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Mitchell_Porter comments on The Value (and Danger) of Ritual - LessWrong
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Okay, here are a couple of things that bother me about this whole enterprise:
Maybe this is a British thing, but it smacks a bit of Taking Oneself Too Seriously, which is a capital crime over here. For some reason the the idea of a bunch of earnest, self-ascribed "rationalists" coming up with their own rituals just makes me cringe. I'm struggling to pinpoint the source of the cringing, but it's definitely there. It's probably personal, but put it down as evidence that you're going to cause adverse emotional reactions in some people.
I'm a bit wary of the idea of trying to form LW communities. Why do we want to do that? I think of LW as a great forum for discussing a bunch of intellectually interesting ideas, and I'd almost certainly be interested in meetups if there were any near me, just because discussion in person has it's own perks. But actually trying to form meetup groups into communities? That feels a bit like mission creep to me.
Related to the above: I'm wary of setting off down a path that is likely to make LWers identify (more) strongly as being LWers. I'm with Paul Graham on this. Bundling an ideology of any kind with fun community-type stuff seems like a recipe for producing unwarranted attachment to said ideology.
I'm glad you had fun with it, but I think you could just, you know, have a party, at which you might venture to read some texts you like, or sing some songs, or not if people don't want to. Rather than a ritual, with all the gunk associated with that.
Celia Green - a British author - once wrote "[Children] seek intensity of experience. They do not have much experience of life and they may seek it clumsily. As they grow older and saner they learn not to seek it at all."
The injunction not to take oneself seriously, if taken seriously, would lead to self-sabotage and guaranteed mediocrity. Much better that people try and fail, and still keep trying. Even better to get it right, but I do not see how an attitude of unseriousness will help there.
Green is a brilliant thinker who somehow ended up shut out of academic life, and her best works (The Human Evasion and Advice to Clever Children) are full of insights into why taking yourself seriously is the only reasonable thing to do, how and why ordinary consciousness works to suppress such an attitude, and how to see past the traps that your own mind or the attitudes of others may set for you. They are also full of imprecations against the human race for not supporting her work, but perhaps she has a right to that attitude. There ought to be a shelf full of commentary on her works by now (and surely she would have filled a shelf by herself if her life had worked properly), but somehow she remains unknown.
Here is another salient quote from Green: (After scorning the fact that most poetry is about "Love and Death":) "If the human race were a little more advanced, it would want to write poems about infinity and the inconceivable..., and if it were more advanced still it would have more urgent things to do than write poetry."
Substitute "hold a ritual" for "write poetry", and you'll get my message. I do believe that this is what functioning higher intelligence looks like: extremely urgent and directed in its activities, when it is empowered to be so. Life is short and existence is radically uncertain. "Ritual" may be something of a proxy for purpose, but at least it is reaching after empowerment.
To the extent that we did ritual "because it was fun", I think it was a proxy purpose approximately to the same degree that watching a good movie was. Entertainment may change but it's not going away - it's valuable for its own sake.
But some of our group are actively doing important things, and I don't think those things would ever "replace" the function that ritual serves. To the extent that we're doing ritual as a source of community building and inspiration, it basically serves the purpose that it's meant to serve, which is to give you a foundation to go do those things that are more important than writing poetry.