Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

  It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self: What seems to most concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose “society.” Mirrors, for example, don’t show us our “selves,” only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people’s judgments—imagined or real—would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure: Johnson’s forced exit from Oxford, Cowper’s approaching exam. In the nineteenth century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, “severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace.”38 This is not autonomy but dependency: The emerging “self” defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.

  If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depression—anxiety—was surely another. It takes effort, as well as a great deal of watchfulness, to second-guess other people’s reactions and plot one’s words and gestures accordingly. For the scheming courtier, the striving burgher, and the ambitious lawyer or cleric of early modern Europe, the “self” they discovered is perhaps best described as an awareness of this ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one’s behavior to the expectations of others. Play in this context comes to have a demanding new meaning, unconnected to pleasure, as in “playing a role.” No wonder bourgeois life becomes privatized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with bedrooms and studies to withdraw to, where, for a few hours a day, the effort can be abandoned, the mask set aside.

  The Tormented Soul

  But we cannot grasp the full psychological impact of this “mutation in human nature” in purely secular terms. Four hundred—even two hundred—years ago, most people would have interpreted their feelings of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating self as “soul”; the ever-watchful judgmental gaze of others as “God”; and melancholy as “the gnawing fear of eternal damnation.” Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God.

  Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism, which by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had spread beyond such hardcore Calvinist denominations as Presbyterianism and the Reformed Church of Holland to infect, in varying degrees, Lutheranism, Anglicism, and even, through the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for anomie: If you felt isolated, persecuted, and possibly damned, this was because you actually were. Robert Burton understood the role of Calvinism in promoting melancholy, singling out religious melancholy as an especially virulent form of the disease, and his book can be read, at one level, as a polemic against that harsh, puritanical religion.

  The main matter which terrifies and torments most that are troubled in mind is the enormity of their offences, the intolerable burthen of their sins, God’s heavy wrath and displeasure so deeply apprehended that they account themselves … already damned … This furious curiosity, needless speculation, fruitless meditation about election, reprobation, free will, grace … torment still, and crucify the souls of too many, and set all the world together by the ears.39

  With Calvinism, the sense of isolation purportedly rampant in early modern Europe is ratcheted up to an intolerable degree. Christianity requires that every soul ultimately confront God alone, at least at the moment of death, but the Calvinist soul wanders forever in solitude. Friends may turn out to be false—enemies and competitors in disguise—as illustrated by what Weber calls “the strikingly frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warnings against any trust in the aid and friendship of men.”40 Even family deserves no lasting loyalty. In that great Puritan epic, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian flees his home in the “City of Destruction,” despite the fact that “his Wife and Children … began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, ‘Life Life Eternal Life.’ So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the Plain.”41 Bunyan’s own inner domain, to judge from his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, was rarely visited by another human or brightened by a glimpse of the physical world. In over eighty claustrophobic pages recounting alternating fits of despair and moments of hope, one finds few pronouns other than I or animate beings other than Satan and God. When Bunyan does mention some fellow humans at one point, it is to express his disillusionment about these people, whom he had taken as reliable fellow Calvinists: “[They were] much distressed and cast down when they met with outward losses, as of husband, wife, child, etc. Lord, thought I, what a do is here about such little things as these!”42

  One of Max Weber’s greatest insights was to see the compatibility between Calvinism and capitalism, or, we might just as well say, to sense the terrible sense of psychic isolation—“the unprecedented inner loneliness”43—that a competitive, sink-or-swim economy imposed. Just as the soul struggled along its solitary path toward damnation or grace, the self toiled and schemed along a parallel trajectory in the material world. But if that trajectory was to slope upward toward wealth or merely security, much more was required than a cold indifference to others. One had to engage in an endless project of self-discipline and self-denial, deferring all gratification, except perhaps for the pleasure of watching one’s assets mount. “The most urgent task” of Calvinism, Weber wrote, was “the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment.”44 A late-eighteenth-century Scottish medical handbook confirms this view of Calvinism, advising that

  many persons of a religious turn of mind behave as if they thought it a crime to be cheerful. They imagine the whole of religion consists in certain mortifications, or denying themselves the smallest indulgence, even of the most innocent amusements. A perpetual gloom hangs over their countenances, while the deepest melancholy preys upon their minds. At length the fairest prospects vanish, every thing puts on a dismal appearance, and those very objects which ought to give delight, afford nothing but disgust.—Life itself becomes a burthen, and the unhappy wretch, persuaded that no evil can equal what he feels, often puts an end to his miserable existence. 45

  John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquish—“I was a full year before I could quite leave it”46—but he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In Pilgrim’s Progress, the Bunyan-like hero Christian finds that any time he lets down his guard and experiences a moment of rest or even just diminished anxiety, he has lost ground or been sorely taken advantage of. The only thing Christian encounters resembling festivity, “Vanity Fair,” turns out to be a death trap for the virtuous, the place where Christian’s high-minded companion, Faithful, is seized, tortured, and finally burned to death by the wanton fairgoers. Carnival, in other words, is the portal to hell, just as pleasure in any form—sexual, gustatory, convivial—is the devil’s snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.

  Oliver Cromwell experienced a psychological crisis very similar to Bunyan’s. Born to a Puritan family in the rural English gentry, he enjoyed a youth marked by “wilnesses and follies” as well as “love of horseplay and of practical jokes in something less than the best of taste.”47 At the age of twenty-eight, however, he fell into a condition diagnosed by a physician as valde melancholicus, meaning “extreme melancholy,” apparently occasioned by reflection on his youthful sins. As he later wrote to
a cousin, echoing Bunyan: “You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners.”48 After what we might now call a “born-again” experience, Cromwell abandoned the worst of his sins—whatever they were—though, unlike Bunyan, he continued to enjoy music and drink ale and wine.

  Whether Weber succeeded in establishing a seamless link between Calvinism and capitalism is open to question, but his own life provides vivid evidence of the connection between Calvinism and depression. A thoroughly secular thinker himself, Weber was raised by a Calvinist mother to see pleasure in almost any form as a danger to be fended off through ceaseless self-discipline and work. His biographer and wife, Marianne, wrote of his using work to “rescue” himself from the “danger of becoming comfortable.” Of his student life in the late 1800s, she reported, “He continues the rigid work discipline, regulates his life by the clock, divides the daily routine into exact sections for the various subjects, saves in his way, by feeding himself evenings in his room with a pound of raw chopped beef and four fried eggs.”49 A few months after their marriage, he wrote to her, “I can’t risk allowing the present composure—which I enjoy with the feeling of a really new happiness—to be transformed into relaxation.”50

  In his mid-thirties, at a time of enviable academic success, Weber experienced a total breakdown, lasting for months and marked by back pain, trembling hands, insomnia, feelings of worthlessness and despair, and—perhaps most tragically for him—a complete inability to work. Another biographer tried mightily to fit Weber’s problems into a Freudian mold, attributing the breakdown to tensions between Weber and his rather easygoing and self-indulgent father.51 But Robert Burton would no doubt have blamed the mother’s Calvinism and diagnosed Weber, whatever his personal beliefs, as another victim of religious melancholy.

  We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression—suicide—and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, Durkheim found Protestants in the nineteenth century—not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion—about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics, and this was not just a matter of regional difference, since the same ratio prevailed in regions in which adherents of the two religions were intermixed.52 More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late sixteenth century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose. Nor did the suicides reflect a failure to adjust to the Calvinist regime, with its many prohibitions on gambling, dancing, and sexual misbehavior. The historian R. Po-Chia Hsia reports that the plurality of the dead received postmortem praise as “honorable, God-fearing, bible-reading, diligent, and quiet Christians in life.” In fact a majority—61 percent—came from families “that constituted the backbone of the Calvinist regime.”53

  The Lost Cure

  So if we are looking for a common source of depression, on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities, on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanization and the rise of a competitive, marketbased economy favored a more anxious and isolated sort of person—potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalizing depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. All this comes together in a man like John Bunyan, a victim of severe depression—or so we would say in secular language—and a fierce opponent, in his years as a preacher, of traditional festivities, not to mention pleasure in any form. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change,” both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernization. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

  Certainly, in some instances, the destruction of carnival left a residue of sadness and regret. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet bemoaned a childhood devoid of festivals: “My childhood never blossomed in the open air, in the warm atmosphere of an amiable crowd, where the emotion of each individual is increased a hundredfold by the emotion felt by all.”54 The writer Jean Rhys recalled her childhood envy, in around 1900, of the lower-class celebrants she was forbidden to join.

  The three days before Lent were carnival in Roseau. We couldn’t dress up or join in but we could watch from the open window and not through the jalousies. There were gaily masked crowds with a band. Listening, I would give up anything, anything to be able to dance like that, the life surged up to us sitting well-behaved, looking on.55

  There is no evidence, though, of an innate human need for communal pleasure, which, if thwarted, leads to depression or other mental diseases. Obviously, millions of people forgo such pleasures without developing clinically recognized disorders, and it would trivialize the torments of a man like a Bunyan, for example, to ascribe them to his abandonment of dancing and games. But I am not the first to suggest that the suppression of festivities could have played a role in the etiology of the nervous disorders that so plagued European culture from the early modern era on. Speaking of hysteria, which had been viewed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the female equivalent of melancholy, the historians Stallybrass and White note that “carnival debris spills out of the mouths of those terrified Viennese women in Freud’s ‘Studies on Hysteria.’ ‘Don’t you hear the horses stamping in the circus?’ Frau Emmy von N. implores Freud at a moment of particularly abject horror.”56 Freud was so determined to find a purely sexual source for mental illness that he was not prepared to pick up on such clues. “In one way or another,” Stallybrass and White remark, “Freud’s patients can be seen as enacting desperate ritual fragments from a festive tradition, the self-exclusion from which had been one of the identifying features of their social class.”57

  If the destruction of festivities did not actually cause depression, it may still be that, in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. Robert Burton suggested many cures for melancholy—study and exercise, for example—but he returned again and again to the same prescription: “Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company … a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsover else may procure mirth.”58 He acknowledged the ongoing attack on “Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays” by “some severe Catos,” referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: “I … was ever of that mind, those May-games, Wakes, and Whitsun-Ales, &c., if they be not at unseasonable hours, may justly be permitted. Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bag-pipes, &c … , play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best.”59 In his ideal world, “none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings … like that Sacred Festival amongst the Persians, those Saturnalia in Rome.”60 His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the sixteenth century. While the disruptively “mad” were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be “refreshed & comforted” and “gladded with instruments of musick.”61

  A little over a century after Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, another English writer, Richard Browne, echoed his prescription, backing it up with a scientific (for the time) view of the workings of the human “machine.” Singing and dancing could cure melancholy, he proposed, by stirring up the “secretions.” Thanks, he said, to “the prevailing Charms of Musick, etc. that atten
d it, (without which Dancing would be insipid) the Mind is fill’d with gay enlivening Ideas, the Spirits flow with Vigour and Activity through the whole Machine.”62 But if such traditional pleasures were under attack in Burton’s time, they seemed to be on their way to extinction in Browne’s: “Thus we may see what a vast Influence Singing has over the Mind of Man, and with Pleasure reflect on its joyful Consequences, and at the same time be amaz’d that it should be a Diversion or Exercise so little practis’d, since the Advantages that may be reap’d from it are so very numerous.” 63 Reflecting a more puritanical era, Browne recommended no “Saturnalia”—only regular doses of dancing “in a due and regular time,” preferably “an Hour or more at a convenient time after every Meal.”64

  And a century later, even Adam Smith, the great prophet of capitalism, was advocating festivities and art as a means of relieving melancholy.

  The state, by encouraging, that is by giving liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing … would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm.65

  Burton, Browne, and Smith were not the only ones to propose festivity as a cure for melancholy, and there is reason to believe that—whether through guesswork, nostalgia, or personal experience—they were on to something important. I know of no attempts in our own time to use festive behavior as treatment for depression, if such an experiment is even thinkable in a modern clinical setting. There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasures—ranging from simple festivities to ecstatic rituals—have served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression. Almost two thousand years ago, the Greek musicologist Aristides Quintilianus observed, “This is the purpose of Bacchic [Dionysian] initiation, that the depressive anxiety [ptoiesis] of less educated people, produced by their state of life, or some misfortune, be cleared away through the melodies and dances of the ritual in a joyful and playful way.”66 Similarly, a fifteenth-century Italian writer—Marsilio Ficino—who was himself a depressive, recommended exercise, alterations of diet, and music.67