Via BoingBoing comes Paul Saffo’s article on “The Ghost Dances” of the modern world. Using the historical Ghost Dance as a template, Saffo explores the myriad movements rising on all sides of the political and technological spectrum attempting to wrest control of people’s lives and communities from forces that have grown out of local control.

[It’s] 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.

Although I might question the device of an “anthropological shorthand” that generalizes and dehistoricizes a very specific complex of ideas — especially when anthropologists already have a general name for such movements (“revitalization movements”) — I think there is something useful in Saffo’s comparison, notably his recognition that such movements are never about a pure “return to the past” but are, rather, an attempt to “rescue” the past and re-deploy it to create a more satisfying present and future.

The Ghost Dance and it’s political-spiritual cousins are distinctly modern phenomena, in both their goals and their methodologies. As Saffo writes, “Embracing coveted portions of what one opposes in the service of returning an old order is a signature of the Ghost Dance.” Thus we have nuclear technology, the Internet, and the modern transportation system drafted into service in the interest of restoring the social order — even when the desired social order is Muhammad in Medina, the Jerusalem of the Second Temple, pre-contact North America, or even the New Primitivists’ pre-agricultural nomadism. Rather than rejecting modernity outright, these movements often accept the best aspects of modernity (though the definition of which aspects are “best” can vary widely) while rejecting the aspects that minimize individual human dignity (itself a very “modern” idea) or threaten the possibility of community/communion/communitas. That advancing the interests of the individual while protecting the sense of collective identity are often contradictory is only one of many contradictions that not only shape but motivate the modern Ghost Dancer.

The downside of Saffo’s comparison is that it tends to limit our responses. The original Ghost Dance was a response to very real pressures faced by American Indians at the end of the 19th century — yet the implications of the movement were threatening enough to the social order of the day that the Dance was banned and ultimately the movement destroyed, with much new suffering and bloodshed in the process. The labelling of modern reviatalization movements suggests only two avenues of response: either we destroy them, as we did in the late 1800s, or we watch them fade away. Today’s Ghost Dancers have vastly more leverage than the Native Americans of the American frontier — a handful of men with box cutters can embroil the entire world in conflict. The idea that we can destroy every instance of resistance to a growing techno-political world order is foolish — especially when more and more of us are finding ourselves on the other side of the techno-political divide. Without addressing the concerns underlying these movements, it seems unlikely that they will fade away, either — new movements will pop up as other movements run out of steam, because the alternative for most people is simply too grisly to endure for long. So far, the threat posed by the most extreme and most heavily armed of the modern Ghost Dancers has made any consideration of the issues they are responding to seem impossible, even treasonous, making it likely that these movements will continue to exist.

In a Durkheimian sense, though, perhaps the existence of Ghost Dancers is a necessary part of modernity itself, acting as a check on the worst excesses of the modern regime. For the average person in today’s world, these movements form the boundaries of human expression, lighthouses and buoys marking out the rocky coasts and allowing the rest of us to tack a more or less safe route through dangerous waters. Like Durkheim’s suicides, it may be that society produces its own discontents — that they are, indeed, the most modern among us.