Meaningful Calendar Years: Dancing, Mostly

Given my recent reflections on secular life and its relation to religion, I began thinking about the parallels between dancing and religion. One of my earlier posts was Alain de Botton’s talk at TED Edinburgh on secular religion (watch it http://rethinkmundane.blogspot.com/2012/02/alain-de-botton-atheism-20.html) and certain aspects of religion that secular people can learn from. An idea I’ve been thinking about is a Secular ‘Liturgical’ calendar. The idea is that a secular ‘religion’ would have a calendar that directed thought towards various important topics or ideas at points throughout the year. What kinds of festivals would a secular religion that values inquiry, rational thought, and humanism have? I don’t have an answer, but I’d like to pursue this line of thought with someone.

But this brought me to dancing, specifically swing and blues dancing, and how our dance calendars can be like liturgical calendars. I have weekly meetings with my dance club, something like ‘worship’ where we all gather together to dance. We have weekly lessons that meet outside of the larger community togetherness time (sort of like Bible study). And we have pilgrimages. We travel; at least the more devout of us do, to other cities, sometimes other countries (Herrang Dance Camp is like our Mecca http://www.herrang.com/) to see other dancers in other dance halls, sometimes repeatedly, year after year. It becomes tradition to go certain places at certain times of year.

There are even orthodoxies and unorthodoxies in swing dance. For Lindy Hop, there are straight Lindy Hoppers…and then there are people like me who like their Lindy a little less fundamentalist and a little more playful. And with Charleston it can be the same thing. Even in blues there is a strict interpretation of what is acceptable practice and what is not.

Like a church, mosque, or synagogue, dancing fosters a community with similar, if not always the same, values and outlook. We differ in a lot of ways, us dancers, but we do share in basic loves of movement and music. And with our schedules we are oriented towards thinking about what we enjoy doing, where we enjoy dancing, and who we enjoy dancing with, whether they be Balboa or Blues, Lindy Hop or Charleston, or if we’re the Unitarian Universalists of swing, Fusion.

And we need this is the secular world, or at least I think we do. I have a framework like that in dancing, but it’s not true that every person who is nontheistic is a dancer, and every dancer doesn’t necessarily engage in the dance calendar (think Easter Catholics, and I can make that joke because I used to be Catholic). My musings on that will follow soon.

So if dancing can be a religion, I wonder if I can put that on the next census.

Two Videos of Dancing

This is my dance partner and I dancing in a basement. We did this partly to see what we're doing that we don't notice we do (I promise that made sense somehow. We teach a dance class and we're trying to find out habits that we do that are detrimental). The other part of that is just wanting to have some footage of us dancing incase we decide to try teaching else where besides our local scene.

Fusion Dance to "Steppin' Out" from Ross Blythe on Vimeo.

This first video is a mix of Lindy Hop and blues to a song that is not traditionally a Lindy song.

Blues to "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room" from Ross Blythe on Vimeo.

This video is more ballroom and drag blues. The connection is closer than previous video. It's more about feeling the dance than getting from point A to point B.

Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

Alain de Botton says what I've been thinking about religion and secular culture, only with more clarity and greater wit.

Alain de Botton: On Pessimism

Alain de Botton - On Pessimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.

In line with my fascination with de Botton's writing and thought, here is a secular sermon he gives.

Posts to follow on my thoughts about making a secular religion.

WARNING: this is on pessimism. if you are in a good mood and don't want to start feeling a little, well, you know, not so, I suggest listening to this later.

Alain de Botton on Success, TED

For those of you who know me, I am a huge fan of Alain de Botton. I think this is a very interesting talk and timely, given many of us are about to graduate (or have done so already) and have concerns about what comes next. I liked most in this video his discussion of success in that success involves the loss of something else, what we have chosen to miss out on.

Happy belated Thanksgiving.

The Justice Cascade and Normative Theory

I’ve been in a Political Science and Philosophy graduate reading group this semester and it has been a very interesting experience. First off, we use the same words to say different things. Secondly, there is a drastic difference in writing style from one discipline to the other. Thirdly, we have differing ideas of an agent’s (loosely speaking, people and institutions made up of people) relative importance as it corresponds to an overarching structure.

A talk today was given by Kathyrn Sikkink over her book The Justice Cascade. The premise is that a new model is needed to understand political change, and specifically in this case, the drive to punish individual heads of state for human rights violations.

This stance is novel for a couple reasons. One, heads of state are usually immune after their regime or they leave power for the crimes they committed. Two, state sovereignty is not usually violated. International courts can prosecute current heads of state for violations (with varying degrees of success of course). So what accounts for this paradigm shift.

In short, norms about harm, revenge, human rights, and notions of sovereignty come into play. The Justice Cascade is the diffusion of these norms more globally. These ideas are ignored by traditional constructivist political scienctists because ideas and agents are too small and unimportant compared to the structures they inhabit.

Not so anymore. Media, new and old, is more and more global. There is a reason China keeps a lock on social networking sites. Ideas can be disseminated quickly with minimal effort. What someone wrote about justice in France can be read by someone in Libya. When dissidents in Syria are struggling to find the words or the frame work for their cause, they can read and discuss the uprisings in Tunisia.

Technology is an interesting new factor, becoming a channel for the old norms we in the west have lived by and transmitting them elsewhere. This would be a more interesting line of thought to follow.

TED Talks: Digital Preservation

Why Historical preservation?

It’s about more than just sites and history. The history and the sites provide a context. Concepts, ideas, truth, many things are understood only when they are in a context. Meaning is given in a context. Without that context we lose site of what is meant, what is real.

Digital preservation of physical reality is another step in saving and preserving the human context and history. It’s a mapping of the human cultural genome (borrowing the phrase from another TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html). Our history and our sites give us the context to talk about what it is to be human.