The Ghost Dances

[Dave Monroe]

More than half a century ago, economist Joseph
Schumpeter described technology’s impact as a process
of “creative destruction.” That understates what is
afoot today. Innovations of the past few decades have
transformed our world. Familiar landmarks are gone,
replaced by an unrelen.... The result is an age of
technological anxiety even as we count on technology’s
gifts to deliver us to new horizons.

Inventors, themselves, harbor doubts.... This
divergence between the optimists and pessimists causes
some to rush pell-mell toward the past while their
opposites race toward the future.

Another of Schumpeter’s generation, British physicist
and author C. P. Snow, warned against the growing
divide between the “Two Cultures” of science and the
humanities. If only it were so simple. Two cultures
have been replaced by a forest of intellectual
stovepipes in which knowledge in one’s narrow field is
so vast and mastery so time-consuming that experts
have little time to comprehend adjacent fields, much
less the full sweep of scientific discovery.

If experts are confounded, pity the public. A large
percentage globally still consider technology to be
magic, in the literal sense. Superstition competes
with reason .... In a strange and ironic twist of
history, we inflict on ourselves the same wrenching
change visited on other cultures as they came into
contact with western culture and its innovations over
the past few centuries. And our reaction today is
little different from how many of those unsuspecting
cultures responded. We engage in the “Ghost Dance,” a
painful and contradictory accommodation that at once
reaches back to grasp disappearing cultural norms
while simultaneously rejecting and embracing
disruptive alien novelties.

The Ghost Dance has recurred frequently in human
history, but the term has its origins close to
California. By the late 1800s, a decades-long assault
of European values and technology, not to mention
forced relocation, poverty, and disease had taken
their toll on Native Americans across the west. Many
tribes were at or near collapse when on New Year’s Day
1889, a Walker River Paiute mystic named Wovoka had a
vision. Wovoka foresaw a new age in which the white
interlopers would vanish and the natives would reclaim
a rejuvenated world and be rejoined by their
ancestors. Wovoka preached that this new world would
arrive sooner if believers would engage in moral
conduct, peaceful behavior, and practice a ritual
round-dance that came to be called the Ghost Dance.

Word of Wovoka’s prophecies electrified the western
tribes. Native delegations visited Wovoka and carried
his prophecies back home. But each community
interpreted the message in its own way. The
long-suffering Sioux concluded that the ritual of the
dance would accelerate the imminent destruction of the
white man and that wearing special ghost shirts
(likely inspired by the ritual garb worn by their
Mormon neighbors) would protect the Sioux against
white men’s bullets. Uncomprehending government agents
noted the rise of the Sioux Ghost Dance with alarm.
This culminated in the death of Sitting Bull and the
1890 massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota. White agents across the West suppressed the
Ghost Dance rituals and when Wovoka’s prophecies
failed to come to pass, the disappointment only
accelerated the collapse of native cultures. By 1900,
the Native American Ghost Dance was all but forgotten.

This dark history has made the Ghost Dance an
anthropological shorthand for any millennial movement
preaching a rejection of alien novelties and a return
to traditional ways. The Ghost Dance is very much
alive today. The global rise of religious
fundamentalism is pure Ghost Dance .... The current
opposition to evolutionary theory is an indelible
example of the Ghost Dancing phenomenon....

Embracing coveted portions of what one opposes in the
service of returning an old order is a signature of
the Ghost Dance. New Guinea is home to many Ghost
Dance episodes in the form of 20th century “cargo
cults,” movements that rejected the ways of the
European strangers but coveted their cargo, the
seemingly magical tools and trinkets the white men
bore with them....

Iranian fundamentalists see no conflict in nurturing
an aggressive nuclear program even as they rail
against the corrosive effects of western ideas and
technologies. And since the mid-1990s, fundamentalist
Christian ranchers in Texas have been working with
Jewish fundamentalists to establish a herd of red
heifers as a breeding population in Israel. In their
belief, until a red heifer is born in the Holy Land
and its ashes used to purify the faithful on the
Temple Mount, the Armageddon that Biblical
fundamentalists hope for cannot occur. Despite their
fundamentalism, they have eagerly embraced the most
modern of technologies, including artificial
insemination, in the service of their eschatological
cause.

These dramatic examples belie the fact that the Ghost
Dance isn’t danced merely in Madrassahs, or
fundamentalist churches, but throughout the Global
Village, from American churches to Shanghai malls to
halls of power in Washington D.C. and capitals around
the world. It was Armageddon-obsessed Christians who
helped elect George W. Bush. Prominent Christian
pundits as well as some in the Pentagon have cast the
Iraqi War as a holy war of biblical prophesy. The
“strict constructionism” of American constitutional
conservatives is a political Ghost Dance. Elsewhere,
political uncertainty leads to other nostalgic looks
back. Communism seemed discredited in the ’90s, but
after a decade of corruption and widening divergence
between rich and poor in the former Soviet Republics,
a small but vocal minority advocates returning to the
old order.

It is not just the past-lovers who embrace the Ghost
Dance, for the Ghost Dance often exhibits itself as an
utter rejection of the old in favor of leaping into
appealing but unknown new worlds. Techno--theoretic
“extropians’’—believers in an unbounded technological
future—argue that technology is not moving fast
enough....

[...]

In every historical instance of the Ghost Dance, the
common animus is uncontrolled and uncontrollable
change imposed from the outside. Our modern Ghost
Dance has no outsiders; we wreak the change on
ourselves. Our modern wonders overwhelm us not with
alien values; but with a vast and unnerving choice of
our own creation as we are delivered to a horizon of
terrifying freedom. We fear change, but we fear making
the wrong choice even more. The temptation is to Ghost
Dance the choices away. This is the appeal of
religious fundamentalism, a strategy to arbitrarily
restrict one’s options and outsource the choosing to
an infallible higher authority. Young Muslim men are
assaulted by a media blizzard of western images in
their homes and neighborhoods and markets. Alternately
lured and repelled by modernity’s siren song, they
flee first to their mosques, then to the training
camps where they take up the Ghost Dance.

The Ghost Dance has often been equated with the death
rattle of a culture. But it can also be its rebirth.
Wovoka’s vision still quietly survives in many native
communities. Others are dancing anew. A short distance
from Wovoka’s Walker Valley grave is the Black Rock
Desert home to “Burning Man,” the annual Ghost Dance
of artists and contemplators whose work often
incorporates the very technologies creating the
changes their art and essays so eloquently speak
against.

Burning Man is a California invention, the latest
metaphor in a long tradition of cultural innovations
inspired by the cycles of creative destruction that
have swept this state since the Gold Rush. First we
invent our technologies; then we use them to reinvent
ourselves. Just as we build and export technologies,
California also exports its share of cultural
responses to technology’s challenges. Remember the
Summer of Love? It started here and went global the
same summer we put a man on the moon.

As a theater of both condemnation and approbation,
Burning Man is pure Ghost Dance. It is a collective
act of diplomacy to reconcile the future with the
past. But, viewed only as an isolated annual event, it
is still only theater, providing inspiration but not
salvation. In other forms, the Ghost Dance occurs
everywhere on the planet at the same time.

We are now locked in a race against the Manichaean
Ghost Dancers bent on unwinding modern society. An
alternative Ghost Dance is key to the globe’s
survival. The world needs another California export
now. It must overcome our technological anxieties to
bridge hope and despair. Whether it is a dance of life
or a dance to stave off annihilation doesn’t matter;
we must join in a new Ghost Dance now.

http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/September_2005/The_Ghost_Dances.asp


		
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