Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  What is baffling about this parallel is the apparent lack of any parallel conditions within the societies involved. The Protestant Reformation took place in a Europe already possessed of large cities and teetering on the verge of the industrial revolution. Wahhabism, in contrast, found its first converts in the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, a place still occupied by tribal nomads based around oasis settlements. Capitalism and industrialism, for all their alleged role in the Protestant Reformation, were at best distant rumors in the tiny town of Ad Dir’iyyah, where Wahhab made his base. And while sixteenth-century Europe was beginning to expand into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, eighteenth-century Arabia was a backwater within the Ottoman Empire, which was itself already in decline. Anyone looking for a “materialist” explanation of both Islamic and Protestant puritanism—that is, one based on concrete economic circumstances—can only throw up her hands in despair.

  Possibly there were no common conditions underlying the two “reformations,” Protestant and Islamic. After all, Wahhab was hardly the first puritanical reformer within Islam. The conflict between a cold and legalistic form of Islam, centered on sharia, and the more accessible Sufist tendency goes back many centuries. What distinguished Wahhabism from most earlier Islamic “reform” movements was the patronage of a tribal chief, Muhammad ibn Saud, who transformed it from a theological challenge into an armed campaign. One attraction of Wahhab’s teachings to the Saudi leader was that they justified raids on neighboring tribes, which could be judged as “infidels” according to Wahhab’s rigorous standards. Thus Wahhabism provided a loophole in the Muslim prohibition against attacking fellow Muslims: If they did not accept a purified Islam in the form of Wahhabism, they could be killed—or offered the opportunity to convert. According to one of the best-known historians of Saudi Arabia, “Wahhabism was an ideology of military expansion and raids from the outset,”2 and it spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula at sword point.

  Though perhaps not entirely at sword point. There is one clue suggesting a possible common thread between the religious reform movements in sixteenth-century Europe and eighteenth-century Arabia. According to an Arabic text dating from at least the nineteenth century, it was Wahhab who introduced the use of guns to the Saudi tribe: “They [the Saudi tribe] followed Wahhab in religion and in worldly affairs as in managing wars, interests, and hostilities … and he ordered the people of Dir’iyyah to learn how to shoot guns. He [Wahhab] was the one who obtained for them the guns that they now have.”3 Firearms were not new to Arabia, of course, but until Wahhab, the nomadic Arabians fought largely with swords and bows and arrows. He may have been a traditionalist, aiming to restore a pure and original form of Islam, but he was also a modernizer.

  Clockwork Armies

  Within Europe, guns have been credited with redressing the imbalance of power between mounted aristocrats and the common people. One lowly fellow with a gun could potentially bring down an armored nobleman with a sword, and it was this possibility, in part, that made carnival seem increasingly dangerous to the powerful. But used in war, guns had a very different effect—grinding down the individual soldier to the level of a cog in a giant war machine—and this process drew enthusiastic support from the new puritans of the Protestant Reformation.

  The pre-Reformation, medieval European style of fighting, featuring mounted aristocrats armed with bladed weapons, had always allowed for plenty of downtime among the foot soldiers, much of it devoted to revelry. Guns, which became the weapon of choice in the sixteenth century, required far greater discipline among the rank and file, in part because of the very primitiveness of the available firearms. Since muskets and harquebuses could not be aimed with any precision, they worked best when fired in volleys by a great many men at the same time. And since they took several minutes to reload, the men had to be adept at the process and trained to spend every moment when they were not actually firing preparing to fire again. This was a job not for “warriors” in the old-fashioned, individualistic sense, but for men who should perhaps be considered the first true proletarians—the rigidly disciplined, dully obedient soldiers of the new mass armies. Any discussion of the suppression of carnival in Europe would be incomplete without mentioning the disciplining of Europe’s fighting men, who had to be forcibly restrained from the drinking and carousing that had once enlivened military service for so many reluctant conscripts.

  It was a Calvinist, the Dutch aristocrat Maurice of Orange, who first applied the spirit of Calvinism to the business of war. In the early 1600s, three hundred years before the American efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor transformed factory work by breaking it down into a series of repetitive gestures, Maurice devised a detailed schedule of motions—thirty-two in all—for each soldier to follow while firing, reloading, and firing again.4 His new system required endless practice, marching, and reloading, to the point where the necessary motions were automatic enough to be performed in the stress of battle. But in Maurice’s system, the “drill,” as it came to be known, went well beyond what was necessary for practice; the point was to fill the soldier’s time entirely, and when he was not drilling, he was assigned tasks formerly disdained by fighting men, like digging trenches and constructing fortifications. “Idleness,” as the historian William H. McNeill writes, “was banished from military life. This was a great departure from earlier custom, since waiting for something to happen occupies almost all of a soldier’s time, and when left to their own devices, troops had traditionally escaped boredom by indulging in drink and other sorts of dissipation.”5 As the military historian M. D. Feld observed, “The changes instituted in the Dutch armed forces corresponded strikingly with the outlook expected of a middle-class society,” and he was referring to a middle-class Calvinist society.6

  Another Calvinist, the English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, took the new military discipline a step further, banning outright all the soldier’s usual diversions: drinking, gambling, looting, womanizing, even cursing. War had always been a dangerous and uncomfortable occupation for the common man, but it had also offered a break from routine, a chance to travel and carouse. But Cromwell’s “New Model Army” offered no carnivalesque entertainments, only the effort of functioning as one tiny part of a vast, smooth-running machine. This was a prospect that, however appalling to a fun-loving peasant boy, thrilled Calvinist ideologues, and not only on account of its potential military advantages. “Above all creatures [God] loves soldiers,” according to one English Calvinist preacher, referring to the drilled and disciplined Calvinist type of soldier.7 Even without the threat of war, even for civilians, the drill seemed to Calvinists an admirable use of time. “Abandon your carding, dicing, chambering, wantonness, dalliance, scurrilous discoursing and vain raveling out of time,” urged another preacher, “to frequent these exercises.”8

  The new Calvinist armies were hugely successful. Maurice used his to defeat the Spanish troops occupying Holland; Cromwell won out over the aristocratic Cavaliers, who practiced a non-Puritan form of Protestantism and still fought in the old, disorderly, aristocratic style. Soon monarchs and generals all over the Western world were imposing the drill and the new Calvinist discipline on their own armies, regardless of whether these armies were Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Thus, with the help of reformed and reforming religions, Europe adjusted to the imperatives of gun-based warfare, and the changes have been with us ever since.

  European historians in the Marxist tradition have tended to look to the “means of production” as a determining social force, omitting what the anthropologist Jack Goody terms the “means of destruction.” Thus they are more likely to see the industrial revolution as the change underlying the Protestant Reformation than to consider the role of the military revolution wrought by guns. But gun-based warfare, no less than industrialization, required social discipline on an unprecedented scale—huge numbers of men (and in our own time, women too) trained to obedience and self-denial, and the new Protestantism helped to provide it. W
ahhabism may have served the same function in tribal Arabia, which—thanks to Wahhab himself—was making its own adjustment to gun-based warfare.

  Drilling with Dromedaries

  Was military discipline linked to religious puritanism in the mind of Wahhab or his patron, Muhammad ibn Saud? Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing. What we do know, however, is that Saud was, like Wahhab, a military innovator. According to a Frenchman who had been on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and served as French consul in Aleppo at the time when the Wahhabis invaded Syria:

  It was at Diriyah that Ibn Saud began to realize his designs of conquest, neglecting nothing in order to ensure their success. His soldiers, who were already accustomed to fatigue, became even stronger and more indefatigable through the drilling which he instilled in them. He did away with horses, replacing them with dromedaries. This animal is as swift as the horse, but stronger; nature created it for the desert which would be uninhabitable without it. Ibn Saud ordered that each dromedary should be mounted by two soldiers. He rationed not only the soldiers’ food, but also that of the animals.9

  The reference to “drilling” provides a startling link to the puritan-led military reforms of seventeenth-century Europe. It is unlikely that Saud’s men, who numbered about six thousand, drilled by repetitive marching, as the Europeans did, because they were not foot soldiers but what Europeans would call cavalry. Possibly, the shift from horses to two-man dromedaries was an adaptation to the use of guns that Wahhab insisted on. The guns available at the time—probably muskets—would have been of little use to a single man on horseback: It was hard enough to reload a musket on the ground, much less from the back of a moving animal. But with two men on a dromedary’s back, one could manage the animal while the other devoted himself to the tricky business of shooting. Thus the drilling instituted by Saud may have been practice in shooting and reloading from the back of a moving dromedary.

  But drilling is not just a matter of forcing men to master a particular military technology; its universal goal is to inculcate an iron level of discipline. Saud wanted his men to be “indefatigable”; he even hardened them by limiting their rations. These concerns are entirely consistent with the asceticism and self-denial demanded by puritanical religious reforms. In both the European and the Arabian cases, one real function of religious puritanism was to make fighting men internalize the discipline that the new gun-based mode of fighting required: Not only the generals insisted on sobriety and obedience among their troops; according to the puritanical reformers, so did God.

  By the nineteenth century, military modernization and religious puritanism were clearly linked in other parts of the Muslim world. In 1826, the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II destroyed his own army of janissaries, about one hundred thousand elite foot soldiers, who were resisting military reforms. The janissaries may have been condemned by their record of palace coups, but it is interesting to note that they were also closely associated with a particularly ecstatic stream of Sufism. In Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha, who governed throughout the early nineteenth century, introduced Europeanstyle military reforms along with a wide-ranging attempt to discipline his population. He cracked down on Sufism generally and attempted to outlaw the mulid, a saint’s day festival similar to European carnival. In “modernized,” early-nineteenth-century Egypt, the anthropologist Michael Gilsenan writes, “military parades, marching in new time to the new drum rhythm, were approved, productive and expressive of order and hierarchy; Sufi processions and banners were violently attacked, as they still are, as productive and expressive of precisely the opposite, as well as being denounced by some authorities as un-Islamic.”10

  Could there have been a connection between the repression of festivities and the need for disciplined mass armies in other parts of the world? The Roman Empire, for example, relied on a rigidly drilled infantry, and it would be interesting to know whether the Romans’ intermittent hostility to ecstatic religions could be traced, in any way, to this aspect of the Roman military.

  Then there is the intriguing case of China. Max Weber observed that the Chinese had abandoned their ecstatic traditions very early, so that by the time of large-scale empire, “dances are not to be found—the old war dance had vanished—nor are sexual, musical, or other forms of toxic orgies found.”11 According to Weber, “all orgiastic elements were strictly eliminated” from the state religious cult, which deemed ecstatic rituals “as dangerous as the Roman nobility once considered the cult of Dionysos.”12 It may be relevant that ancient China had undergone its own military revolution, beginning in the seventh century BCE, when foot soldiers armed with crossbows began to replace aristocratic warriors in chariots. Quite possibly—and I leave it to the appropriate historians to explore this further—the crossbow played a role in the culture of ancient China similar to that of the gun in early modern Europe or eighteenth-century Arabia. The project of disciplining large numbers of ordinary men to the repetitive use of an action-at-a-distance weapon—the crossbow or gun—may have required a level of social discipline that is incompatible with traditional festivities and ecstatic rites.

  7

  An Epidemic of Melancholy

  Beginning in England in the seventeenth century, the European world was stricken by what looks, in today’s terms, like an epidemic of depression. The disease attacked both young and old, plunging them into months or years of morbid lethargy and relentless terrors, and seemed—perhaps only because they wrote more and had more written about them—to single out men of accomplishment and genius. The puritan writer John Bunyan, the political leader Oliver Cromwell, the poets Thomas Gray and John Donne, and the playwright and essayist Samuel Johnson are among the earliest and best-known victims. To the medical profession, the illness presented a vexing conundrum, not least because its gravest outcome was suicide. In 1733 Dr. George Cheyne lamented “the late frequency and daily increase of wanton and uncommon self-murders, produced mostly by this distemper,” and speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanization, “have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England.”1 A hundred years later, little had changed: “[Nervous] complaints prevail at the present day,” claimed a contemporary, “to an extent unknown at any former period, or in any other nation.”2

  Samuel Johnson, the intellectually prodigious son of impecunious parents, first fell prey to depression in 1729 at the age of twenty, shortly after being forced to leave Oxford for a lack of funds. According to his friend and biographer James Boswell, himself a victim of depression, Johnson’s “morbid melancholy” began to “afflict him in a dreadful manner” upon his return to his parents’ home.

  He felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.3

  Without a degree or much possibility of a career, he spent hours sitting and staring at the town clock without seeming to notice the time. He took long walks, pondering suicide. But it was not only the prospect of poverty and failure that rendered him vulnerable, because years later, at the height of his success as a writer and popularity as a conversationalist, the illness struck again. “My terrors and perplexities have so much increased,” he wrote in his early fifties, “that I am under great depression … Almighty and merciful Father look down upon my misery with pity.”4

  To the English, the disease was “the English malady,” described in Timothie Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie in the late sixteenth century, and exhaustively analyzed by the Anglican minister Robert Burton in his 1621 classic, The Anatomy of Melancholy. B
ut the rainy northern island was not the only site visited by the disease; all of Europe was afflicted. According to Andrew Solomon, the concern with melancholy originated in Italy and was carried back to England by English tourists.5 It seemed primarily a Spanish problem, however, to the Italian political theorist Giovanni Botero, who observed in 1603 that the men of that country “have more than a bit of melancholy, which makes them severe in manner, restrained and sluggish in their undertakings,” and the problem was rampant in the court of Philip III.6

  By the eighteenth century, melancholy was as much a German disease as an English one,k presenting later historians of that nation with the paradox that “the era of dawning light, the Enlightenment” should also be characterized by “black gall and melancholy persons”—such as the editor Karl Philipp Moritz, who “could sit all day, without any thoughts, scribbling on paper, and could loathe himself for the loss of time, without having the energy to use this time any better.”7 In France, which produced the famous melancholic Jean-Jacques Rousseau,8 the disorder did not become a major literary theme until the mid-nineteenth century, when it afflicted, among others, the poet Charles Baudelaire. From the nineteenth century on, depression figures prominently in the biographies of the notable: the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the German social scientist Max Weber, the American psychologist William James.

  The disease grew increasingly prevalent over the course of the twentieth century, when relatively sound statistics first became available, and this increase cannot be accounted for by a greater willingness on the part of physicians and patients to report it. Rates of schizophrenia, panic disorders, and phobias did not rise at the same time, for example, as they would be expected to if only changes in the reporting of mental illness were at work.9 According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, while ischemic heart disease trails in sixth place.10 Fatalities occur most dramatically through suicide, but even the mild form of depression—called dysthemia and characterized by an inability to experience pleasure—can kill by increasing a person’s vulnerability to serious somatic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Far from being an affliction of the famous and successful, we now know that the disease strikes the poor more often than the rich, and women more commonly than men.