It’s sad but Dionysian orgies ain’ t what they used to be

David Aaronovitch
The Times
April 24, 2007

Let me be careful. I bear the scars on my psyche for having dared in the past to suggest to readers that life may not be significantly worse under Labour than it was during the Wars of the Roses or the reign of Bloody Mary. I was an unlovable combination, it was implied, of Pollyanna and Peter Mandelson — a privileged journalist somehow insulated against the gothic impossibility of current social conditions.

So a fortnight ago, when there was a substantial opinion survey on happiness after the Blair decade, I thought I’d let it pass unremarked. It was, in any case, a strange affair. Asked whether Britain was a “happier place to live in” now than in 1997, only 8 per cent thought it was, while 58 per cent thought it wasn’t. But 22 per cent thought that it was a better place for women to live in, 35 per cent a better place for disabled people, 51 per cent for ethnic minorities and a bona 61 per cent thought that it was better for gay people. The suggestion here seemed to be that “they” were getting better treatment than “us”.

I’ve written before that objective measurements hardly explain such feelings. We are richer than we were, live longer, have higher disposable income, better access to healthcare, better educational results, and face lower crime rates. Nor is it true, as is currently being suggested by Apple in its recent advertising campaign, that we’re working longer hours than anyone else in Europe. The 2006-07 British Social Attitudes Survey remarks that there is “some evidence that individual working hours have actually gone down in the UK”. From 1997 to 2005 the percentage of men working more than 50 hours a week declined from 22 per cent to 16 per cent. But it makes no difference. From the high culture marks of the broadsheet books pages to the demotic throwaways of TV sports coverage, one thing universally agreed is that we are miserable.

One writer who has taken the long view of unhappiness is the American Barbara Ehrenreich, who this month published Dancing in the Streets, subtitled A History of Collective Joy. It is Ehrenreich’s contention that one significant factor in modern depression has been the suppression, over time, of communal rituals and festivals. And, in particular, the suppression of those events in which human beings collectively gave themselves over to ecstasy. That’s the feeling, not the pill. Although, thinking about it, it could be the pill.

We got rid of the rites of the Bacchae, the Dionysian orgies, the Slavic pagan romps in the woods, the Carnival of Fools, the rowdy church singers, and replaced them with spectator events in which the role of the crowd was limited to buying peanuts and chanting “Go, Red Sox!” The ending of ecstasy coincided, suggests Ehrenreich, with the “discovery of the inner self”, the rise of the mirror and an epidemic of depression. In so doing we lost communion, for “the prehistoric ritual dancer . . . did not believe in her gods; she knew them, because, at the height of group ecstasy, they filled her with their presence”. Quite how Ehrenreich knows this is another question.

Puritans, whether modern ones or Roman ones, could always point at the harm that such festivities might cause. Today the casualty of a rave might come to in a lockup minus his dignity and his watch. When the Anatolian cult of Cybele came to Rome in the 2nd century BC, its wild celebrations were marked — at their height — by members of the priesthood cutting off their own testicles. You can imagine waking up in the morning, asking yourself whether last night’s revels had really happened, and then looking down.

One of the interesting aspects to Ehrenreich’s argument is that it fits into a pattern of contentions that our problem is a loss of human authenticity; an idea that there was a prelapsarian past when we were in better contact with our real selves and, therefore, with God. It is doubtful, however, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who might agree that capitalism has been bad for the soul, would accept that the answer was more pleasure through ecstatic dancing, drug taking, boozing, fornicating and fighting.

If it were possible to apply Ehrenreich’s analysis to the here and now, we should expect to find that those countries most influenced by Calvinism would be the most depressed and unhappy. And what we find is the exact opposite. Last week the faculty of economics at Cambridge published its European Happiness Index, in which 20,000 people in 15 countries were asked to rate their overall happiness on a scale of one to ten.

Naturally the results were headlined as showing that Britain had only come ninth and that our happiness had dropped slightly. Equally naturally it wasn’t pointed out that Britain did best out of the large European countries, with Italy, France and Germany joining Greece and Portugal in the bottom five. The happiest places though, were Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and the Netherlands. The former MP Martin Bell was quoted as pointing to the alleged abuse of the honours system as one reason for the claimed reduction in trust in Britain that might underpin the fall in happiness.

This was hard to square with the details. Most of the fall happened in Scotland, Wales, northern and south-western England, but in London, East Anglia and the East Midlands there was no drop. Are people really more worried about cash-for-peerages in Carnforth than in Cambridge? Unsurprisingly people took what they liked about places such as Denmark (good childcare, low immigration, excellent cycling facilities) and decided that these were the crucial factors. Some Danes themselves were less impressed, arguing that the culture was simply one in which complaint was less respectable than in Southern Europe.

Anyway, what do you do about it? The Cambridge researchers themselves noted that “happier people tended to have plenty of friends and acquaintances, as well as at least one very close friend, or a partner” and then suggested that “policymakers” framed social policies to help folk to be happier. I am not sure that a national friend-finding initiative headed by Gordon Brown, or even David Cameron, is going to find favour with the British public.

There is one thing. We need more revelries. We need less anti-fun Nimbyism and more bonfire nights, street parties, open-air samba classes, Olympic Gameses, London Marathons, local carnivals, park concerts, Demis Roussos and raves.