Ritual

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Robin:
Hello, Agnes.
Agnes:
Hi, Robin.
Robin:
Today, we're going to discuss a book or at least jump off from there called Ritual and Its Consequences, an essay on the limits of sincerity and something else I can't see here, but and the PDF title, it's very long, by Seligman, Weller, Witt, and Simon.
Agnes:
Okay.
Robin:
Think it's
Agnes:
just an essay on the limits of sincerity.
Robin:
That's Oh, okay. That there wasn't more to it than I I missed. So I I liked you had pointed me to this book, although I I think I had had a copy and then somehow lost it. But, anyway, I think but I liked how many different concepts this book was trying to take on, and they're all interesting concepts. Although I fear it just throws them all out there and doesn't integrate them that well. But the thesis, is what I suggest focusing on initially here, which is this contrast the authors wanna make between a ritual orientation and a sincere orientation. In their mind, that is their central thesis, so I'm not terrible to focus on that initially. And to highlight it, I I want to bring your attention to, say, page one zero six in ritualness consequences. PDF? Or Of the PDF. Yeah. Well but, I mean, it's at the top of the in the PDF, it's the number at the top, so it would be in the text. It's not the what what what is the page number? One twenty three, I guess, is is the PDF page number.
Agnes:
One okay. Alright.
Robin:
And the authors go through a sequence of what they see as iconic sincere stances. Mhmm. And it's nice to sort of see the range of them in order to get their sense of what sincerity is or what it means. So it starts out with the the Calvinist, am I really saved? And the teenagers, am I really in love? Are at heart similar kind of questions. They are sincere questions about, you know, what you really feel. And then he has the example of in Russia or China, the search for a true revolutionary consciousness. And this is on the next page, one zero seven. And, analogously, in the nineteenth century springtime of the peoples, there was the being at one with the spirit of one's folk, as a different sort of truth. And then he gives an example of a Sartre Sartre book, iron in the soul, where it's about a workers' movement in Paris and how great it is to sort of have that unidirectional sense of self purpose. That's a sincere stance. And then he talks about Puritan rule, and I think those I think that's it in terms of a range of descriptions of what sincerity is, which I thought was helpful. That is, he some point gives a summary of the distinction of a ritual and sincerity, but, to find it here at the moment. But I think it talks about ritual as being focused on actions and making sure you're doing the right actions, etcetera, and sincerity as a focus on whether you have the right internal stance or attitude and wanting to drive your actions from that sincere, proper attitude. And the book is trying to say the modern world has neglected the ritual stance relative to the sincere stance. And this, I think, is the essence of the criticism in that if we take these examples of sincerity, I think what we're supposed to see is they can't all make sense together. That is some of these people trying to see, for example, you know, the real people's view of their nation, we might look at that and go, well, you're you're forcing them on the situation. That's not a real thing. But in their view of the world, that was the real thing that they were really wanting to find in themselves because their whole view of their world had at the center of it that stance. And that's what it is to be sincere, they're saying, is to take this idealized view of the world and insist on it so strongly that you force everything around that one purported internal, variable or stance or v or feature. And they're saying that just doesn't usually exist. It's too strong an idealization that, in fact, reality is more complicated than that, and you're just gonna be unhappy if you try too hard to force this sincerity. I think that that's how I'm reading their critique here.
Agnes:
It seems to me that this definition the definition of sincerity that we get here is, in a weird way, pretty close to the definite ritual definition of ritual that we get at the beginning of the book. So the way they set up ritual at the beginning of the book is that a ritual world is a world as if as opposed to the world as is. That is that there is this point of view that we can take on the world where we don't introduce any fictions to it. We just let it be what it really is. That's the that's the sincere world. That's the world as is. And the world the the ritual world, the world as if, is a world that involves an idealization. It involves taking a way that we see things and projecting it onto a small space. And it's critical in their view that it's a small space. So the ritual world is, only a small part. It only claims a small part of the world, so it's going to be the world of a certain tribe or maybe a certain play, or a given interaction. And and the thought is that we need these sheltered little subjunctive idealized as if worlds, worlds that can never be the totality of the way things really are. We need that for our social life. And the the the sort of sincerity threatens to blot that out. But on this on the picture that I just gave, you know, the the sincere world would be sort of like a which they sometimes they sometimes describe it this way, like the world of capitalism or something. A world Or
Robin:
just of harsh competitions at the beginning.
Agnes:
Like Atomized individuals, that are that have to interact inside a a a an undifferentiated global order or even atomized individuals that stand in abstract moral relations to one another. Right? So, like, if there's just a kind of absolute morality and we just have to interact in accord with that absolute morality, that would be another annihilation of ritual. So it seems to me that the passages that he is describing in this, you know, like, the need to establish the the this this this Calvinist, and the teenager in love is something like, an attempt to take a given domain of ritual and make it somehow totalizing. So it's something like the, it's a transformation of ritual into sincerity or something like that. It's it's something more complicated than just that sincerity.
Robin:
I agree. That is initially, the book starts out with this idea that there's just the ordinary world, but the ordinary world is not very good and that we do better by constructing these as if worlds and then acting as if in them. So saying please and thank you, for example
Agnes:
Exactly.
Robin:
And and being polite and being generous and and talking as we understand each other. So they initially rationalize ritual and its value through the I mean, they just define it as as if, and they the book has an enormously wide range of uses of as if, and they aren't there isn't an obvious thing they all share in common. But, clearly, I'm convinced there is this capacity for as if, and it's a strong capacity that we do use a lot. But, apparently, there is this conflict that often we get unhappy with as if because it feels insincere, I guess. It feels like we are pretending too much, and we should stop pretending, or we want to stop pretending sometimes. That that the modern world is more set aside at least the overt embracement of such pretense. But that's why I was intrigued by this later discussion. The core of their critique of sincerity of you know, isn't so much that we I mean, initially, the critique was, well, we will lose the benefits of being polite and acting as if we like each other and and that we are kind and understanding for each other, etcetera, and that that would be the problem with sincerity. But in the passages I was just pointing to, it's a very different critique of sincerity. It's a critique of sincerity as being yet another as if world that we are taking too literally and insisting on. And that's they have a lot of the discussion about the benefits of this ritual or as if world is the fluidity of being able to go in and out of them and to not take them all literally and having some ambiguity and sort of mixing and matching them and that, basically, a tolerance for inconsistency and a bit of hypocrisy is okay. And then here, they're fleshing that out by saying there just is not this world as it is isn't a thing in some sense is what they're saying. At least it's not a thing you can socially actually use very reliably. And when you try to insist on the world as a thing, what you end up insisting on is a particular as if world that your community has generated. And when you try to in insist that everything be framed in terms of these core elements of this world as you've imagined it, you're you're insisting on things that aren't really there, and that's what you're causing problems. That is the problem with sincerity is there is no sincerity, really. At least that's the way it seems here.
Agnes:
Right. So that would be interesting. Right? It would be like, like, there's this that line, like, facts don't care about your feelings. It would be like, there are no facts. That is there's no just statement about the way the world is. That can't enter into our relations to each other. Everything we say is socially, accepted and therefore, reflects our socialization, which would be pretty radical view. But, you know, I mean, they do say something earlier in the book about why the demands of sincerity come in. And at least one reason why they come in is, attempts to close the ritual order. So, like, that is the the the space of ritual tends to become canonized. There's a tendency to say, these are the rules, and they're fixed, and they're done. And this is how we're gonna do it forever. And and that's a block against, as they tell the story, this is around page 40. As they tell the story, that's a block against sort of too many sages. The problem with sages is they get to make up rules. And so
Robin:
Including the rule that there's no more rules.
Agnes:
Sorry? Right. Exactly. Well, there's no more rules for them or something like that. So so you have this problem with, people being able to make up rules and make up rituals. And a response to that problem is to say, no. Our ritual order is set. It's complete. We're just gonna keep going like this forever. And then that provokes the response of it's not sincere. So ritual closure. So one way to read this book is just to say there's a problem internal to the ritual system. There is only a ritual system. Right? Because there's no real dealing with the world as is. But the ritual system will, you know, there's a pressure towards closing it off. And when it gets too closed off and innovation becomes impossible, then people start to notice that it's fake, that it's only how things as if. It's not how things really are. And so then there's a demand for sincerity. And you could read those the the later passages that you were, you know, pointing to about the Calvinist, etcetera, as like, maybe we could just, it's like the the war to end all war. It's the ritual to end all rituals. Like, maybe if we just had, you know, the kingdom of heaven on earth or something like that or the total moral law, then we could have this form of ritual that would encompass everything, and it would be final, and it would be closed, and we would be done. So it's a kind of you could read it they don't put it this way, but you could read it as a kind of attempt at ritual closure that forestall any future worries about sincerity.
Robin:
So on this, you know, trying to deconstruct, I guess, these sincere descriptions, they have a little section there in in the pages I was talking to you about a couple and the ritual of saying I love you. Mhmm. And What
Agnes:
page is that again? Give me the p give me the the PDF number, not the
Robin:
PDF number. It's one twenty three, the one I started on.
Agnes:
K. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Robin:
And they basically say that, this ritual, I love you, they say it's a performative aspect is more important than it's denoted of function, I. E, relation you know, the married relationship can last for decades via these sorts of rituals. And that if they try to inquire too deeply and do they really love each other without these sorts of rituals, it it will fall apart and they won't last is the claim here. That is, a marriage can't last for thirty years on sort of just the do I feel like I'm in love is the claim. That doesn't work.
Agnes:
No no footnotes here. No evidence provided for this claim about what a marriage can survive on. But okay. This is this is a problem with this book more generally.
Robin:
True. True. Right.
Agnes:
Don't give a lot of
Robin:
And, I mean, and this idea of true love is one of our current society's sort of more core sincere notions. So this is challenging to that. But I think when we see the the Calvinist and the, you know, nationalist, etcetera, we can more see that maybe their concept of sincerity is something they've constructed and will fall apart if they examine it too closely. But that is, I mean, they're they're making the argument that just follow the rituals. Just just go with these as ifs and don't ask too closely whether they can all be made sense of in terms of some deep, sincere parameters. And one of them talks earlier in the book about the the, Confucianist point of view. Yeah. And, basically, from the Confucianist point of view as presented is that don't even worry about having the right motives or the right feelings or anything. Just just keep doing the right things.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And if you just practice doing the right things, you will just be a good person, and it it doesn't really matter what you feel or or intend or or, you know, your internal emotional stance. And that's presented as something also that the or some Jewish scholars had presented also as a view of Judaism. That and they're I think they're trying to positively tell the moderns that maybe that's okay. Maybe it would be okay to see being a good person as doing the right things and practicing doing the right things, and it doesn't so much matter what you feel or your intentions or your internal sincere state.
Agnes:
Right. So I think I hadn't thought about it this way when I read the book, but I now think it's worth noticing that the space of ritual, which is a social space of certain kinds of interactions and it's important that there are particular kind of interactions. They tend to be repetitive, done the same way every time, etcetera. That that space has to be contrasted with the nonsocial space, that is the world as is. But there are two kinds of nonsocial spaces. They're both important, and they're interestingly different. One of them is the internal world of your mind and your intentions, and the other is just like the world of nature and the ways in which it subjects you to, you know, being struck by lightning or whatever might happen to you. That is the social order is this, like, safe space, basically, from, you know, the kind of vagaries of the natural world. And I think that, what in effect, it's a kind of it's a very sociological point of view to say that the more important point of view is that social, to to think of that social level. And, you know, the way the way things go in the natural world, like the laws of science, all that, that doesn't matter very much. And your internal states, they don't matter very much. What matters is that we engage in certain repetitive behaviors together. That's what life is really all about.
Robin:
It seems like you could maybe give them a a more positive view if you said they they completely respect the real physical world and how that's important, but they see you know, you can improve on that by creating these as if worlds, and that requires that you, you know, act as if and set aside your doubts in some ways in order to be as if. But that this internal real true emotional world, that's not the true physical world. That's another made up world. That I think that's kind of their critique is you're treating that as if it was the same sort of real thing constraint like the rest of the physical world, like the lightning that might strike you. And I think that's what their criticism is directed against, not not the sort of real world outside of your internal feelings.
Agnes:
I I guess I think the, kind of critique of capitalism that's at least implied at certain points, it suggests there is also a critique of the outer world. That that is what they want, they want the social world to be differentiated in a certain way, to form these little subgroups. And if we stand in some kind of, economic unity, then that would be external in a way that threatens the world of ritual, I think.
Robin:
I agree that they they think that too simple minded an attitude toward the actual world is is detrimental and that people should be allowed to make more distinctions. So they have this critique of the modern world as, you know, some UN declaration is not allowing as many distinctions among people as ritual does, and they want to push back against that and say, you know, when we make more distinctions among ourselves, including nations and classes and things like genders, I guess, that that allows a richer as if world that can right make us rise higher than this capitalist dog eat dog world that we would fall into without ritual. But I still think they're distinguishing that from the sincere world, the the internal emotions and the sincerity. I think they are reserving their strongest criticism for that.
Agnes:
Only do internal emotions. And I think they would say similar things about the world's internal emotions. Namely, they're not gonna deny that that's a real thing that exists. What they want to deny is that it, has a kind of, like, preeminence.
Robin:
Priority. That it should be the center and origin
Agnes:
of everything. Say the same thing about the world of economic transactions. Right? That Right. Understands it as giving you the fundamental picture of how human beings relate to each other. So I think it's just, like, to carve out this space is to deny the, sort of, like, lexical priority either of, like, the, you know, retreat of the inner part of the mind and your intentions or the outer world, which could be could be thought of naturalistically, and that's how they think in the earlier parts of the book. And it could also be thought of as the, like, global economic order.
Robin:
I think I agree. Now they they they are ambiguous. So they use this word ritual in one sense for all as if things Yeah. Which then includes, you know, politeness norms. It includes play. It includes fiction. Everything else becomes ritual by this general thing. But then they also use the word ritual for the more specific religious or spiritual rituals, which then have distinctive features from some of the other words that they are more repetitive. They and they even talks about their particular function as sort of, you know, being able to enter the world where there is a deity and there is an order and and there's justice imposed by the deity and that that's a nice world to be able to enter. And I I guess they seem to be ambiguous about whether it's true. That is I think they're really recommending that religion can have this value for you, and you don't have to believe it's true exactly. But you just have to set that question aside and be able to enter it as if and see the world in at least the religious ritual as if it were true and that that has important advantages. Although I think at some point, they say you can't actually have that work and take this distant stance of thinking it's all just a social function or something. Right? They have this story about you you couldn't take Durkheim's view, and that doesn't work for you for religion. Know? Seeing it from the outside is something bonding you together. You'll have to see it from within that ritual, but somehow, you it's not clear whether you're seeing it as true. That is you're seeing it as if. So but some of these as ifs you see, you're supposed to see for example, he says the religious rituals are permanent and are context independent, whereas playful rituals are temporary and, you know, based on the particular assumptions you make at the beginning of play. But when you go into the religious ritual, you're going into the same one god who rules the entire universe forever, and you go back into the same rose ritual, and it's the same setup. So it's in a constant true everywhere as if. Does that make sense?
Agnes:
Yeah. I mean, I also think that that constant true everywhere as if is precisely what pushes in the totalizing direction, which then tries to establish the as if world as the only real world that there is. You know, it might be in the kingdom heaven or whatever. Right. And that's why they think that, that sort of trends towards religious fundamentalism. That's what in their view religious fundamentalism is.
Robin:
Right. But then the question is what is a nonfundamentalist stance toward religion exactly?
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
What what exactly do you believe then, or is it somehow you're not supposed to have beliefs? You're just supposed to act and follow the rituals?
Agnes:
Just like the example they give that should be most relatable to us is the one about that you've already referred to. You know? If I say, like, please pass the salt instead of just saying pass the salt, then there's no real truth value of please. I'm not giving you more information by saying please. But I am, like, recognizing your agency, formally recognizing your ability to decline, right, to not pass the salt, and treating you as, my equal within the context of the interaction, which they call the illusion of equality. Right? So and now it's gonna have to be, well so do I see you as my equal or not when I say please? Right? It's the illusion of equality, but maybe I need to be taken in by the illusion as long as I'm using the word please. Or maybe I just don't think about it. Like, they say, well, it's just not very important whether it's true, so maybe you don't think about whether it's true. So there's a couple possibilities. You're taken in by the illusion. So while I'm saying please to you, I think you're my equal even though you're really not. I I somehow while I'm saying please to you, I avoid thinking about the question of whether or not you're my equal. And so I just don't think about whether it's true or not. But it it kind of seems like the the critique that they want to give of the domain of sincerity, it all devolves back into, like, this messed up thing that we're doing with these as if worlds where you both have to say that we think that things are that way, and you at the same time have to deny that we think that things are that way. And, of course, they're gonna, you know, kind of roll around in that and say, oh, it's an embrace of contradiction, etcetera. But I think there's just actually a problem there. There's a there's a problem of how one inhabits such a space, and maybe it's, like, inevitable that this kind of thing would break down eventually. It just doesn't make that much sense.
Robin:
It seems like a lot of the function of these sorts of rituals is intended to be outside the scope of the ritual. So if you think of, like, saying the pledge of allegiance to the flag or something, the point just isn't to feel united with the nation during the saying of the pledge of allegiance. Right? It's that, like, when there's a war on, you go fight in the war because you have this sense of pledge of allegiance. Right? Or or even in the religion and the religious ritual, you're so devoted to religion that if there's a religious war, you fight there. Or in the marriage, it's not just I say I love you, but I stay with you for thirty years. Right? So there's this open question of the relationship between the as if entrance to this world that's related to another, you know, lifetime of behaviors that is directly influenced by supposedly the, you know, the stances and and feelings that you generate in the ritual.
Agnes:
That's a good point. So and maybe that's a kind of weakness where they really want to think about ritual as continuous with play. That is, like, a ritual for them is very much like a game that has, you know, a structure and a set of conceits that you operate in accordance with while you're playing the game. And then when the game's over, it's over, and you're doing something else. And, it looks like an important disanalogy is that with rituals, the effect of the ritual is supposed to be felt in that social world even when the ritual is over, or is that not supposed to be true about games?
Robin:
Right. So it's not clear actually that ritual is as if. You know, if I'm in the ritual, you know, eating the wafer as if it was the body of Christ or something, the point is that has a relationship to what happens outside the ritual. I'm the as if is extending there. That's part of the point of religious rituals, presumably. Say a marriage say a marriage ceremony. Right? I mean, I mean, he talks about a marriage ceremony as an as if thing, but the whole point is it's supposed to set up this marriage. It's supposed to be lasting a long time.
Agnes:
Right. Right. So there's a question about I guess this is partly why, when a ritual becomes sort of empty or hollow, you don't keep doing it because it will stop having the relevant effect. Right? You could still keep keep up with the performance.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
But if it isn't creating the result that you want, you have no incentive to keep up with the performance.
Robin:
Right. So, like, when two business people make a deal and they shake hands, the shaking of hands is is a ritual, and it's an as if world. I'm not stabbing you in the back with my knife because my here's my hand out in front of you with no knife in it, but it's supposed to be making sure that we go ahead with the deal and that we don't betray each other after we walk away from shaking hands. Right? So it's not I mean, if it's as if it's as if over a much longer time and scope than the mere shaking of the hands, Same way for the marriage ceremony. Like, if you could say marriage isn't as if, the whole marriage isn't as if, and we agree we start at that first moment to treat each other as if we were gonna stay with each other forever and like each other, etcetera. And that's what a marriage is, and we have these other rituals to support it. But the whole marriage is then the as if, not the marriage ceremony.
Agnes:
Right. So maybe what you need are little worlds within little worlds. Right? So there's the big world.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And then there's the world of the marriage, which is a little world. And then there's the rituals, which are the even littler world inside the little world that establish in some way the boundaries of the little world, the marriage.
Robin:
That initiates. So often rituals are know, transitions like graduation ceremony or something. So you might say, well, what's really going on is we're we're we have these as if worlds, and we need a specifically vivid as if world to tell us that we're entering a new as if world. Like, when know, beginning, you say, hey. You wanna play? If you're a little kid and you got some neighborhood kids, hey. You wanna play? I wanna play dragon. And that's a little ritual, but that's an especially important ritual because that'll set the as if for the rest of the playing dragon. And then for especially important as if, we need a whole especially important entrance as if.
Agnes:
Right. Right. But it is an interesting like, I think it's interesting that with games, we don't necessarily need a ritual in order to start the ritual of the game. Like, we like, you could, for instance, have with your friends a ritual of how you choose what game you're going to play. Or you could just all talk about which one you wanna play. And those would both be perfectly fine ways of getting into the space of the game. But it looks like for these other for life rituals, we want we want there to be a ritual that initiates the the little world.
Robin:
I guess there's a way in which we anticipate it might be hard to sustain the as if, like marriage, whereas it won't be so hard to sustain the board game and that we need, something we see as especially powerful as a sign and prod to have a chance that this other as if will be able to be sustained against the various obstacles and and things that can work against it. And that's the idea maybe of the marriage ceremony is to go we're gonna do this as if to say we're really serious about marriage, and it's real a real thing that we care a lot about, and and it's important to all of us. And we're all here to make sure it happens. And so, you know, we're all saying, yeah, there could be big obstacles, but we we here are as if we're really committed to this thing, and we're really gonna work at it.
Agnes:
Yeah. So maybe that's connected to the kind of, you know, religious fundamentalism, that tendency towards religious fundamentalism, which I think from these authors' point of view is of a piece with, like, the tendency towards reform movements, you know, stuff. Everything from
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
You know, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the feminist revolution, etcetera, the anticolonial, that all of that is a kind of, ritual to end all rituals. It's like we're pessimistic about the sustainability of any ritual except the one which would be in some way final where there could be no ritual after that. There could be no correction or something like that. So it's not that we don't have any ritual. It's just that we only want these really good ones.
Robin:
So I I guess a fundamentalist stance toward marriage would be that you're actually supposed to keep the promises you make in the ceremony perhaps. That seems like the analog of a fundamentalist stance toward religion where you think god actually did go up into the sky, and he's actually coming back someday. Right? And, I mean, would they also want they seem to be critical of fundamentalist religion. Would they also be critical of fundamentalist marriage? You know, let's just have the ceremony and, like but we're we're not actually committed to each other that much. We're we're we're really gonna be opportunistic here, but it's nice to have the ceremony.
Agnes:
Right. Well, that second thing is what most people have. Right? They have Or
Robin:
or say think about law. Right? So law is certainly a place where we do some rituals in order to create the as if that we're going to be very serious about the legal case in front of us. But a fundamentalist attitude toward the law is, and you mean it. You're actually, as the juror, gonna look at the evidence and only, you know, prosecute you know, click Larry's guilty if you actually think he's guilty. But that's a fundamentalist attitude toward being a juror. Are they thinking that that's going too far and and that's too sincere?
Agnes:
Right. So, I think that, I think with marriage, they would say, yeah, it is going too far. That is that is most people don't. Right? Like, they they might say till death do we part, but I don't think that they think they've committed themselves to not getting divorced under any circumstance or something even though they have committed themselves in the speech. Right?
Robin:
They said it. Right.
Agnes:
They said it, but they didn't mean it. And they didn't need no one thought they meant it. I think that with the law, like, you know, I think that there's parts of it. Yeah. I don't think we mean all. Like, in God We trust or whatever. There's parts of it where you're, like, swearing on the bible. Like, do you mean something by swearing on the bible? Is it that the bible will go up in flames if you I think those people are fine with a bunch of that not not being taken very literally.
Robin:
But I think they are it's important that they all think some of it will be taken pretty literally. That is since it seems to me that some degree of sincerity is assumed by a lot of institutions and most people in them, including them. I I don't know if they really wanna embrace a fully no never sincere thing.
Agnes:
There are there are rituals that there are sort of limiting case like contracts. Right? Like, the signing of a contract. Is that a ritual? I mean, in a way, yes. But it is also something where it's meant to be taken literally, and that you can, you know, you can litigate if it doesn't get taken literally. And I think a lot of sort of legal proceedings are similar to contract in that way. And
Robin:
Then whether whether we call it a ritual depends on what stance we take about sincerity toward it.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Right? So you might their criticism of that is, oh, sure. It's fine to say you shouldn't be too sincere about rituals, but that's because you called this thing a ritual. I'm gonna be sincere about this because this thing that looks like a ritual you call it a ritual, I say it's the real thing, and therefore, we should treat it like the real thing.
Agnes:
Right. Well, I think that, the thing about law they don't say it. They don't talk about this, but here's in their defense. Law understands itself to be only a small part of human life, and it understands that it cannot govern most of human life. It relegates itself to a little corner if you do something really bad.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And I think that they think it's okay. Similarly with a contract. Right? A very, very small subpart of our interactions are governed by contract. The danger about these fundamentalist movements, which would be the same danger as I think you get in the sort of politically progressive reform movements, is this kind of totalizing character where they would then obliterate all other rituals. Law doesn't threaten to obliterate all other rituals because it doesn't its domain is just not that big.
Robin:
I think you're you're expressing yourself too strongly there. So if we look at these examples of the the critic the things they criticize, the Calvinist and the nationalist and the, you know, the romantic, etcetera, some of those are consistent with each other. That is you could be, you know, have be truly in love or not and be truly devoted to your nation and truly believe in your god. All of those could be true, but they they are large. They ask a lot. They they aren't necessarily totalizing, but they are they are larger. Maybe they could plausibly say implausibly large. That is the the size of the the view you have to have to take this idea of, you know, whether I'm truly in love is the key measure of things, is just too big. It it you you have to do too much damage to too many things to impose that on such a large scope.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, I was not, yeah. Like, I guess I'm You know, I think that they think of the religious fundamentalism as those things taken to a certain extreme.
Robin:
An excessive extreme.
Agnes:
Yes. But but maybe that they those other things that are not as dangerous are naturally going to tend towards fundamentalism over time.
Robin:
So it is striking here that the thing that they're most critiquing is this idea of a true feeling, which is, you know, a relatively tiny part of the set of all things that there are. So they're you know, they don't they don't really criticize the idea of galaxies or atoms or all sorts of sort of strange things we might postulate as being in the world and relevant things. It's the idea that a true feeling should be the thing governing some particular set of practice. That that's the thing they are focused on, true love or true sick being saved or things like that. And then it is interesting to notice that, in fact, we do have many views where a particular feeling is said to govern a very wide scope of behavior. Am I really in love, for example? And that's maybe it's worth just worth noting how, in some sense, extreme that view is that in a huge world of all these complicated behaviors and feelings and people interacting and everything, that there would be some true feeling in your side self that's stable across time and relatively unidimensional and that it would, in fact, govern and control reasonably this huge area of behavior.
Agnes:
Right. I I mean, I guess I think that there's gonna be a lot of work of the religion dictating what your feeling is. So Sure. It's not like you just have to look inside all the time. It's like you have you're told what you feel partly.
Robin:
Well, the am I saved is you know, there's all these rules about what it will take to become saved. And then if you are saved, that, you know, is a binary thing that affects all your relationship with the universe and life and everything else afterwards. But, you know, the idea that there would be this binary am I saved thing is a pretty surprising fact about the world if it were true and perhaps implausible. And the same as am I in love as a binary thing might also just be a pretty implausible fact about the world. And so, you know, we might say, well, they're getting at some reasonable critique of this thing called sincerity. It's not necessarily that ritual is the answer to it per se, but, I guess it's partly an answer. But it's it's just noteworthy to see this critique of this thing in the world that's called sincerity and to see what I I would call a relatively coherent critique of it to say you know? Because ritual is full of all this complexity and and detail and everything else. And then, you know, the idea is you just keep practicing all this detail, then your life, which is a complicated thing, will slowly go better. And you might at least well, that's at least comparing a complicated thing to a complicated thing and imagining that a complicated thing produces a complicated outcome through a lot of, you know, various channels, and that's at least plausible at that level. So it's it's a postulation of this extreme simplicity as the thing that governs huge scopes of complicated activity. I think that's a reasonable critique to say that's implausible. And if you push that too far, things are just gonna break, you're not gonna be happy. Am I really a German? You know? Why should there be such a thing as whether you're really a German and can really enjoy being in Germany?
Agnes:
Right. But it seems like that that pressure is very close to the kind of conceptual pressure that we were putting on. Like, what is this space of ritual? Like, do you actually you believe it? Is it real? Or is it that you're pretending that it's real, or is it that you're not thinking about the question of whether it's real? Like, it looks like there's a problem making sense of yourself when you're in this space of ritual. And there's a pressure that's gonna come from that, from the demand to make sense of oneself. Do I mean this? Is this for real?
Robin:
Right. So then a reasonable response would be to say, well, the space of possible belief is really large and complicated. There it's not a binary belief or not. You couldn't sort of believe it to various degrees in various senses at in various moods, and that would be the sort of complexifying response to the to the, you know, do I really believe it? Well, you can sort of believe it in some ways, But what what else would you think?
Agnes:
I think that there's something destabilizing about noticing that when you say please, you are, you know, supporting the illusion of equality. That undermines your ability to say please.
Robin:
Especially with somebody you feel superior to.
Agnes:
Right. Or or with somebody where you haven't thought about this question. I mean Right. But most of all, with somebody where you've said this to them about the please being the illusion of equality.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
So we can say this line about, well, there's all different kinds of beliefs, but, you know, it's just it's not an accident that, like, I can't say to you while let's say I'm saying please. I'll be like, in many ways, I don't see you as my equal. Because there's lots of different kinds of belief. And you
Robin:
know? Right. Yeah.
Agnes:
No. It looks like I really have to pretend in that context. Like, I kind of all the way believe that you are to the point even of not saying it. Right? When you really believe something, you think to assert it because it's such an obvious presupposition of the encounter.
Robin:
I mean and, I mean, you're making me realize these as if worlds have a number of simplifications, and one of them is that our beliefs are more starkly binary in them. That's kind of the point of them. Because in those worlds, when your beliefs are starkly binary, we can reason more about them. You either believe this or you disagree with this.
Agnes:
Do you love me? You're like, well, you
Robin:
know Right.
Agnes:
What? Belief has many meanings. You know? It depends what the meaning of is is.
Robin:
Right? Exactly.
Agnes:
That's not gonna work. It's like yes or no. And I think that's right that a lot of these a lot of these spaces of ritual have this interestingly digital character. Like, there's three options or something. Right. You know? Or there's there's two thing there's you this or not this, and they're delimited in those ways. And there's, like, a lot of different possible moves that are just not in that space, that don't exist as far as that space goes.
Robin:
And that simplifies it and makes it so for example, in the please and thank you, the simplified world is I'm either your friend or your enemy. Right. Pick which. Oh, I'm your friend. Okay. There we go. Now we're done.
Agnes:
Right. And and it's like like like when a kid doesn't say thank you and you because when they got a present and you criticize them for it. Like, they might say, look. There are all sorts of possible reasons why I didn't say thank you. There's a whole space of them. Right? And you're like, no. There's only one, which is you are being rude, and you gotta say thank you. And so, like, we live in the world with these two options, and you've gotta pick the other one. And that's also a fact about ritual. So, yeah, I guess, like, the thing is that in the nonritual world, you can make the movie you just made about all different flavors of belief, but, doesn't look like we're asking about the ritual world. We're asking about what it's like to inhabit that world and to wonder whether you're really in it or not.
Robin:
And, actually, I think, in terms of practicing through our lives, most of the most of the time in our lives, almost all of it for most people, would be spent in various as if worlds with very simplified rules. And you have to, know, becoming an academic or a philosopher or something, do all this work to realize that you have these more options in the real world, but those are real worlds that you almost never inhabited before.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Like Just the very idea you can have degrees of belief. For many people, they had just never heard of that and suddenly have this new option of degrees of belief, but that's because at some point in their life, they were informed that in the larger real world, you have more options, really. But for most of the life, they spent in these simplified worlds where they didn't. And then, in fact, most of their life after school, they will go back to worlds where they don't actually have these options.
Agnes:
Right. Like, in a conversation, you don't have degrees of belief. Like, I, in most conversations, I wanna know, like, look, are you arguing for pee or not? You know? Are you defending it? Are you defending the opposite? And I'm not interested in your that's that's private. You know? But in the as for the part of the conversation goes, if you're defending it, then you're asserting it. And then that's a a 100%. Right? You believe it with probability one, right, with with with, you know, like like like as the whole word tautology.
Robin:
And and we we academics pride ourselves perhaps on being more sophisticated and having a wider range of stances we can take on various issues than, say, most people would discuss it. But there's a set of assumptions in the as if world of academia that, you know, I don't speak about it unless I'm a world expert, and then I'm gonna publish on it and it's had proper referee, you know, evaluation.
Agnes:
Right. It's a it's the as the as if world of ac of academia is still a social world, and so it's still got its own set of as if rules and which are yes, which are binary. And one of the rules is you spend a lot of time talking about how binaries are
Robin:
bad. Right.
Agnes:
But, like, they're not ever in between. They're always, like, good or bad and usually bad. So Right.
Robin:
Right. So I'm I'm starting more to think that this as if world thing is just the usual case, and we actually find it quite hard to do anything but that. I mean, we have to work pretty hard to find a way to have a conversation where the usual as if rules don't apply.
Agnes:
I just had so I had I had a kinda crazy thought, which is there used to be this conceit, or rather there was a historian. I don't remember when. He must be probably early twentieth century. I think his name was Bruno Snell. I'm gonna look it up right now because it's gonna be, like, very embarrassing if I'm get this totally wrong. I mean, it's probably already enough that I don't. And he he okay. Okay. Yeah. Discovery of mind, who thought that the ancient Greeks, didn't really have something like, a kind of self consciousness or inner mental life. And this this point of view on the ancient Greeks was sort of ridiculed afterwards as absurd. But you might think, here's a way to think about like, you know, if we go back to this book about ritual and, we see the tight connection between, sort of the world of ritual and the being less into sincerity, authenticity, the privacy of your mind and intent, we can actually flip the thought you had earlier, which is not that they doubt the reality of the ritual world because they give priority to their inner mental life, but that the very idea of having an inner mental life is just a way to wonder about whether the ritual world is real. That is the the consciousness springs into being when you start to question ritual, and there's gotta be something else. Right? And then the real me is not in this interaction, and it's, like, somehow now in my head or something like that. So the thought would be that the that I mean, this would in a way be pushing against the line that they give in the book. Not exactly because I wanna defend the inner world of authenticity, but that that inner world of authenticity and sincerity only comes into being when the ritual world collapses in some way. So it's a sign that something has gone wrong with ritual. The ritual was not able to sustain itself as a reality. That's when you get self consciousness. That would be that would be the the the very unfashionable defensive snow.
Robin:
Well, I I think we often have this idea that somebody is making a promise, and do they intend to keep it? So that's, I think, one of the ways in which we ask about sincerity most naturally in our world. Somebody promise I pay them, and they're gonna deliver tomorrow. Do they intend to deliver tomorrow? Are they gonna run away? I, you know, marry somebody they promised to be faithful. Do they intend to be faithful? You know, things like that. You know, I have a soldier who I assign as a scout who says he'll come back. Does he intend to come back? Is he just gonna escape the war as a scout? I mean, it does seem like for even before the Greeks, we would have had those sorts of concerns about whether people's words corresponded to their intention state.
Agnes:
It would be like, is he brave? You know, is he just? I don't think I would say does he intend. So here's the thing. They talk about in the book that, like, in the in the world of sincerity, lying becomes really significant as a an evil thing. And, like, you're supposed to be honest, you're not supposed to lie. You're supposed to say what you really think in your head. And it struck me. I don't think I mentioned this, but, like, in ancient Greek, the word for to lie is which means to say something false. And if you say something false by accident, it's the same word. They don't have a separate word that means to lie.
Robin:
Right. And
Agnes:
they do point out that in, like, a lot of Greek literature, you get things like the noble lie. That's Plato. Right? You get, these telling of myths in the Platonic dialogues where there's kind of a lack of concern for whether or not they're true. And so it looks like at least some of the, you know, modern world's kind of obsession with, do you really mean it? Like, do you really intend? Are you saying the truth? Are you being honest? Is not shared by these, ancient societies. And, oh, another thing they bring up is about, like, that there are a lot of ways to talk about cleverness that is just a way of saying, like, what we would call lying. But from them from their point of view, it could be you're you're good at manipulating things. There's a kind of cleverness in, Odysseus being Politropos, being many a manifold kind of person, which is to say he sometimes promises stuff and then just doesn't go through with it and gets away with the whole thing. That's how awesome he is. So, yeah, it may just be that we carve things up a little bit differently because we live in the world of sincerity because ritual collapsed. It abandoned us.
Robin:
Right? So there's been this decline of ritual, I guess. I mean, it's nice to come up with theories for why it declined, but then there's a problem of too much if you have too many different theories that'll explain the same thing, you wonder, well, they can't all be right.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Or there'd be a big coincidence. So one explanation here for the decline of ritual is this increase in priority of sincerity, Morris.
Agnes:
The explanation I'm offering.
Robin:
No. No. But that's what the book is offering.
Agnes:
The book is offering. Saying goes the other way. You prioritize sincerity because ritual collapses. Yeah.
Robin:
Go ahead. But then we need some other reason why ritual would have collapsed.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
And then, another I mean, I think I would I wrote a blog post today about was just the idea that rituals tend to be relatively specific and copied relatively precisely, at least religious rituals. And then a lot of more ancient behavior in a lot of parts of your lives could be like that because the world was pretty stable. But as the world's changing more rapidly, you need to copy other people's behavior at a higher level of abstractions, not just copy all the exact details, but, you know, copy at a level that you could then generalize. And so that may also explain the reduction of religious ritual because we're more importantly trying to find a robust description that will you know, a a way you can do the church service not here but out out in the out in the woods, you know, on a riverboat. Like, if your life's gonna have all these different changes, then we need to give you rituals that you could then, you know, apply and generalize. And then it there's there'll be less attention to lots of specific details and more sort of the general point of the general structure of it.
Agnes:
Right. So a lot of stuff about, you know, women officiants in Christianity or Judaism. Like, is that the continuation? Right? Or gay marriage as a form of marriage? Those are attempts to copy the tradition at a higher level of abstraction. Because if we copied it too in too much detail, we would have to say, well, no. You can't have gay marriage or no. You can't have, women rabbis or something like that.
Robin:
Well, the Confucian story in the beginning of the book says, look. You copy specific rituals, but then you're supposed to generalize from that to all the other behavior. And a a sage is is a person who learns the rituals so well that they could always do the right thing no matter what showed up.
Agnes:
Right. Right. But then that was dangerous. That was then what raised the problem of and then they can sort of innovate. You have once you have too many sages, it's a problem of too many sages. Right? Where then it looks like you don't need the rituals, and, also, they can innovate in an indefinite number of ways. You have to just trust them. And then you end up closing down the cannon and being like, no. No more innovation. This is how we have to do it. So and we kinda deal we kinda got rid of sages, I feel like, a long time ago.
Robin:
And you have to wonder why. I mean, I people liked Gandalf, the wizard character in Lord of the Rings, but he wasn't so much a sage. He he didn't offer a lot of advice. He just, you know, was able to do a lot of things. But it is
Agnes:
We have, like, we have, like, geniuses and stuff. Like, people who are allowed to break the rules. So maybe that's the the sort of genius character. But
Robin:
Yeah. They're not so Svena's wise in the same way. Like, a sage is supposed to, like, be generally wise about lots of different things, and a genius, like, figures one gritty thing out, but it doesn't mean they're great about the rest of their life.
Agnes:
But but I was suggesting a reason why, ritual would collapse, namely conceptual incoherence. It just collapsed under the weight of its conceptual incoherence, which would predict that what you would get is an abandonment of local small scale rituals and at the same time, a kind of striving for a uni the totalizing universal ritual that you get in the religious fundamentalism or political reform movements or, the ritual to end all rituals. So it could just be that this whole as if thing just doesn't actually, this does not make that much sense. And, like, eventually, we realized it didn't make that much sense, and we stopped being able to do it.
Robin:
I mean, we still say please and thank you. So, I mean, there's a lot of these small scale conversational rituals. We definitely are doing as if when
Agnes:
Right. I I agree, but we are also, pretty willing to give them up. And, like, under pressure, they don't they don't hold up.
Robin:
Right. Although, I mean, again, I am struck by this overall critique, which says that these totalizing these larger totalizing worlds you construct that you think are the real worlds, to the extent they are just yet another construction for convenience, like with binaries because that's easier to talk in terms of, etcetera, then you're gonna get into trouble when you rely on them too strictly.
Agnes:
Absolutely. But it's not clear to me that defeating those approaches is the win that these authors think it is for their ritual favored view because that might be the last refuge of ritual. So by destroying it, they're just that's it. That's the end of ritual then.
Robin:
Maybe we just become capitalist, selfish, crude animals of the sort they fear we would become without ritual.
Agnes:
That's one possibility. Or we find our next thing. But, like, I do think that there's something very powerful in the thought that this sort of, this subjunctive space of ritual points to something that's sort of at the heart of what culture is. Culture is a set of rules that we follow, and we sort of pretend that they're natural. We pretend that they're the rules of how things really always have to be, that there's a kind of necessity to them that they don't have. And that's, it may just be that that was a sort of temporary bit of technology, that is dying out.
Robin:
It does it is a striking fact that we just have this capacity to do as if, and we are really inclined to use it a lot. But it's it doesn't take very much of a prodding for us to fall into it with, other people around us or to pick up the habits of as if the people are doing. Just go along with
Agnes:
them. Right.
Robin:
I I think we're about out of time.
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
Alright. Till we talk again.
Agnes:
K.