Or, Why the Old Myths and Magic Don’t Work Anymore
I originally published this in Buffalo Report on 1 March 2005. It’s about the collapse of the symbol systems that made the nation a coherent political body. As such, it remains relevant.
In 1889 a young Paiute Indian named Wovoka fell ill with a fever and, in his delirium, visited heaven. While there he talked with God and saw that all the Indians who had died were now young and happy doing the things they had done before the White Man had come upon them. News of the new messiah spread rapidly among the remnants of the Indian tribes. If they danced the right dances, sang the right songs, and wore their consecrated Ghost Shirts, not only would they be immune to the White Man’s bullets, but their loved ones would return to them, the White Man would vanish from the face of the earth, and the buffalo would once again be plentiful. Their fervor and belief were not rewarded and the Ghost Dance, as this last wave of revivals came to be known, soon passed into history.
That, however, is not the Ghost Dancing that concerns me. I mention it only to provide some comparative perspective. Anthropologists and historians have told that story hundreds if not thousands of times. It is the story of a people’s last desperate attempt to retain symbolic control over their world. Such revivals occur when a way of life has become impossible, for whatever reason, but the people themselves continue to live. In desperation they resort to magic to remake the world in terms they understand.
The Ghost Dancing that concerns me is not that of Stone Age people displaced and conquered by iron-mongering and coal-burning industrialists. My concern is the Ghost Dancing that has become a major force in contemporary American cultural and political life. Widespread belief in the impending Rapture – when all good Christians will be taken to heaven and all unbelievers consigned to hell – is the most obvious manifestation of the contemporary Ghost Dance. But it is hardly the only manifestation. Refusal to accept evidence of global warning is another symptom, as is refusal to attend to ground intelligence in conducting the war and reconstruction in Iraq.
For that matter, belief that the so-called Singularity is at hand – when computers will surpass humans in intelligence – is Ghost Dancing as well. This type of Ghost Dancing may seem rather geekish and harmless, for there aren’t all that many of these particular believers. Belief in the Singularity, however, is close kin to continued belief in the feasibility of the Star Wars anti-missile defense systems, in the Pentagon’s desire to develop a highly robotized military where the machines do the riskiest jobs, and in a more general belief that technology will fix everything.
Truth and Traditions 