Is ritual passé?
Published by punkass marc December 1st, 2006 in ConformityPZ links Twisty and extends (one of) her point(s) that ritualism is primitive and unnecessarily celebrated in our culture. He adds:
I’ve heard that so often: that people need ritual, that there’s something beautiful and comforting about the predictable and stately. Why? I get along fine without it, and find it a nuisance when I’m subjected to it, so it’s clearly not a universal human need, like food or love. If you’re brought up with it, if it’s dunned into your head that you must attend Sunday services or you will go to hell, I can understand how the relief from an artificial anxiety might feel good…but why not cut the problem off at the roots and raise kids who aren’t instilled with those foolish fears?
Ritualism is usually tied to religion, and in that sense, I wholly agree with PZ. But assuming you allow the word ritual to apply to other areas of life, anywhere you might establish “a prescribed or established rite, ceremony, proceeding, or service,” then however primitive the need for it, I’d wager most humans find great comfort in ritual. And I doubt PZ can claim to be wholly ritual-free. Surely there’s _some_ pattern of behavior recurring at regular intervals in his life that he has established and enjoys, no?
In theory, I’m made uncomfortable by ritualism and try to avoid it. In truth, I still willingly participate in it. For example, I host a Thursday night card game. People arrive and leave at the same time, we have a pattern for who orders food, we play the games in a certain way, and I feel bummed when we have to skip a week. It’s pretty much an established proceeding, which makes it kinda ritualistic, and, frankly, it’s comforting.
Twisty rightly identifies the undertones of ritualism as “conformity, obeisance, and orthodoxy.” It’s definitely nothing to celebrate, and might be a need humans should strive to overcome.
But does anyone out there avoid ritualism entirely?
I love nothing more than my weekly trip to the Olive Garden.
Ritual pervades humans existance. Every culture has its rituals and often a huge amount of importance is placed on those rituals.
Honestly, I think if you tried to live without ritual, or were raised not knowing the rituals of your culture, you’d probably end up creating your own rituals anyway. I think humans are just wired that way…
I think that when you live hand to mouth, when life is a weary grind of wake up work for food sleep wake up work for food sleep, the comfort that comes from connecting with the community/God/gods/nature through regular traditions like prayer, chanting, meditation or religious or family gatherings is a balm. It breaks the monotony of the rut of just surviving by being a time, event or experience to look forward to, then to enjoy, then to remember and anticipate the next occurrence.
Who ‘needs’ it? No one? Everyone? What’s the difference between ritual and habit, between ritual and tradition?
Anyone who puts their left shoe on first every time they dress, pats their dog on the muzzle every time they enter the house, lights a candle on the dinner table, takes the family elders to dinner every time they’re in town or plunks down on the sofa for their favorite cable show every Wednesday night is participating in a non-essential experience that gives them comfort, even if unconsciously.
Maybe the rituals of others, large or small, are what’s silly and extraneous. While our own are harmless and pleasurable. See: Evangelicals on Catholics, atheists on religion, most of us on goth kids who draw pentagrams in graveyards on Halloween, etc.
Like you said, if you equate ritualism with religious dogmatism, then yeah, I’m not down. I wonder if ritualism isn’t being mistaken for traditionalism here. There are a lot of traditions that are ritualistic (like going to church every Sunday, celebrating Christmas), but not all rituals are apart of the traditions that I think need to be questioned. I’d argue that it is tradition that fosters “conformity, obeisance, and orthodoxy,” not rituals. Like you, I also host a weekly card night, and I hate it when it doesn’t happen. I also wake up every morning and write for at least four hours and when that doesn’t happen (usually because I drank too much during card night), I’m not happy with myself. I’d even argue that blogging is a ritualistic endeavor. I bet most of us blog at roughly the same time of the day everyday.
So while I get the point that Twisty and PZ are making and I agree with it, I wonder if what they are calling ritual isn’t really blind adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake.
I’m an atheist and a Christmas enthusiast, primarily because I enjoy the rituals associated with the holiday (and the accompanying college bowl games). In my house, Christmas rituals have a distinctly secular flavor — no baby Jeebuses need apply.
But there’s something comforting about decorating the tree, etc., something about handing down traditions to my offspring, marking the passage of another year, recalling earlier times when we were engaged in the same activities.
I don’t know if humans are hard-wired that way, but as someone pointed out (maybe in the IBTP comments section), it’s a scary, chaotic world, and we are pattern-seeking animals. Ritual is perhaps a way of imposing some sort of recognizable, happy pattern in a maelstrom of confusion and sorrow. To the extent that it doesn’t seek to impose dominance (like religious rituals invariably do), I don’t see the harm.
atheists on religion
If I thought religion was “silly and extraneous,” I’d ignore it like it deserves to be ignored. However, it’s crawled up too many undeserving asses for me to consider it innocuous.
junk science: Well, I meant, topically, atheists (in the general) on the rituals of religion. And Evangelicals (in the general)on the rituals of Catholics, and etcetera.
I agree on the ass-crawling-up.
In the broad sense, I’d say absolutely that humans are ritualistic creatures. It’s pattern-seeking behavior and probably imprinted on our brain from evolution, because seeking patterns and familiarity kept us alive. Like so many other things, we have really big brains and therefore our simple urges tend to be expressed in complex ways. Is it something to overcome? Not sure. It would probably be nice to be less attached to ritual, but going completely without it would very likely have the side effect of undermining our abilities to think and expand, since we’d be reinventing the wheel every damn day. Rituals free up brain space. I get home and change into my pajamas and make dinner roughly the same way every night that I’m staying in, and not having to plan the way my evening is going means my brain is freed up to think about what I want to write about.
Ritual is also important in maintaining relationships. A lot of human interactions are ritualistic, and that’s fine. Poker night is an example. Another small example is telling someone you love them or exchanging physical affection when you see each other. Intellectually, they don’t need these demonstrations of affection to “know” that you love them, but without them, the relationship will erode over time, sure as you’re born.
Amanda, what you said…
That’s why the words “ritual” and “habit”, both really referring to similar repetative behavior, are interesting to compare.
“Ritual” seems to have some kind of darker aspect to it (at least when I think of it), while “habit” seems more neutral (unless used in the junkie meaning)…
While Amanda ponitificated about ritual and MikeEss rang in with habit I thought *marriage*. Congratulations.
While Pony did her usual drive-by nonsense, I thought *pathology* and *illiteracy*. Congratulations.
In the larger sense, I agree with PZ as Marc does. Religion, however, is not humanity. Human nature does require some form of ritual for comfort. Pony needs to make fun of people to make herself feel better. I need to have regular discourse with my sister to make me feel better. We do things we may not want to call ritual, but to me, that letter I get ever other week from my sister is something I look forward to, since she and I have a friendship and I need to keep up with her though we are so far apart at the moment. We use a ritualized action formed from high school days , where she was in Boston and I in Arkansas, where we write each other every other week in order to keep each other abreast of our activities and where we can emote to each other as we need to. It’s a comfort zone. Is it the same as religious ritual? No. It’s more like Mike’s habit. Humans need certain comfort zones, and I see no problem with that as long as it doesn’t create a structured hierarchy designed to make every person form the exact same habit. I don’t think every one should go around mocking people with drive-by flames as they see fit, disregarding their arguments. Pony may disagree. She seems to get a lot out of her own ritual, since she does it so much. HMMV.
I personally belive that making ritual apply to multiple people through law or hierarchical constructs is what PZ and Marc and Amanda are arguing against, and to equate these things with rituals that humans designate for themselves based on their own life and their own relationships is just incorrect.
Another small example is telling someone you love them or exchanging physical affection when you see each other.
EEEeeeEEEeeeEWWWW, you do that ritualisticly!? Saying “I love you” and hugs and kisses and sex are fun and emotionally satisfying for reasons other than the comfort of the known, if you’re doing them as rituals then you’ve got problems - or if you can’t tell the difference between emotionally satisfying but ultimately spontaneousy actions and ritualistic ones, you have problems.
Rituals are non-spontaneous and structured, habits can be habitual (hence the name) but spontaneous and non-structured.
And about the whole “pattern seeking monkey” thing…
pattern seeking is another way of saying we have an inbuilt deterministic bent, we look for meaning in stuff, hence conspiracy theorists and my ability to phase out staring at my mandelbrot set patterened shower curtains while I shower, rituals twist this so that the act of doing something itself becomes the reason for doing it -and form there we get conservatives and organised religion and all sorts of other brands of authoritarian nastiness.
Habit can be nice, but we do habits because they’re nice, not because habits themselves are inherently some sort of greater good around which we should rotate our lives.
that’s alot of the problem with christians, they tend to focus on works (and evangelism, Fred at slacktivist has wrote about this in his LB critique, the badness of obligatory evangelism) as some sort of obligation that they have to do because works are what christians should do.
The point of jesus’ message is that he tried to move the zeroth century jews of jerusalem away from this uniquely pharisee idea of doing only that which must be done and nothing more than that which was proscribed in the rituals of the day.
The buddha also kinda went at the reverse side of that as well, the whole rejection of asceticism can be taken literally, or it can be taken as a metaphor for striving so hard at doing something that you in fact achieve the opposite result than you were supposed to - the asceticism is an attempt to renounce all worldly things through the active of sitting around and not eating anything, but as he did that the hunger grew and grew until it was all he could think about - and so the ritualistic act of starvation only bound him tighter to his own personal desire to eat something to the exclusion of all else.
Ritual is the attempt at something that strives so hard, puts so much effort into it all but fails to note that it’s grasping at water, squeezing harder in an attempt to stop the water leaking away. Rituals are ultimately foolish wastes of time, that they tend to go hand in hand with the evils of organised religion is coincidental rather than cuasative, but not a particularly surprising coincidence.
R, because something is a ritual doesn’t mean it’s insincere. Ritual in this case is going through a set of motions that are well-established, instead of just reinventing the wheel every time. Telling someone you love them when they don’t know it is information-sharing, whereas telling someone who does know is a ritual, and is bonding.
I agree that defending rituals can bleed into denying that we need to examine rituals very closely and make sure they are sincere and they are good, but they strike me like any other tool—tools are morally neutral. It’s how they’re used that is the issue.
The fundamental problem with religion is it’s built on bullshit. I think Marc, me, PZ, Twisty—our real issue is that we hate the notion of comforting lies. The idea of a ritual connotes comforting lies, but that’s probably because the most eye-catching rituals tend to also be the ones that are reinforcing comforting lies. I think that’s why people also tend to believe that modest things are the most sincere, because the lack of pagentry means that you aren’t distracted from the real issues. Weekly poker night is more modest than church, and it’s more sincere—everyone there will say they’re there to have fun and see friends, and that’s the truth.
R, because something is a ritual doesn’t mean it’s insincere. Ritual in this case is going through a set of motions that are well-established, instead of just reinventing the wheel every time. Telling someone you love them when they don’t know it is information-sharing, whereas telling someone who does know is a ritual, and is bonding.
Exactly. If I call my mom once a week to tell her I love her, then it becomes a ritual, but a ritual invested with real feeling. Someone could probably talk about how dumb it is to express affection in this expected way, but that person would be an asshole.
Yes, I love Twisty, and intellectually speaking, I would have agreed with her on this 100% a few years back. But I can’t now.
My sister died last year. We’re not, on the whole, a religious family. But when my parents told me they were going to cremate her quietly, with no service, I hit the roof.
I wanted the the whole ritual. The full mass and the Wake, too. In fact, I demanded both and got them. My surviving sister was as surprised by my reaction as I was. She (unlike the rest of us) is very conservative and thought she would be the only one calling for the traditional Catholic service.
It wasn’t religious for me. It was about publicly acknowledging my sister’s life and her death with other people who knew the family or were a part our family. I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture, although I suspect it’s the latter. Either way, there is something deeply comforting to be found in some rituals.
Exactly. If I call my mom once a week to tell her I love her, then it becomes a ritual, but a ritual invested with real feeling. Someone could probably talk about how dumb it is to express affection in this expected way, but that person would be an asshole.
Hee. I like this very much, piny.
I think it’s interesting that people seem to be assuming habit is the healthier form of ritual. On the one hand one of the reasons I stopped liking church even before I stopped being Christian was because I just didn’t understand how praying with someone else’s words that were the same every time could possibly have personal meaning (note to anyone that does find personal meaning this: I was like eight. I still feel that way personally, but I understand that other people feel differently for reasonably valid reasons).
But on the other hand, I can’t think of a single thing I would call a habit that I wouldn’t rather get rid of–procrastination, reading leftyblogs instead of studying for midterms, forgetting things everywhere, bumping into things–and I don’t even have any physically harmful ones like smoking, excessive drinking, etc. (unless you count staying up too late because I dawdle on leftyblogs and don’t start my homework till one in the morning). Whereas things I do because they’re genuinely comforting as opposed to temporarily stress-relieving (or just uncontrollable) I guess I think of more as rituals, even if I don’t really use that word in my head (like: winding down after a long day by meticulously setting up a playlist to match my mood, then listening to it on repeat). But maybe that’s just a question of semantics.
Also, in response to R. Mildred, I think there can be something nice in ritual in a relationship. Obviously most random kisses and hugs and I love yous and the like are just that–random–but in my (limited) experience there’s always been something nice about the expectation that when you see each other, you’ll exchange a quick kiss, and when you hang up the phone, you’ll both say I love you, and things like that. It doesn’t mean that EVERY SINGLE TIME you feel like you’re doing it for the good of the relationship and not because you really want to or even that when you do it in these circumstances you’re doing it for the good of the relationship; it’s just something you don’t think about, and it’s nice not to have to think about it.
Also, this is very tangentially related, I remember on 9/11, when I was starting my second day of the eighth grade in Manhattan, I had long since stopped believing in anything remotely Christian but there came a point where I started repeating Hail Marys to myself, just to hear something familiar. So maybe there is something to this ritual-in-times-of-need thing.
Someone could probably talk about how dumb it is to express affection in this expected way, but that person would be an asshole.
You rang?
Nah, can’t be bothered, I always forget to figure in people’s family into those sorts of thing, though now that I think about I might start phoning my dad up regular like, at 1am to scream abuse at him.
Just so he knows how I feel about him.
And I did kinda write that in between doing pushups so no rituals HERE, no sirree.
And I did kinda write that in between doing pushups so no rituals HERE, no sirree.
We aren’t being ritualistic when we do pushups, RM. We’re worshipping at the temple of the body.
I think that some families are more spontaneous than others, but the line between habit and ritual is so thin as to be nonexistent. And a lot of empty-gesture allegations tend to be from people who see the meaning of the gesture in question as, well, stupid.