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Book: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Quotes of Book: Dancing in the Streets: A
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  1. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

    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.
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  2. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

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

    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.
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  4. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

    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
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  5. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

    With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.
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  6. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

    In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.
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  7. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Dancing in the Streets: A

    The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.
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