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
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.
To me the maladaptive pressure is that intention matters hugely in personal interactions and evaluations, but is the completely wrong measure of goodness at scale - and so In government and government policies and political leaders.
As Adam Smith noted: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner…”
Yes, sorry - my point was that a simple ritual -> intention drift over - say - the last 2000 years is too simple - given the great emphasis on intention in the founding texts of Christianity.
"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.
In Greece, an individual without a Polis was nothing. It was reasonable to sacrifice an individual for the good of the polis. You knew your place based on how you were born within in a structured society. The patriarch performed the religious rites on behalf of his people. In many ways the collective had primacy over the individual. Versus today (in Christianity) each individual has a personal relationship with God, you are in principle free to seek whatever job you want, and in the West individual human rights have primacy over the interests of the government or state. The trend is from collective to individualistic even from Greece to the modern West.
I'll concede that "Greece" wasn't individualistic; Athens was, and various other cities at other times. Sparta may have been the least-individualistic state that ever existed. I often mean "Athens" when I say "Greece", because Athens was the ancestor of the West in a way that the rest of ancient Greece was not.
I don't think it's quite right to say medieval Christianity emphasized a personal relationship with God, since after the growth of the Waldensian, Cathar, and Hussite sects starting around 1200, people, and certainly laity, who claimed to have such a personal relationship were generally burned to death, and it became a common practice (though never ordered at the level of the Vatican AFAIK) to outlaw the reading of the Bible by the laity or in any vulgar tongue. The Church was doctrinally required as an intermediary. From about 1000-1600, laity usually prayed to Mary or other saints, not directly to God or Jesus.
I emphatically disagree as far as cultural artifacts such as art and literature. Medieval Christian artists made nothing but typological art, both visual and literary, before their local Renaissance. There were approximately zero individuals in medieval literature other than individuals named in the Bible.
Any higher level, long-term trends certainly get messier the more we zoom in, with local and temporal variance. Athens may have been more individualistic than other city-states, and Greece may have been more so than other regions of the time. But even in Athens, the state took precedence over the individual. Individuals were “ostracized” for the good of the state. Religious rituals were performed by one on behalf of the clan. The individual wasn’t fully realized in Medieval Catholicism, but the Christian idea of individual salvation and primacy of individual over state was a step in that direction. Christ died for the sins of every individual, not for the tribe. The Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment further advanced the individual toward where we are today, but it was a long process. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to the trend that could be pointed out.
"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." -- I disagree. Techniques like interior monologues and limited point-of-view were developed recently, but the story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Greek tragedies and comedies, and even medieval morality plays, are driven by the desires of their characters.
What changed was that characters have shifted back-and-forth over the ages between being predictable /types/ and being unique /individuals/. Greek fiction had individuals; New Comedy and Roman fiction reduced them to types, which they remained throughout the Middle Ages. The internal beliefs of characters always drive the plot, but individualistic characters have individual beliefs, which are varied and unpredictable. A type is a stereotype of a social class, and types are generally found in the fiction of authoritarian and/or communitarian states, which assign everyone into a type at birth and force them to act like that type throughout their life.
This was not generally a gradual change; the contrast between Pagan Europe and Christian Europe is stark, and the contrast between Christian Europe and Renaissance Europe is equally stark (basically the same difference, in reverse). The difference is between two stable but contradictory memeplexes of mutually-supporting beliefs. Changing one belief in this memeplex produces contradictions with all of the other beliefs, so mixtures of the two worldviews are unstable.
Each memeplex conquered new territory gradually, but the change between individual works could be as stark as the contrast between Italian painting before and after Giotto, between /Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man/ and /Finnegan's Wake/, or between Amadís de Gaula and Cervantes.
It's true that the beliefs of individualistic characters require more explanation, because we can make more assumptions about what types believe. But it is still the beliefs that drive the behaviors.
We may just disagree about what "exterior" fiction looks like. Focusing on external behaviors rather than internal thoughts is (in the opinions of many psychologists) what low-functional autistics do. Post-modernist fiction is basically autistic fiction. It isn't interested in characters (/Invisible Cities/ barely even has characters), but in textual tricks, puzzles, references, self-references, puns, non-linear timelines, fourth wall-breaking, metafiction, logical paradoxes, convention-breaking, recursion, and other mathematical or formal operations. 1970-2010 was probably the high point in all of literary history for such "exterior" autistic fiction.
Read Umberto Eco's bizarre literary criticism in /Six Walks in the Fictional Woods/ for a view into the way an autistic reads literature. It's full of hilariously bizarre conclusions which miss the essential and latch onto the accidental, like, "Pornography is film in which story-time is synced with viewer-time." Eco cared nothing for the emotions of characters in the fiction he read, and hardly at all for the plot. His favorite novel was one so badly written that you couldn't say for sure what order the events happened in; he loved coming up with new theories about what had actually happened in it.
I could tell a similar story about modern art, but the modern artists would insist that I had it backwards, and that their shallow art focuses on the "true" interior, while "mere illusionism" (realism) focuses on the "surface".
Philip Rieff called our age the “Therapeutic Age” because of our inward focus on psychological wellbeing, as opposed to a former reliance on religious and moral frameworks. An extreme case is the trans movement, in which the real truth is found in a person’s inward psychological state as opposed to the apparent reality as seen from the outside. Carl Trueman traces the intellectual and psychological origins of our Therapeutic Age in detail in his fascinating book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.”
What about the primacy of the individual over the tribe? Ritual often serves to bind one to something else. Secularism and material abundance have eclipsed religiosity and the value of fertility. A person can safely live a more selfish life now, for lack of a better term.
"humans have been long been learning how to better describe and see their interior states"
Chesterton remarked on novels that they were descriptions of differences between people, and that this was why the best at the time were by women, who were exhaustingly capable of detailing them
I don't think this can be well understood as a secular trend; ritual makes more sense as a way to preserve a material culture when a generative collective intelligence collapses. You've written about cultural rot [1], and you know increased resistance to change is a common feature of "mature" systems [2]. Christianity was explicitly an attempt to either revive the generator of old Israelite law, or propagate a new sort of
collective intelligence justified on the basis of the implied values of the old generator. Rabbinical texts from that time widely acknowledge that prophecy (the capacity to collectively recognize new fundamental insights and therefore fully legitimate first-principles legal and political innovation) had ended within the Israelite tradition, and medieval/rabbinic Judaism is the mostly-ritualized successor to the prophetic Israelite culture.
The Enlightenment seems to be in some important sense the victory of the steelmanned Christian project [3], and our culture seems to be re-ritualizing [4] as we come down from that 300 year golden age.
I haven't read the book, but just to add one piece of data to support that long-term trend. In the history of Hinduism, in the Vedic period, there was a great emphasis on ritual and completing rituals exactly as prescribed. Later, in the Puranic period, there was more of what might be called the Bhakti movement, which focused on personal sincere devotion.
Now, Hinduism still remains a very ritualistic religion, but it's interesting that even in such highly ritualistic traditions, there has been a long-term trend towards more interior states.
Yes. The Puranic period was 4th century BCE to about 1000 CE, long before the modern era, helping to make clear how old is this trend. The axial age, 8th to 3rd centuries BCE, is also said to include a move from ritual to more internal standards.
Joe Henrich lists this trait as a part of the WEIRD psychology. Maybe it has something to do with the move away from clan-based society to a modern one? St. Paul can fit into the picture, as Christianity was a universalist religion, as opposed to the clan-based Judaism (chosen people and all that).
Any implication that there is some kind of inevitability or evolutionary progress to this development is surely wrong. Focusing on ancient texts inevitably restricts one's view to elite producers of thought which comments on but cannot reflect the lifeworld of a vast majority of premodern people.
Interiority and individualism might be a side-effect of literacy and literary values. Historians of ideas like Charles Taylor and Peter Harrison have to be brought into the conversation.
I know this is widely believed, but at least one Homeric scholar has challenged the idea that early protagonists had no sense of self (@joelchristensen). Is there actually academic support for it?
In any case, it's not at all straightforward to disentangle the Western/WEIRD preoccupation with individualism from the ideas and technologies that turned privacy into a virtue.
I wouldn't be surprised if this "inward turn" in fact only seems more pronounced against the collective loss of ritualised behaviours that bind people to stable communities - even as monks and ascetics - revealing the rise of toxic nationalism and fundamentalism as symptoms of what Taylor called the “malaise of immanence”.
Re: "humans have long been learning how to better describe and see their interior states". I like this. It's why the 20th century was labeled the century of psychology.
Historians have used the example of parents' views of children and child-rearing as an example of progressive psychologicalization; with children in ancient eras considered property and extension of parents, and later as economic assets, through to the modern conception of children as providing psychological benefits to parents and having inherent human worth.
This is fascinating to reflect on in the context of many countries. I live in SEA and that transition is starkly clear here. Two neighbours could have drastically different behaviour in terms of rituals - one strictly following all their religious/belief rituals while another living completely in the abstract. Even people seem to transition through it during their life. As they get older they may find more (or less) comfort in those rituals. A life event could cause them to go either way. Habit forming, subgroup expectations and how we respond to it on the individual and collective level is truly fascinating.
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.
R o
Hmmm…
I’m probably two or 3 steps behind the rest here.
To me the maladaptive pressure is that intention matters hugely in personal interactions and evaluations, but is the completely wrong measure of goodness at scale - and so In government and government policies and political leaders.
As Adam Smith noted: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner…”
Yes, sorry - my point was that a simple ritual -> intention drift over - say - the last 2000 years is too simple - given the great emphasis on intention in the founding texts of Christianity.
"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.
In Greece, an individual without a Polis was nothing. It was reasonable to sacrifice an individual for the good of the polis. You knew your place based on how you were born within in a structured society. The patriarch performed the religious rites on behalf of his people. In many ways the collective had primacy over the individual. Versus today (in Christianity) each individual has a personal relationship with God, you are in principle free to seek whatever job you want, and in the West individual human rights have primacy over the interests of the government or state. The trend is from collective to individualistic even from Greece to the modern West.
I'll concede that "Greece" wasn't individualistic; Athens was, and various other cities at other times. Sparta may have been the least-individualistic state that ever existed. I often mean "Athens" when I say "Greece", because Athens was the ancestor of the West in a way that the rest of ancient Greece was not.
I don't think it's quite right to say medieval Christianity emphasized a personal relationship with God, since after the growth of the Waldensian, Cathar, and Hussite sects starting around 1200, people, and certainly laity, who claimed to have such a personal relationship were generally burned to death, and it became a common practice (though never ordered at the level of the Vatican AFAIK) to outlaw the reading of the Bible by the laity or in any vulgar tongue. The Church was doctrinally required as an intermediary. From about 1000-1600, laity usually prayed to Mary or other saints, not directly to God or Jesus.
I emphatically disagree as far as cultural artifacts such as art and literature. Medieval Christian artists made nothing but typological art, both visual and literary, before their local Renaissance. There were approximately zero individuals in medieval literature other than individuals named in the Bible.
Any higher level, long-term trends certainly get messier the more we zoom in, with local and temporal variance. Athens may have been more individualistic than other city-states, and Greece may have been more so than other regions of the time. But even in Athens, the state took precedence over the individual. Individuals were “ostracized” for the good of the state. Religious rituals were performed by one on behalf of the clan. The individual wasn’t fully realized in Medieval Catholicism, but the Christian idea of individual salvation and primacy of individual over state was a step in that direction. Christ died for the sins of every individual, not for the tribe. The Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment further advanced the individual toward where we are today, but it was a long process. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to the trend that could be pointed out.
"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." -- I disagree. Techniques like interior monologues and limited point-of-view were developed recently, but the story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Greek tragedies and comedies, and even medieval morality plays, are driven by the desires of their characters.
What changed was that characters have shifted back-and-forth over the ages between being predictable /types/ and being unique /individuals/. Greek fiction had individuals; New Comedy and Roman fiction reduced them to types, which they remained throughout the Middle Ages. The internal beliefs of characters always drive the plot, but individualistic characters have individual beliefs, which are varied and unpredictable. A type is a stereotype of a social class, and types are generally found in the fiction of authoritarian and/or communitarian states, which assign everyone into a type at birth and force them to act like that type throughout their life.
This was not generally a gradual change; the contrast between Pagan Europe and Christian Europe is stark, and the contrast between Christian Europe and Renaissance Europe is equally stark (basically the same difference, in reverse). The difference is between two stable but contradictory memeplexes of mutually-supporting beliefs. Changing one belief in this memeplex produces contradictions with all of the other beliefs, so mixtures of the two worldviews are unstable.
Each memeplex conquered new territory gradually, but the change between individual works could be as stark as the contrast between Italian painting before and after Giotto, between /Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man/ and /Finnegan's Wake/, or between Amadís de Gaula and Cervantes.
It's true that the beliefs of individualistic characters require more explanation, because we can make more assumptions about what types believe. But it is still the beliefs that drive the behaviors.
We may just disagree about what "exterior" fiction looks like. Focusing on external behaviors rather than internal thoughts is (in the opinions of many psychologists) what low-functional autistics do. Post-modernist fiction is basically autistic fiction. It isn't interested in characters (/Invisible Cities/ barely even has characters), but in textual tricks, puzzles, references, self-references, puns, non-linear timelines, fourth wall-breaking, metafiction, logical paradoxes, convention-breaking, recursion, and other mathematical or formal operations. 1970-2010 was probably the high point in all of literary history for such "exterior" autistic fiction.
Read Umberto Eco's bizarre literary criticism in /Six Walks in the Fictional Woods/ for a view into the way an autistic reads literature. It's full of hilariously bizarre conclusions which miss the essential and latch onto the accidental, like, "Pornography is film in which story-time is synced with viewer-time." Eco cared nothing for the emotions of characters in the fiction he read, and hardly at all for the plot. His favorite novel was one so badly written that you couldn't say for sure what order the events happened in; he loved coming up with new theories about what had actually happened in it.
I could tell a similar story about modern art, but the modern artists would insist that I had it backwards, and that their shallow art focuses on the "true" interior, while "mere illusionism" (realism) focuses on the "surface".
Philip Rieff called our age the “Therapeutic Age” because of our inward focus on psychological wellbeing, as opposed to a former reliance on religious and moral frameworks. An extreme case is the trans movement, in which the real truth is found in a person’s inward psychological state as opposed to the apparent reality as seen from the outside. Carl Trueman traces the intellectual and psychological origins of our Therapeutic Age in detail in his fascinating book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.”
What about the primacy of the individual over the tribe? Ritual often serves to bind one to something else. Secularism and material abundance have eclipsed religiosity and the value of fertility. A person can safely live a more selfish life now, for lack of a better term.
Yes, I think individualism / communitarianism is the key here.
"humans have been long been learning how to better describe and see their interior states"
Chesterton remarked on novels that they were descriptions of differences between people, and that this was why the best at the time were by women, who were exhaustingly capable of detailing them
> Note that I still sorry that culture specified in terms of interiors seems harder to evolve and hold stable.
Typo on "sorry", not sure what was meant here.
I don't think this can be well understood as a secular trend; ritual makes more sense as a way to preserve a material culture when a generative collective intelligence collapses. You've written about cultural rot [1], and you know increased resistance to change is a common feature of "mature" systems [2]. Christianity was explicitly an attempt to either revive the generator of old Israelite law, or propagate a new sort of
collective intelligence justified on the basis of the implied values of the old generator. Rabbinical texts from that time widely acknowledge that prophecy (the capacity to collectively recognize new fundamental insights and therefore fully legitimate first-principles legal and political innovation) had ended within the Israelite tradition, and medieval/rabbinic Judaism is the mostly-ritualized successor to the prophetic Israelite culture.
The Enlightenment seems to be in some important sense the victory of the steelmanned Christian project [3], and our culture seems to be re-ritualizing [4] as we come down from that 300 year golden age.
[1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/more-than-death-fear-decayhtml
[2] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/old-minds-are-fragilehtml
[3] https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/calvinism-as-a-theory-of-recovered-high-trust-agency/
[4] https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/
I haven't read the book, but just to add one piece of data to support that long-term trend. In the history of Hinduism, in the Vedic period, there was a great emphasis on ritual and completing rituals exactly as prescribed. Later, in the Puranic period, there was more of what might be called the Bhakti movement, which focused on personal sincere devotion.
Now, Hinduism still remains a very ritualistic religion, but it's interesting that even in such highly ritualistic traditions, there has been a long-term trend towards more interior states.
Yes. The Puranic period was 4th century BCE to about 1000 CE, long before the modern era, helping to make clear how old is this trend. The axial age, 8th to 3rd centuries BCE, is also said to include a move from ritual to more internal standards.
Joe Henrich lists this trait as a part of the WEIRD psychology. Maybe it has something to do with the move away from clan-based society to a modern one? St. Paul can fit into the picture, as Christianity was a universalist religion, as opposed to the clan-based Judaism (chosen people and all that).
Any implication that there is some kind of inevitability or evolutionary progress to this development is surely wrong. Focusing on ancient texts inevitably restricts one's view to elite producers of thought which comments on but cannot reflect the lifeworld of a vast majority of premodern people.
Interiority and individualism might be a side-effect of literacy and literary values. Historians of ideas like Charles Taylor and Peter Harrison have to be brought into the conversation.
Literature itself increased in interiority, so this can't just be about rising influence of literature.
I know this is widely believed, but at least one Homeric scholar has challenged the idea that early protagonists had no sense of self (@joelchristensen). Is there actually academic support for it?
In any case, it's not at all straightforward to disentangle the Western/WEIRD preoccupation with individualism from the ideas and technologies that turned privacy into a virtue.
I wouldn't be surprised if this "inward turn" in fact only seems more pronounced against the collective loss of ritualised behaviours that bind people to stable communities - even as monks and ascetics - revealing the rise of toxic nationalism and fundamentalism as symptoms of what Taylor called the “malaise of immanence”.
Re: "humans have long been learning how to better describe and see their interior states". I like this. It's why the 20th century was labeled the century of psychology.
Historians have used the example of parents' views of children and child-rearing as an example of progressive psychologicalization; with children in ancient eras considered property and extension of parents, and later as economic assets, through to the modern conception of children as providing psychological benefits to parents and having inherent human worth.
This is fascinating to reflect on in the context of many countries. I live in SEA and that transition is starkly clear here. Two neighbours could have drastically different behaviour in terms of rituals - one strictly following all their religious/belief rituals while another living completely in the abstract. Even people seem to transition through it during their life. As they get older they may find more (or less) comfort in those rituals. A life event could cause them to go either way. Habit forming, subgroup expectations and how we respond to it on the individual and collective level is truly fascinating.