Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love.

Whyyyyyyyy????

Why not just get together and hang out and... I don't know. Play party games? Talk? Watch movies? Why a ritual?

Because humans experience an emotion of "sacredness" (in scare quotes because although the feeling is commonly associated with religion, it doesn't need to be), which many people think is fantastic. This blogger puts it pretty well:

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine. Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is “divine,” and we justify it in various ways. He cites Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that “sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of “crypto-religious” behavior.” He specifically cites Eliade’s conclusion that even a person who is committed to a “profane existence” has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others–a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

(Page 193). For Haidt, this passage perfectly characterized his own sense of “feeble spirituality,” one which was limited to “places, books, people and events that have given me moments of uplift and enlightenment. Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.”

Haidt’s writing caused me to consciously realize that I too hold various things to be sacred, even though I hadn’t before consciously labeled them with the word “sacred.” Here are some of the things I would put in this category:

• Holding the hand of either of my daughters while we walk.
• Having an honest and intense conversation in a quiet place.
• Being alone in a quiet and beautiful place, including places of natural beauty. Consider further that even atheists can enjoy churches.
• Beating back the temptation of the confirmation bias through self-critical thinking, thus recognizing that one was previously wrong about something important.
• Being part of a sustained group endeavor to lessen real world human suffering.
• Being in the presence of another person who is cheerfully working hard for the benefit of others.
• Viewing certain photographs representing transitions in my life.
• Reveling in the Milky Way stretching all the way across the sky.
• Catching up with a good friend after many years apart.
• Noticing the kind eyes of a good friend while we visit.
• Rediscovering the intense beauty of something I had been taking for granted.
• Creating high-quality art or music, or enjoying high-quality art created by others.
• Resisting the temptation to edify one’s self above others.
• Being consciously aware of places that were important to me, such as the house where grew up, or the location of my high school (even though it is now a shopping center).
• Experiencing the natural healing powers of one’s own body after an illness or injury.
• Holding my wife at the end of a day or the beginning of a new day.

I agree with Haidt that these sorts of experiences have a certain character to them that seems to “transcend” ordinary daily activities. It seems equally true that damaging any of these things, ridiculing them or preventing them would trigger a deep mourning, and even a sense of disgust, and that this emotion would go well beyond any sense of pragmatic loss.

Perhaps, then, the existence of the sense of the Sacred is something on which believers and nonbelievers can agree. Really, we should add experience of the sacred to that long list of things that believers and non-believers have in common. Perhaps we can learn to humbly allow each other to celebrate these moments in his or her own way. If only we could allow each other the freedom to experience such things without casting arrogant judgment, without acting like know-it-all experts of the ineffable. Without succumbing to the temptation to use others’ experiences of such elevated emotional experiences as the springboard to start arguments.

Your reaction seems to be "this ritual stuff smacks of religion, and I don't want to get involved with any of that!". My response would be, roughly, "Humans have this awesome in-built feeling that makes things feel beautiful and great and fantastic and helps us give moments of respite in the middle of all or other worries, and religion has made this land-grab and laid unfair claim on the whole experience. Well, why the hell should we put up with that? Why should the whole thing be labelled 'religious', when it's a basic emotion of human beings that doesn't require being religious in the first place? Religion has done a lot of harm already, and if we begin cutting off valuable and important parts of ourselves simply because we feel those parts are associated with an enemy tribe, we're voluntarily letting religion do more damage. I say we stop that shit right here."

As someone who enjoyed the Solstice a great deal, I'd like to throw a data point out there:

• my family doesn't have a religious or spiritual background of any kind, so I didn't experience rituals as a child. I still enjoy spiritual / religious singing in groups, both in languages I understand and don't, and usually don't take the lyrics seriously. I find most of the value in the feeling of bonding / appreciation.

• The event felt more playful than solemn, and certainly not authoritative. People seemed to be taking it with a grain of salt, it was like a social experiment of sorts. I felt perfectly comfortable with not singing along for some of the time, and this didn't feel alienating or disengaging.

That said, I think I do understand your revulsion towards rituals, and your view about collectivization of emotional experience is an interesting point that hasn't occurred to me.

I've never been to any LW meetup, but I wouldn't surprise me if such reports sound creepier than the actual rituals were due to their, er, literary genre.

Thank you for writing this. My reaction has been pretty much the same. I'm guessing that people are just wired differently, a lot of people seem to be feeling like they'd like to participate in something like this.

Well, yeah. The whole point of rituals like this in religion is to switch off thinking and get people going with the flow. The epistemic danger should be pretty obvious. Ritual = irrational.

I'd like to say that I have similar feeling concerning this.

Even if I wouldn't probably feel bad participating in any ritual, the described things (candles, people crying, reciting texts by Yudkowsky) are completely incompatible with my taste. Perhaps it is the apparent absolute lack of humor and the exalted seriousness which is most off-putting for me.

Since you mention that you had the same reaction last year, I assume that you've read the discussion that took place then that covers this issue, yes?

I know I'd feel pretty darn uncomfortable if I was at a gathering and everyone started a collective sing-along.

You are talking as if a required ritual was sprung on unsuspecting meetup participants. This is obviously not true. Both Raemon's and my rituals were advertised specifically as such. If you don't want to participate in a ritual don't go to one. There are plenty of non-ritual meetups that go on year round. I know Raemon even made the solstice event a two-day event. One day was ritual, and the other was just a regular get-together. So if you wanted to meet everyone without taking part in the ritual you could just go to the second day. In Columbus we didn't have to do that, because it wasn't open invite, and everyone in our group wanted to do the ritual (plus we have regular get-togethers all the time anyways).

Whyyyyyyyy????

Why not just get together and hang out and... I don't know. Play party games? Talk? Watch movies? Why a ritual?

For us (Columbus), our goal was to increase group bonding and cohesion. We find the people in our group to be worthwhile individuals, and want to increase positive affect between group members. Rituals and traditions are a good way to strengthen group ties, and when we were building our ritual we were specifically looking for ways to hack ourselves into feeling closer to the people we want to feel closer to. (i.e. doing things in unison, affirmations, etc)

I really feel rather unsettled by the fact that you're using Eliezer's writings as a kind of... I don't know, mass? Sermon?

Again, this is a good route towards consensual group/self-hacking. It is one thing to read something and rationally think "yes, this is a good idea/this is true." It is quite another thing to actually change your daily thoughts and actions to fall into line with what you rationally think is true (think of the difficulties people have battling akrasia, for example). In order to do this, you need to get those beneficial thoughts and ideas deep inside your intuition/system 1 reasoning. Ritual is one way to hack yourself to do this.

The things that we recited were the Litany of Gendlin and the Litany of Tarski. The ideas they represent (I value the truth, and want to believe only what is true. What is true is already so, and my belief-state doesn't change that, etc) are ideas that I very much WANT to be put as deep into my psyche as I can get them.

If you want to change your daily thoughts and actions, you need to change your elephant. Not just your rider.

Rituals and traditions are powerful things to our primitive monkey brains. We are purposefully, and with the full knowledge and consent of every participant, using it to engage in group self-hacking.

On the subject of making up your own rituals, I can't resist sharing these two links from Wondermark.

Update: The new tradition of the Hanukkah Duck develops further.

Ok, I thought I knew what a Schelling Point is, but this usage puzzles me a bit. If I'm interpreting it right, though, my question is... why do this?

I stole that usage from (I think) Marcello. The idea is that people come together to be thankful and have fun and celebrate in one specific place and time and manner, and that makes it a unifying event that everyone enjoys more.

First off, I upvoted your post. I probably should edit something to this effect in the main post - I value this kind of feedback very much. I think ritual is valuable, but I acknowledge that it has some important costs, most notably in the form of visceral reactions among both existing important members of the community, and potential newcomers who might be turned off.

Daenerys covered a lot of the important points. I'll be addressing some additional points in a later post. Most of what I had to say about this is covered in my post from last year, The Value (and Danger) of Ritual

For some reason I find it interesting that you so casually mention getting married in the description as though it was nothing more than a minor diversion from the evening's main event. I half think you just threw that into the story to check if anyone read that far. Oh, and Congratulations by the way.

I'm amused at your scarequotes around "hugged." (Did you mean "goodbye?")

I'm glad this went well, and interested in how it explored very different areas of ritual-space. I've gravitated towards music because it's what I know and am good at, but have been aware that there's a lot of completely different things I can be doing. I think I'd be interested in skyping about this after I've finished the upcoming sequence.

I'm confused - this sounds like vows to date rather than to be married. It's your business, but I'm curious - what's the purpose of vowing temporary affiliation? And what's the purpose of calling it marriage?

(Edit: rereading, I guess the purpose is healthcare and lower taxes. Is that it?)

Even though I only want to grow a community in my area, and have little interest in starting or participating in a group ritual-thing, reading your report gave me lots of fuzzies. Group bonding is a powerful thing...

Edited the main post to properly link to it. Thanks!

No, it seriously puts people in a more suggestible state - it's better modeled as a drug that as a behavior. Yes, and there's another bonding behavior that delivers a lot of oxytocin and endorphins, namely sex.

You make a convincing argument in favor of banning sex. :P

Claim to not be a cult

Scumbag Lesswrong

start stealing ideas from cults.

This is the primary thing that I've come across that seems like a rationalist activity that meshes well with children. (It also originates in a fictional story, as far as I can tell, and so I'm curious how well it actually works.)

There are people in the NYC community who expect to have kids soon, and friends in San Francisco with kids who might potentially come to one in the future.

This whole experience was inspired by my family's Christmas Eve celebration, which was inherently designed for children. I customized it for the people who make up our community now, but will definitely be revising things as kids become part of the equation.

This may well involve splitting off into multiple events that kids don't participate in. (For example, we might have the "fun" part of the evening end with some activity for kids, and then they go to bed, and then older people do the more serious sections). How exactly to handle it depends on how many kids are coming, how old, etc. We'll cross the bridges when we come to them, but yeah, they're coming.

This could be fixed by singing in a language people are unfamiliar with. I think wordful singing, even in a language I don't know, is qualitatively different from wordless singing in a nice way.

I feel like this is missing a sentence or two of context?

Wouldn't you want to be singing things that call forth possible objections? Where would we be if Christianity had the hold it did a few centuries ago, but without any Bible in which to find monstrous morals or inconsistencies? And if we'd be fine, since Christianity would never have taken hold, then isn't that reason enough to have words?

I'm intending to post the written version of the speech I gave as a separate article. (I deviated a bit from it, since I wasn't reading from a script, but the gist is the same)

Originally I was going to wait till the end, to wrap up the sequence, but after some comments on this thread I realized it was really important to do that sooner rather than later, so that when I say "ritual is a pretty important thing" readers had better context of what I was talking about and why.

I am leaning towards posting it tomorrow. I figure I should at least give people a day to see this article, and give them a a chance to read through the book. (Thoughts on how to best approach that are welcome, perhaps by PM.)

The first verse might be a bit awkward but the rest seems appropriate:

Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks their light didn't die;
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied;
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand;
And light one candle for the wisdom to know
That the peacemaker's time is at hand!

Chorus:
Don't let the light go out,
It's lasted for so many years!
Don't let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears!

Light one candle for the strength that we need
To never become our own foe;
Light one candle for those who are suff'ring
A pain they learned so long ago;
Light one candle for all we believe in,
That anger not tear us apart;
And light one candle to bind us together
With peace as the song in our heart!

(chorus)

What is the memory that's valued so highly
That we keep it alive in that flame?
What's the commitment to those who have died?
We cry out "they've not died in vain,"
We have come this far, always believing
That justice will somehow prevail;
This is the burden, This is the promise,
This is why we will not fail!

(chorus)

Don't let the light go out!
Don't let the light go out!
Don't let the light go out!

"To all whom it may concern, thanks."

Fixed.

feel connected to something greater (I think stargazing in general does that) and serene and loving (of everything) and loved (by nothing in particular)

I am curious, are you suggesting (or do you think) that feeling this way, and experiences that make you feel this way, are a good thing?

I'm downvoting this particular post, but mostly because I want to kill the PUA discussion - it's distracting and mostly irrelevant and past experience has shown it can easily consume an entire comments page. I upvoted an arbitrary other one of your posts to compensate.

PUA is generally criticized for seeming nonconsensual, violating other people's agency, possibly putting your own desires above theirs, and so forth. I don't see how a purely consensual and voluntary ritual can be called dark arts "in the exact same way".