Dancing in the Streets Quotes

“The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.40”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“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 dance - meaning the group dance, as opposed to the relative recent, European - derived practice of dancing in couples - was 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" - a painfully disturbing conclusion.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“The historian Michael Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for the kind of ascetic, single-minded, self-denying personality that Calvinism sought to inculcate, and certainly some of the successful revolutionaries of the West would seem to fill the bill. As we have seen, the English revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist himself, railed perpetually against the festive inclinations of his troops. The Jacobin leader Robespierre despised disorderly gatherings, including “any group in which there is a tumult”—a hard thing to avoid during the French Revolution, one might think.73 His fellow revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just described the ideal “revolutionary man” in terms that would have been acceptable to any Puritan: “inflexible, but sensible; he is frugal; he is simple … honorable, he is sober, but not mawkish.”74 Lenin inveighed against “slovenliness … carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality” as well as “dissoluteness in sexual life,”75 seeing himself as a “manager” and “controller” as well as a leader.76 For men like Robespierre and Lenin, the central revolutionary rite was the meeting—experienced in a sitting position, requiring no form of participation other than an occasional speech, and conducted according to strict rules of procedure. Dancing, singing, trances—these could only be distractions from the weighty business at hand.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“In the at least three-thousand-year-old struggle between Pentheus and Dionysus— between popes and dancing peasants, between Puritans and carnival-goers, between missionaries and the practitioners of indigenous ecstatic danced religions — Pentheus 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 joy—other people, including strangers—no longer holds much appeal.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to the dance.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“Ecstatic rituals build group cohesion.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“Festivities serve an ancient function of building group unity among the participants.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but 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.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“Costuming serves different, even opposite, functions for different people. For most, the wearing of team colors allows a fan to blend in with a mass of other similarly clad fans; it would be unwise to flout the color coding by inadvertently wearing the opponent's colors while sitting in a section of the bleachers occupied by home team fans. But for others, costuming - and in some cases, uncostuming, as with the Yalies who run naked through the stadium at the annual Harvard-Yale game - is a valid, some might say exhibitionist, bid for attention.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“(…) people do not freely and affirmatively search for pleasure; rather, they are “driven” by cravings that resemble pain.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy