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Hey Dude, Do You Collectively Effervesce?
One Saturday morning, long ago, I was walking the dog down a Venice Beach street and an old battered car pulled up next to me. In the driver’s seat, a tattooed guy with a burning cigarette between his fingers. In the passenger’s seat, a down-and-out looking woman who rolled down the window and asked, “Hey, do you party?”
As I said, it was about 10AM on a Saturday, and I was walking the dog and carrying a just-filled plastic bag — if you get my drift — so it was pretty clear I wasn’t in their target demo, for whatever it was they were targeting. But now, according to NYMagazine, we know that the urge to party is bedrock human behavior:
What contemporary Americans refer to as “partying” is of a piece with what French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” According to Durhkeim (and so many Snapchat stories), when people start moving in a shared, directed experience, a current of excitement starts pulsing through them.
Yeah, right. But there’s more:
In a tribal or religious setting, University of Connecticut anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas tells Science of Us, a shaman would have carried people through ecstatic experiences, but today that’s the role of the DJ (or rock band or soccer team, depending on your enthusiasm). Xygalatas has added empirical weight to collective effervescence. For a 2011 paper, Xygalatas and his colleagues went to a Greek village where fire-walking has been practiced for centuries. He rigged biomarker trackers to village people on the night of a fire-walking festival, where the emperor-saint Constantine is said to possess fire-walkers as they dance across hot coals. The ritual was “emotionally aligning” for the entire community, as indicated by heart rates. Viewers shared heart-rate synchrony with the fire-walkers, and the people who were socially closer with the fire-walkers — relatives and friends — had greater synchrony. That’s why, Xygalatas speculates, if you spend the weekend at a music festival, the acts that you identify with will sprinkle you with the fairy dust of collective effervescence while the ones that aren’t part of your identity might leave you disconnected, unsynchronized.
I guess nothing is worse than being unsynchronized.
But it does suggest — aside from whatever “partying” my curbside friends were engaged in — that it’s fun to be part of a big, loud, cheering group, aligned with a particular thing. Which may be why supporters of presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Gary Johnson (and Bernie Sanders, during the primaries) seem so pumped up and thrilled, and why they look a little too intense and transported to folks watching from the low-impact and lean-back perspective of the sofa.
At a festival or concert or dance party, you get a release from everyday routine and conventional expectations about behavior. To an outsider, she says, this is counterintuitive: The thump thump thump of electronic music may appear “mundanely repetitive,” but that misses the point. “Every night out can generate a good story,” she says, “maybe even the new love of your life!” After all, the music literally syncs people together.
Sounds like a political rally in 2016. For those of us who don’t, um, party.
Published in General
“To party”, verb intransitive, means to engage in the interplay of sex, drugs, and cash, converting between these currencies as the situation allows.
The exchange rate is quite steep for the rube.
I dunno. I’ve always preferred enjoying life to having fun.
The physical and mental changes experienced by any type of crowd in such a setting have long given thoughtful human beings pause, even if they didn’t have the science at their fingertips to describe it. It’s why, in the past, societies attempted to channel experiences that solicit this behavior into religious rituals or civic festivals that would both express it and give it order and meaning as part of something larger (or, in the case of some of our more zealous and sober forebears, why it was outlawed entirely).
Our society does not attempt to order or moderate this powerful experience–at least, not very strictly. Sure, there are informal mores at a rave and customs at a sports stadium, and Monday’s obligations place restraints on Sunday’s activities (at least among more functional members of society). Our democratic, flat society has many opportunities to experience such a thing, but it has little to say about it. What is it for? Is it good?
We are not the first to observe that as our politics become more authoritarian, our amusements become more libertine.
I too am content to remain out of sync with the prevailing culture. I will only collectively effervesce with my family and close friends!
This is what I kept thinking about—the Nuremberg Rallies being (Godwin has me firmly in his thrall) my go-to example. The point/problem is that it is a neurological, physiological phenomenon. Even if some may be less susceptible to some sources of excitement than others, this is hardwired. There are obvious Darwinian advantages—the tribe that effervesces together stays together—-but it makes us so manipulable, so prone to demagoguery of various stripes. As Emerson summed it up, “a man will worship something.”
This would be one of the many arguments I would make to, say, Sam Harris: it’s not enough to disprove (if you want to) or disdain God. There is always another “God,” and the chances are very good it will be no better. Now that I think of it, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are utopian: they believe in a perfectible humanity, with “perfection” being defined as perfectly reasonable. The tragic view of humanity tells us we’re stuck with unreasoned effervescence and might as well make the best of it (as Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity have been attempting to do, with fair success, for lo’ these many millennia…).
This.
Is this the same thing, that, in more prosaic times, we called mob psychology?
Yes, indeed. Introversion is a virtue.
That sounds like a description of Hell to me.
Sidearm Sartre.
I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the invitation to “party” in Rob’s story would have ended up being something like this.
Me, too, but note that according to C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, hell is when people keep moving further away from each other rather than figure out how to get along. Maybe it’s just another picture of the same thing.
No.
Completely irrelevant, but when my daughters were learning to use the toilet, my husband used to sing “My girl wants to potty all the time, potty all the time potty all the ti-i-ime…”
Cracked me up.
Reminds me of a more youthful Sean Penn, before he became a hardcore knuckleheaded Lefty.
I’m a Canadian conservative Christian.
I don’t effervesce.
Ever.
You didn’t know Yer in I.T.? I don’t think it takes being a programmer to figure that out.
I first heard this usage of “party” in the Hallowed Halls of Microsoft, so I know it must be both Universal and Correct. </sarcasm>