Why Modern Sincerity
In May I read and posted on the 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. I’ve since recorded two discussions on the topic, one with Agnes Callard at MindsAlmostMeeting, and another with Stephen Adubato at Interintellect. And I’ve watched two talks by the book’s authors. I now want to change my mind.
The book’s big question is why the modern world has to a great degree moved from ritual-based to sincerity-based ideals. Long ago people primarily understood their ideals in terms of more specific model behaviors, described in matching stories and trained in matching rituals. But today, we tend to understand our ideals more in terms of ideal internal states of belief, motivation, and emotion. For example, we’ve described ideal internal states of love, spirituality, national allegiance, revolutionary fervor, and social activist commitment.
While we’ve seen a big change on this in the last few centuries, this process was also happening slowly long ago. For example, Saint Paul talked about preferring the spirit of the law to its letter, and the Protestant Reformation favored sincere belief states over Church rituals. And over centuries, romantic love has slowly become our ideal of marriage. Also, at a similar rate, and over a similar time period, our fiction has also come to focus more on the interiors of characters, relative to their external behaviors.
In my prior post, I noted that faster social change pushes our our values to be specified at higher levels of abstraction if they are to generalize to new situations, and that internal states offer such higher generality. But faster change only happened in the last few centuries, while this whole process started long before then. Other explanations that I’ve considered are driven by increasing wealth, but that also only happened in the last few centuries.
So I now lean toward this explanation: humans have been long been learning how to better describe and see their interior states, and this sharper view has led us to tell stories, and describe our ideals, in terms of these interior states. The rate of this learning may have sped up in last few centuries, but it started long before then.
Note that I still worry that culture specified in terms of interiors seems harder to evolve and hold stable.
Emphasis on intention is much more basic to Christianity than Paul - it was central and distinctive in Jesus' teaching. "But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment;". "A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of." And so on. In contrast to the idea that if we just do the things we are told to do, that will fully satisfy the requirements.
"Long ago people primarily understood their ideals in terms of more specific model behaviors, described in matching stories and trained in matching rituals. But today, we tend to understand our ideals more in terms of ideal internal states of belief, motivation, and emotion. For example, we’ve described ideal internal states of love, spirituality, national allegiance, revolutionary fervor, and social activist commitment. While we’ve seen a big change on this in the last few centuries, this process was also happening slowly long ago."
Same objection as my previous comment: this was part of the same change, from individualistic Greece, to the communitarian Middle Ages, to the individualistic Enlightenment. It was a gradual change geographically, but was comprised of conversions from one extreme to the other within individual lives.
We can actually point to the day and place that the first shift, from individualist to communitarian, became inevitable: Oct. 28, 312 AD, at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, when Constantine's victory re-unified the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, and gave him the power to (eventually) impose Christianity on all Rome.
The difference you're talking about between rituals and belief is a fundamental difference between Greco-Roman religion and Christianity. Greco-Roman religion required everyone to participate in the rituals. It had no theology or ethics. It had required actions and, at times, professions (such as that the emperor is a God, or that the gods exist). Whereas Christianity cared most about what each person believed.
Greco-Roman religion (usually called "paganism", but the word just means "non-Christian") was extremely liberal. Medieval Christianity was totalitarian, based less on the sayings of Jesus than on the totalitarian writings of Plato.
I don't think many people spend a long time in some middle ground between liberalism and totalitarianism. The demographic and geographic shift of the front lines over centuries is gradual; the change within a single person is more rapid.