http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/September_2005/
The_Ghost_Dances.asp
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 unrelenting stream of novel weirdisms—from off-shoring to phishing
to pharming, from life extension to cyborgs, and even glow-in-the
dark genetically-modified bunnies. 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. Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill
Joy ’79 worried enough to write in 2000 that powerful new
technologies emerging from the industries he helped build threatened
to make the human species obsolete. Others such as inventor Ray
Kurzweil anticipate a breathtakingly utopian world in which
technology confers godlike powers on mankind. 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cultures have been replaced by a forest of intellectual stovepipes in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 as we struggle to comprehend the
vast changes unleashed by our technological mind children. 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, be it Islamic fundamentalists pining for a return to the
Caliphate, Jewish fundamentalists battling moderate secularism, or
Christian fundamentalists preaching an imminent Second Coming. The
current opposition to evolutionary theory is an indelible example of
the Ghost Dancing phenomenon. From this opposition has arisen
“creation science,” a deeply contradictory belief system that
attempts to use scientific method to discredit scientific theory to
prove the literal truth of the Biblical version of creation.
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. One cult, the Mambu, concluded
that the foreign cargo was in fact made for the Mambu by their
ancestors in a nearby volcano and stolen by the white interlopers.
Attempting to set things right, the Mambu and other New Guinea cargo
cults copied European garb, built replicas of airplanes, and imitated
European customs, including the quintessentially English ritual of
high tea.
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. While some ghost
dancers desperately want to put on the brakes, these technological
believers are convinced that redemption can be achieved only by
stepping on the gas and fleeing into the future.
Some of technology’s faithful have already made their flight
arrangements. Cryonics enthusiasts arrange to have their bodies
chilled in liquid nitrogen at the moment of death to preserve them
for resuscitation when future medical technologies can return them to
full health. Some opt to have only their heads preserved on the
assumption that their consciousness eventually will be uploaded into
a successor of today’s computers.
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.
Paul Saffo is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo
Alto. His essays
have appeared in Fortune, The Harvard Business Review, The New York
Times,
Newsweek and Wired. He comes from a den of Golden Bears that includes
his
mother and an aunt.
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