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Notes -
Yes, I know, I’ve read Plato as well. I remember rolling my eyes and audibly groaning at the passage where he implores the state to regulate the musical modes people are allowed to listen to, such that music can only be used for “pro-social” ends.
Absolutely untrue. We have examples of hedonistic philosophy as far back as the Epic Of Gilgamesh; the alewife Siduri offers the advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night… These alone are the concern of men.” In Ancient Greece, Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene founded a whole philosophical school of explicit hedonism. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were arguing about the particulars of egoist hedonism 200 years ago.
Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy? I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology. People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun, and of doing things spontaneously without needing to have all social action coordinated by authorities optimizing toward the “greater good”.
Again: When and by whom?
It’s so ironic, because what’s one of the most common conservative critiques of rationalist materialism? “You just want to reduce all human affairs into a systematizable spreadsheet. Your worldview leaves no room for organic human experience. You want every human action and utterance to have a quantifiable rationalistically-legible purpose, such that humans become mere cogs in a machine.” Yet to me, this is precisely what you are doing, and claiming that all the great Christian and/or Western civilizations of old were exactly like this! Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?
Why didn’t you think about it instead of “rolling your eyes and groaning audibly”? This doesn’t mean anything to me. My dog also rolls her eyes and sometimes groans and her reasoning is mediocre.
You have misinterpreted the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s an epic, which commemorates the deeds of a heroic man who meets a variety of figures and obstacles. The very existence of the Epic is a rebuke against hedonic philosophy. Siduri is a young woman who keeps wine, both symbolic of vanity. Gilgamesh argues against Siduri and moves on. The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.
Dances were not spontaneous in European history. They were organized, the dance routines themselves were orderly, they were scheduled on a calendar, and there were rules about gender intermingling. The only people I see dancing spontaneously in joy are homeless people, schizophrenics, and characters in Hollywood movies. Even today dancing is not spontaneous. You plan to attend an event in which you dance, and you conform to the dancing tradition of the group — this occurs even if you’re a member of the Crips!
blinks
People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.
“Spontaneity” is a late 20th century meme. But joy is a real thing, and it’s telling that we no longer speak in terms of joy today but fun. Joy is a deeper pleasure than fun. We wouldn’t say that a person who spontaneously binge drinks experiences “joy”, or the person who stands in a crowded bar jumping up and down. People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.
I never claimed that the author(s)/compiler(s) of the Epic agree with Siduri. I am saying that her existence in the text very clearly demonstrates that there were in fact people at that time who did espouse hedonism. Your claim was that hedonism is “a recent phenomenon”. Yet I have provided you with what I consider very strong evidence that it is not, in fact, recent. (And how convenient for you that you received to even give a cursory look at the other examples I provided.)
Again, they are very much not irrelevant if your claim is that fun and hedonism are a recent phenomenon. If in fact people who are the exact opposite of “recent” can be shown to have fun, your argument falls apart.
When I read Tacitus’ account of the Germanic peoples, I see a great deal of spontaneity and unstructured play/fun. You don’t have to think this is a good or admirable way to live - I think there are a lot of very unsavory things about the lifestyle he imputes to them - but to flatly state that it didn’t exist strikes me as a highly tendentious claim.
Yeah no, this is a textbook example of joyless thinking, and it makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually experienced what normal people would think of as joyful.
Look, I agree with you that people should be temperate in their indulgences! I agree that the life of a heroin addict merits scorn! To be entirely ruled by one’s passions and incapable of distinguishing between the appropriate decorum in different scenarios is indeed beastly and unbecoming. However, everybody needs to be capable of letting loose sometimes. Everybody needs moments that are unstructured, unplanned, and not directed toward rationally-legible ends. I would not wish to live in a purely “Apollonian” civilization shorn of any appreciation for simple pleasures.
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