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juliawise comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong
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Thank you; I appreciate your response. Based on what daenerys wrote, I think that my response breaks down as follows:
Using ritual to insert things deep into your psyche is something that I think is just bad. Using writings on rationality as sermons, reciting litanies about truth by candelight, etc., misses the point and is dangerous because it attaches you to the views and propositions in question too closely.
Using ritual as group bonding... I don't understand the motivation, to be honest. I acknowledge that it probably works, I just can't understand why you'd want to do it. This is, of course, a personal preference, not any kind of criticism per se.
The above two points notwithstanding, I find rituals very icky and offputting (especially, upon reflection, when they have an (explicitly?) religious feel to them!). This is the case regardless of whether the purpose is worthwhile and whether the ritual effectively serves the purpose.
From your linked post:
This describes me. Not literally; I never (well, almost never) had any mindless rituals forced upon me, but I don't like mindless ritual and enjoy the rationalist perspective for absence thereof.
I haven't tuned out, but I do find it offputting, as I mentioned.
I find this view unfortunate. Not just for the personal reason that you're describing my reaction as an acceptable cost (which I can understand, even if it makes me somewhat sad), but because I don't agree with your framing. I don't think I'm a cynic. I consider myself rather idealistic. I'm not sure why you think only cynics would be turned off by such things.
The rest of your post largely doesn't address my concerns, I'm afraid. bryjnar's comment here is fairly close to my own views, and the responses don't seem at all satisfactory to me.
I am beginning to suspect that this may be a fairly fundamental difference in preferences.
Happiness research is pretty clear that better social connections make us happier. There's a reason that church-goers are happier than non-attenders. Ritual is good at facilitating group bonding, and group bonding is good for people. (Provided it doesn't lead you to do stupid stuff.)
I fear that part of my comment was not entirely clear...
Let me ask you this: do you actually want to group bond? This is quite a separate question from "based on research, I believe group bonding will make me happier".
For myself, I sometimes think: "Hm, I like this person/these people; they are cool and interesting. I enjoy hanging out with them, and intend to continue doing so in the future."
I can't imagine myself thinking "Hm, I want to group bond with some people/these people. What can I do that will have that effect?"
That is, group bonding seems to be the goal here. Is it actually something that you directly want, or is this a case of "research says that it will make me happier, and I want to be happier, so I will do this"?
P.S. As for the church goers... yes, I can believe that they are happier (although that's "happier on average", right?). I don't think we should therefore conclude that they have the right idea about this whole ritual-as-group-bonding thing.
Yes, group bonding is something I directly want, because I've enjoyed it in other contexts before. For one thing, I'm not that good at making casual friendships, and given a casual social setting, I won't get very close to people. I wouldn't have traveled to New York just to hang out. Participating in a more structured group activity makes people more likely to actually get together and connect with each other. Also, ritual is good for bringing up topics (death, hope) that are hard to bring up in casual conversation. Once introduced in a structured way like a ritual, the topics are easier to address afterwards in unstructured conversation.
Also, I think community support is a good thing that most of us don't have enough of. Group bonding helps produce a norm of helping each other, even if we're not especially interested in every group member as an individual.
I imagine group bonding is valuable because of reasons like "I want to adapt those values and behaviors, because they seem useful, but I can't individually self-modify - I should find a group that follows these behaviors/values, so that I can adapt them via peer pressure." At least, that's my perspective.