Collective Effervescence: Anecdote to Trump Administration

The New York Knicks gave us something last week that America desperately needs. Sociologist Émile Durkheim had a name for it more than a century ago: collective effervescence.

It sounds academic, but it isn’t complicated. It is what happens when thousands of people experience the same emotion at the same moment. Joy. Hope. Belonging. Something larger than themselves.

And something extraordinary happens in our bodies.

Look at New York. The streets filled. Strangers hugged. People in Knicks jerseys screamed together as though they had known each other for years. For a few glorious hours, people were not Democrats or Republicans. Rich or poor. Young or old.

They were simply New Yorkers. Not a MAGA hat to be seen, I might ad. Or a blue tee shirt either.

Maybe our crisis is not just about Donald Trump. Or the ever-growing number of people whose power exists only because they stand close to power.

Maybe the deeper problem is that the thing we surround ourselves with most is not each other.

It’s our phones.

We live inside tiny digital rooms curated by algorithms that feed us outrage, fear, and certainty. We mistake connection for community and followers for friendship.

Human beings were not built for that.

We were built to gather.

I am also a film critic, and years ago I attended the first Bentonville Film Festival, founded by Geena Davis. Much of her life’s work now is devoted to gender representation in film because she believes something very simple. If a girl can see it, she can be it.

She may be one of the reasons we have made so much progress for women in film.

At one panel she discussed background actors in movies. Researchers had studied crowd scenes and discovered that only about ten percent of the people gathered in town squares on screen were women.

Geena held out her hands, looked up, and asked, “Do they think we don’t like to gather?”

Everyone laughed.

And of course it wasn’t funny.

Women have gathered since the beginning of time. Around fires. Around tables. In kitchens. In churches. In circles of grief and circles of joy.

I wrote an entire book about it, Circles of Collaboration. I have long believed that collaboration is more powerful than leadership and that perhaps we have spent too much time celebrating leaders and not enough time building collaboration, which is way more fun too.

But that is another story.

The task before us now may be very simple.

Gather more.

Not just for politics. Not only to protest. Not merely to complain.

Anyone who has been reading this column knows I don’t believe most protests accomplish anything. They often make us feel good without changing very much.

Community changes things.

I recently moved to a small town on the North Fork of Long Island. I call it Main Street USA. I actually live on Main Street.

You know who else does? Latino families. Families who, like me, are searching for a different kind of life than the one we left behind.

I have decided to invite some neighbors over for dinner. But I am absolutely going to invite the people next door for a barbecue. Phone not invited.

Not to talk politics.

To get away from our phones.

Last night, a gathering took place at my beloved White House. Everyone knows what happened. But I can tell you one thing with certainty.

It was not collective effervescence. Nope. Not for a second.

Collective effervescence cannot be manufactured. It cannot be ordered from a stage or imposed from above. It rises from shared purpose, shared joy, and shared humanity.

Get behind something that isn’t political.

Join a book club.

Volunteer.

Go to the high school baseball game.

Attend the concert in the park.

Cheer for the local team.

Because community builds a good country.

And if America is interrupted, perhaps the repair begins not in Washington, but around dinner tables, in town squares, and in crowded streets filled with people wearing blue and orange and believing, if only for one night, that they belong to one another.