Fundamentalist movements—with their totalizing claims of authentic belief—should be understood as prototypical sincerity movements, not as a return to some kind of “traditional” ritual order.#
What we usually call the “modern” period, therefore, should instead be understood in part as a period in which sincerity claims have been given a rare institutional and cultural emphasis… Even revolts against this so-called modern era are done in the name of finding ever-more-authentic forms of sincerity.#
The promotion of modern “secularism” has in fact always occurred in conjunction with the growth of “religion” as a category, because these are the two remnants from the splitting apart of worlds where religion and daily life were intertwined.#
The Christian is, phenomenologically speaking, doing something very different from her Jewish and Muslim counterparts. She is engaging in a voluntary, discursive, indicative, and very private act. She is sincere. The Jew and Muslim instead undertake a performative, repetitive, subjunctive, sometimes antidiscursive, and social (even when done alone) act. They are doing ritual. To conflate all these acts as “prayer” misses the point of the different actions and denudes them of their significance to the people involved.#
On the most fundamental level, the ordering of social life requires us to
make distinctions, to posit differentiations, and, in the most elemental way, to separate out the different units of our social world. Social order, as all order, rests on distinctions and on separation. Logically, the separation of different units requires the positing and maintenance of boundaries between them. It is not mere coincidence that the creation myths of different peoples typically begin with a process of differentiation, whether in the book of Genesis or Hesiod’s Theogony or the Akkadian Enuma Elish. They also go on to show how a concomitant process of dedifferentiation threatens the newly divided world, as with Chronos swallowing his children or the stories of the Flood, both Babylonian and biblical. Differentiation and hence order are won only at great cost and sacrifice and maintained with great effort and wisdom.#
Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we can see in forms as widely varied as those Puritan sermons and the Buddhist concern with uncovering the Buddha nature hidden within each of us. In some sense, then, sincerity works as the social equivalent of the subjunctive, which we discussed earlier. If there is no ritual, there is no shared convention that indexes a possible shared world. Instead, social relationships have to rely on a never-ending production of new signs of sincerity (though of course there can be ritualized forms of the search for sincerity).#
Rituals occur in a kind of pure subjunctive, and it is hard to imagine them at all without boundaries that can be crossed. And indeed they disappear in moments of utopianism, when all boundaries seem to dissolve. What use are food taboos if we live in a world that is not inherently polluting, if it is not
broken but complete? What is the need for sacrifice as a way of communicating
with the divine if the divine already exists within us? Buddhism thus removed
the Hindu sacrifices because the Buddha-nature is inherent in every individual, just as Protestants moved away from Catholic sacrifice because each follower needed to take God directly into her own heart without intermediation. This is why utopian movements so often also tend to be antinomian, denouncing all conventional rules.#
Ritual and play share some strongly salient features that set them both apart from the
world of work, of instrumental calculation and other modes of integrating self and world.#
Since the practice of ritual creates its own illusory world, ritual must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation… it is nondiscursive in the sense that it cannot be analyzed as a coherent system of beliefs. The meaning of ritual is the meaning produced through the ritual action itself. That is one reason that so many rituals include nondiscursive media like music or masks, and even language may be used in ways that defy discursive interpretation.#
Getting [ritual action] right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again—it is an act of world construction. This suggests the counterintuitive insight that in this world of ritual acts the self is left more “room to wander” (perhaps also to wonder) than in one where the self has to be firmly identified with its role—where the matrix of social order is in sincerity (for which there is never enough evidence, cannot be, anywhere, at any time).#
When we say of a culture that its members share a symbol system, or a set of values, or a common idea of the sacred, we are in essence asserting that they share the potential space of a shared “could be.”#
What constitutes society—what makes the social a sui generis entity, irreducible to any other—is precisely a shared “could be,” a mutual illusion of the sort that all rituals create. To a great extent, this is what symbols do more than anything else: they represent a “could be.”#
Rituals such as saying “please” and “thank you” create an illusion, but with no attempt to deceive. This is a crucial difference from a lie, which is an illusion with a clear attempt to deceive the other. In this ritual is much more like play, which is the joint entrance into an illusionary world.#
Sincerity imagines a world “as is” instead of ritual’s multiple worlds of “as if.” It looks to discursive meanings and unique selves instead of repeated acts and fragmented realities. One crucial implication of the turn toward sincerity over the last few centuries has been a general dissolution of social boundaries in principle, even as people constantly reassert them in fact.#
Sincerity often appears as a reaction against the perceived hypocrisy of the ritually created subjunctive. Yet those reactions in turn tend to ritualize over time.#
All too often the modern world has absolutized boundaries. This occurs, on the one hand, through the construction of unassailable identities (such as racial, ethnic, or what are termed “religious” identities, or even the idea of citizenship in the nation-state), and, on the other, through the destruction of all particularism and denial of all constitutive difference between peoples and communities.#
There is a very strong ‘‘sincere’’ component to contemporary manifestations of religious radicalism—be they Christian, Islamic,
Hindu, or Jewish. To no small extent, this sincerity occurs in the romantic expressivism of these movements… This view understands the religious act—and, all too often, the religious act as politics—
as the vehicle for self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is less God’s work that is being realized in the world than one’s own projection of selfhood. Too often this is the unfortunate result of a privileging of authenticity and choice as touchstones of religious action in today’s world.#
The importance of sincerity within Protestantism is in many ways a commonplace… It is, to be sure, not unique to Protestantism. It can be found to be equally salient among Hasidic Jews, Zen
Buddhists, or Chinese Mohists of two millennia ago. Henri Peyre has traced
its role from the Renaissance through twentieth-century French literature.
But it is in and through its Protestant articulation that it has had such a
pervasive and formative role in contemporary culture.#
Sincere views are focused not on the creation of an “as if” or a shared subjunctive universe of human being in the world. Instead, they project an ‘‘as is’’ vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality “as it really is.”#
Ritual can be, of course, an orientation to the sacred, but it is not the only possible such orientation—sincerity is another, of equal importance, and of vastly different
import.#
It is the framing of the actions, not the actions themselves, that makes them rituals. Thus both partaking of the Eucharist and shaking hands can be understood as actions that are framed ritualistically. They can also be understood nonritualistically, at least on their margins.#
Ritual can also take place with no concern for meaning (at least in its standard discursive sense), and in many cases informants refuse to spin out meanings, but simply say that they perform rituals in certain ways because that is the tradition. Most of the meanings we can read into ritual, after all, come into play outside the frame of the ritual itself. Ritual… is about doing more than about saying something.#
The famous Augustinian understanding of the Eucharist as the “visible sign of an invisible grace,” although it long predates the Reformation, has become the mode through which much of ritual has been understood. In such a view, the “thing itself” always resides beyond the ritual, and the ritual act is only its instrument. To be sure, this understanding has led to important exegesis of ritual’s symbolism, but it also led to an emphasis on inner states like sincerity or belief that may not always be relevant to the social and cognitive contexts of ritual action. Among other preconceptions, this orientation suffers from an overly subjectivist and individualist emphasis on meaning and interaction. Such a view sees the “essential” or constitutive arena of action (often read as intention) as something within the social actor or actors, with the external, formal ritual seen as but the marker of these internal processes.#
At the dawn of agriculture, all societies were built on institutions rooted in family ties, ritual bonds, and enduring interpersonal relationships. New institutional forms always built on these ancient foundations by variously augmenting, extending, or reinforcing the inherited forms… Later, once purely kin-based institutions were insufficient to scale up societies any further, additional non-kin-based, nonrelational institutions did develop. But, crucially, these institutions were always built atop a deep foundation of kin-based institutions.#
Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our
mental programs in subtle and diverse ways.#
By creating affines, cultural evolution has harnessed a shared genetic interest that no
other species has managed to exploit. In many societies, these otherwise weak affinal ties are highlighted and nourished by social norms involving gifts, rituals, and mutual obligations.#
Kin-based institutions have evolved
culturally to create tight-knit and enduring social units by diffusing responsibility, criminal culpability, and shame across groups like clans or lineages, which downgrades and sometimes eliminates the importance of individual mental states in making moral judgments.#
[Kin groups] tend to become associations only when economic conditions make it desirable to erect monopolies against outsiders.#
Class interests as well as status interests may be represented by parties. In contrast to classes and status groups [however], parties are always purpose-rational associations, since their goal is the acquisition of power in larger associations.#
Classes are part of the economic order, status groups, of the social order; put in another way, classes are rooted in the sphere of production and acquisition, status groups in the realm of consumption.#
The concept of “commercial economy” is quite independent of the existence and extent of a “capitalist” economy, that is, economic activity oriented to capitalist calculation. In particular, the normal type of commercial economy involves meeting need through a monetised economy. It would be wrong to assume that the existence of capitalist economic activity developed in step with the increased use of money to meet need, hence, that it entirely followed the course taken in the Occident. Rather, the opposite is the case. The increased extent of a money economy could be accompanied (1) by the increasing mo nopolisation of Chancen of making large profits on the part of a ruler’s household. This occurred in ancient Egypt during the time of Ptolemy, for which domestic account books show that the money economy was very developed, but they also show that this did remain a form of monetary accounting based on the household, and never became capitalist calculation. Or (2) with the rise of a money economy, the farming out of fiscal Chancen could arise, resulting in a traditionalist stabilisation of the economy (as in China, which will be discussed at the appropriate point). Or (3) the capitalistic valorisation of monetary property could be directed towards investments other than those oriented to exchange Chancen in a free goods market, and hence not oriented to acquisitive Chancen represented by the production of goods (which is almost exclusively the case outside the modern occidental economic region).
#
In a piece by Prof. Jacobi (about the Irvingites, 1854) I see that the Mormons assume that God is not everywhere present but moves with great speed from one star to another. Splendid! Generally progress means, compared with a more childlike age, that more spiritual conceptions are achieved, as if a more childlike age had fancied that God moves with great speed from one place to another—and now the modern age understands that God is everywhere present. But here the movement is in reverse! It is very characteristic, and presumably I am not wrong in assuming this to be the influence of trains and the invention of the telegraph. In all probability there is in store for theology a completely new development, in which all these modern inventions will be employed to decide the conception of God.#
Theories of the physical world are shaped by the social relations within the culture which generates them, and these are used in turn to express in reified format the essence of that culture’s ideal of order.#
The growth of a market in children’s life insurance was shaped by changes in the way that children themselves were valued: these began as a means of giving the “sacred” child a proper burial, later becoming a means of investing in their future education. Neither life not children’s insurance was a straightforward case of commodification or an instance of the encroachment of market values into terrain whose moral fabric they immediately destroyed.#
One lesson of the last several years is that human capital is virtually the only reasonably reliable store of value in periods like the present. Is it just coincidence that active academics (not the emeriti), media commentators and “intellectuals” in general think the rest of society makes too much fuss over inflation as a social problem?#
If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly on the natural inclination every one has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest.#Quoted in Tom Palmer, “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom” (1990)