Keeping Together in Time

William Hardy McNeill argues in Keeping Together in Time that dance and close-ordered drill have played an integral role in human socialization throughout world history. He argues that dance/drill (or, "keeping together in time" with rhythmic movements) satisfies a subconscious, irrational, emotional need among humans and promotes subgroup affiliation, "fellow feeling," and communal bonding. McNeill's slim volume was based on a series of lectures he delivered in Europe. While his lectures focused primarily on the relationship between close-order drill and military effectiveness in world history, this volume tries to broaden the thematic analysis to early hunter-gatherer societies, ecstatic religious practice, politics, and war. McNeill does not try to provide definite answers to his hypothesized relationship between rhythmic movement and human bonding, but uses this book as a thought-piece to explore some potentialities for dance playing a prominent role in the rise of civilized humanity. I would suspect that many of his propositions have also become outdated as the evolutionary sciences upon which he bases some of his claims have surely progressed since the 1990s.

Nevertheless, I find the implications of his research intriguing for twentieth-century military history. McNeill proposes that close-order drill plays a prominent role in establishing communal bonding and a sense of comradeship among those who participate in rote exercises during basic training. McNeill remembers experiencing similar feelings of "muscular bonding" [a term McNeill uses as short-hand to describe the increased sense of fellow feeling and subsumption of individual identity into the collective that occurs during sustained rhythmic movements] during his time in the service during the 1940s. In some time periods, McNeill speculates that the social bonds established through routine drill helped solidify bonds of comradeship before men were tested in battle—thus, primary-group cohesion (a.k.a "Band of Brothers") could occur before men ever experienced combat.

This leads to a few interesting questions about the U.S. Army in Vietnam. What happens, then, when recruits are separated from their basic training classes and sent overseas as individuals to replace casualties in active units? While these men would have experienced the "boundary loss" of individual identity during close-order drill and have likely cemented relationships with comrades through rote exercise and rhythmic movement, they surely lost these social benefits of basic training when they were spliced out from basic platoons and sent overseas. As McNeill indicates, it is difficult to quantify or precisely define how dance and drill played a particular role in socialization (especially when abstracted as a general theme in world history) when separated from the plethora of other factors at play. Nevertheless, it would seem that the "muscular bonding" that occurs during basic training certainly played some role in the relative psychological and social well-being of soldiers shipped overseas with their training cohort and those sent abroad as individual replacements.

On the whole, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to most readers, aside from some niche specialties among military historians and world historians . . . and, of course, fans of William H. McNeill.