Pluralism vs. Monism

Pluralism maintains that the universe comprises various distinct entities that exist independently. In contrast, monism posits that seemingly disparate elements are interconnected fragments of a unified whole. While pluralism emphasizes the diversity of the world, monism emphasizes its unity. The former reflects the micro or analytical thinking of the West, whereas the latter represents the macro or holistic thinking of the East.

Pluralism is used by capitalists to justify and defend individuality, independence, freedom, and autonomy of the individual, advocating for self-interest, personal liberty, rights, private ownership, competition, and a free-market economy. Conversely, monism views individuals as interdependent members of an integrated human society, emphasizing collective interests, coexistence, equality, fraternity, cooperation, responsibility, and the overall well-being of society. These two philosophies have given rise to different economic and political systems. The question of which philosophy better serves humanity's best interests and can lead mankind toward a brighter future remains unanswered.

Aristotle stated, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Before modern times, monism was the prevailing philosophy throughout human history. Early humans recognized the importance of unity and cooperation for the survival and success of the species. However, this shifted with the advent of modern science and technology, which empowered individuals and fostered self-sufficiency, giving rise to individualism and pluralism (see Tango and Individualism). These ideologies promote personal liberty, choice, diversity, LGBTQIAPK rights, same-sex marriage, etc., championing multiculturalism that embraces iconoclastic values, relativism that denies the distinction between true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, and beautiful and ugly, anti-intellectualism that resists science and reason, affirmative action that protects heterodoxies, marginal cultures, minority groups, and alternative lifestyles, reverse discrimination against mainstream culture, tradition, and conventional wisdom, the success and dominance of a shrinking minority and the struggle and failure of a growing majority due to competition, the consequent plutocracy, and the aggrandizing inequality, division, polarization, dissension, and disunity in society.

After all, individualism and pluralism stand for the law of the jungle and have no respect for equality and morality. This poses a threat not only to societies that embrace such ideologies but also to the world at large, as evidenced by the growing moral decay, societal fragmentation, and widespread lawlessness in the US, the lack of moral integrity among its political elites, and the destructive impact of their self-serving, hegemonic, bullying, belligerent, and coercive foreign policies on the world (see The Lessons of Tango).

What pluralism and individualism fail to acknowledge is that people are inherently interrelated and interdependent, whether they realize it or not, and that the survival and success of the species depends on human cooperation (see Tango and Gender Interdependence). A human society must be built on philosophies that unite rather than divide people, along with some kind of moral code, institutions, governance, and order. Turning people into individualistic rivals only fosters conflict, animosity and chaos, as evidenced by the unrest resulted from US-led efforts to "liberate" people, and the ensuing humanitarian disasters and refugee crises, which are further aggravated by the open-border policies and multiculturalism at home. The situation will only worsen if we continue to propagate radical liberalism, assert absolute personal freedom, prioritize individuals over society, oppose any order that we consider authoritarian, call democracy the tyranny of the majority, label one gender the oppressor of the other gender, radicalize education, media and law, and fragment society into more and more conflicting factions (see Darwinism and Confucianism).

While liberalism once played a positive role in liberating human creativity and potential, contributing to the success of capitalism in the West, its excessive focus on individualism is proven self-destructive. As a reader insightfully commented, "Freedom and human rights movements led people to put a lot of emphasis on individuality and as a result, the inflated self-image lessens our ability to view the world as a connected whole. This inflated self-image is also probably the root cause to many modern psychological ailments and problems: loneliness, depression, and mental disorder. If we can zoom out and see ourselves as a tiny one, rather than the one, in this big universe, a fact that has not changed a bit since the big bang, we may again find the beauty in the ancient natural law and adopt the right perspective towards the self and the rest of the world " (see A Wise Voice). The outcome is a re-concentration of resources, wealth, and political power in the hands of a few, only this time that is done not in the name of slavery, monarchy and aristocracy, but free competition.

Observing the success of capitalism in the West, the East, while adhering to its holistic philosophy and Confucian values, began to encourage people's initiative and creativity, which has also brought positive changes to the East in recent decades. While the East strives to integrate the strengths of the West, the West remains stagnant, refusing to learn from the East. It believes that, based on its past success, its way is the only right way. Instead of addressing its deep-seated ideological and structural flaws, it becomes increasingly neoliberal. The West spends vast resources on media propogandas, NGOs, military, cognitive, trade, technological and financial warfares to defend its system and impose its ideologies on others. This is not surprising given that capitalism has a vested interest in these ideologies, without which plutocracy loses legitimacy (see Democracy vs. Plutocracy).

However, this time the balance of power has changed. The pluralist West may have had an advantage over the monistic East, and it may continue to have an advantage over a Westernized East, but it cannot compete with the monistic East that has incorporated the strengths of the West. Individuality and sociality are two facets of human nature that must be balanced for the well-being of mankind and society as a whole. Neither authoritarianism, which suppresses individual freedom, nor individualism, which denies humanity's shared destiny, coexistence, and interdependence, can foster a cohesive human society. A healthy society thrives on fraternity, solidarity, cooperation, and the willingness of individuals to prioritize collective interests over personal ones and work together as a team. This is how families function (see Tango and Family Values). This is how tango is danced. This is how China is growing strong. And this is how America can regain its strength.

Despite the influence of individualism and pluralism, tango offers a new perspective for us to see ourselves as interconnected and interdependent members of the human family. Tango teaches us to cherish, love, accommodate, and cooperate with each other, and has demonstrated that is the only way to a better world (see Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds).

Champaign Milongueros Group Charter

Champaign Milongueros is a group of tango students who regularly meet here to study and dance the milonguero style of tango.

Our mission is to gather like-minded local tango dancers, to promote the milonguero style of tango, and to cultivate a culture of fraternity, solidarity, cooperation and community within the group.

We observe the tango protocols practiced in the milongas of Buenos Aires, including personal hygiene, dress code, separate seating, cabeceo, navigation rules and milonga etiquettes. (See Milonga Codes.)

A leadership team consisting of four elected individuals is responsible for recruitment, training, events, and liaison.

This group opens only to committed tango enthusiasts who want tango to be part of their lifestyle, not for casual dancers.

The following are the terms to join this group:

1. Dedicating to the milonguero style of tango.

2. Committing to regular and long-term participation.

3. In addition to attending classes and dancing at this location, members rotate to host a biweekly group event, such as potluck, picnic, hiking, seminar, tea party, sports, milonga, etc., at a separate time and location of their choice. These activities are designed to foster friendships and encourage members to participate in team building.

4. Newcomers must agree to this charter, complete the training and meet our standard to become a member and attend our milongas.

Tango Music and Its Danceability

One

Tango music is 4/4 time. There are four quarter notes in each measure and each quarter note receives a beat, counted as 1, 2, 3, 4. The first and third beats are the strong beats on which we step. The second and forth beats are the weak beats on which we do ancillary actions such as cross, weight change, hip rotation, pivot and embellishment, etc.

Each quarter note can be evenly divided into two eighth notes. We count the resulted 8 eighth notes in a bar as 1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and. Similarly, each quarter note can be evenly divided into four sixteenth notes. We count the resulted 16 sixteenth notes in a bar as 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a.

The ability to divide the notes and predict where the subdivisions fall is important because it enables the dancer to take advantage of the increased footwork possibilities. Feeling rhythm is internal. The rhythm must be in your mind before it can happen on your feet. Rhythm is the most essential element in music, which can exist without melody, as in the drumbeats of primitive music. Dancing is body's response to rhythm. We naturally step on the accents of the music. Without rhythm there is no dance.

But feeling rhythm becomes not so easy when syncopation is involved. Syncopation is the way musicians spice up the music by shifting, splitting, adding or omitting beats, such as shifting the accent to the even-numbered beat (1, 2, 3, 4), extending a beat (1 - - -), starting a note on an unaccented beat and continuing it through the next accented beat (1, 2 -, 4), splitting a note into subdivisions (1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and), accenting the subdivision (1-and, 2-and, 3-and, 4-and), adding an accent (1, 2, 3, 4), omitting one or more notes and replacing them with a rest, etc. Syncopation modifies the rhythm and makes it more interesting, yet difficult to follow.

Nevertheless, dancers welcome the challenge. As long as the beats are consistent with the time signature, i.e., as long as the entire song can be counted with 1, 2, 3, 4 from beginning to end, the music is danceable. In fact, songs that we like to dance most are neither arrhythmic nor mono-rhythmic, but complex yet still have regular, recognizable and predictable beats, which is the characteristic of classic tango. (See The Characteristics of Classic Tango.)


Two

That is changed when musicians started to experiment new ideas like improvisation, counterpoint, cross-rhythms, poly-rhythms, compound rhythms, asymmetrical rhythms, complex harmonies, odd numbered meter in which the notes are not evenly grouped (such as 5/4 time and 7/8 time), mixing duple time, triple time with quadruple time, playing different instruments at different rhythms, or ensemble of instrumental part and vocal part with different rhythms, etc. These methods, though creative, make the rhythm too intricate to dance to, which becomes a characteristic of modern music.

Musicians still produce classic music today; therefore, not all musics made in the contemporary time are modern music. Only musics containing unconventional elements are modern music. There are gray areas, of course, but modern musics are all incorporated with at least some nontraditional elements, which make the rhythm of the song, or sections of the song, irregular, unrecognizable, unpredictable, and thus undanceable.

Some people argue that all music is danceable, which is not true. Perhaps all music that can be played with the two legs is danceable, but fingers can move much faster than legs, and an orchestra of dozens or even hundreds of fingers could make the music extremely complex, especially when it is intended for listening only.

For music to be danceable, it must have recognizable, predictable, and followable beats. Dance is our body's response to rhythm. We feel comfortable with rhythm because it facilitates our movements. Our rhythm echoes regular occurrences, biologic clock, heartbeats and muscle memory of rhythmic motion such as walk, etc. Millions of years of human evolution made rhythm aesthetic and musical to our senses, and our body naturally responds to rhythmic sounds. Although it is possible that with practice some professional dancers can dance to irregular and unpredictable beats that they memorized, ordinary dancers without special training can't do that. DJs must be aware that the music they play at the milongas is for ordinary dancers to dance social tango, not for a few highly trained professionals to show off their skills. A DJ needs to keep the majority of dancers in mind and not yield to the pressure of a few individuals. (Being a DJ myself I am fully aware of such pressure.)


Three

It needs to be pointed out that the change in modern music is not coincidental. We live in a society where rampant liberalism and individualism drive many people to pursue individuality at any cost and profit-driven commercialim constantly pushes for innovation, repackaging, impression, exoticism, eye-catching boldness, etc. in order to increase sales. Innovation improves life, but it also causes unintended consequences. Every time I bought a smart phone, a smarter one was repackaged the next week. In economic terms that is called "creating demands" so consumers would keep throwing away their perfectly functional old phones for new ones, causing tremendous waste, as this documentary discloses. People grown up in this culture exhibit a lack of depth and lasting quality. They confuse novelty with beauty, focus too much on the flashy form rather than the substance, and constantly seek for changes. The following quote from a reader's comment reflects such a mentality.

"Most of us did not start doing the tango in order to get the ocho just right. Most of us saw elegant, dramatic and erotic moves in a performance that took our breath away. Then we take tango lessons and dance among older people who look down their noses at beginners for not doing the details as well as they can, who are quite conservative in their tastes, who are uptight about the eroticism, who are offended when attractive young people look better at the erotic movements than they do, and who are too weak, inflexible, heavy, and cowardly to do the more dramatic moves... The idea of dividing tango into social dance and 'show' dance trivializes efforts to be more creative and to actually do the dance that we were attracted to in the first place. Performance is not just for tourists. It includes ballet, modern dance, jazz and other rich, culturally important forms. It can be brilliant and revolutionary, changing the way we think. It can give tango dance its Isadora Duncans, Sergei Diaghilevs, Merce Cunnihams and Astor Piazzollas. Tango and dance have always included a conversation between performance and social dance. Both should be respected at spaces in which creativity can take place. That's how art and culture evolve in living ways."

I am not getting into why the milonga is not the place for performance (see Social Tango and Performance Tango) and will concentrate on creativity here. No doubt, creativity has changed our way of living. But, despite its many contributions, we should not forget its drawbacks. Human creativity is a double-edged sword. It provides us with automobiles, computers, GPS and beautiful, danceable music like classic tango; it also provides us with weapons of mass destruction, narcotics, high-tech crimes and undanceable noises. Human creativity can improve life if we use it wisely. It can also destroy life if we foolishly think we can do whatever we want just to be novel, and ignore the force beyond human control that produced and conditioned us, whether you call that force the Cosmos, Nature, Law, Tao, or God. In fact, human creativity has already caused many problems to our very existence, such as the irreversible damage to our home planet, pollution, climate change, environmental catastrophes, the exhaustion of natural resources, the collapse of the ecosystem, chemical, biological and nuclear threats, the astonishing number of death caused by all kinds of hman inventions including guns, drugs, automobiles, man-made virus and modern warfare, and the polarization and dysfunction of our governments thanks to our very creative politicians, etc.

The obsession to creativity is also the cause of the relentless efforts of many DJs to make their music selections unconventional. They collect songs that are abnormal, rare, exotic and hard to follow. They make their brand by paying little attention to the danceability of their collections. They embrace modernism and look down at the classics despite that the classics are the time-tested quintessence embodying what is deemed beautiful and danceable by generations of dancers. They ignore the fact that sixty years after the end of the Golden Age tango dancers today still love classic tango music while the "revolutionary" music created during the same period has long been forgotten. They are blind to the fact that in every generation there are people who created lasting classics and people who created fleeting rubbish. They don't understand that creativity must serve the best human interests, needs and aesthetics to have a lasting value, which in case of dance is danceability, not outlandishness. Although they love music and may have collected a big number of songs, they don't understand what constitutes danceability and what does not. Worst of all, they tend to play unfamiliar, abnormal, erratic and undanceable songs in the milongas since the danceable ones are traditional.

Dancers don't reject innervation and creativity. In fact that is what we do on the dance floor. We welcome challenges that can make our dance more interesting. But we also desire music that is danceable. We want our DJs to put danceability above other concerns in their selection of music and carefully listen to each and every song from beginning to end to make sure it is entirely danceable before playing it at the milonga, and we want them to play for us the average social dancers, not only for few elites or weird dudes. (See My Two Cents on Music Selection.)

Dancing to Melody - Poema

Stepping on the beat and dancing to music are not one and the same thing. The former is the basic of musicality, but it is not the most sophisticated. Beats are rhythmic stresses that regulate the speed of music. They are interrupted and unemotional. Stepping on beats is like jumping, the focus is on the accent, and the movement is vertical, sudden, broken and dry.

The most important thing in dancing is to express the feelings of the music, which lie not in beats but in melody. Melody is the sweet, emotional and continuous tone that expresses the sentiment, emotion, beauty and fluidity of music. Dancing to melody is like skating, the focus is on the flowing tone, and the movement is horizontal, even-paced, uninterrupted and smooth.

In dancing, we can focus on beats, or we can focus on melody, which leads to different dance styles. When we focus on beats, we wait for the beat to come and step on it with force, the movement is interrupted, short and incoherent. Here is an example.

This song, Poema, like most tango songs, is nostalgic and melancholy. "Tango is a sad feeling that is danced." - said Enrique Santos Discepoloo. The lyrics of the song were written by Eduardo Bianco, who played the first violin in the orchestra of Teatro Apolo in 1927. Bianco learned that his wife cheated on him with the pianist of the orchestra and shot his rival to death in a fit of jealousy. The lyrics reflected his regret, grief and pain. Here is the English translation by Alberto Paz.

                        It was a dream of sweet love,
                        hours of happiness and loving,
                        it was the poem of yesterday,
                        that I dreamed,
                        of gilded color,
                        vain chimeras of the heart,
                        it will not manage to never decipher,
                        so fleeting nest,
                        it was a dream of love and adoration.

                        When the flowers of your rose garden,
                        bloom again ever so beautiful,
                        you'll remember my love,
                        and you will come to know,
                        all my intense misfortune.

                        Of that one intoxicating poem,
                        nothing is left between us,
                        I say my sad goodbye,
                        you'll feel the emotion,
                        of my pain…

The music was composed by Mario Melfi in 1932, which was arranged by Francisco Canaro in 1935. Only the last two stanzas were sung in the Canaro's version, by Roberto Maida.

Dancing Poema, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the lyricist, as if you can't bear the pain of saying goodbye to a lost love. You still need to step on the beat, but you don't do it in a sudden and broken way. Rather, you focus on the emotions of the melody and let your movements be fluid, even-paced and continuous. Here is an example.

Note that this couple is not chasing the beat, but dancing slowly, as if they can't bear to be separated from each other. Their steps are much simpler, softer, smoother and more melodious, matching the melancholy mood of the music (see The Elegance of the Milonguero Style).

I often feel my partner still focuses on the beat when I try to lead her to dance to the melody, which is not surprising given that most students are only taught to step on beats. Next time you dance Poema, try to pay more attention to the melody. The key is to control the speed of the movement to let your steps be even-paced rather than sudden, short and broken - especially if you are a woman, who represents the melodic or feminine mood of music (see The Characteristics of Classic Tango).