Sociology: An infectious call for a return to the Dionysian principle of celebration
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy By Barbara Ehrenreich Granta, 319pp. £16.99.
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night
Walk along a certain stretch of the south quays in Dublin almost any day and you will come upon a small band of people, young and of varied nationalities, mostly northerners, Germans and Scandinavians and the like, squatting silently on the pavement. Their aspect is a mixture of eagerness, expectancy and vague, wistful melancholy. They will not be the same people every time, but all will share the same sense of purpose. Although they will be dressed in the latest youthful fashions, the expression in their eyes will be ancient, elemental, the same that you would have seen in the eyes of the participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries, of the disciples at the Sermon on the Mount, of the pilgrims at Mecca.
The site is that of the U2 studios, the devotees on the pavement are U2 fans, and they are waiting in hopes of catching a glimpse of Bono.
They come in all seasons, endure all extremes of weather. They will keep to their vigil through whole days, entire nights. They are touching in the nakedness of their need, but also a little frightening; there is the impression that they would sacrifice anything, risk anything, annihilate anything, for the one chance of beholding their saviour in the flesh. Sometimes the neighbours who live next door to the studios will take pity on them and give them a glass of water to slake their thirst or a hot drink to warm them up. One local man of good heart and kindly intent has been known to introduce himself to them as Bono's uncle and sign their autograph books with an illegible scrawl, which is enough to satisfy them and send them happily home to London, Berlin, Yokohama . . .
This is the devotional aspect of fandom; these pavement people are members of the silent orders, the contemplatives. Their noisier brethren, the ecstatics, are to be found in stadia in all corners of the world, waving a myriad arms above their heads, holding aloft the flames of 30,000 cigarette lighters, chanting, shrieking, moaning, dancing. And Barbara Ehrenreich loves them, and believes that their exuberance and joyfulness might yet be the saving of the world.
Ehrenreich is "an acclaimed historian of human behaviour", as the blurb describes her, and Dancing in the Streets is a wonderful book, at once scholarly and easy-going, serious and witty, stylish and polemical. She contends that the pressures of civilisation - or "civilisation", as she will have it - and in particular the Protestant work ethic that is vital for the success of capitalism, have almost destroyed our species' natural inclination to communal celebration, and have driven us into general neurosis. Our repudiation of the primitive in our natures has brought us to a point where, she writes, "the essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, [is] its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world".
ALL IS NOTrestraint and gloom. Ehrenreich is a child of the 1960s - she was surely at Woodstock - and sees in rock'n'roll, and also in what she calls the "carnivalising" of spectator sports, the hope for a return into our midst of the god Dionysus, the seductive instigator of riot, drunkenness, dance and joy.
As one scholar [ Michael Jameson] writes, the god in many ways resembles a certain kind of wandering musician in our own time, one who is also capable of inspiring "hysteria" in his devotees: the "male leader of the pop group, who for all the violence of music, gestures and words is neither traditionally masculine nor yet effeminate. To the established order he may be a threat but not to the adoring young, especially the young women." With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.
Ehrenreich, as well as being an investigative journalist, is a bit of a scholar herself, and while her touch is as light as that of a faun's fingertips upon the pan-pipes, her book is a solid study of the way in which, over the centuries, the brakes were steadily but relentlessly applied to the human propensity to engage, at every opportunity and on the slightest pretext, in a good knees-up. We have, she points out, a "rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another", but "what we lack is any way of describing and understanding the 'love' that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual".
One does baulk somewhat at her benign view of the human collective. Anyone walking through Times Square, or Temple Bar, on a Saturday night might wonder if "love" is quite the word to apply to what large groups of people get up to when they are drunk and in a mood to carouse. And glancing back at the wars and pogroms and "ethnic cleansings" of our time, one could be forgiven for expressing at least a faint reservation as to the benevolence of the group, the crowd, the Volk (although, as Ehrenreich points out, terrifying gatherings such as the Nuremberg rallies were strictly controlled by the organisers, and were entirely spectator, not participatory, events). Ehrenreich is adamant, however, declaring that the "mission" of her book is "to speak seriously of the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation". As she says, disdaining the latter-day witch doctors of the couch and the notepad, human beings alone are "gifted with the kind of love that Freud was unable to imagine: a love, or at least an affinity, holding people together in groups much larger than two".
She traces the history, the declining history, of what in general she dubs "ecstasy", from its archaic roots in the primitive world to such contemporary phenomena as rock concerts, Latin American carnivals, baseball tournaments and World Cup finals. She suggests that dance may have developed out of modes of tribal defence, when our hominid ancestors would gather together to shout, stamp and wave sticks so that predators would be unwilling "to tangle with what appears to be a twenty-foot-long, noisy, multi-legged beast". (In a delightfully dotty footnote she proposes an experimental test of her hypothesis, in which hungry lions or leopards would be put in confrontation with separate sets of human volunteers, some motionless and some jiving, all protected, naturally, by invisible electric fences; there is a benign behaviourist lost somewhere in Ehrenreich.)
ONE OF THEincidental pleasures of the book is its etymological aspect. Like all good scholars, Ehrenreich is ever alive to the fact that not only meaning but also history are tight-woven into words. She reminds us, for instance, that the word "ecstasy" is derived from Greek terms meaning "to stand outside oneself", and that "enthusiasm" comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, "literally, having the god inside oneself - or what many cultures in our own time would call a 'possession trance'." The bulk of her narrative is taken up with her account of how those in power sought to curb such collective trance-like enthusiasm and our need to partake of the ecstatic. She trawls through the annals to show how from the Middle Ages onwards the "nervous elites" withdrew more and more from public festivities, fearing for their dignity upon which they believed so much of their power depended. Along with this fastidious drawing in of the skirts came an increasing distrust and fear of "the crowd" - a fear and distrust that was shown to be well-founded with the eruption of the French Revolution.
In a fascinating chapter, "Jesus and Dionysus", Ehrenreich points to the similarities between the two figures:
Strikingly, both are associated with wine: Dionysus first brought it to humankind; Jesus could make it out of water. Each was purported to be the son of a great father-god - Zeus or the Hebrew god Yahweh - and a mortal mother. Neither was an ascetic - Jesus loved his wine and meat - but both were apparently asexual or at least lacking a regular female consort. Both were healers - Jesus directly, Dionysus through participation in his rites - and both were miracle workers, and possibly, in Jesus's case, a magician.
The struggle for dominance between these two divinities was long and fierce: as late as AD 691 the Christian Council of Constantinople was inveighing against the worship of Dionysus. But as Ehrenreich, who approves of "Jesus's sweet and spontaneous form of socialism", sardonically observes, "the early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus, too".
It is the "repressive impulses of the Church" - or churches - that provoke Ehrenreich's most withering scorn; as she remarks, "nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople's finding their own way into the presence of the gods". She is particularly scathing of Calvinism, with its condemnation of "all forms of festive behaviour, including leisure activities of any kind", even, on occasion, football (and we know why Methodists will not make love standing up - because if they were seen it might be thought they were dancing). The sociologist Max Weber, who suffered through a bleak religious upbringing - the most urgent task of Calvinism, he wrote, was "the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment" - saw a direct link between the doctrines of Calvin and the triumph of capitalism; it was Weber, after all, who coined the phrase "Protestant work ethic". As Ehrenreich writes,
The immense tragedy for Europeans . . . and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They would congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European "progress", they had done something perhaps far more damaging: they had completed the demonisation of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help - the mind-preserving, life-saving techniques of ecstasy.
EHRENREICH IS GREATLYcheered by the joyfulness and life-enhancing hedonism of what she calls the "rock revolution" and carnivalised sporting events, which have led "young people in the heart of the postfestive Western world [to] rebel against the immobility required of the 'audience' and, against all expectation, begin to revive the ancient tradition of ecstatic festivity". However, she is angered by the way in which big business has moved in on the revels of the young. "There is no better way to subvert a revolution," she writes grimly, "than to enlist it in the service of moneymaking."
Elvis Presley's Colonel Parker was surely one of the more egregious and greasily plausible latter-day manifestations of the trickster Mephistopheles.
Yet Ehrenreich, stalwart baby-boomer that she is, refuses to despair, and closes with a heartfelt rallying call:
The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, colour, feasting and dance?
Yes, but please remember, there are people trying to sleep in here.
John Banville's most recent book, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, isChristine Falls (Picador).