The particular problem with the ritual is that unlike the other things, it seems to exist only for the purpose of community-building. Opting out of the other activities makes your cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t like fanfiction / board games / decision theory that much”, which isn’t that bad. Opting out of the ritual makes the cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t care that much for being a community member”, which is a bit more unfortunate.
Then there’s also the small thing where the nonsensical community forming rituals have popped up in every human culture everywhere as far back as we know anything about human cultures, and always tend to develop the side effect of the socially gelled people favoring each other a bit more over the boring people who don’t bother to play along with the rituals. This is what the social instinct response is about, not paranoia about hooded murderers going about stabbing people one night. Traditional societies seem to end up with all members participating in whatever the local ritual is, because that’s the guarantee for belonging in the in-group and the other in-group members having your back. If you don’t see the point in the ritual, tough. The social cohesion mechanism wasn’t built for you, just smile and play-act along for the bit of extra guarantee that someone might have food to spare for you as well on the next famine year.
I think that people’s response to ritual is hard to explain. I have trouble explaining it. “Community-building” is sort of the default explanation. In the same way, if there were a real-life meetup, “getting to know people better”, which is almost a synonym for “community building”, is a default explanation because it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
I think you make a good point that presenting it as “community building” might sound exclusionary, and I will stop using that justification. But in the end I don’t think it is any more about community building than meetups or board games or anything like that—only harder to explain, so that that explanation becomes more salient. Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
Sure, but this is in the same sense that it’s hard to explain why we perceive three-dimensional objects when the input we’re getting is two-dimensional arrays. It took a lot of smart people paying attention to unravel that particular puzzle, but there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious about it.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in face to face interactions that isn’t present in online conversation, and it evidently includes things that many of us find gratifying.
Which things those are is worth knowing (not least because we can use that knowledge to build more gratifying telepresence rigs) but not knowing it doesn’t preclude being gratified by them, any more than not knowing how to derive 3D models from 2D images precludes perceiving 3D objects.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, granted. I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I agree with this sentiment in general, but in cases where the “something” that’s being valued is valued only by some people, rather than all (here I am referring to rituals, rather than just “meeting people face to face”), seeking an explanation is more important.
(blink) That is, if I value two practices P1 and P2, and 95% of the population values P1 and only 5% values P2, you’re saying it’s more important to seek an explanation for valuing P2 than an explanation for valuing P1… yes? Can you expand on why you believe that?
I’m not sure how you got what you said from what I said; I surmise that I was much less clear than I thought, or that I am not understanding you. Attempt #2, in the hope that it’s the former:
If everyone likes a thing, then asking “why do we like that thing” is of academic interest.
If some people like a thing but other people don’t like that thing, then asking “why do some people like that thing” has practical use. Maybe we can bring the naysayers around. Maybe we will discover that the advocates’ reasons for liking the thing are bad reasons. Maybe we’ll discover something about the underlying preferences that will allow the pro-thingers and the anti-thingers to get along better. In any case we’ll very likely come to understand each other better, and will be less likely to think that people of the other preference type are abnormal; at the most basic level, we’ll do better at keeping in mind that people of the opposite preferences exist at all. That’s a good thing.
The relevance to the discussion of rituals has to do with the fact that some participants and pro-ritual commenters have expressed sentiments such as “humans need ritual” or “people like ritual” or “people have a need for experiences of sacredness” or other things along those lines. My motivation for commenting has been largely to point out that such comments are sorely in need of having the word “some” (or, at best, “most”, conditional on at least some data supporting such a claim) inserted into them.
And given that that’s the situation — that some people like rituals, but some clearly do not — the question of “why do some people like ritual” acquires a more than academic interest, for the reasons I outlined above.
Sorry about the failure of communication, but as it happens you answered my question. Thank you.
To my mind, asking why everyone likes a thing that everyone likes has practical use. If we can answer that question, we can understand how we make that judgment, we can understand how we make related judgments. That’s a good thing. (I do agree that it’s of academic interest, though. Like many things of academic interest, it has practical use.)
That aside, though… sure, if your motivation is largely to point out that some people don’t need ritual, like ritual, or need experiences of sacredness, I expect that’s true.
Right. I probably am going for a bit of a selective reduction here with my kneejerk reactions. There’s all sorts of quite strange when you think about it stuff going on with playing board games too, for instance, which I’m not being concerned about.
Still, I think we have a mutual appreciation here that rituals are powerful stuff. I worry a bit when I see a not that broad culture (compared to society at large, or the academia as a whole, for example) like LW picking up on a ritual and taking it up as its own, and thinking about what role rituals end up having everywhere in human history. I’m seeing things getting on a path to ending up as something like Freemasonry (assuming for the moment that they’re more secular than they are), where there might be an understanding that the rituals are just a formality, but participating in the culture without participating in the rituals still basically doesn’t work.
I might also notice that all the subcultures that stick around for more than a generation or two seem to come with rituals running the show. It might be that the actual problem I’m pattern matching isn’t about adopting rituals at all, but about subcultures sticking around past their expiration date instead. Subcultures that go bad quickly tend to have more overt badness indicators.
Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
“Come join the Solstice Ritual” sounds like just people being silly to me, while this sounds like something from a Grant Morrison comic book that will end with someone’s head being carved open by robed creatures with giant insect heads.
Hmm… although I’ve never been to any of these rituals, but from reading the descriptions, it hasn’t been my impression that it would exist only for community-building. For example, I found the description of the 2011 ritual touching on an emotional level even though I was reading it all alone at home, and I expect that the rituals would also have given me a strong emotional kick that wasn’t directly related to the group bonding aspect. Going out to a movie with friends would probably be a good analogy: being in a group does enhance the experience, and the group bonding is a plus, but the main reason we go there is the movie itself.
The social bonding and getting to meet new folks was not what gave me a strong feeling of “man, I want to participate in that” when I read the description of the original ritual. In fact, all of the social bonding stuff was just extra: a nice plus, but hardly the point. What attracted me was, well, the ritual itself: the feeling that it could give me a deep, lasting emotional experience that’d move me to the core, a faint echo of which I felt while reading the post. That would ultimately be a solitary and personal experience, even if I needed the presence of a group to help me achieve it.
What I was trying to say was that I don’t think that its level of “(only community building)-ness” is much higher than that of board games or fan fiction. A little higher, maybe, but not that much. I don’t know if I’d feel differently if I’d actually participated in such a ritual, though.
The particular problem with the ritual is that unlike the other things, it seems to exist only for the purpose of community-building. Opting out of the other activities makes your cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t like fanfiction / board games / decision theory that much”, which isn’t that bad. Opting out of the ritual makes the cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t care that much for being a community member”, which is a bit more unfortunate.
Then there’s also the small thing where the nonsensical community forming rituals have popped up in every human culture everywhere as far back as we know anything about human cultures, and always tend to develop the side effect of the socially gelled people favoring each other a bit more over the boring people who don’t bother to play along with the rituals. This is what the social instinct response is about, not paranoia about hooded murderers going about stabbing people one night. Traditional societies seem to end up with all members participating in whatever the local ritual is, because that’s the guarantee for belonging in the in-group and the other in-group members having your back. If you don’t see the point in the ritual, tough. The social cohesion mechanism wasn’t built for you, just smile and play-act along for the bit of extra guarantee that someone might have food to spare for you as well on the next famine year.
I think that people’s response to ritual is hard to explain. I have trouble explaining it. “Community-building” is sort of the default explanation. In the same way, if there were a real-life meetup, “getting to know people better”, which is almost a synonym for “community building”, is a default explanation because it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
I think you make a good point that presenting it as “community building” might sound exclusionary, and I will stop using that justification. But in the end I don’t think it is any more about community building than meetups or board games or anything like that—only harder to explain, so that that explanation becomes more salient. Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
Sure, but this is in the same sense that it’s hard to explain why we perceive three-dimensional objects when the input we’re getting is two-dimensional arrays. It took a lot of smart people paying attention to unravel that particular puzzle, but there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious about it.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in face to face interactions that isn’t present in online conversation, and it evidently includes things that many of us find gratifying.
Which things those are is worth knowing (not least because we can use that knowledge to build more gratifying telepresence rigs) but not knowing it doesn’t preclude being gratified by them, any more than not knowing how to derive 3D models from 2D images precludes perceiving 3D objects.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, granted. I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I agree with this sentiment in general, but in cases where the “something” that’s being valued is valued only by some people, rather than all (here I am referring to rituals, rather than just “meeting people face to face”), seeking an explanation is more important.
(blink)
That is, if I value two practices P1 and P2, and 95% of the population values P1 and only 5% values P2, you’re saying it’s more important to seek an explanation for valuing P2 than an explanation for valuing P1… yes?
Can you expand on why you believe that?
… what?
I’m not sure how you got what you said from what I said; I surmise that I was much less clear than I thought, or that I am not understanding you. Attempt #2, in the hope that it’s the former:
If everyone likes a thing, then asking “why do we like that thing” is of academic interest.
If some people like a thing but other people don’t like that thing, then asking “why do some people like that thing” has practical use. Maybe we can bring the naysayers around. Maybe we will discover that the advocates’ reasons for liking the thing are bad reasons. Maybe we’ll discover something about the underlying preferences that will allow the pro-thingers and the anti-thingers to get along better. In any case we’ll very likely come to understand each other better, and will be less likely to think that people of the other preference type are abnormal; at the most basic level, we’ll do better at keeping in mind that people of the opposite preferences exist at all. That’s a good thing.
The relevance to the discussion of rituals has to do with the fact that some participants and pro-ritual commenters have expressed sentiments such as “humans need ritual” or “people like ritual” or “people have a need for experiences of sacredness” or other things along those lines. My motivation for commenting has been largely to point out that such comments are sorely in need of having the word “some” (or, at best, “most”, conditional on at least some data supporting such a claim) inserted into them.
And given that that’s the situation — that some people like rituals, but some clearly do not — the question of “why do some people like ritual” acquires a more than academic interest, for the reasons I outlined above.
Sorry about the failure of communication, but as it happens you answered my question. Thank you.
To my mind, asking why everyone likes a thing that everyone likes has practical use. If we can answer that question, we can understand how we make that judgment, we can understand how we make related judgments. That’s a good thing. (I do agree that it’s of academic interest, though. Like many things of academic interest, it has practical use.)
That aside, though… sure, if your motivation is largely to point out that some people don’t need ritual, like ritual, or need experiences of sacredness, I expect that’s true.
Right. I probably am going for a bit of a selective reduction here with my kneejerk reactions. There’s all sorts of quite strange when you think about it stuff going on with playing board games too, for instance, which I’m not being concerned about.
Still, I think we have a mutual appreciation here that rituals are powerful stuff. I worry a bit when I see a not that broad culture (compared to society at large, or the academia as a whole, for example) like LW picking up on a ritual and taking it up as its own, and thinking about what role rituals end up having everywhere in human history. I’m seeing things getting on a path to ending up as something like Freemasonry (assuming for the moment that they’re more secular than they are), where there might be an understanding that the rituals are just a formality, but participating in the culture without participating in the rituals still basically doesn’t work.
I might also notice that all the subcultures that stick around for more than a generation or two seem to come with rituals running the show. It might be that the actual problem I’m pattern matching isn’t about adopting rituals at all, but about subcultures sticking around past their expiration date instead. Subcultures that go bad quickly tend to have more overt badness indicators.
“Come join the Solstice Ritual” sounds like just people being silly to me, while this sounds like something from a Grant Morrison comic book that will end with someone’s head being carved open by robed creatures with giant insect heads.
Hmm… although I’ve never been to any of these rituals, but from reading the descriptions, it hasn’t been my impression that it would exist only for community-building. For example, I found the description of the 2011 ritual touching on an emotional level even though I was reading it all alone at home, and I expect that the rituals would also have given me a strong emotional kick that wasn’t directly related to the group bonding aspect. Going out to a movie with friends would probably be a good analogy: being in a group does enhance the experience, and the group bonding is a plus, but the main reason we go there is the movie itself.
The social bonding and getting to meet new folks was not what gave me a strong feeling of “man, I want to participate in that” when I read the description of the original ritual. In fact, all of the social bonding stuff was just extra: a nice plus, but hardly the point. What attracted me was, well, the ritual itself: the feeling that it could give me a deep, lasting emotional experience that’d move me to the core, a faint echo of which I felt while reading the post. That would ultimately be a solitary and personal experience, even if I needed the presence of a group to help me achieve it.
This isn’t at all unlike what I imagine the ingroup-strengthening response to ritual to feel from the inside.
What I was trying to say was that I don’t think that its level of “(only community building)-ness” is much higher than that of board games or fan fiction. A little higher, maybe, but not that much. I don’t know if I’d feel differently if I’d actually participated in such a ritual, though.