Awe

As Steve Kerr’s Warriors won games thanks to waves of scoring rarely seen before, experts offered explanations. It was the result of certain kinds of passes, or trick plays that Steve had learned like a comedian picks up jokes on the road, such as “the cyclone play” of the Iowa State Cyclones basketball team. When I mention these possibilities, Kerr laughs.

Basketball is like music. . . . In a band, you don’t need five drummers or guitarists. . . . The question is how five players all fit together.

This is a deeper principle of our hypersocial evolution: successful groups move in unison and integrate different talents into a smoothly functioning, synchronized whole. One of the most successful species on the planet, the leafcutter ant, puts the varying skills of its different members to use in a coordinated whole: there are leaf cutters, haulers, builders—all cutting leaves, transporting them, building their home, tending to the queen. Evolution favors species that move their bodies in the ways they were meant to move. Our feelings of awe signal to us when we are integrated into these patterns of coordinated movement with others.

I ask Steve about the secret of collective movement. It is the fans, he tells me. When we are playing our best, they are joyful. They get up off their feet, cheer, and dance.

Indeed, watching beloved teams brings us awe. Inspired by Durkheim, one sociologist immersed herself in the lives of Pittsburgh Steelers fans. At games on Sundays, fans fall into moving in unison in walking to the stadium and parking lot to enjoy pregame rituals, often involving beer and barbecued food. The collective feelings are effervescent, evident in embraces, crying, howling, arms thrust in the air, and, for some, devotional acts, “saintly tendencies” of physical sacrifice:

A man with a stern face in front of me, probably in his late twenties to early thirties, began to remove layers of clothing. Finally, he pulled his final shirt up over his head and stood cheering and screaming without a shirt in temperatures around 15 degrees Fahrenheit. After a second stellar play on behalf of the Steelers, the man beside him also took off his many layers of coats and shirts and the two clutched hands and screamed.

Steelers fans focus their attention on sacred objects representing their shared identity: Steelers-themed jerseys, coats, lawn chairs, and, during the game, the Terrible Towel, a black-and-gold towel that seventy thousand fans wave in unison to appreciate great plays. Devoted fans describe themselves as “family” and “Steeler Nation”—the default self giving way to something larger.

As we near the end of our conversation, Kerr’s former teammate Michael Jordan is on his mind. He recalls how Jordan would remind his teammates that “there are young fans in the stands, there perhaps for their only NBA game, who came to watch us play.”

When I ask Steve what his life in sports means to him, he ends our call with this:

It is a civic duty to give people joy.

Grooving

When European colonialists first traveled to Africa, they were awestruck, and more often horrified, by the dances of the people they encountered. Dance’s pervasiveness, effervescence, and power unnerved these Westerners seeking fortunes and to “save souls.” In Africa, communities danced to appreciate childbirth, puberty, weddings, and death, moving people into a shared understanding of the cycle of life. Groups fell into rousing song with martial sounds and empowering dance when nearing war or when heading out for a hunt, whose success would lead to celebratory dance that paved the way for food sharing. Even forms of labor were symbolized in dances representing agricultural work, planting, digging and harvesting. Moving their bodies in the way they were meant to move.

And in Africa, and many Indigenous cultures worldwide, dance was and often still is a physical, symbolic language of awe. Dance symbolized experiences of being in the presence of the Divine. Specific dances told stories about gods and goddesses. The origins of life and the afterlife. Battles between good and evil. People danced to symbolize feelings of awe for thunder, lightning, heavy rains, and overpowering winds, a tradition which, apparently, traces back to a distant predecessor of the chimpanzee waterfall dance.