Life without Ritual

[genderjumper]

I've absorbed a lot of concepts over the past few years about how significant the actions of belonging are to all kinds of communal activities, from religious worship to concerts to fandoms to family to professional athleticism... In many of these contexts (including religion), the acts of participation become ritual, and those rituals are as important (or sometimes more important) than the actual tenets of faith, understanding of art, or agreement between community members.

As someone who grew up with zero religion, a weak sense of family, and a strong sense of finding my own way, I've rarely had use for ritual. When I've participated in rituals belonging to others (such as attending a chanting concert in the mantra tradition or a movie marathon), I have indeed found them stirring on a deep level, where I could understand people's devotion to those activities or those spaces/people, but I've never found rituals that were so important to me that I felt compelled to continue them.*

If I had to guess what my most ritualistic practice might be, I first have to define ritual, because I've also systematized a LOT of my behaviors as a cognitive shortcut and I would need to differentiate the two. Take masking against COVID-19 for example. I think a lot of people believe I am engaged in magical thinking or ritualistic response to anxiety, but I am following a lot of data that includes both macro- and micro-level harm from COVID disabling and killing humans en masse. I can envision not just a world where that practice one day ends without my beliefs shifting (however unlikely that scenario has become since it would require defeating a pandemic that benefits from being ignored), but where if I were to scratch my habits and re-examine the whole thing, I would come to much the same conclusions and practices all over again. The same can be said for how I dry off coming out of the shower, one of my earliest memories of systematizing behavior for a cognitive shortcut: if I forgot this pattern but decided to make a new one, I would likely come to roughly the same result. Ritual, on the other hand, is about who is present and the meaning they put in the behavior AND the behavior itself, and so I suspect if you had a slightly different group of people, a slightly different goal, or a slightly different timespace context (meeting in a school instead of someone's kitchen), a group devising its rituals could come up with dramatically different results without being less effective.

The difference for me, then, is that ritual is non-replicable and systematization is replicable. The uniqueness of the non-replicable ritual is its vulnerability, and a person or group of people's intention to keep it going is part of its social magic, long before you get into how good it feels to harmonize with 100-100,000 strangers or perform a rhythm that channels the attention of the same. (Oh, that's interesting... ritual is about channeling not just intention but attention. And thus checking our phones "religiously" is in fact pulling us away from communalizing rituals toward individualizing ones that FEEL communal but aren't? Well, that's a bit outside my comfort to speculate, but I'm noting it nonetheless.) Back to my sources and lived experience, it feels good to act in unison or syncopation with a group of like-minded people, and that is true whether it's a system or a ritual: playing in a band feels great, singing along at a concert feels great, participating in a protest feels great (rallies are long past convincing politicians to change much, but they do help participants feel connected and involved and may lead to further engagement). Whether deliberately or not, religions and other communal spaces have channeled those joys into their own sustainability, but that doesn't make rituals inherently religious.

Which raises questions: can those of us who have spent most of our lives mostly adrift from community ties solidify our ties when we do find them through some kind of ritual. Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical NOT to? If we pursued this line of inquiry further, would it be more ethical to make up a meaning or borrow one, to turn meaning-making into the meaning, or to eschew meaning altogether, and how would that affect the hold the ritual keeps on participants?

(I guess I need to supply a theoretical foundation here, but the best I can offer is my own personal brand of "life-hacking": recognize the way the brain works and leverage that knowledge in the direction of becoming the person you most want to be.)

Comments

Asterisk*

[genderjumper]

*We've disproven the historical assumption that autistic people have only an internal life, but the "auto-" as in "self" may be recontextualized if, as I suspect, we autistics are less inclined to participate in the rituals we might otherwise inherit and/or our propensity is to participate in voluntary or original rituals more often than those handed to us by others. In this way, we are broadly less interconnected and have to work harder to build and maintain communal practices, wherever we are on the social spectrum of autistic experience.

*humming White Wine In The Sun by Tim Minchin*

[flamingsword]

The rituals that I pick up from friends and family and the internet all tend to be things that either have a meaning that I agree with or can be recontextualized to have such a meaning. Movie Night had a deliberate meaning of watching crazy movies and building geeky community. Orphan’s Thanksgiving (and other holidays) meant that even if our families of origin were uncomfortable or unhappy-making to be around, we could still have kinship with people worth welcoming. The rituals that I like but that don’t have a meaning that fills needs I have _right now_ tend to fall by the wayside.