Keeping Together in Time by William H McNeill

...Though never mentioning Durkheim, McNeill here affirms the thesis of his most important work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which Durkheim argues that religious beliefs are inseparable from, and derive much of their capacity for creating social solidarity from, shared ritual practice...

...Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.of California, Berkeley...

...It is just here that I found an article in the May/June 1996 Harvard Magazine that helps in understanding McNeill's thesis...

...Even knowing that, I was not quite prepared to learn, as I did in the recent spate of publicity about him, that not only was Colin Powell raised an Episcopalian, but that his service as an altar boy prepared him psychologically for a career in the army...

...McNeill does a great deal to clarify this otherwise disconcerting conjuncture...

...His comments on the use of rhythmic motion, derived in part from military drill but in part from calisthenics, in the creation of modern nationalism, culminating in Hitler's mass demonstrations (inspired in part by the mass socialist parades on May Day, which in turn were inspired in part by Corpus Christi celebrations) are suggestive of why moving together in time has fallen in disrepute in much of the Western world...

...Close-order drill, MacNeill's starting point, turns out to have emerged in only a few rather special circumstances, although dancing in preparation for or celebration after military exploits is widespread in simple societies...

...And here I want to push just a bit beyond Hoy...

...When I point out in a talk that the two institutions in which Americans currently express the greatest confidence are the military and the church, this news is usually received with nervous laughter...

...Not muscular bonding, but critical reason...

...Noting that none of the other primates seem to have the capacity to keep together in time, he believes that the earliest humans, probably well before fully developed language, were able to establish extended bonds of solidarity through the capacity for shared rhythmic movement...

...When we kneel or stand or sing together we are potentially providing the coherence without which critical reason will surely tear us to pieces...

...It is in this latter genre that he has produced the book being here reviewed, nothing less than a survey of the historical impact of shared rhythmic motion from the paleolithic to the present, an impact that he finds surprisingly significant...

...Here are two institutions that provide the stability of shared rhythms, (relatively) impervious to the disturbing chatter of critical reason...

...This extended solidarity enabled Homo erec-tus more than a million years ago to enlarge its territory to include most of the old world, signaling the emergence of a very different sort of primate indeed...

...Yet McNeill is probably right in arguing that the virtual elimination of solidary rural communities, which provided most of the urban as well as rural population of the world until the last few generations, creates a major deficiency in all modern societies leading to the breakdown of even elementary social cohesion...

...At Harvard, beside the excitement and the freedom, he found isolation and despair, the lack of the "enabling hierarchies" that could provide support for those on the verge of a free fall into a personal abyss...

...His principal work, The Rise of the West, put comparative history on the map...

...McNeill's starting point is frankly autobiographical: how did it happen that as a draftee in 1941, while enduring basic training in a camp on the barren plains of Texas, he actually enjoyed the hours spent in close-order drill...

...Intensive drill in the Greek phalanx or trireme provided the social cohesion and sense of self-respect that reinforced citizenship in the ancient polis, but in early modern Europe its meaning was more ambiguous, sometimes reinforcing citizenship, sometimes absolutism...

...It may be somewhat unnerving for readers of this magazine that the two places where what McNeill calls "muscular bonding" have been most central have been religion and the military...

...The failure of the Vietnam War was not a failure of the rhythms and rituals of the army but the failure of a political idea...

...He puts in perspective something that has often been noticed, namely that the liturgical movements of the more advantaged members of society are apt to be relatively sedate, whereas those of the dispossessed can become energetic to the point of inducing trance...

...Here again there are ambiguities...

...Virtually all small communities of which we have knowledge, whether tribal or peasant, have been united on significant occasions by community-wide singing and dancing, usually more or less explicitly religious in content...

...From this small beginning McNeill draws large conclusions...

...Where did that failure of a political idea come from...

...Can the triumph of critical reason avoid self-destruction without coming to terms with the deep prelinguistic nature of human existence...

...In subsequent treatises, The Pursuit of Power and Plagues and Peoples, he has shown how changes in military technology and the spread of infectious disease have altered the course of history...

...Yet he also found something missing that he had taken for granted at West Point: "The army's sublime work is done in concert, individuals so synchronized in their individual efforts that they seemed graced....Few watch soldiers on parade or at work without feeling the seductive rhythms of their concerted efforts...

...Not West Point, but Harvard...

...McNeill does not at all want to minimize the importance of the achievement of full linguisticality, subsequent to the appearance of Homo sapiens, which apparently lies behind the cultural explosion that began some forty thousand years ago and has not stopped since, but he believes that the use of fully grammatical language added to but did not displace the powerful social significance of shared rhythmic motion...

...But do we really have a choice...

...In recent years he has turned to extended essays to raise very large questions about the shape of history, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History and The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community being examples...

...And he recalled an experience he had had in Vietnam where he had come in by helicopter after a successful battle and observed what the soldiers were doing: My work had been done long before the battle, and satisfaction came to me privately as I stood watching those soldiers recover through the saving rituals they performed together—burying the dead, policing the battlefield, stacking ammunition, burning leftover powder bags, hauling trash, shaving, drinking coffee, washing, talking as they restored order and looked out for one another's welfare...

...Robert M. Bellah William McNeill has become something of a national treasure...

...McNeill gives the interesting example of the strongly-bonded citizen armies of the French Revolution that then turned out to be manipulable elements in the establishment of Napoleon's autocracy...

...If keeping together in time can be put to terrible use, as it certainly has many times, so can and has critical reason...

...McNeill points out that what we today usually mean by "dancing," namely paired cross-gender performances with some degree of sexual intent, is, when viewed historically, aberrant to the point of being pathological...

...They were bound up in the throngs of community, and that communal satisfaction was its own pure reward...

...And that of course is just what makes so many secular intellectuals nervous about both of them...

...But McNeill moves beyond Durkheim in noting that in complex societies divided by social class muscular bonding may be the medium through which discontented and oppressed groups can gain the solidarity necessary for challenging the existing social order, using early prophetism in Israel as an example...

...His answer in his admittedly somewhat speculative history of keeping together in time (after all who bothered much to write about such things) is that "moving our muscles rhythmically and giving voice consolidate group solidarity by altering human feelings...

...Pat C. Hoy II, the author of the article "Soldiers and Scholars," tells of coming to Harvard to teach writing after retiring from many years of teaching at West Point...

...But he cannot but feel that his memory is "tainted" by a war that will never end because we cannot assimilate it to any idea that would make moral sense of it...

...Again the proximity of Episcopal liturgy and military life, while making a certain amount of sense, was not something I would spontaneously have imagined...

...In Cambridge he found "intoxicating freedom" and the excitement of intense intellectual exchange between students and faculty...

...Perhaps this brings us back to why the military and the church are the two most highly respected institutions in America today...

...We are not faced here with an either/or: we need to find the right way to bring them together...