I like how they make the title sound like ritual is a problem. Our culture believes that, I liked to believe it, and so the book is more appealing. (book on amazon, pdf excerpt)
The book is not about rituals, but rather the attitude that ritual engenders. It’s an attitude of “If we do things the right way, we can move forward together.” It values actions, and right actions are sufficient. Ritual is delineated in time and space, so we don’t need to be in harmony all the time.
The book is really about the opposite of this ritual attitude—sincerity—and its consequences. Sincerity is about inner beliefs. It says that actions are valuable as expressions of correct beliefs. What matters is that our heart is in the right place. Sincerity is not limited to weekly services or 5x/day prayers. It demands consistent beliefs all of the time, everywhere in life. It demands your very identity.
When the grocery store cashier says, “How are you?” I say “Good.” He says one phrase, I say one of a few appropriate response phrases, and the grocery-buying proceeds.
My friends and I ridiculed this: “Why do we say ‘how are you’ when nobody means it? It’s so stupid, I hate small talk.” That’s the sincere attitude, where words have only literal meaning. Now I get it. It’s a ritual, it smooths human interaction with mutual acknowledgement.
Ritual & its Consequences chronicles historical oscillations between ritual and sincere attitudes in dominant cultures. For pagans like the ancient Romans and Greeks, it was enough to perform the right ceremonies. They weren’t threatened by people (such as early Jews) worshiping a different god, because there was room.[1] Judaism moved to a more sincere attitude (God is with you every moment, and he covets your heart) as Christianity spread. Catholicism moved Christianity relatively toward ritual. Then the Protestants, especially the Puritans, gave us a hard swing toward sincerity that continues today. The modern non-religion, belief only in science, is the most sincere culture yet!
Wait. Science doesn’t care about inner beliefs; how is sincerity relevant?
Ritual actions are valued for their own sake. Sincere actions have some cause or purpose.
Modern anthropologists look at a ritual from the sincere perspective, seeking explanations, like that the movements and words exist for a reason. The words must have meaning, and the actions have either some causal effect or a symbolic meaning. Science looks at the details of a ritual as we would a chemical reaction or a mission statement.
With a ritual attitude, it’s different. The needed meaning is “this is how our people have done it for generations.” We do these things together in order to do things together. Stepping into the ritual, we step into a shared world. Each of us knows what to do. This gives unity within a deliberately bounded world.
My favorite secular ritual is home football games. We go to the stadium, we wear our team’s colors, and while we are there, our team is the best. We yell it, we chant it, we fight with anyone who says otherwise. We sing along with the national anthem, we eat the same hot dogs and stomp along with the same fight song.
Our team is not literally the best. But it is right and appropriate to say so, really loudly, over and over, in this ritual. It’s a bounded world to share, with beliefs we assume for the moment. Later at home, I might laugh about how our team hardly ever wins.
This is the second difference: ritual creates a shared world that isn’t real; we step into the ritual as if this prayer is going to bring the rain, as if we are all one. Belief is private. Modern Jews I know follow their traditions and don’t bother each other about personal belief in God. Sincerity goes further: there is one world that we all live in, the world as is, and we must share that, all the time.
Now do you see where science fits? Science says we share one world, and that we can make sense of it with reproducible measurements.
I do believe we share one physical world. Except that we’re each in a different piece of it. I’m in a peaceful back yard with sun and shade. Someone else waits in cold rain for a late bus. For the purposes of human experience, even our physical world is different.
And for human experience, the physical world is the least of it. The socially created world, stuff like money and property and legal rights, rules our lives.[2] Our social interactions give us happiness or torment. These are what matter, and these are different for every person and situation.
I don’t live in only one world; I live in my household with my family, with my team at work, and sometimes in a concert with the fans and the band and the staff. Even if I did live in one world, no other person would share all of it. Trying to have the same, consistent beliefs as other people is not useful. At best, it leads to hypocrisy, as the beliefs I profess at home (“Child, nothing is more important than you”) don’t match my actions at work (“Yes, I can travel that week”). Of course, I can rationalize these into consistency. That’s a skill of sincerity.
Life has this ambiguity. The third difference is: the sincere attitude denies this ambiguity. The ritual stance copes with it.
At work, I adopt an “as if” belief structure: this project is definitely going to succeed, and it is important to customers. It will make a difference to the company. My team will be together long enough to make investments in our relationship worth it, and this code will be in production long enough that quality matters. My whole team acts this way, and we follow agreed-upon processes. We can move forward together in this bounded time and place.
If I adopt a sincere attitude, then my company must be the best at all times. Its success is inevitable, this technology is the greatest innovation since the printing press. I have to eat, sleep, and breathe the latest fad. Hire young people without kids so they can put in 92 hours because this company is only for the bought-in, the believers, the sincere.
The sincere attitude is fully dominant right now in modern culture. It is epitomized by fundamentalism, where only one belief system is acceptable and all different people must be crushed. It is epitomized by a utopian dream of scientific understanding (or AGI) leading to some uniform society. A ritual attitude recognizes that any one definition good, at scale, is a great evil. We need differences, we need boundaries, and we need to choose to come together.
Not all lies are deception. “We are the best” may be totally false and a great thing to yell. “This project is important” might well be true, and it’s useful to believe it together. “How are you” is not a question, yet it has a purpose.
The ritual attitude is not superior to sincerity; taken too far, it is stagnation. A balance of both is most appropriate: traditions followed mostly, and reasoned about and improved. Right now, our culture needs appreciation for beliefs that acknowledgedly flex by situation, for conscious working (and singing) together, and for more kind acts whether we’re feeling it or not.
[1] This tidbit about pagans is from The History of God by Karen Armstrong, my current reading. Ritual and its Consequences draws great examples from Chinese history, about Confucianists (ritual, tradition, right action) vs Mohists (sincere belief, individualism).