Sincerity Adds To Drift

The 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity is hard for me to understand, but I’ve been trying to figure it out, as the concepts it considers seem interesting and important:

In any ritual, as with saying please, performing the act marks acceptance of the convention. It does not matter how you may feel about the convention, if you identify with it or not. In doing a ritual the whole issue of our internal states is often irrelevant. … Getting it right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. … In daily life there is often much pushing, screaming, grabbing of hairbrushes, not helping with the dinner or feeding the dog, and so on. The parents then decide that everyone has to treat each other with a bit more respect, more civility, more use of please and thank you. Many of us have experienced this and know that it works—at least for a time, until the please and thank you begin to get lost. Ratcheting up the amount of love everyone feels, on the other hand, is not the way to make life more pleasant in the household. There is no need, and it is not even possible. …

Ritual … 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. …

Building a better society, therefore, is based upon ritualization: creating a canon of practices that everyone should follow. And the criterion for which actions from the past should become part of that ritual canon is simply based on whether a continued performance of them helps to refine one’s ability to respond to others. … there is no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guidelines, laws, or principles. There are only actions, and it is up to humans to ritualize some of those actions and thereby set up an ordered world. …

Sincerity often grows out of a reaction against ritual. It criticizes ritual’s acceptance of social convention as mere action (perhaps even just acting) without intent, as performance without belief. The alternatives it often suggests are categories that grow out of individual soul-searching rather than the acceptance of social conventions. Sincerity thus grows out of abstract and generalized categories generated within individual consciousness. The sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘‘mere convention’’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction. …

From the point of view of sincerity, ritual is mere hypocrisy and convention. Viewed from ritual, however, sincerity can threaten the very existence of society by refusing its conventions. …

The Calvinist’s ‘‘Am I really saved?’’ and the teenager’s ‘‘Am I really in love?’’ are at heart similar kinds of questions. After three decades of marriage, kids, laundry, mortgages, funerals, fights, and in-laws, the relationship tends to be sustained by [ritual] … Relationships that fail to … over the long term tend to fall apart. It is not enough to love each other sincerely if people fail to act as if they love each other; and acting as if they love each other includes ritualized forms of expressing concern, verbally and in concrete deeds of helpfulness. …

Sincerity tries to resolve all ambiguity to forge a ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘unsullied’’ consciousness. Fifty years ago in Russia or China it was the search for a ‘‘true’’ revolutionary consciousness. In the mid-nineteenth-century springtime of the peoples it was to be at one with the spirit of one’s folk, … Sartre’s … Iron in the Soul … showing the attraction of the workers’ movement … along with the self-loathing of those who could not master such unidirectional sense of self-purpose. …

Both the scholarly community and commonsensical readings of world history … claim that traditional societies are governed by ritual—that is, by largely unquestioned external norms, customs, and forms of authority that regulate individual lives. In contrast, modern societies are seen as valuing individual autonomy, such that norms, customs, and authority are accepted only through the conscious choice of the rational individual. …

[But] the opposite of ritual is not … individual autonomy. It is rather sincerity—the belief that truth resides within the authentic self, that it is coherent, and that incoherence and fragmentation are therefore themselves signs of insincerity. … ‘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. … so pervasive have these sincerity claims become that even [fundamentalist] revolts against this so-called modern era are done in the name of finding ever-more-authentic forms of sincerity. (More)

I may have finally made some sense of all this, in terms of a view I described four days ago:

One simple way to [integrate economics and cultural evolution] is to pick an abstraction border level that separates the two. More detailed choices are made via optimization to implement heuristics, obey norms, and achieve subgoals that are set most abstractly by cultural evolution. For example, planning a route from A to B consists of searching for a path between them that minimizes a culture-chosen cost goal, prefers culture-chosen tech, avoids violating culture-set norms, and follows culture-inherited heuristic subpaths when available. …

It seems that a big trend of the modern era has been to move this border to higher levels of abstraction … puts a higher premium on intelligence … faster actual rates of change … [but] has a problem of being harder to reliably copy … contribut[ing] to cultural drift. … Another implication of this mixed view is that once you dig into a person to a sufficient depth, their coherence will degrade a lot. Culturally inherited goals and habits are just going to be a lot less coherent with each other, especially in a world where the environment is changing fast and culture is drifting. (More)

Before the modern era, we inherited culture more via rituals and habits, which specified our ideal goals implicitly and at lower levels of abstraction. These ritual/habits and resulting goals were not especially simple or coherent, but people were in the habit of not thinking about them very critically. As these changed only very slowly, people mostly knew what to do, and that was usually enough.

But we don’t like to think of ourselves as having an abstraction layer of goals that we simply inherit from culture. We’d rather think of ourselves as having simple deep consistent goals that drive all our behaviors, with no layer of change. We were thus vulnerable to “sincere” culture theories that try to explain ideal behavior in terms of a few simple deep ideal goals. Like truly saved, true love, true revolutionary consciousness, and true spirit of one’s people. Prior rituals and habits that pushed behaviors at odds with these theories were then rejected as hypocritical, as were “insincere” personal inclinations to behave in conflict with these theories.

The much faster rates of change in the modern world pushed people toward a more abstract border level of culture, and caused more cultural drift, both of which plausibly made people more open to such “sincere” culture theories. But, alas, as the behaviors recommended by such theories deviate substantially from the behaviors recommended by our prior inherited mix of rituals and habits, their adoption also has plausibly added greatly to cultural drift.