By
Barbara Ehrenreich
Perhaps
the best kept political secret of our time is that politics, as a democratic
undertaking, can be not only “fun,” in the entertaining sense, but
profoundly uplifting, even ecstatic. My generation had a glimpse of this in May
1968 and at other points in that decade, when strangers embraced in the streets
and the impossible briefly seemed within reach. Insurgencies again and again
engender such moments of transcendence and hope. People danced in the streets of
Havana when Batista fled in 1959; 30 years later, they danced on the Berlin wall
when East Germany succumbed to the democracy movement. There was revelry in
Republican Spain in the 1930s, and “drunken anarchy” in St. Petersburg in
1917. In moments such as these, politics overflows the constraints of parties,
committees, elections, and legislation and becomes a kind of festival.
Today,
no one imagines that the political process might be a source of transcendent
passion. Throughout the world, voter participation is declining, even in those
places, like the former Communist countries, where multi-party elections should
still be expected to possess the charm of novelty. Nothing underscores the
emotional desiccation of the democratic process more than the American political
conventions, which reached such a depth of tedium in 1996 that the television
networks threatened not to return in 2000.
On
the rare occasions when we encounter it today, political passion is likely to
seem exotic, anachronistic—a remnant of some heroic past. A writer for
Harper’s, for example, attended a concert in Madrid last year commemorating
the Lincoln Brigade, and reported: “... the place is on fire. The passion is
palpable, a heavy intoxicating aroma you practically taste as you inhale... When
Labordeta... starts into his ‘Cancion de la Libertad’ (‘Song of
Freedom’), they [the audience] go nuts. They sing along, bouncing the roof of
the stadium on its struts...Thousands of young fists pump the air. Everywhere
people are weeping... I’m having trouble not weeping myself, though for what
I’m not sure—perhaps because political passion like this seems irretrievably
lost in my life.”
We
don’t have much of a vocabulary for this sort of experience, certainly not in
English anyway. There are rich and nuanced ways of talking about the love
between two people, ranging from simple sexual attraction to ecstatic communion
and undying mutual commitment, but there are few words to describe the love, if
it is that, that can unite thousands of people at a time. “Community” is the
word we are most likely to reach for, but in the mouths of politically centrist
“communitarians” (of whom Hillary Clinton is the best-known representative)
it has become another code for the kind of moral conformity that conservative
leaders are always promising to impose. Besides, great moments of political
euphoria are not celebrations of pre-existing communities, but the creation of
community out of masses of people who are, for the most, part, formerly unknown
to each other. In the revolutionary crowd, old hierarchies and hostilities
dissolve. Black and white marched together in the American movements of the
1960s; Catholics and Huguenots embraced in the French Revolution. United by a
common goal and emboldened by the strength of numbers, we “fall in love”
with total strangers.
“Love”
is in fact that word that participants have used again and again to describe the
transports of the revolutionary experience. The novelist Flaubert, who
participated in the French Revolution of 1848, has a character caught up in
“the magnetism of the enthusiastic crowd...he shivered in an exhalation of
immense love, of supreme and universal tenderness, as if the heart of all
mankind beat in his chest.” Very similarly, a witness to the Paris Commune of
1871 wrote: “Embrace me, comrade, who shares my gray hair! And you, little
one...come to me as well!...It seems to me that the very soul of the crowd now
fills and expands my chest. Oh! If only death could get me, if only a bullet
could kill me in this radiance of resurrection.”
The
boundaries of the ego dissolve, one’s very body expands, in imagination, to
contain the multitude. These are ephemeral feelings, but they can be preserved
through art or preserved and amplified through ritual. In 1790, for example, the
first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was celebrated throughout
France with festivities that recreated the thrill of the original insurgency.
The historian Jules Michelet reported that in the town of Saint-Andèol, “the
people...rushed into each other’s arms, and joining hands, an immense
farandole [line dance], comprising everybody, without exception, spread
throughout the town, into the fields, across the mountains of Ardéche, and
towards the meadows of the Rhone; the wine flowed in the streets...”
The
sciences of human behavior have little to tell us about the experience of
collective ecstasy. In the realm of psychology, Freud took his cues from the
conservative French writer Gustave Le Bon, who viewed the behavior of the
revolutionary crowd as dangerous and deranged. Freud acknowledged that the
collective joy of the crowd was of a singular intensity: “men’s emotions are
stirred... to a pitch that they seldom or never attain under other conditions;
and it is a pleasurable experience...” Nevertheless, he proceeded to squeeze
these extraordinary feelings into the familiar Oedipal triangle of the nuclear
family: Members of the crowd were displaying “an extreme passion for
authority,” “a thirst for obedience”—to some leader who was only a
stand-in for “the dreaded primal father.” The fact that insurgent crowds
are, at least at the level of conscious experience, almost always engaged in the
overthrow of traditional authorities—kings and dictators did not impress the
great patriarch of Western psychiatry.
Contemporary
sociology has little more to offer. In reaction to the reactionary perspective
of Le Bon, American sociologists have tended to ignore the emotional aspects of
social movements except in the case of racist and fascist groups, where the
emotions in question are usually hatred and fear. As one dissenter from this
tradition, the American sociologist John Lofland, wrote in the early 1980s:
“Historically, sociological scholars of collective behavior addressed crowd
and mass phenomena that were dominated by one or another of three kinds of
intense emotional arousal: fear, hostility, and joy.… As the decades have gone
by, the third element of this trinity—joy—has been gradually dropped out.…
Who now seriously speaks of ‘ecstatic crowds,’ ‘social epidemics,’
‘fevers,’ ‘religious hysterias,’ ‘passionate enthusiasms,’
‘frantic and disheveled dances’...?”
Instead,
progressive political movements are analyzed as entirely rational undertakings
in which people, motivated by ideologies, guided by “organizational
factors,” and resisted by “social structures,” pursue their strictly
instrumental goals. Meanwhile, the study of collective joy has been marginalized
to “crazes” and “fads.”
In
the absence of scholarly insight, our knowledge of collective excitement is a
little like the Victorian understanding of sex. Victorian adults understood that
human bodies could be coupled in ways that were, however unmentionable, often
conducive to procreation. Many, if not most, of them must also have known, from
their own experiences, that such couplings could be intensely pleasurable. But
there was no way of talking about the joys of sex; the word “orgasm,” for
example, did not enter popular usage until the mid-20th century. Similarly
today: we know that large numbers of people can come together in ways that seem
to us, as spectators, exciting and even intoxicating; and we know this because
television is always bringing us riots, revolutions, and the “hysterias” of
sports and music fans. But we have no vocabulary for the feelings that may
inspire and be engendered by such events. Even those of us whose political
identities were forged in great moments of insurgency remain, by and large,
tongue-tied about the emotional depths of our involvement. We can talk about
“the issues,” but not about the ecstasies.
Yet
there is, in the European tradition alone, a “hidden history” of collective
ecstasies waiting to be unearthed and put in a politically comprehensible
context. Long before there were anything we would recognize as “political”
movements, there were ecstatic movements of the oppressed, usually employing the
language and symbols of religion. The ancient Greeks, for example, were familiar
since Homer’s time with the phenomenon of maenadism, in which worshippers of
Dionysos, almost exclusively women, periodically abandoned their domestic tasks
to stream up into the mountains, where they drank wine, danced ecstatically into
the night, and sometimes, it is reported, caught live animals, ripped them apart
and ate them raw. It is difficult, of course, to determine how much the accounts
of maenadism were distorted by the prejudices and fears of male contemporaries.
But the scholarly consensus today seems to be that the maenads represented an
actual historical cult with great appeal to women—who were, of course,
otherwise largely excluded from public life. If they could not literally rebel,
they could at least enjoy the emotional release of these mock rebellions
conducted in the guise of pious, though unorthodox, observances.
Europe
experienced similar, though less ritualized, outbreaks, with the “dance
manias” of the 14th and 15th centuries. Beginning in the wake of the Black
Death that decimated Europe in the 1370s, troops of people—almost entirely
drawn from the poorest classes—would “...form[ed] circles hand in hand, and
appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continue[d] dancing...for
hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a
state of exhaustion.”
Priests
were powerless to stop the dancers, who sometimes asserted that their dancing
honored some particular saint, and sometimes that it was the result of a curse
imposed in punishment for sin. Since the 19th century, the conventional
scholarly explanation is that the dance manias must have been induced by some
chemical poison, perhaps ergot, which is related to LSD and can contaminate
crops of rye. But such explanations do not account for the well-known
contagiousness of the manias, to which participants were readily recruited from
bystanders in the streets. A better explanation may be that the manias
represented a kind of proto-rebellion sparked in part by the Church’s campaign
to suppress the ancient tradition of dancing in churchyards and even within
churches themselves. The ecstatic ring-dance—occasionally spilling over into
what the clergy saw as wanton revelry—had been a part of the tradition of
Christian worship since at least the 3rd century, and part of pagan traditions
before that. Barred, over time, from their traditional venues, the dancers took
to the streets, where they often expressed their defiance openly by menacing or
attacking priests.
Throughout
the late middle ages, the Catholic Church bit by bit extirpated not only
religious dances and millenarian sects, but the festive high-jinks associated
with the Feast of Fools, in which priests themselves had once played a leading
role. Squeezed out of religious settings, collective ecstasy could find
expression only in the more secular setting of the carnival. In some ways, the
European carnival of the late middle ages and early modern period represented an
institutionalized form of dancing mania. People feasted, drank, and danced for
days on end, usually in circles, lines, or groups of three. In addition,
carnivals often featured sporting competitions, dramatic performances, elaborate
costuming, and sometimes such un-Christian activities as animal sacrifice and
worship of pagan goddesses. What amazes historians today is the “truly
prodigious” amount of time devoted to such festivities: 16th century French
peasants could expect to spend days amounting to a total of three months of the
year, or an average of one day out of four, in carnival revelry. (In northern
France, the annual celebration of a parish church’s founding would alone take
about eight days.) In 17th century Spain, a contemporary estimated that a total
of five months of the year were devoted to saints and observed with festivals.
It
was the dissident Soviet writer Mikhail Bakhtin who rescued carnival from the
historical margins, pointing out that it represented a ritualized rebellion
against authority in all forms. In carnival, the poor created a “utopian realm
of community, freedom, equality, and abundance,” marked by the inversion of
all normal hierarchies: Men might costume themselves as women and vice versa,
lay people dressed as clergy, kings, and priests were symbolically mocked.
Interestingly, the same themes of ecstatic abandon and defiance of hierarchy
appear in the carnival tradition worldwide, even in places apparently untouched
by European influence. At the beginning of the 18th century, a Dutch visitor
found Africans on the Coast of Guinea celebrating: “... a Feast of eight days
accompanied with all manner of Singing, Skipping, Dancing, Mirth, and Jollity;
in which time a perfect lampooning liberty is allowed, and Scandal so highly
exalted, that they may freely say of all Faults, Villainies, and Frauds of their
Superiors, as well as Inferiours without punishment so much as the least
interruption.”
As
Bakhtin wrote “...Festive folk laughter...means the defeat of power, of
earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and
restricts”—at least for the duration of the festivities. Some scholars have
challenged Bakhtin’s interpretation, pointing out that, far from being a true
rebellion, “carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a
permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and
relatively ineffectual as revolutionary work of art.” But carnival, considered
as a popular art form, increasingly verged into outright rebellion as the modern
era wore on. In 16th century France, festivities at Maras and Romans became
cover for armed insurrections of the urban poor against the nobility. Similarly,
19th century Caribbean carnivals provided the setting for numerous slave
rebellions. As the British scholars Stallybrass and White have written: “It is
in fact striking how frequently violent social clashes apparently
‘coincided’ with carnival....to call it a ‘coincidence’ of social revolt
and carnival is deeply misleading, for...it was only in the late 18th and early
19th centuries—and then only in certain areas—that one can reasonably talk
of popular politics dissociated from the carnivalesque at all.”
The
first recognizably political mass revolutions in the West—as opposed to the
occasional carnivalesque excesses of earlier centuries—were the American and
French revolutions of the late 18th century. In these, for the first time, we
find the emergence of a hierarchy of revolutionary leadership, organized
debates, and what the sociologists would finally regard as rational goals. But
these early revolutions, deadly earnest as they were, also drew on the carnival
tradition: American rebels danced around “liberty trees” derived from the
maypoles that were so central to British and French folk festivities. French
villagers used actual maypoles to serve as a “sort of visual tocsin bell”
signaling the outbreak of revolt. There is “no doubt,” according to the
French historian Mona Ozouf, of “the privileged link between the maypole and
collective joy,” whether of the “political” or merely festive variety. In
1791, for example, farmers in Perigord set up maypoles in the public squares,
attacked symbols of feudal power, and ripped the pews out of churches “both
with some violence,” it was reported to the National Assembly in Paris, “and
in the effusion of their joy.” So it is with some justice that Henri Lefebvre,
the intellectual father of the French situationist movement of the 1960s, could
proclaim, “The revolutions of the past were, indeed, festivals—cruel, yes,
but then is there not something cruel, wild and violent in festivals?” Just
as, we might add, there is so often something festive about revolutions.
Certainly
the authorities had begun to see something dangerous and even potentially
seditious about popular festivities well before the 18th century “age of
revolution.” Beginning in the 16th century, authorities throughout Europe had
campaigned more or less systematically to suppress all forms of lower-class
public entertainment, usually in the name of morality. Sports like football,
which in medieval times had involved hundreds of players at a time, were banned,
public drunkenness outlawed, even the wearing of masks prohibited. Traditional
carnivals were denied their licenses to operate; dancing was attacked as lewd.
“In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century...there were
literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to
eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life...everywhere,
against the periodic revival of local festivity and occasional reversals, a
fundamental ritual order of western culture came under attack—its feasting,
violence, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were
subject to surveillance and repressive control.”
Underlying
this repression was the fundamental shift toward industrial capitalism. The old
calendar of festivities may have suited the seasonal rhythms of agricultural
life, but had no place in a world ruled, for the first time, by the minute-hand
of the clock. In the new, bourgeois scheme of things exemplified by emergent
Protestantism, time was money and self-denial the cardinal virtue. Merchant and
man-servant, banker and weaver alike, were expected to forego immediate
gratifications for a life of disciplined labor and to reserve their sole day of
rest, Sunday, for activities no more boisterous than hymn-singing. It was this
centuries-long project of repression, historian Norbert Elias observed, that led
to the Freudian notion that “civilization” could be achieved only at the
price of spontaneity and ecstatic abandon. In other words, one could no longer
look to other people as a possible source of pleasure and empowerment—they had
become competitors or, worse, censors, on the watch for any sign of moral
slippage. The “self” was now conceived as a sort of thick-walled kernel,
insulated from all other selves, and to which the delirious self-loss of the
festivity or festive revolt could only seem terrifying, like a kind of death.
From
the start, the puritanical ethos of the emerging middle class put its stamp on
that least puritanical of undertakings—revolution. The apparently spontaneous,
festive revolts of the peasantry and urban poor horrified the intellectual
leaders of the French revolution, who undertook, like the clergy before them, to
suppress carnivals and all other “indecent forms familiar from the ancien
regime.” Revolutionary officials sought to replace “the ill-planned
festival, the secret, nocturnal festivals, the noisy festival, the revelry, the
mingling of age groups, classes, and sexes, the orgy” with bland spectacles
dedicated, for example, to “Reason.” With Lenin, of course, the
revolutionary tradition diverges absolutely from the older traditions of popular
festivity. He wrote in fact of his gratitude to the capitalists for having
disciplined the working classes into a kind of “army,” because the modern,
Marxist-Leninist revolution was to be a kind of war. The leading actor in this
grim new version of political change was the “professional revolutionary,”
and his only passion, a cold, ascetic, drive-to-power.
In
place of the suppressed communal pleasures of the medieval world, 20th century
cultures offered two alternatives: the privatized pleasure of individual
consumption, and the vicarious pleasure of mass spectacles. The idea that the
deepest satisfactions could be found only in a private setting, among one’s
immediate family members, arose in the 19th century, when the tradition of
carnival had been almost destroyed. A British preacher of the time urged that
happiness “...does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in
capering around a May-pole. Happiness is a fireside thing. It is a thing of
grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more removed from
the riot of mere merriment.”
Accordingly,
holidays like Christmas, which had once been celebrated in England with public
dancing, feasting, drinking, and masquerading, retreated indoors to become
cloyingly domesticated “fireside things.” With the emergence of a mass
consumer culture in the 1920s, private enjoyment—of meals, vacations, and
“entertainment”—decisively replaced the shared feasts and collectively
engendered excitement of traditional festivities. Sexual love became a public
obsession and the theme of every popular song and movie in part because it was
the only remaining occasion for the ecstatic self-loss once found in the festive
crowd.
At
the same time, participatory festivals and sports steadily gave way to mass
spectacles: Festivals, fairs, and carnivals were replaced by official parades,
with the urban crowd serving only as audience. Popular sports became spectator
sports, requiring no physical effort and offering no physical satisfactions. But
the greatest spectacles of the 20th century have been militaristic in theme: May
Day parades, Nuremberg rallies, and, most recently, a televised air war.
Nationalism, along with its innocent sidekick sports fandom, provides our only
routinely acceptable experience of submergence in some greater human unity, with
the role of the patriot, like that of the fan, being only to cheer on cue. The
engaged participant—dancing, miming, mocking the authorities—has been
replaced by “the passive spectator, the onlooker silent and amazed.”
The
same passivity extends now to the realm of politics, which, it is often noted,
has become another “spectator sport,” and not usually a very gripping one at
that. Even the most conscientious citizen finds her role reduced to
“consuming” the political news, usually in solitude, and casting an
occasional vote. If the elimination of participatory recreations is lamentable,
the end of participatory politics is truly tragic: For what we know as the
democratic process exists only because of revolutionary movements of the last
200 years, which in turn drew on a much older, “pre-political” tradition of
lower class (and female) festivity. We have lost not only an ancient kind of
pleasure, but the spirit of collective creativity which gave birth to democracy
in the first place.
There
are still Leninists among us—though they are today more likely to be
conservatives than communists—who would argue that politics is best left to a
specialized elite, far removed from the passions of ordinary people. But to move
beyond the status quo, toward a genuine democratic renewal, we need social
movements that allow for, and actively generate, the collective excitement of
large numbers of people. Skilled labor and community organizers understand this,
and attempt to build experiences of solidarity and empowerment into their
organizing drives. Art, too, has a role to play in reviving the human capacity
for joyous connection with others and the creative powers latent in those lost
connections.
But passion and art cannot be reduced to mere instruments for the achievement of political goals. Even desperately poor people such as French peasants and workers in the 18th and 19th centuries and Mayan peasants in our own time have fought for far more than the redress of economic grievances. The slogan of striking American mill workers in the early 20th century was “bread and roses”—embracing both the means to live and the transcendent experiences that give life meaning. As Lefebvre wrote on the eve of 1968, the “final clause of the revolutionary plan...is the Festival rediscovered and magnified by overcoming the conflict between everyday life and festivity...” Which is to say that collective joy is not only a side effect of egalitarian political movements; it must ultimately be their goal: To institutionalize the festival, with its disorderly creativity and collective euphoria, as the principle of everyday life.