Put on your party shoes it’s time for political hedonism – The Guardian

It is clear that hedonism is a potent ingredient of grassroots activism. Women wearing pink hats against Donald Trump in Washington DC. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Heard about blackout culture ? Its sweeping across Americas universities and its lethal. Students down cocktails of alcohol with the singular aim of passing out. Nearly 2,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related injuries each year, and there are increasing calls for college authorities to stamp out binge drinking.

No wonder hedonism has a bad name. For many people, its nothing more than a byword for immoral and irresponsible self-indulgence, evoking the heroin overdoses and drunken rampages made infamous by films such as Trainspotting.

This disdain for hedonistic pleasures is reflected in a growing puritanical streak in the modern happiness industry, which would have us all staying calm doing mindfulness courses and sticking strictly to clean-eating wholemeal diets. You wont find sex, drugs and rocknroll in the index of many self-help books: western culture is becoming addicted to moderation and self-control.

I am not, of course, suggesting we embrace blackout culture. Rather, we need to recognise that we are neurologically wired to seek pleasure and that it is central to most peoples sense of wellbeing. The desire for pleasure is part of human nature, points out the neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach adding that perhaps we have to accept that the human brain makes us disproportionately interested in pleasure.

We should welcome hedonistic pleasure-seeking into our lives because of our brain chemistry and because, for centuries, it has been an incredibly enriching ingredient of human culture.

When Franciscan missionaries first arrived in Mexico, they witnessed Aztec rituals that began with the eating of a black mushroom, probably Psilocybe cubensis, a hallucinogen. Hedonism has also fuelled some of literatures greatest works, from Samuel Taylor Coleridges opium-dream poem Kubla Khan to Robert Louis Stevensons 60,000-word novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which he allegedly wrote during a six-day cocaine binge in 1885.

But perhaps the greatest hidden virtue of hedonism has been its role in catalysing social change. The roaring 20s saw an explosion of carpe diem pleasure-seeking in response to the horrors of the first world war. Here was a new generation, wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken. The result was an outbreak of vitality and experimentation that challenged social conventions, from open lesbian relationships to the spread of jazz that helped to bridge black-white divides.

Then came the drug-fuelled counter-culture of the 1960s, where any hippy worth their salt was turning on, tuning in and dropping out on a psychedelic bus tour, and spending the summers living it up in a free-love commune. Yet personal and social liberation went hand in hand: it was these same tie-dyed hedonistic explorers who turned their backs on Vietnam and joined anti-war sit-ins at Berkeley where they lit up joints instead.

Half a century on, I believe we are in danger of losing touch with our hedonistic selves. The time has come to rediscover this vital part of who we are, for both personal and political reasons.

On the personal level, a healthy dose of hedonistic experience is an antidote to our age of mediated proxy living, where we are caught in a state of continuous partial attention checking our phones, on average, 80times a day and spending more than nine hours each day staring at screens. We are becoming more interested in being spectators of life on our iGadgets than actually living it for ourselves, increasingly trapped in a matrix of vicarious experience. Hedonism is a route to reconnecting with direct experience, returning us to touching, tasting and feeling the world.

At the same time, hedonism has barely tapped potential to revitalise politics. Think back to the carnival tradition of the Middle Ages, which was about raucous boozing and dancing in wooden clogs, but also an expression of anti-authoritarian defiance: peasants would dress as priests and lords in mockery of their masters while, from the 16th century, slave revolts were common during carnival time in the Americas.

Such defiance is urgently needed today. Representative democracy is crumbling before our eyes, with a wave of far-right anti-system politicians stepping in where traditional parties have been failing to deal with issues such as widening inequality, migration and terrorism. The consequences have ranged from the authoritarian xenophobia of Donald Trump to a blinkered charge for hardline Brexit.

We need to reignite that carnival spirit with a new wave of collective hedonism. It is our greatest hope for creating a seize-the-day mass politics for the 21st century that can deliver progressive democratic renewal.

Todays grassroots movements can look for inspiration in medieval festivities and in more recent instances of political hedonism, such as the carnivalesque protests in eastern and central Europe in 1989, when the Orange Alternative movement in Poland held anti-government demonstrations led by people wearing fancy dress, while in Prague the Society for a Merrier Present held a silent march called A Fruitless Action wearing helmets made from watermelons and holding up blank banners. Such protests grew into the mass movements that brought down whole regimes. As the historian Padraic Kenney writes, what started as just a carnival became a revolution.

From the pink bloc protesters in fairy costumes who taunted police with feather dusters in the global justice movements Carnivals Against Capital in the noughties, to the pink hats of the anti-Trump Womens March this year, it is clear that hedonism is a potent ingredient of grassroots activism. Too many marches today end up deadening passion with strings of well-meaning but tedious speeches from inaudible speakers. We need to revitalise protest movements with a hedonistic carnival spirit that keeps us engaged and hopeful by making us feel fully alive.

Its time to forge a new political hedonism and dance to the tune not only of carpe diem but its plural, carpamus diem. Lets seize the day together.

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Put on your party shoes it's time for political hedonism - The Guardian