Hello. How Are You?
We are creatures of ritual. The leader of the midnight death ceremony lovingly lifts the chalice, the forest cult celebrates, in song, the morning sun on the solstice, two friends shake hands and say ‘good morning’ to each other, a family solemnly thanks God (or the farmer, or the cow) for its food, a tribe takes pubescent boys through weird, physically demanding ordeals in order to mark the threshold to adult freedoms… mini-olympics on the green, association solar-flares in the forest, seven days of incubation in the depths of a Chauvet cave; even our choice of clothing is ritualistic in that it announces, through the set ‘script’ of what we are wearing, meaning.
Symbolic acts are not performed in order to achieve a causal result, but to participate in and confirm our qualitative participation in represented reality. A couple exchanging rings to bless their marriage are actually changing their shared attitude to that marriage. If we translate rituals into words it’s very hard to put them any better than ‘I exist’ or ‘we exist, together’, although really nothing is communicated, rather there is a kind of consecrated stillness or silence, which our gestures or our tones ‘point’ towards. If an idea is expressed, it is often little more than that our lives are somehow fated, inevitable; not because of anything, but in our commitment to the goodness and rightness of what we do which, we find, produces all kinds of beneficial effects.
Ritual is a performance of the qualitatively real, that which is absolutely opaque to quantitative understanding. That’s why rituals have to be irrational, and why they dissolve under rational scrutiny. In ritual, the purpose is to express the spontaneous, qualitative, inner truth of an event; a meeting, through non-spontaneous—scripted, artificial—behaviour. If we take a Pinter play, or a funeral ceremony, or talking about the weather, rationally, literally, all we can see is the script, the artifice. If we take the Pinter play literally it seems unreal, if we take the funeral ceremony literally, it seems pointless, and if we take conventional pleasantry literally it seems trivial, worthless. The most that can be rationally granted to rituals is that they merely encode, in playful games or poetic forms, something which could be much more precisely, scientifically, articulated. Rituals, says the rationalist, are really for children.
We live in a rational, grown-up, world so it is no surprise to find that rituals everywhere are hollowed out, their shells ridiculed, as mere superstition, or placebo, or entertainment, and then discarded or ignored. As the solipsism of rootless rationality reaches its culmination in postmodernism, form dissolves, making it impossible to ritually engage with the other. Unable to commit themselves to common symbolic acts, modern people feel embarrassment at authentic ritual and repulsed by its conformity. It’s just not ‘authentic’ to wear the same clothes as as one’s fellows, or to perform a choreographed dance, or to celebrate our love in a manner that our ancestors did; but this new ‘authenticity’, in its isolation from the mystery of the other, can only ever represent itself. This is how all the ‘individuals’ of a postmodern world, with their self-assertive identities, end up looking and sounding exactly the same as each other.