America Has Forgotten the Power of Ritual

When you type “ritual” into Google, the top link (P1) is for an online retail startup for multi-vitamins. It is not surprising that the great marketing tool of -21stcentury capitalism -Google- contributes to the conflation of ‘ritual’ with mere ‘personal habit.’  Yet, this is how most American English speakers use the word ‘ritual.’  It stands in for a highly embedded personal preference of sorts, just waiting for a marketer to step in. It’s telling that Americans are so completely lacking in appreciation for ritual that they are happy to define it as repeated, personal habit. However, any good social scientist knows that ‘habit’ and ‘ritual’ are two wildly different social phenomena, not to be confused with each other. Ritual still exists in American culture but primarily almost exclusively capitalist-constrained environments. Rituals are communal, group processes in which individuals get subsumed into ritual roles, processed by the ritual, and transformed in a way that transcends their petty personal interests and preferences. We have stadium rituals. We have college graduation rituals. We have MBA first-year ‘initiation rituals.’ We have hazing ‘rituals’ at fraternities and sororities. And perhaps the most significant sustained practitioner of ritual in American society: the military boot camp. Ironically, the U.S. armed forces remain one of the only professional practitioners of human ritual whose transformation aims at fusing individuals into coherent groups aimed at a broad social purpose. Most human rituals focus historically (think the long sweep of human history) on hunting, feasting, divine supplication, and life-cycle transformations (i.e. initiation into manhood or womanhood) in pre-modern times. Wait. Let’s look at that list again and see how irrelevant it is to the modern world. Very few Americans hunt for their food or hunt at all. Only a minority of Americans participate routinely in religious rituals. Most Americans do not eat dinner in a group on your average day, and families rarely eat the same item for dinner. The only life-cycle transformations broadly participated in are related to education. Our birthday celebrations are less ritualistic than orgiastic of consumption (and alcohol). The American birthday is an excellent example of the perversion of ‘ritual’ in modern American life. American birthday celebrants celebrate their individual preferences and desires. Everyone else is ‘forced’ to go where the birthday girl wants to eat, drink or celebrate. We ask celebrants to submit to the individual’s desire. This is NOT how ritual works in human societies. Our approach to birthdays is the opposite of ritual, which obligates the individual to suppress personal preferences and adopt ritual roles. When I lived in India in the late 1990s, I was shocked to see how birthdays get celebrated there. Birthday girls and boys buy candy and distribute it to their family and friends, individually, in person, all day long if necessary. The Indian birthday is NOT about the individual. It’s a celebration of the individual’s social network. I wouldn’t call this a true ‘ritual’ per se, but it certainly wanted to be one. Needless to say, when someone shows up at your door in India with their birthday candy, you have no right to refuse it (throw it out discretely if you don’t want to consume it). Refusing someone’s birthday candy would be like pissing on your relationship with them. I’m sure it’s happened, and it’s one hell of an interpersonal test of trust. One of my hypotheses for my upcoming book on the fate of individualism in America is that our appalling lack of daily and weekly social rituals has slowly undermined our ability to function as a complex society. It has also weakened our ability to sustain any serious interpersonal ethics among ‘strangers’ in civic society. We learn to be ethical inside of everyday communities. And ritual is the oxygen of human community. A lack of meaningful, purpose-driven ritual weakens our ability to function coherently in the face of significant change threats operating beyond the realm of humanity – like the increasing release of dangerous trans-special pathogens, rising environmental pollution, and runaway climate change. Last weekend, I took my boys into Savi’s workshop at Disneyland’s Galaxy Edge Star Wars park. It cost me both arms, but behind the capitalist curtain an amazing ritual transpired. When enough money and creativity get applied, capitalism can put on brilliant rituals where the individual loses herself in a ritual transformation. In this came, we came out with very expensive, custom-built souvenirs. Our actual social lives not really changed at all. The sad reality is that I see more ‘ritual’ in purpose-driven startups than in everyday families and local communities. The alienation of today’s youth no doubt explains why so many folks want to join these startups. They see the possibility of a real human community there. However, what most will find is a perversion of community and shallow ritual to support it. Capitalism has no real need for community or ritual per se. And it will easily betray its core functions for the sake of profit in venture-backed entities. This is what I’ve seen in my private-sector practice. Startup company ‘rituals’ quickly become theaters of worship for the hero-founder and little else. But the hunger for ‘purpose’ found among startup employees sublimates a huge unmet need for ritual integration into a functional social community.