There's something about dancing in the traditional sense that is remarkably social and romantic. Romance by definition speaks of letting our emotions take control and of being swept up in the moment. And there's nothing quite like dancing to symbolize this. When you dance, you set aside your individuality to join as one with another person, moving in graceful steps across the floor. Dancing brings two people together, yet it also maintains social rules that keep you separate. It's hard to imagine anything else so intimate and yet removed at the same time. Your partner, even as she melts into you, remains mysterious.
I write this not to encourage everyone to grab a partner and go waltz. Certainly, with my two left feet, I'm not the one to be advocating that. But how many of you honestly know the waltz, or the foxtrot, or the East Coast swing? There's something symbolic in this decline in American dance.
In the "Book of Laughter and Forgetting," Milan Kundera speaks warmly of the Czech people dancing in the streets of Prague each spring. He talks of the joy that came from being associated with this communal dance, this celebration of life. Yet in the end, he is isolated. A dissident, Kundera is estranged from his fellow Czech people. The next spring he watches lonesomely from his window at the smiling faces dancing below.
I fear that we Americans are becoming too much like Kundera. Symbolically, we're the ones who are losing our communal dance, and we're the ones left alienated on the side. Successive reports and polls show increasing alienation in our society. Membership in community organizations-gardening clubs, men's clubs, the Junior League, the YMCA, etc.-is down. Depression is up. Instead of talking face to face we increasingly use instant messenger programs. We don't speak with our neighbors anymore. For our romantic liaisons, we turn to the Internet instead of our communal support groups.
There's a reason our generation has been termed the "me generation." We're becoming so focused on individuality that we forsake our relationships with others.
Even when we do try to be social, something seems to be lacking. There once was a time when being social for its own sake was important; it is not so anymore. In the past the goal was to meet others and to get to truly know them; today we stand around a keg, loud music blasting in our ear, hoping that in some primordial fashion we'll be able to make a connection. Even our social hours and parties have become vehicles of alienation and separation. When was the last time you went to a party, met someone new, and talked with them for hours? When was the last time you truly got to know someone?
Learning social skills is an integral part of being educated, yet here at Amherst this education is lacking. Friends of mine who have entered the Rhodes Scholar competition speak of the cocktail party as the greatest dilemma facing Amherst students. No one has ever instructed them on how to behave. This is not going unnoticed by people. Robert McKelvey, the President of the Rhodes Scholars Society of America, told me last August that the selection committees were having increasing difficulty finding individuals who lived up to Cecil Rhodes' ideals. I spoke with the dean of admission for Stanford Law two years ago, and she expressed a similar concern. After we had discussed Buddhism, the proper way to cook a crab, skiing at Lake Tahoe and the state of the American legal system for three hours, she remarked that conversations like that were rare for her these days. Speaking particularly harshly of Swarthmore College, she told me that today the law school has plenty of very gifted academics to choose from, but that it is increasingly difficult to find students who are socially adept.
We humans are, by our very nature, social creatures. And if the aspects of modern society are eroding our social lives, then this problem must be addressed. People are only able to settle their differences if they talk. We see this in both politics and our daily lives. We'll always have our differences, but if our society becomes more alienated and isolated, bitter partisan rancor will only increase. Left to fend for ourselves, our paranoia will increase, and we will face many psychological problems, a trend we're already beginning to see.
I don't have an easy solution to this. Sociological problems take quite a while to change. But maybe dancing exemplifies something we can do. Last March I attended a party in Paris with a group of French youth. Several of them played in the band, belting out the Blues Brothers' "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," while the rest did "the rock," a popular dance in France from the 1970s. Everyone there seemed to know this dance, and without recourse to alcohol, everyone seemed to have a great time. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, talking until the wee hours of the morning about everything from dancing technique to Bordeaux appellations. This was a fete, a truly social affair.
If we want to have a similar situation here, dancing is one small step we can take. When you dance with your partner, the two of you are alone, even in the midst of others, and you simply must talk with him or her, smiling all the way and opening yourself up in a remarkably social fashion. Just as the waltz is made up of several steps, dancing is just one small step in the waltz of life. But you can't dance until you take that first step. And if we as a society are going to experience the vitality that Kundera yearned for, we too should grab our partners and take that first step.