigued by the rituals and the group cohesion that results from war. So she wrote her next book on this human capacity and even need for group cohesion. What she found is that just about every society, at the time of Western contact, had some way of altering their bodies, and dancing around a fire or totemic object to some sort of rhythmic beat, music or a drum. Almost every traditional society had ways of using motion and music to bind themselves together and to achieve states of collective ecstasy. Europeans were generally disgusted by this, and tried to stamp it out as best they could. She shows how Christianity used to be a danced religion, but in the middle ages that got stamped out too. And what we’re left with is this rather dry and puritanical fear of ecstasy and loss of control.

The reason I have found this book so wise is that I am interested in the possibility that human beings are products of group level selection. That’s the idea that we evolved in part by groups competing with other groups. I’ve come to believe that we have a variety of mechanisms in our minds that allow us to temporarily become like bees in a hive, and these experiences of collective merger are among our most prized and important experiences. Ehrenreich’s book gives a full account, looking at the history, the anthropology and the psychology, of why this is true.

When you read this book, you feel as though you have discovered additional rooms in your mind, or in your heart, that are almost never used. It helps explain things like the rave phenomenon, and it can help explain silly things like line dances – why we like to move in synchrony so much.

But aren’t we moving further away from this, just sitting behind our computers all day long?

Yes – but most likely we will soon find ways to move in synchrony through our computers. One of Ehrenreich’s points is that there is an eternal battle between Apollo and Dionysus – as Nietzsche put it – the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has gotten the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.