" We’ve robbed ourselves of opportunities to celebrate. "
No problem.
The current resident of the Oval Office is keenly aware of, and has dedicated himself to accomplish all of the above.
So long as " He " is the object of the celebration.
1
Voting is the sacrament of democracy. We need a national, paid election holiday and every polling place needs a guy in a waistcoat and a powdered wig with a big old cudgeling thing like Drum Majors sport, who pounds the floor and calls out each entering voter's name in an appropriately stenorian voice.
19
Mr. Brooks, you sounded like a true Confucian. Four Chinese characters that capture the essence of Confucius teaching: "Li, Yi, Nen, Qi" can be found edged on rock faces and palace walls all over China.
Roughly translated "Li" means to live in accordance to a set of shared rituals: remembrance of ancestors, celebration of harvest, and respectful courtesy towards others. "Yi" means be helpful to others and always keep your promises. "Nen" means to lead a frugal and uncorrupt life. "Qi" means be genuinely contrite for your wrongful actions.
6
"There should be a ritual for when a family moves onto a street and the whole block throws a barbecue of welcome and membership."
Mr. Brooks, do you really think the American people believe that they have enough in common for this to make sense anymore? The vegetarians would be horrified by the smell of cooking meat. The elite wouldn't touch anything that wasn't certified organic. Is your lawn devoid of all weeds? Then the well-educated would deduce that you're a cad who uses pesticides and decline to expose themselves to the toxic cocktail which you, in exercising blind American freedom, may have used. Deplorables might not feel like anyone really saw them unless there were injectable opioids, or marijuana, or at least flowing alcohol at the barbecue. The pious (of any faith) would feel scandalized to attend a gathering where some of the guests were casually polluting the scene with alcohol, and so they too would decline the invitation. Chinese nationals and first generation Chinese would politely decline—unless the neighborhood were entirely Chinese. Ditto for Indian nationals and first generation Indians—unless it were the kind of neighborhood in which they stood to establish prestigious, influential connections.
In America's cities, in her intellectual centers, and in all of California, Mr. Brooks, this is America in 2019. In truth, that we are a people riven—this is what so many of us know for sure that just ain't so.
8
Mr. Brooks, this column is timely, a need for rituals. Heard of Sandhyavandanam? a prayer offered to the Sun 3 times daily at dawn midday and sunset? What rituals help you mark the passage of time on a daily basis?
1
I served as a military chaplain for 22 years. That means I was surrounded by and initiated rituals on a daily basis. I LOVE them and I believe we need them. I don't know how many civilians know that on military bases we still hear taps at bedtime, reville at dawn and the national anthem at the end of the duty day; (and if you are outside when the national anthem plays you come to attention and salute the flag). That's just a normal day! When there is a change of command or a memorial service or promotion ceremony it gets even more colorful and meaningful. People interrupt their day and stop to share stories and food and hopes.
I agree we all need more rituals! Thanks for this great article! And you know what? There isn't an app for that!!
8
I agree. There should be more rituals that community centered. Neighborhood parties, and community meetings that do not ever focus on the politics but on the neighborhood. Not at as the remaining ones have become but as they were 60 years ago.
There was a Welcome Wagon Lady, or Gentleman, who would arrive at the door of someone who had moved into town recently. They would bring a basket of coupons or letters of introduction from the local privately owned shops and restaurants. A reference sheet of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, gardeners, and baby sitters. A map of the town, with points of interest and bit of history. There was usually an Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt and barbecue every Spring and every Autumn there was another Harvest barbecue. Every house would bring a big bowl of whatever side dish. Everyone would bring something to barbecue. Nobody was refused. Until. A black family moved into our white neighborhood. Their house was egged and toilet papered, and a cross was burned in their front yard. That was in 1966. It was also when everything neighborhood stopped. It is also when the community committee decided that no house could be painted purple or pink. Over time it became what it is today; a committee of rule makers and gated communities.
We need to go back to just being ordinary people who are going to accept people in our neighborhood not based on anything other than part of our community.
9
Another thought-provoking column from Mr. Brooks, which presents a potentially valuable idea drawn from the latest book he read. Perhaps we do need more rituals. On the other hand, perhaps rituals can be a force for badness, because, though they comfort, they also ossify unjust power structures and encourage the unreflective acceptance of same.
So, on balance, do we have too few rituals or too many? Who the heck knows? Oh well, in a few days we'll have another idea from Brooks to get enthused about.
1
Ritual that can/should easily occur daily...
After sitting down for dinner, alone or with family or friends each day, first (join hands and) give thanks for the food you are about to eat.
2
When I hear of the need for more ritual, I'm reminded of "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.
5
Another example of Brooks' sort of "it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness" wishful thinking. When God is dead, and faith in government has sunk to nil among so many, there's little basis for rituals for most Americans. Social media and shopping fill the gap, with the results we all see. Until Americans can produce something for most of our people to profoundly believe in again, rituals will be meaningless and beside the point for most people. It's natural to want magic when you're lost to find your way out. Too bad there is no magic for what plagues America: its loss of faith about almost everything. Hence the utterly desperate, crazed Trump cult on the right, and the much better founded love for Bernie on the left. Bernie may give us something to believe in yet. Then we can talk about appropriate rituals.
1
O gee, David, more "nice-nice." Talk with people who work two or three low wage jobs. Or with students taking classes and working at MacDonald's. Or with depressed people, or
people with frustrations so great they have violent urges.
Talk with people who have lost their confidence in job security, companies, safety nets, health care and farm land threatened by massive flooding, tornadoes, wild fires. Talk with people who have gone inward with the notion of survival, for just themselves and their kids who struggle financially and do not live nearby, can't afford travel to birthday parties or other of your rituals. Talk to people who do have their rituals, within theologies that exclude and demean "others." Whose rituals are self-serving, even smug. Get on a bus and see how many men will ritually get up to give a woman their seat. You might find an old guy will do so. Ritual life goes back to agrarian cultures in the survival basics, then more and more isolated by theology, business and social class. Yeah, I sort of hope our species can come up with some nice rituals in which sharing is truly the point, and not just for mutual, physical and emotional defense. Or for "winning."
What rituals can be admired among those Trump observes?
If you can find any. The Easter Egg Roll? His honest golf games? Sheesh!!!!
4
Because the majority of us are living paycheck to paycheck, with immense student loans, and can’t afford to throw a party.
6
The only ritual anyone under forty cares about is turning on his or her smart phone in the morning: presuming, of course, that it was ever turned off.
3
Here's an example, from today's NYTimes, of a new form of ritual that has arisen spontaneously with the rise of social media and the slowly increasing willingness of women and families to speak publicly of pregnancy and infant loss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/well/family/parents-mourning-stillbirth-follow-familiar-patterns-on-youtube.html
Nice thought David, but sounds just a wee bit disconnected. Do you know how hard people are working these days? Citizens don't have time for rituals, much less even civilized plans for anything much of the time. The good old party is much to blame for this with their attacks on unions and the fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage. With the super rich eroding the middle class to the point of no return, I am surprised that you would even float such a quaint and nostalgic idea. Good luck David Brooks, oh and how about getting out and relating with the working people of America.
4
Do you honestly think people are working harder than people in the 1930’s did? By all measures, those people found time for rituals.
5
Ritual so quickly becomes forced ritual or implied forced ritual. No thanks.
4
Rituals are the ties that blind - substituting non-thinking for rationally addressing the human condition. They are the holdovers from a time that venerated ignorance and delusional thinking. Rituals coerce belief in that which is not true. Coerced belief is no belief at all.
Mr. Brooks is free to have whatever rituals he needs. Just don't impose them on the rest of us.
5
Couldn't agree more. In the Navy the command gathered for ceremonies for events such as promotions, awards, and change of command. They gave us a sense of community, of common purpose, and promoted mutual respect.
Not much of that these days. Even if these rituals existed everyone would be 'too busy.'
2
This is very well said and clearly true. Rituals are part of every successful community, whether religious or national or local. It can be a mass or a service or daily prayer.. It can be holidays or parades or any of a hundred things that bind a community together.
Yes it can be standing for the national anthem, or a march to protest police misconduct toward minorities. Those are equally compelling rituals.
Discrediting ritual is corrosive to society. It breaks down society. You do not have to agree with the rituals nor with the community which is united by the rituals. But you at least be willing to respect their right to do it.
Our cynicism is in our way. Our diversity. Our loss of confidence in our government system, in our community, in our neighbors, in our religion, that stops of us from joyfully joining into the rituals meant to bind us. Just read the comments
4
The most important ritual facing Americans is to vote in November.
8
One problem is that some civic rituals can't be reconciled with reality.
Anyone who wants to have a little fun on July 4th, but can't stomach the increasingly fascist tendencies of the American right wing knows the feeling.
Or how about Columbus Day? Or Andrew Jackson? Or the way Civil War revisionists appear to have colonized the thinking of the Republican Party? What about America's inability to deal with its history of anti-black racism?
Rituals that mask reality or help perpetuate lies about history aren't doing anyone any favors.
4
Speak for yourself, David. IMHO, we already have too many that have become meaningless to so many.
1
What a refreshing pleasure to read a David Brooks column without a single snarky remark about liberals. Thanks Mr. Brooks - I know it can't have been easy!
I wonder if you would join with your fellow Americans to make Election Day a national holiday?
2
Glorifying rituals is a favorite tactic of fascist governments. Sorry, but it's the truth.
4
Brooks always takes the path of least resistance: appeals to religion and nostalgia - soft solutions to hard problems.
He is, once again, making an appeal to conservative values and solutions to address social challenges. He wants social reform to be bottom-up. Beware of top-down government social policies.
Rituals are tribalistic – one person’s ritual is another person’s threat. Ritual may mark a person as an “other.” To fully appreciate any ritual, you have to be a member of the tribe. Some rituals have been appropriated by particular tribes – the national anthem by the MAGA tribe, and Christmas is a division of the capitalist tribe.
There is no doubt that we need some kind of glue to provide a national collective purpose. But the glue that worked in 1620 when the community was tiny, all-white, agrarian, and religious won’t work in a modern, fast-paced, urban America with a diversity that would make the Mayflower Puritans’ heads spin.
What Brooks won’t do is offer practical strategies that address our current reality. Ritual is a fragile solution to today’s national and global challenges. How would Brooks foil capitalism’s dominance of our lives, or technology’s role in isolating and dividing us? Would he favor a mandated national service of some kind – everyone gives a year or two of their lives to a national purpose. Of course not, that’s government. And how would ritual overcome racism?
These are questions I don’t think Brooks is prepared to answer.
2
When my son married for a second time, they included a part for his daughter and her new stepmother to pledge their love and support to each other. His daughter knew her new stepmother for several years at this point so it was meaningful. My granddaughter has always referred to her step mother as "my Danielle" as in "my daddy and my Danielle."
3
Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, unbeknownst to us-our daily lives were filled with rituals. At dinner time, we lit candles, placed flowers on the table, said a prayer before the meal. We knelt next to our beds and said our evening prayers. We kissed our mother, then our father good night.
Birthday celebrations were a full of traditional rituals. The birthday child chose his/her favorite dinner. They got to sit in the"King's chair” to open presents. And they were absolved from doing all their chores that day.
In school, we saluted the flag and said the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer. We said the rosary, We plucked flowers from our gardens on Mary’s Day. The church we attended was rife with rituals which we all grew up with and practice to this very day.
The trimming of the Christmas tree has always been the choreographed with rituals: playing Christmas carols, wrapping the tree in colored lights then carefully unwrapping the ornaments and placing them just so. The pièce de résistance was the creche set. Very carefully, the hand painted pieces were strategically placed, until the next child came along and moved the camel or the sheep or the Three Wise Men - placed to their preference.
My group of women's friends gather once a year for a weekend and we start off the first meal by singing our rendition of Sidney Portier’s famous “Amen!”
3
No!
1
Looks like David Brooks hit a home run.
2
'We tend to overload [rituals] and turn them into expensive bloated versions of themselves.'
I submit that bloating up the ritual is an attempt to reinvest it with meaning after society has changed to such an extent that its former relevance is gone.
For instance, a wedding used to mark the loss of virginity - almost always, for her; more often than men would admit, for him. It marked setting up a separate family unit, an entry into adulthood, often the first time under a roof other than one's parents. Embarking into the 'here be dragons' area of the map. Proclaiming a new identity to the community.
Rarely is any of this true now. The couple have been having sex, sometimes even with each other; cohabiting, or living alone.
Hence the rise of the 'bridezilla', in a dress that looks like the cake at a Mafia wedding; the arrogant 'destination wedding' assumption that invitees will schlep halfway around the world to serve as background for one's selfies.
Much the same applies to high school proms, quinceaneras, other ceremonies; or bogus 'rites of passage', as when Kindergarteners 'graduate' in twee cap and gown. A desperate scramble to infuse 'meaning', much as our Buffalo wings and similar fast food overspice to infuse flavour into bland factory-farmed ingredients.
1
For rituals to have any value they need to be meaningful, whether societally or individually. Standing for the Star Spangled Banner is a public ritual, but its value as ritual is undermined if it forces the acquiescence of whole swaths of our population whose lives are endangered by the status quo. So, kneeling during a performance of the national anthem becomes a counter-ritual. Here too, the ritual is infused with meaning.
And of course there are our individual rituals: things like waking up at a certain time, routines that segment time into meaningful units. These too often have value. But so many of our ritual behaviors are little more than neuroses; these are more like fetters than meaningful acts; and when they interfere with life we're better off punting them.
2
Interesting. The first thing I thought of when I read this piece was the word "boundaries." Recognizing them, respecting them, crossing them.
1
Baseball seems to have made the list for ritual behaviors in the comments. Today when it is time for the seventh inning stretch the the loudspeakers blare and the crowd joins in for a rousing "God Bless America" (sans Kate Smith, another short lived ritual). If I'm at a game or watching on a screen, I tune out the crowd and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame". Call me a diehard. "Cause it's 1, 2, 3 strikes your out at the old ballgame."
3
I agree with Brooks on this one, although he should desist from his dilettantish philosophizing.
Since antiquity, rituals have provided a vehicle for organizing experience and time and memorializing the achievements of wondrous human beings—from rites of passage to celebratory holidays. Rituals enable families and communities—and even nations—to cohere at a higher level of unity through affective identification with relevant cultural symbols. Religious ceremonies are a classic example of rituals’ unifying power, as adduced by a host of scholars including Jessie L. Weston, Mary Douglas, and Julia Kristeva.
Rituals can be problematic, however, insofar as they support fascistic nationalist identities and totalitarian regimes—think cross-burning. The goose-stepping military parades that mark significant events and dates in Communist-turned-totalitarian regimes typify the exclusionary character of many rituals. And an overabundance of ritual will detract from the significance of each.
My father loved celebrating birthday parties while the rest of us were rather blasé about it, unengaged in another birthday that came and went. Now, I see it my father’s way. Sometimes, ritual is all we have left through which we can discover significance and value in our lives.
2
Most personal rituals are with family activities such as holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. These are all rites of passage that can be shared in a personal way.
Probably the most important ritual we are part of is a loved one's last days. There is nothing more important than having a loved one believe their life had meaning and purpose as a testament to our lives. Remembering and honoring other people's lives is the highest ritual we have and what we can learn from.
3
Proper rituals should always have a true purpose and good outcomes. But be careful. Like some traditions, blindly following some rituals (or some traditions) just because “we have always done it this way,” can cause rigid thinking, become stifling, and lead down a dangerous path. Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” comes to mind.
2
Rituals are a definite double-edged sword. They lead to symbolic belief and to cynicism. I would advise people and a society to be circumspect in their use of ritual. They can lead to an unthinking willingness to act solely to satisfy ritual belief.We see this often. Brooks's idea to use them for anything and everything is bad. Overused ritual either gains too much currency or becomes meaningless in its ubiquity.Societies that overuse ritual often do so to control freedom. There are people that love the United Staes because we are unconstrained by meaningless ritual. In other words you can do what you want to do here. That's also a double-edged sword.
3
In so pluralistic and diverse a society as we find ourselves in today, a communal ritual is going to be hard to define, particularly as some, inevitably, will find themselves excluded from it. On college campuses today there are various "commencement" or graduation ceremonies -- for Blacks, for Latinxes, for Asian-Americans, for gays--and the list grows. We are finding may students would prefer to skip the general ceremony and attend one of their own. Are we too tribal? too balkanized in ceremonies and rituals? Is there ANYTHING we can think of doing TOGETHER? (And I don't mean singing the national anthem at a baseball game. Many of us do believe in the ritual of taking the knee for that one.)
Rituals are important, Sebastian Junger in his book "Tribe" talks a lot about it, the importance of it and how we have to a large extent lost this. I have Jewish friends who are not observant who still do a form of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah in their families because it is important to still have the kids to pass into the next stage of growing up. Rituals can be personal, they can be within a family, and they can be within a community or communities; but the thing they have to be is meaningful, where the participants are getting something out of it, even if in some ways it differs in what meaning they get. Rituals that are forced, rituals that come out of observance to dogma, rather than understanding, to me have no meaning, it is the sharing, even if for different views of the ritual, that is important. Among other things, it is about respect, it is understanding that I as a relatively non religious person can celebrate something like a child's first communion or Bar Mitzvah because it is giving recognition to the family and their beliefs, even if I don't believe that; it is also another reason why forced rituals don't work, because that is not respecting the beliefs of others, that is hitting them over the head with yours.
Interesting to read this today. I had just last Friday posted the following to Facebook:
I just got off the phone with someone that I’ve been friends with since 1985. His wife recently died, and he went to his first Seder without her last night. He said it was incredibly hard, in spots, and incredibly uplifting in others.
And I thought about the rituals of life. These rituals are the glue that binds us together. We all — secular and religious — have rituals that bind us. For some it is the cooking of meals in service to others, for some it is the participation in making glorious music, to some it is the quiet reflection in thanksgiving. To yet others it is standing tall in the face of injustice, to others it is the honoring of flag and country. For some it means reaching out, to others it means reaching in.
Whatever rituals you hold dear, I wish you peace, joy, and love.
8
I'm not so sure. Little family traditions are fun. Rituals do build a sense of membership in a community. But doesn't that also define non-members of the community, outsiders, you know, fair game for discrimination. We're a fairly clubby lot, we humans, and I think we should try to fight that tendancy rather than strengthen it. "Now everybody has to get together and hop three times on your right foot, or else." I don't like it. Be free, I say. Do what you like.
2
@Spacedancer
"But doesn't that also define non-members of the community, outsiders, you know, fair game for discrimination."
Perhaps, but rituals also provide an easy path for the outsider to become an insider.
1
There is in fact a Jewish ritual in which one who is released from jail is welcomed back to the community. On the first Saturday or Jewish holiday following his release from prison, the newly freed man attends prayer service and he is obligated to be called to the Torah during the reading of the scroll, an honor customarily extended to leaders of the community or one celebrating a life cycle event. At the conclusion of the section read at the releasee's turn at the Torah scroll, he recites the "Birkhat HaGomel" That blessing reads "Blessed are You, Lord our God, ruler of the world, who rewards the undeserving with goodness,
and who has rewarded me with goodness." The congregation then responds in unison, "May He Who has rewarded you with goodness, reward you with more goodness for eternity." This blessing is also recited in similar fashion by someone who has recovered from an illness, returned from a perilous journey or otherwise survived a traumatic event.
"Some say East Some say West Some say Balance is the best," Bob Marley. Too many rituals can bind, blind or even strangle a person ( like the respondent from the Soviet Union, or - with respect to people of faith - sometimes far too many religious rituals or with respect to nationalists - nationalism which is a form of tribalism - people singing their anthem harkens to bad times in human history.I am sure many of us enjoy countless small innocuous rituals from coffee and the NYT'S in the morning, to an afternoon workout, to Friday night swim with the kids, to volunteering somewhere Tues eve. Margaret Vissar wrote a book called "The Rituals of Dinner" - that is enough ritual for me. To all things moderation.
1
David- thanks for your piece about rituals which are so important. I recently celebrated my Adult Bat Mitzvah with 8 other women from our synagogue and it was an opportunity for us to study and prepare for an event that was denied us as children (for various reasons). Feeling very grateful for this opportunity to connect to an ancient ritual as an adult woman.
3
Mr. Brooks complains that apart from a few major rites". . . daily life goes unstructured, a passing flow of moments." But that is how the natural world - that our species seeks to rule, remake and also distance itself from - is. Much as humans pursue exemption from its working - with suicidal destructions - we are in it, part of it. We need enough structure for safety, no more.
It is true that rituals provide comfort because they remind us we're not alone. That is generally a good thing. But rituals also provide comfort and a sense of unity to members of ISIS.
2
I love Brooks' recent articles on our shared sociology and psychology. Rituals are very important for human groups to form cohesion, and they are vital for inclusion and unity. As many communities hurtle towards hyper-individualism, we need common rituals more than ever.
Some folks here seem to think these rituals are supernatural or religious actions, but that is very much untrue. You practice secular rituals with your friends every day -- have a certain handshake or phrase you greet each other with? That's a ritual, and it brings you closer to your friends. You swipe in at work, or meet on the floor for a scrum meeting every day with your coworkers. That's a ritual. You instinctively say "love you" when you hang up the phone while talking with a loved one. That, too, is a ritual. Every aspect of human society is steeped with rituals, it has no bearing on the presence of religion. They are simply repeated actions that humans share in order to foster a sense of "we," of something shared. It is simply something human societies have been observed to have since time immemorial, and that we know is important for group cohesion.
2
There seems to be a lot of cynicism about rituals among the woke crowd, but I am sure the wokest of them put on their football jersey on game day or push each other out of the way for $5 toasters on Black Friday. Not all rituals are religious or spiritual. Not all of them have some deep meaning. They are how we shape our identity. More and more we have been losing our identity as Americans, which is why we have started to feel so divided by differences such as political party, race and gender. We are all yearning for a meaning greater than our individual selves, and our differences rather than our similarities are giving us this meaning.
What used to define us, since we are not united by an ethnicity or language, was rituals and a shared belief in freedom. We have grown cynical about our rituals such as the National Anthem to the point that they can be exploited for political gain, and our belief in freedom is no longer unique to us, so what really defines us these days? Football? Materialism?
This is not so much nostalgia for the past as ensuring our future. It does not seem real to us that we could fail since we have not had a real existential threat in many decades. Our greatest military and economic rival China, the one we keep assuming will fail because of lack of freedom, is dead set on replacing us as the leader of the world. They are on track to do that. The Chinese people have a strong belief that that is their purpose.
3
There is something very spiritual about a ritual. A deep feeling, a one with the universe. I don't think David meant a ritual to procure something......but rather to feel something. And that feeling is greater than we can comprehend. It doesn't have to be religious, but it could be; it doesn't have to be communal, but it could be; it doesn't have to be traditional, but it, too, could be. The heart is calmed. Bravo, David, for your sensitivity and thank you for not being afraid to express it.
4
Do you know what a good ritual is? Marriage. It's an age-old custom that provides the cornerstone of so many societies, and pledges that you'll stay with your wife through thick and thin--even when she gets older and your assistant is young and attractive.
3
"There should be a ritual for returning soldiers, in which the community assumes responsibility for the things the soldier had to do to defend the nation."
Wouldn't that require a communal opinion of the merit of what the soldier did? Would such a communal view exist? Does it exist for what our soldiers have done in say Afghanistan and Iraq?
What happens when one group of people insist on the moral rightness of their interpretation of events as celebrated in their ritual and goes on to impose it on everyone else?
Many of the events Mr. Brooks would like to celebrate with rituals would not be evaluated in the same way by all members of the community.
Let's be very wary of communal rituals and focus instead on personal and family ones - unannounced private events kept off Facebook etc., at which a consensus has been achieved.
What he or she did was go off and face real danger while you sat on your behind in Irvine asking deep questions. Unless he or she was on the Joint Chiefs,the soldier did not have any say in what was done. The community welcomes the person thanking them for their sacrifice. It is the same thing at a Memorial Day service. Nobody questions what the deceased men and women did. The only thing that matters is they are gone and we are still here, thanks to them.
1
Most rituals I can think of are the cement that seeks to hold tribes together. I did like the suggestion of a ritual celebration of voting. I also love to hear our national anthem at baseball games. In the 7th inning stretch here in Seattle, while we're all up on our feet, we join in a raucous singing of Louie Louie. I feel a part of the diverse community that showed up that day for the game.
3
Simplest ritual of all: Standing for the National Anthem at a ballgame.
It's a unifying concept. Easy to do. A moment everyone can ponder how lucky they are to live in the US while someone sings or a band plays nine bars.
32
@Thomas Penn in Seattle Great ritual. But do we expect people who are often targeted because of their race to join in? Are they supposed to feel lucky to live in a place that pretends to be a land of equality but in reality is not?
I believe it was Aldous Huxley who wrote about the danger of confusing symbols with the things they are supposed to represent. Brooks does that all the time. He does not seem to understand that creating symbols or rituals of unity is not the same as creating unity itself. Creating symbols and rituals is easy. Creating unity itself is not. For most of his adult life he has supported a party that has used (and still uses) divisive tactics to gain power. So he really is the wrong person to be giving lectures on unity.
28
@Thomas Penn in Seattle
The unspoken part of rituals is what happens when someone, for whatever reason, chooses to not stand for the anthem, shake your hand or wear the ribbon. Why should they if they feel they are not being allowed to be part of the "community" because they are being picked on for all the rediculous and mean spirited reasons people use to limit the rights of others. How about rituals that are heinous to one group but not another. Rituals, like religion, are about tribes and are the root of many of the bad and evil things we see. You bet I'm a cynic. Rodney king had it sussed.
" Why can't we all just get along"? The only ritual that matters is the one few follow. Treat others as you would be treated.
14
@Thomas Penn in Seattle
The problem is that not all rituals are necessarily good or meaningful.Having the national anthem playing at every event from a ball game to the opening of a used car lot trivialized it, and it shows, a lot of people during the National Anthem at ballgames are in the head passing of whatever they have ingested, wandering around, texting, etc, which means it isn't a good ritual since that requires people to share in the meaning of it.
I will also add that the people sitting during the Anthem may appreciate the US more than those who stand, unlike in totalitarian states (or even what some in this country who want to force others into patriotism, whether it is the Anthem or the Pledge),because in the US you have the right to sit down during the Anthem, to protest, and try and make others aware of how you feel. Forced anything rings hollow, none the worst than a ritual being done by rote rather than feeling.
21
"welcome back into the community"
Which one? The one that refuses the notion of "blended families"? Traditional morality is now largely "hate speech." Brooks sees the terrifying spectacle of trying to contain what has been unleashed by "blended" morality, and wants to hit the reset button before the unraveling hits critical mass. Traditionalist are watching the inferno with amusement and are doing their best to fan the flames from the sidelines to hasten it over the abyss. Brooks seeks dignity for his "blended" concoction in traditional patterns. That door will remain slammed shut to him.
1
Most of the rituals that you describe, Mr. Brooks, are based upon supernatural beliefs. I think that society should be moving in the opposite direction.
2
Maybe. The problem is that many group rituals become public de rigueur drills, that people participate in because they are “supposed to”. Such rituals have the effect of imposing group think, rather than critical thinking, about the underlying assumptions and truths. Religious ceremonies and patriotic rituals come immediately to mind. Violation of such rituals brings swift condemnation and ostracism. Taking a knee at an NFL game, for example. Want to be a Boy Scout? You’ll need to stand at attention, salute and recite an “oath of duty to God and country”. Rituals stifle independent thinking and behavior, and maybe that’s makes conservatives happy.
1
Indeed, rituals produce social and cultural meanings in our lives.
1
The first rituals that impressed me as a young boy were the preparations ballplayers made for an at bat. They never varied. Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox, my hero, raised the bat high above his head perfectly perpendicular to the ground, then wiggled his hips. Rocky Colavito of the Detroit Tigers stretched with the bat held in both hands behind his shoulders. Many players kept it simple. They pawed the dirt with their cleats, adjusted the family jewels, then tapped the plate with their bat. All set.
There’s pleasure or comfort to be taken watching others at their daily rituals. I live across a small street from a large Catholic Church. Early any morning, from my kitchen, I can see the daily communicants coming down the street toward the church’s side door. Canes are common. They are mostly very old women
On Sunday and Wednesday nights, a Haitian congregation fills the church. It’s more of a dressy occasion for them. The women often wear hats. On summer evenings the church windows are open. Joyous voices engaged in hymn rise from the pews and fill the street. Now and then, a passerby pauses, leaning against my fence and listening.
As time goes by, rituals give you a clue about how the church is faring. These days, there are lots of funerals, but few weddings.
When I hear bagpipes in the morning, I know a firefighter has departed.
34
@Railbird
Rocky Colavito was a nice man, but a very tough guy. Nonetheless what he and Yaz did were idiosyncratic gestures that related to their game, not rituals which relate the particular to the general for the common good of society.
MLB Manager Mike Hargrove as a player had so many batters' box machinations he was known as the "human rain delay."
If those things were rituals, Hargrove would be a candidate for canonization.
5
Railbird, your recollection of Rocky Colavito is missing his ritual of pointing the barrel of the bat directly at the pitcher’s head, intimidatingly, before assuming his batting position. I adopted that ritual, and practiced it with varied degrees of success during an enjoyable sandlot, little league, high school baseball and adult pickup softball career.
7
@JMS
You’re right. Thanks for dusting off the rest of that nearly 60-year-old memory.
3
Rituals can, unfortunately, just as easily lead to smug exclusiveness as they do in religion. Sorry, but this is no solution to societal ills. Mere veneers.
Rituals are quaint. Is there an app for that?
1
There should be a ritual in which Congress investigates the egregious behavior of a sitting president and acts to remove him based on evidence of his crimes. Oh, wait...
3
Impeachment is a powerful collective ritual.
2
Indeed. But first, let's re-examine the rituals we already have.
When Francis Scott Keys wrote the line 'Land of the Free, Home of the Brave' in the National Anthem, there were 1,538,038 slaves in America - owned by some very scared people.
Oh, and let's stop making our kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance. "One nation, indivisible." Really? It was initiated during America's apartheid years. They made black kids living under segregation recite it and they made white kids in all-white schools say it. That's how America's kids were raised to look past racism. (Didn't work.)
Columbus Day. The Pledge of Allegiance. Thanksgiving. July 4th. The Constitution. Every single one is undeniably a racist hypocrisy or a racist hoax, more a cause for contrition than celebration.
I've never known a nation so unwilling to look in the mirror. When I leave here shortly after 40 years, I won't look back, not even once. But I'll miss you madly, New York. I'll always have you in my heart. You schooled me.
1
One challenge is to find a way to make rituals inclusive and not so exclusive, divided by religion and culture, as so many are.
I think that National Service, FKA the Draft, was an excellent ritual that built citizenship, partnership and service and introduced people to Americans they otherwise would never know and maybe harbor prejudice again. How about reintroducing a rite of passage for all American young adults, be it military or community based?
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This column was brought to you by "Hallmark Cards Inc"
A nice homey column, that you do knock out so well. For me these rituals suck. The first was my Bar Mitzvah, not the ones of most of my friends at a rented hall with music and catered food, but in our finished basement.
I still remember the comment of one guest, "This was one of the nicest "at home" events" she said. It stung, as it was reinforcing that we were not up to snuff among second generations Jews. And we weren't.
As I'm getting older the next ritual I will be in attendance will be another expression of status and life achievement. The very top will get an Obit in this paper, others can buy a paid announcement. But for many, it will be anonymous, and the pain of survivors will be magnified by the distance from the ideal, which you so casually celebrate.
But, keep on writing, as I enjoy writing these put downs ;)
1
Rituals vanished in my life when I left my midwestern family after college for the high-tech aura of the Golden State. My career succeeded but meaning suffered. I came to realize the value of simple ritual as I observed my younger brother's religious rituals with his family.
I didn't want to return to my religious experience of the past, so what could I do in my own house?
I've started very simply at the evening meal and all larger meals to acknowledge whatever I find appropriate for the occasion. I make sure it happens every time. It is somewhat like a "prayer" in that it highlights what is important. Sometimes the words are rather lightweight, but that's OK because it all takes a little practice. I can tell my family likes it.
2
My grandparents started a ritual, perhaps inadvertently. With five children born within eleven years, they would line them up as "steps" (in age order) and have them photographed by a professional photographer, through their teen-aged years....This was in the early part of the last century--maybe 1922-1930. All old-fashioned, sepia toned. And then, at every subsequent family gathering, when all five were there, someone would take a picture...all kinds of photos, snapshots, black and white, color, polaroid. "We need a step photo" someone would say and they'd all line up.
Now that the last of the five has just passed away, it is a wonderful remembrance of all of them, through the ages, from the 1920s to the 1990s. All of us cousins treasure them. And we'll pass them down to our children with all the stories.
2
Joseph Campbell's "Power of The Myth" talked about the impact on society from the loss of rituals. Rituals help keep communities together. The lack of shared ideas, gatherings and activities fracture our society and erode the bonds that bind us together.
3
Yes, rituals are strong strands in the ties that bind, and in that way can be powerfully beneficial to us all. On the other hand, they may also become links in the chains that constrain us, on both an individual and societal level...tools to enforce conformity or demand allegiance. Like many good things, too much is detrimental. Personally, I like rituals but favor a modest dose of them more aligned with momentous events in the life of a person or community.
1
Born in the 1950's, I remember an America that was valiantly holding fast to its rituals and ceremonies. And the common denominator which linked nearly every social interaction was a code of dress----proper attire was pretty much observed in every situation. A wedding had one code; a funeral, another. We had attire for cocktail parties; we had attire for dinner out. Always---always---did we look great.
I have said it before in these pages and I will say it again: Americans would start to feel much better about themselves and each other if they only looked better. Personally, I grew up living the adage that 'a coat and tie builds character.' Incredible compared to now, but I wore more dinner jackets/tuxedos before the age of ten than most men today would wear in ten lifetimes. When I fly, I still wear a jacket.
But it isn't always easy. I am often looked down on for being 'overdressed', 'old-fashioned', 'fancy schmancy' or---and this is my favorite---'rich'. I do enjoy the irony of being condemned, while if I'd left the house in torn jeans and an untucked collarless shirt, coiffed in a pink mohawk haircut with my body covered in tattoos and piercings galore, I'd meet with societal approval.
Please, America. Let's return to the ceremony of proper dress (and manners). It's amazing how much better you'll feel when you are looking good, and how much better the world looks when you yourself are a dignified part of it.
4
A small but significant ritual exists at cancer hospitals around the country. When patients have completed their course of chemotherapy or radiation, they ring a bell in the waiting area. Friends and family can gather round and celebrate an end to what is a truly grueling treatment that affects the physical and mental health of the patient and also puts a huge burden on loved ones. One cannot help but be moved by the experience. I attended one of those rituals yesterday. It was an incredibly life-affirming occasion that celebrated moving through a period of darkness into, hopefully, a period of light and hope. Practicing rituals that are truly meaningful bring people together in love, joy, pride and common concern. Rituals that exist just for their own sake risk becoming empty and devoid of meaning.
3
Rituals are good but are too often used as an excuse to overeat. In every office setting and you'll see a cake or some other form of unhealthy food to celebrate someone's birthday, retirement, wedding, etc. two or three days a week. The unhealthy food lies in the center of the break room table all day, beckoning sedentary, overweight office workers to nibble at it during their brief breaks.
I'm guessing that Brooks has kids who have reached the stage where they should look back to see where they've come, and forward to where they hope to go. Good column!
How to have rituals in the age of cynicism and private profit, loss of public service and the deterioration of our institutions?
It has to work at the family level, extend to communities and then to the nation. Families are stressed these days, the kids are moving out looking for a better life, costs are increasing and no one who has less than $2M in the bank can look at the future with any certainty. Add in college debt, opioids, Maga hats and the general level of chaos in our federal systems; it's hard to keep an even keel. Our media is disjointed and there is little trust.
For some, rituals are the antidote. For others, rituals are lost to fragmentation.
I'm looking for Mr. Brooks next column where he advocates for better communities free of fear and free of want, where rituals can take place again. Time to revisit FDR's January 6, 1941 speech and see if it still applies.
4
David might like to visit Guilford, Conn., to see a thriving, almost-400-year-old experiment in community.
On June 1, 1639, 25 Puritan men on board the ship St. John, heading for New England, bound their lives to each other by signing a document similar to the Mayflower Compact. They set forth their vision for the community they would create with their families near Quinnipiack (later New Haven) and pledged to help each other survive and prosper in the New World.
All these centuries later, many of the descendants of those signers are still active in our town, and the communal spirit of the Guilford Covenant is still abundantly evident throughout the year.
2
We graduated from Virginia Tech in 1978, but the VT massacre still affected us deeply. We live in Austin where many young adults immediately moved here because of jobs they had already accepted. As older adults we felt our duty to embrace our Hokie family and help them heal. School pride, affiliations, and celebrations (like going to football games) are rituals.
From this tragedy, a new VT ritual arose. Students and alumni decided to memorize those victims by have a Day of Service on the anniversary. It is nationwide and still goes on today. The young graduates of today may not feel the pain, but they know that ritual is important.
Brooks always takes the path of least resistance: appeals to religion and nostalgia - soft solutions to hard problems.
He is, once again, making an appeal to conservative values and solutions to address social challenges. He wants social reform to be bottom-up. Beware of top-down government social policies.
Rituals are tribalistic – one person’s ritual is another person’s threat. Ritual may mark a person as an “other.” To fully appreciate any ritual, you have to be a member of the tribe. Some rituals have been appropriated by particular tribes – the national anthem by the MAGA tribe, and Christmas is a division of the capitalist tribe.
There is no doubt that we need some kind of glue to provide a national collective purpose. But the glue that worked in 1620 when the community was tiny, all-white, agrarian, and religious won’t work in a modern, fast-paced, urban America with a diversity that would make the Mayflower Puritans’ heads spin.
What Brooks won’t do is offer practical strategies that address our current reality. Ritual is a fragile solution to today’s national and global challenges. How would Brooks foil capitalism’s dominance of our lives, or technology’s role in isolating and dividing us? Would he favor a mandated national service of some kind – everyone gives a year or two of their lives to a national purpose. Of course not, that’s government. And how would ritual overcome racism?
These are questions I don’t think Brooks is prepared to answer.
3
This is another in an endless series of David Brooks' columns entitled, "Wouldn't Life Be Wonderful If We Could Turn Back The Clock To 1950?" It is difficult to continuously and unabashedly meld cloying sentimentality with an ill-disguised worship of conservative WASP social values and yet Brooks delivers ... ad nauseum.
4
"There Should Be More Rituals!"
omg, not THAT old chestnut again...
4
We have no shortage of rituals: Lavish weddings, Christmas shopping, football Sunday, football Saturday, football Friday, Thanksgiving and, yes, Thanksgiving football. The problem is these are often unsatisfying and sometimes outright harmful distractions. In an electrified and digital capitalist society, there is almost always money to be made (a clear opportunity cost for rituals), including huge industries designed to harvest money from our rituals and our desire for rituals.
Tell me about a new ritual that has taken root, and I will tell you the title of an upcoming "Adam Ruins Everything" episode.
1
The idea that soldiers today are defending the nation is bunk. They are advancing the misguided ideas of GWBush and Cheney in Iraq and all recent presidents in Afghanistan. They are not making the nation safer; they are servants of the military-industrial complex.
6
In this light, was playing the violin while Rome burned a ritual?
The NYT intellectual conservative voice seems to be advocating the pursuit of feel good ritual as a diversion or an alternative to addressing fundamental causes that inflict real damage. The core problems of our country merit his attention.
While rituals have purpose, good or exclusionary, they are but temporary window dressing if the structural underpinnings of our house are ignored.
4
@Dirk
"While rituals have purpose, good or exclusionary, they are but temporary window dressing if the structural underpinnings of our house are ignored."
Agreed, but I think it's worse than window-dressing, Dirk - Brooks' vision of submissive endorsement of 'life's important moments' culminates in submission to state authority, with unquestioning self-sacrifice - of ones own life or the life of a loved one - as the greatest, 'binding' good.
1
The way David presents rituals makes them sound as if they are inclusive and binding. Unfortunately many rituals tend to keep outsiders out rather than including them.
3
David,
It is obvious that you’ve undergone a change in your life.
That you are “born again.”
I congratulate you.
But, there are those among us that prefer a personal and private approach to the many things that you want to publicly celebrate.
As a private person I feel intimidated by the ceremonial and ritualistic. To me it’s close to bullying. It says
‘Join in ... or else”
Good for you David, but I miss the old David Brooks.
Should there be a ritual for that too?
4
There is a reason why the concept of faith has been so durable. It fills a human need, a desire for connection, community and solace.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I feel like there is new faith out there, waiting for its evangelist. Every time I open this paper (virtually, of course - I read online) it feels like there is yet another story about alienation, about hatred, about polarization. The old structures and old faiths are failing. Nothing yet has risen in their place, but it will.
1
How about something really simple like re-learning how to say thank you ? I think this is a huge community builder that has been lost, to the detriment of our social fabric.
3
Mr. Brooks claims our hunger for rituals is so great that we overload the ones remaining.
Yet, if we are so hungry for rituals, why have we abandoned them?
Could it be that all rituals are naked attempts to corral feelings, to manipulate emotions, to empty the ritual itself of any authentic meaning?
The church herds its sheep into activities and rote words that take away one's own personal authentic sorrow or joy and substitute something musty and empty.
Who is to dictate to another how to react to the events in their personal lives? How is a stranger equipped to ritualize my joy or my grief? Mostly, the priest is an intrusion.
Do-gooders welcoming returning soldiers would not always be either welcome or needed if family is present, and if family is present, no amount of ritual from do-gooders would suffice.
And, Mr. Brooks, you can throw "fun parties" any old time for any old reason or no reason. Why not throw one to celebrate a new age where you are not hidebound by some ritual or empty convention?
Or, instead, you could contribute the money spent on rituals and fun parties to something meaningful and productive or to someone in need, where ritual is the last luxury they imagine.
1
Amen, and amen, and amen again.
1
Mr. Brooks: your article moved me to tears. A brilliantly written, timely and poignant piece about the need for ritual celebrations by the community to remind us all of the beauty we all experience and our need to celebrate beauty together.
Thank you for the best piece I have seen in my memory. We should welcome back to society those who paid their debt by serving time. We should welcome new neighbors. We should remember by rituals we are one community who share far more together than our hyper political times suggest.
Thank you, sir, for the most insightful, loving and human article I have ever read. I plan to work hard to implement in my life your suggestion. I hope to touch others and share your genius insight with anyone I can. The world will be move loving and tolerant when we share more rituals together.
3
I like cleansing rituals like impeachment.
8
Who picks the rituals? The clerics? The conservatives? There are plenty of stupid rituals based on falsehood; best to let them end. I will decide my own rituals thank you.
2
See Arnold Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage
1
Ritualistic behaviors can exclude as well as include...witness the hyper-ritualistic behavior of the KKK.
3
While I agree with Mr. Brooks' wistfulness for simpler times, his suggestion for more rituals ignores how much damned work goes into these events. I spent too many years working in the non-profit arena and volunteering, so I come by my cynicism honestly. No matter how hard you work to put together a meeting or celebration, someone will inevitably come up to you afterword and say "This was really nice, but why didn't you...?" It makes me tired to think about it.
3
More rituals.
We need different funerals for the 85,000 children who starved to death in Yemen, some way of making up eulogies who have yet to live.
I want my patients to have more birthdays, anniversaries, hiking trips to favorite National Parks. BUT I no longer want to see tripling of infant-maternal deaths in our countries.
I want every person to be in a solid, loving family situations where these rituals begin and are carried through the years.
But these rituals mean NOTHING as 25% of diabetics have given up buying horribly expensive insulin.
I want every minority family to perform rituals such as picnics and barbecues in public parks for their children...until good Christian white folks call the police as “something bad might happen.
We have too many rituals for our selfish lives here in the USA. But I would like families having any free time when they’re working two minimum wage jobs and barely feeding their children.
David you have NO IDEA how the real world lives. Sad!
6
When the KKK burns a cross, that's a ritual. Trump's rallies are rituals. It's silly to assert that rituals are necessarily a net positive.
4
I'm a big Brooks fan who regularly defends him in this comments section against bitter liberals who will not give him the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that he frequently writes articles similar to this one -- articles that Gandhi or JFK or MLK could have written. However, I've at last grown weary of his angst, indifferent to his nostalgic longing for a whole, healthy society that has never existed. Mr. Brooks, if you want a different society, then lay out a vision for one. Retire to the country, write a book that will lead us to a better way. Failing that, please do something more constructive with your column -- like taking on this historically regressive Republican party with more vigor. More rituals? Okay, but to what end? You’re sending out plaintiff distress signals, but no savior is appearing to grant your desires, Mr. Brooks. You're a writer, an intellectual. You are the type to provide a vision if you have the courage to attempt it. Otherwise, man up and train your guns on worthy targets.
4
Agree. Ritual can bind us. You can start your own right now. For example...
On October 17, 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area at 5:04pm. On our block in San Francisco, no electricity, etc.
We came together on the street with BBQ’s and folding tables to listen to our portable radios, grill food and drink wine.
Every year since, we have gathered. Getting a permit from the city to close the block. Sharing food and drink. City kids revelling in their block being closed to traffic.
The young people explain to the neighbors why we gather. They ask and answer “four questions”. (Modeled after the Seder tradition.) “Why do we gather each year”? “Why do we share food”? Etc.
It’s become a ritual we hope becomes a tradition.
111
@Rich Shrieve that is so cool. I was living in San Francisco At the time and was so impressed with how the community came together. It’s wonderful that you celebrate that each year.
5
Portland has a sanctioned ritual called Neighborhood Night out every August. People gather in parks or close off their streets for food, music and community.
5
It seems to me that ritual was one of the prime ingredients in the fascist crown of thorns the world was decorated with prior to WWII. Do we want that again. All the other ingredients appear to be present. Who would want a slice of that pie again?
1
I love David Brooks' writings and would love to meet him.
1
Loved this column...Really love your new book.
So happy the “real” David Brooks has risen from the political carnage that is taking place and ,once again, teaching us.
2
Yes! From a psychological perspective rituals are comforting and community building, incredibly important aspects of our well being. The more new secular rituals that are invented the looser the grip of religion with its dangerous nonsense and inherent oppression of women and outsiders. Religion has had a near monopoly on ritual for too long. D.A., J.D. NYC
2
Of course ritual is important, as are myth and foundation tales. But there are good reasons, too, to shed rituals. The rosary? For some, that was a dull piece of mindless drudgery. A ritual to welcome a felon back on the streets? That exists, of course-- for the Milkens and the Stewarts--but not for the black and brown guys who are usually even denied the franchise. When ritual no longer serves a group or society it becomes a weapon in the hands of the powerful. So, David, we need to address what is really missing in the formula that holds societies together. When I first came to America, a difference I noted was that in Europe criticism is more common than praise; whereas here, praise was unstinted. The explanation was simple: Europe was full, the pie divided and guarded jealously. Here, there was still room to grow. There was an American dream. Now, Trump declares that we are closed. Trump has made us into a provincial England. And he devises rituals accordingly: Lock her Up; Enemies of the People! David: time to un-nail your colors from the GOP mast!
3
What will happen to people who don't join in the ritual? Marginalized? more ground for us vs them?
Live and let live.
4
I can't imagine anything worse than living in a community that has come together around some kind of purpose. COUNT. ME. OUT!
We had some created rituals in our family. One was Sunday night “Blessing time.” We lit candles, said a blessing over each of our children, had a special desert, and went through the calendar of the coming week... practices, rehearsals, projects, meetings, whatever. Said some prayers and sang some songs. Always the same ones. The children, all grown, seem to remember it fondly. Families can design their own rituals.
Here is a silly but useful one: monthly neighborhood bunco night. Neighbors gather, get the latest news..... who is having surgery, who might move, who is going on a trip. And it’s fun.
Anything we do and we make important, that is not based on consumerism, is good for our souls and our communities. The secret is to do it for our souls and communities and not in response to news or advertising.
2
I like the idea of voting as a ritual with the day becoming a national holiday celebrated like the 4th of July. Even as a Democrat in an extremely red state where my vote is cancelled out, I've ritualized my voting activity - vote in person on the morning of election day and proudly wearing my "I Voted" sticker all day long.
5
There are real differences between people who end up Conservatives and people who end up Liberals. Conservatives are much more into obeying authoritarians, group think and mindless rituals. Liberals are much less into formality and rigidity. Mr. Brooks thinks to make everyone into a homogeneous unthinking mind set. It is just what Conservatives do, real world not withstanding.
3
@gratis
Not really sure what planet your Democratic/Republican divide comes from but as a conservative my view is exactly opposite this one. Interesting perspective......
Thank you, David, for your timely call for rituals. These are transitional times in human civilization when we may sit and see all of the world's events of the day together, where we are individually able to comprehend ourselves as a collective single organism united in consciousness, in human intelligence. The path to understanding our own lives as a transcendence from materiality to soulful collective intelligence is the bright dawning of our new reality. All we understand to be untoward this dawning new day affirms our awakening, overpowering darkness with light. Let us celebrate the coming of age of humanity.
1
The places where the rituals of community exist have few jobs and the places with jobs leave little to no time for the luxuries of rituals. Although Mr. Brooks has made an effort to get in touch with that other America, more work needs to be done.
1
The wedding ceremony is one of the most common rituals in modern American society, and look at the divorce rate. Rituals without a clear appreciation of reality, the imperfections of others, and the acknowledgement that change is constant, are empty and meaningless, and are external acts without internal meaning.
2
There should be a ritual for when social conservatives, making apocalyptic predictions about America's lack of social cohesion, use the most cynical of political maneuvering to circumvent the will of the majority and install a radical president who in short order divides the country and breaks several of our most important institutions. Because it happens every other presidency.
2
Sure, let's have rituals. As long as we keep paying our 9% student loan interest and 29% credit card interest. Cause government rules interfere with business.
1
We have plenty of rituals in this country, some just may not be that attractive.
In family therapy, rituals arise out of routines. The daily brushing of the teeth before bed becomes a ritual when it holds deeper meaning for the family and becomes part of their family dynamics. Reading a book to a son or daughter before bed, saying grace before meals, a yearly holiday feast all start as a routine and gain meaning over time.
Rituals don't arise by themselves, they emerge over time as people repeat their daily activities with others and those activities take on deeper meanings.
If you like the writer's ideas about rituals, start a activity with your family, your neighbors or workplace. Or even strangers. And repeat it.
2
Rituals that reconnect humanity to the natural world of which it is a embedded part. Rituals that demonstrate humanity's reverence for the sacred Earth.
Nothing we could do would be more beneficial to all.
1
Perhaps David Brooks himself is missing community and ritual. This is a common theme of his. Last night--gloriously sunny and warm--I walked my dogs through the neighborhood and saw all the rituals of spring. Patrick was planting flowers; Mark pulled his telescope out of the garage; Jeanette sat on her porch for the first time in months; Craig played boogie-woogie piano (audible through his open window). In plenty of towns and neighborhoods in America, it's all there, if you look for it.
1
I didn’t going to this article thinking it was going to be very good but it is, we should have more rituals celebrating the small things that make up life, it moves too quickly as it is we don’t recognize all the beauty until it’s gone
1
What we need, most of all, are more rituals that celebrate the unity of all humanity, Gandhi's belief that "All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family." Celebrations of peacemakers as well as of returning warriors. A flag that represents all humanity, not just national flags. More songs to sing and to teach our children that the world is ONE, that we are all one people, that the lives and well-being of all people all over the world are of equal value and importance.
1
Voting in free and fair elections is an essential ritual fundamental to democracy. I wish we had it.
4
Since the election of djt, I myself have started a ritual to mark the transition that comes at the end of each day - I drink myself to sleep.
4
As a psychologist working with divorcing parents, I often coached them about how to minimize wounding of the kids. One element was to exchange "Divorce Vows," e.g. "We'll never ask you to spy on the other, or convey emotional messages to the other." The kids got a written copy.
2
@CGDefintely worthy of a ritual.
David, if you want small town welcome and ritual, come to New England, particularly rural New England. The legislature of my town is the Town Meeting, composed of all electors (registered voters). You haven't lived until you've debated purchasing a new fire truck while swapping lies with your neighbors. Unfortunately, this community does not translate well to cities where anonymity (call it safety in numbers) is the hallmark because you have to, at least in relative terms, trust your neighbors in a small town, and to trust them, you have to know them. There are trade offs. The good news is, we live in America, so when I get tired of my neighbors minding my business, I can high-tail it to a city, or out to the western range land, or to the side of a mountain.
1
Rituals always struck me as phony. Do 'X' when 'Y' happens because that's the way it's always been done. Put on a grand show at the most mundane of human activities. And as others have mentioned, this also encourages a herd mentality.
If a ritual, on its actual virtues, provides you meaning and comfort, by all means continue to participate in it. If it doesn't, you can do precisely what our forefathers intended you to be able to - do as you please and continue your life in peace.
2
On a trip to Papua New Guinea, we stayed at a village on New Ireland & came across a local woman in native dress pounding a pestle who was exceptionally well-spoken; it turned-out that she'd been an air hostess for Air Niugini, had experienced many of the trappings/luxuries that modern life can afford, including an apartment in Singapore, but she said that she'd given it all up & deliberately chosen to return to her village to lead a simple life, and she said that she felt genuinely sorry for us, that we in the highly-individualized West have no tribe or village now to go back to, that we're essentially cut-off from our own tribes, rites/rituals, & thus basically lost. I'll never forget her simple, basic, truthful wisdom.
1
Maybe there should be less. Black Friday anyone? What about the new rituals like gender reveals? Too much. Rituals that are truly important like family dinners are a dream from the past. Those are the kinds I miss the most. Just more family time where everyone is sitting at the table without cell phones and really talking to each other instead of taking pictures and making everything seem picture perfect.
3
Yes, that's the key. Fill the world with automatic meaningless gestures.
My favorite is wearing the American flag on your label (or sleeve) to tell us what a fine patriotic fellow you are.
Going to church on Sunday works too, then Monday is much easier to endure as you cut your opponent's heart out.
4
Of course rituals are important for being healthy. The problem with rituals is that they often actually replace that which they symbolize and for which they serve as facilitating means of and for ... instead of ends in themselves (commonly called “idolatry”). Being well-mannered (or mannered at all) is a lesson Trump has surely taught many of us. Being competitive about being mannered is obviously absurd ... and so “political correctness” has a significant downside. When civilizing ritual serves to help one recall and welcome what one is in one’s basic human decency and forgotten to be about, it accomplishes a useful benevolent purpose.
2
Nice idea but sounds a bit exhausting. Can we swap out one existing ritual for a new one? Like instead of the big wedding shower, have a welcome home ceremony for soldiers.
1
Interesting, David...
When people can no longer afford goods – like homes, for instance – sell them on experiences...
When people can no longer afford experiences – like attending destination weddings and all the pre-parties – sell them on (free) social media...
When people can no longer afford (free) social media – sell them on rituals...
Like immolating the phone they haven’t fully paid for, while all seven of its cameras are turned on and sending final messages to all of the lessee’s accounts...
Rest easy, all – the phone is smart enough to blur the face in the video-feed, where the lessee is in full view squirting lighter-fluid onto the communicant...
You do realize we’re coming full circle...
The ultimate experience is death – and the ultimate ritual is a funeral...
So, anticipating the day when people can no longer afford to die...
They can just Skype in – using green-screen technology to fill in the place they’d like folks to think they’ve gone to, behind them...
Of course, any millennials departing early would Instagram...
2
Thoughts turn, to an X-Mas in July...
Ep. 3: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘The First Storytellers’
BILL MOYERS: So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What we’ve got on our hands. As I say, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.
BILL MOYERS: And you’d find?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the news of the day.
BILL MOYERS: Wars…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society. Half the…I imagine that 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.
BILL MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: None. There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual.....
1
Does the felon welcomed back to the community get their right to vote back? Or are they part of Republican massive voter suppression machine, unable to vote and participate in their community for the rest of their lives?
2
Rituals can be nice, but with them often comes an ugly downside. Rituals often morph into a “herd mentality” and those who don’t subscribe to or avoid the ritual often become outcasts.
Religion, which in fact is mostly “ritual”, is a screaming in your face example. Even within the same religion it can and does get very ugly if you’re less ritualistic than the more “orthodox” set.
How many people have had a jaundiced eye cast at them if they didn’t turn out for the high school football team’s parade or the like.
Rituals can be fine if they don’t become dogma and the motives are other than outright vulgar “Shop-til-you-drop” commercialism....the motivation behind most modern rituals!
4
Aren't rituals also about exclusion? Toast a wedding (and also make those alone feel worthless). Accept an award (because I won and you didn't). Celebrate an anniversary (because your brother just got divorced again).
1
The Aztecs had some wonderful rituals. Real celebrations of community needs filled with high hopes for the future.
1
"Religious societies are dense with rituals — Jewish men lay on tefillin, Catholics pray the rosary — but we live in a secular society where rituals are thin on the ground."
But the same society is made up of Jews and Catholics and actors and LARPers and Freemasons and all sorts of societies, associations, clubs and fellowships. The secular society is not the prohibition of any or all rituals; it is the freedom to observe whatever rituals you please. THAT'S THE POINT...
Good grief. I feel a little seppuku coming on...
2
There are plenty of rituals in America.
Being black African while enslaved and separate and uneqial in America has filled my ancestors and me with a sacred secret life of invisible ritual survival mechanisms that have little or nothing to do with white European Judeo- Christian Americans and their lives and rituals.
A physically identifiable black minority in America that exposes the callous corrupt cruel cynical endemic enduring hypocrisy of a nation that claims to be " a land of the free and home of the brave" where all are allegedly " divinely naturally created equal persons with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
" I am an invisible man" unnamed protagonist from " Invisible Man " by Ralph Ellison
See " The Omni- Americans " Albert Murray
1
How about a ritual were the House of Representatives moves to remove a completely unfit and treasonous President and the Senate, regardless of party affiliation, does the plainly right thing for the country and finishes the job?
3
Perhaps some of us have become fearful of rituals taken up by certain politicians because of the damage it has done to our Democracy to say nothing of the damage done to our children who have been exposed to the toxic narrative and behaviors of a President who is both unconscious and incompetent. The “rituals” of the daily twitter rant and campaign performances.................sad
1
The term “rite of passage” would seem to be a better fit than “ritual” for the types of events and activities David is talking about.
1
The problem is that rituals are centering and reassuring practices only when the participants share the same believe system.
The Mess: the incarnation of Christ. Passover: escaping the captivity from Egypt. Praying five times a day toward the Mecca: the presence of God in our lives.
The problem is that you must believe that God descended upon earth; or that "Jewish people" escaped from Egypt (helped by a genocidal God); or that God actually exists.
Ritual is based on consensus, and most often irrational consensus. And because of that it can quickly become coercive. (Salute the flag ... And if you don't you are not a Patriot ...).
Unless we find something we all can agree on I rather live in a society without rituals.
Confucius had a lot to say about ritual and valued it immensely as a way to connect the past with the present and a way to connect people with the natural order of things. He called it The way of heaven. Twenty five hundred years later the words of Confucius still ring true, which says a lot about the nature of people and things.
An available and essential ritual: VOTE!
6
Those who still practice rituals in America are those who are most marginalized, including orthodox Jews and Muslims. The people who want to make America great again would love some new rituals, especially if they involved lots of marching and guns. Maybe we should be thankful for what we don't have.
71
@Eric Caine "Those who still [actively] practice rituals in
America" include Catholics, Orthodox Christians, liturgically based mainstream Protestants, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and numerous nonreligious groups. The issue Brooks is addressing (as did Robert Putnam in "Bowling Alone") is that fewer people join such groups than previously with and, as David Brooks notes, the rituals that remain to those nonjoining folks have become bloated affairs. But to get back your point -- yes,with some exceptions (Southern Baptists spring to mind) the more orthodox/conservative a religious person is, the more ritual is followed. But you're leaving out millions and millions of people, some of whom are marginalized and some of whom are not; and many of whom aren't religious at all. Speaking of marching: For what it's worth, junior ROTC programs are quite popular in low-income, minority high schools. There's been a lot of controversy about whether we should have such programs or not, but we already have them.
6
on the one hand I like the idea of rituals, like welcoming new people into a community of returning soldiers home. but then I shudder to think of how each new ritual could become a new Hallmark moment with insipid cards and expectations to buy stuff.
1
This is a perfect Brooks column for our propaganda world. "repeat and believe, repeat and believe, repeat and believe".
None of my friends do any rituals. Ritual is for those who think there is mysticism in the world they cannot comprehend. Like believing in ancient scrawling with zero evidence that there ever was any proof of anything about those 'profits'.
Brooks' people 'believe' in things. They are too busy watching the kardashians to bother to understand, look-up or even attempt to comprehend. They have been led to 'beliefs' without question - just like perfect mindless drones who are easily controlled.
1
Get it right, Mr. Brooks. Tell the whole story.
According to "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown" by Philip Gray, lynchings in America were often ritualistic, complete with persons dressing in white costumes, burning crosses, and taking bodily "souvenirs" from the victims' corpses. On a few occasions, thousands gathered to celebrate such rituals.
Conquerors stealing other peoples' lands ritualistically knelt in prayer on foreign shores to dedicate their takings to their own sovereigns before enslaving the natives.
Fraternities have abused pledges and force them to suffer all sorts of humiliations in bonding rituals. Prisoners of war and revolution have been marched though gauntlets of screaming persons and beaten on their way to being tortured and executed. Humans and animals have been sacrificed and their blood poured on altars to appease "gods". Some suicide bombers undergo ritual preparation before going off to murder innocents.
We humans have gathered together and ritualized all kinds of behaviors, and still do. We've always been a mixed bag, as have been the rituals we've created. Best to keep that in mind.
2
Yes, in a country where we have "graduation ceremonies" for Kindergarten, we need more rituals.
2
We can't have rituals anymore, because we have to be politically correct and complete inclusive. So, unless we come up with a ritual that celebrates transgender, left-handed, non-denominational redheads we will have a problem. Such rituals must include no pronouns, because no one knows which ones are okay, there can be no overt reference to custom (Christmas Trees/Menorahs/Chinese Lanterns) unless every person's personal totem is acknowledged. I'm surprised we can have 4th of July at this point, because it must offend someone.
We should all drink when Trump says collusion.
Other than that, collective rituals have a difficult time existing in a do it yourself, individualistic society. Plus our love/hate relationship with authority prevents any ritual prescribed by a government figure.
This column appears to represent just another chapter in Mr. Brooks' continued refusal to make any attempt to distinguish between good and bad substantive policies -- arguably because he simply cannot bring himself to endorse Democratic proposals over Republican ones.
Hence, he continues to seek refuge in social and cultural issues which, at best, may affect people's lives only marginally. Simply put, this is just more "camouflage" for Mr. Brooks' default position of "false equivalence" between the political parties.
2
I think voter registration for the first time should be celebrated as an American coming of age ritual. Maybe family members could present a voter registration card to every member upon his/her 18th birthday and party like the country depends on it!
1
It seems that all too often the American public ritual (I can't speak to others) dissolves into loyalty oaths and persecution of the other. What is Trump, if not a ritual of the decline of white male privilege?
For once I agree with David Brooks.
Here's another ritual we should institute: the one for a disgraced former president who has been impeached, convicted, and removed from the White House, as he attempts to return to the city of his birth.
Should the ritual include a bell ringing? A moment of silence? A Mardi Gras-like celebration? Fireworks to celebrate the restoration of democracy? Should New Yorkers line the street of his route to Trump Towers, all of them turning their backs to him and bowing their heads?
A ritual is called for to celebrate the renewal of our freedoms after the impeachment of a tyrant.
2
Old rituals and celebrations: such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween have been totally corrupted and destroyed by rampant commercialization and the profit motive.
They are all "real"....all go back to legitimate folk memories, and in the case of Christmas and Thanksgiving, to real events.
(For the history of Halloween, research Samhain; for Thanksgiving, we mostly all know what that goes back to; and Christmas, though the date is doubtful, was once real and believed in as real by millions. (See the worship of Mithras for the probable historical origin of mid December as the time for Christmas).
HOW do we, average people, get them back? I frankly doubt we can.
1
Is it any suprise that an importnat ritual for many is standing for the National Anthem at a game...and that violating that ritual (regardless of meaning behind it) should lead to offense?
Our main ritual as American citizens is voting -- the solemn dignity of having our name checked on the register, the hushed silence of entering the private voting booth, scrutinizing our conscience and making the best decision we know how to make -- then receiving a sticker saying "I voted" and exiting out into the sunshine. The humble grandeur of this ritual is threatened by white supremacists, by disgraceful spinelessness in the GOP, by Trump's passive embrace of Russian interference and thuggish disregard for the rule of law. Let's protect voting rights, let's restore voting rights, let's insure the integrity of our elections and have paper trails. Let's cherish the great democratic ritual of voting..
"But ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require."
I attended a funeral today: my boyfriend's 94-year old Dad, a Navy vet and careerist, devout Catholic, proud family man of 8 kids, numerous grandkids, and almost as may great-grandkids.
Many rituals, including Catholic funeral Mass, family eulogy, military taps and flag folding ceremony, and of course the noisy, exuberant sharing of food and countless memories.
And yet, I agree Mr. Brooks, that it's the communal rituals this country needs more of in this age of tribalism and polarization.
I like the idea of a ritual to honor returning soldiers. I like even more the idea of welcoming new members of a neighborhood. Like funerals, communal rituals should help participants internalize external change.
Whatever the ritual, wouldn't it be great if it was periodically repeated, to make sure the spirit of inclusion extended the first time remained alive?
97
@ChristineMcM Aren't a lot of rituals tribal in nature?
3
time to bring back the welcome wagon.
27
@ChristineMcM
Thank you, ChristineMcM. Yes, rituals offer people meaning but they only work if they are repeated. Hence, the ritual deepens as it becomes a "part" of us as persons. The Catholic funeral mass is an opportunity to do many things all at once: say goodbye to the loved one, begin the process of mourning, show love and appreciation, and also, gather as a community of believers. The centrality of the funeral is a re-affirmation of the beliefs of the people. It is messy and at times, fraught with difficulty. But when people pray through the service---as it is intended, then the ritual itself is merely the structure that makes possible all those difficult emotional things. And when people know what they are doing because they have been doing it over and over again (as ritual implies), then it is the emotional and mental muscle that aligns with what happens.
7
I remember going to a Soviet kindergarten. We had rituals for everything: starting each day with a line-up, reciting patriotic slogans, and waving red flags. There was a ritual for each holiday. There was a ritual for thanking our teachers and our parents. I’m sure the rituals continued into adulthood for other kids but I was lucky to have left with my family before I could get totally fed up with the whole rigmarole and do something to bring on myself the wrath of the “community”. And it did not help the USSR, did it? The country fell apart like a rotten heap of rubbish, leaving behind the pent-up anger of brainwashed generations. I say, less ritual, more thinking; less community, more individualism.
49
@Mor: Well said. But we do need to transition to customs, ritualized or otherwise, that help us be communities.
7
@Mor Ritual does not equal the overtaking of the individual.
8
@Mor - nicely put. Milan Kundera writes about this in Unbearable Lightness of Being, rejecting both the forced kitschy rituals of authoritarians (both Soviet-style and US-style) and the romanticizing of such rituals by naive Western lefties. It gives some great perspective on this.
3
We need a new set of public rituals. The old ones, like saluting the flag at a sports event or standing to cite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school have lost their meaning.
The flag and the pledge have been turned into cynical propaganda suggesting that if you don't participate you are un-American. Many black athletes discovered that sentiment.
But the real aspect of ur Americanness are not reflected in those flag rituals. We were born as a country because we questioned authority, not because of our blind obedience.
The flag represents a unique nation, a republic governed by a constitution, not by a bellowing politician. Yet all of this is forgotten or collapsed into ritual as public spectacle, devoid of real meaning.
We stand at attention as military planes fly over on their way to drop bombs on some people who we have not declared ourselves to be a war with. Ritual obstructs reason as well as our sense of moral purpose.
So why not a pledge in our schools to the constitution rather than a flag? In its preamble we are reminded that one of the main purposes of our government is "to promote the general welfare." That should lead to conversations in our social studies class about how to fulfill this commitment.
We do need new public rituals but they need to reflect real public values. I for one think our constitution contains many of those values. And one of them is that it's not a perfect document and sometimes needs to be changed, just as we all do.
59
@Drspock: "a pledge to our constitution rather tgan to the flag..." Hear, hear. Excellent suggestion. Even as a cgikd I never got what was logical about pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, and wondered if I was supposed to be willing to die for IT. "And to the Republic, for which it stands...": that part made sense. We foolishly elevate the flag itself, instead of the ideals stated in the pledge itself---" with liberty and justice for all."
10
Ah...The Power Of Myth (and rituals)! We seem only to be able to ritualize money! Has our clever machines main effect been to eliminate rituals but not our need of them?
Rituals are important and can provide flavor, context and meaning to what could otherwise be just the vicissitudes of life. However, it can be a slippery slope when the ritual becomes more important than the event it is supposed to enhance. In many ways, that is why, in my opinion, so many rituals have gone by the wayside - they were empty observances that the participants felt burdened to have to enact. If one doesn't enter into a ritual with joy and anticipation, there's no point to it. A modern example of the cycle is the use of social media - instagram and facebook started to become places where the joys of life's transitions could be memorialized and shared - then it became toxic: a blend of ego (looking for the most likes) and envy (trolling other people's offerings).
I don't know how to break the cycle except to remind people to be mindful - participate in those rituals that really have meaning and bring joy to you, and let the rest pass by.
I have a ritual that I follow.
Every Sunday morning I take the local paper into the sauna at my healthclub and read through the obituaries.
This accomplishes two things.
1) It allows me to see how unfair life is to those young and old and gives me new appreciation for walking this earth on my own two feet.
And 2) It allows me to see how racism plays a role in America. The last 6 weeks reading through nearly 50 pages of obitiuaries..I didn't see a single photo of a single African American who died in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
How is it that black people don't die in our town when white people are dying left and right?
That ritual has stuck with me for the past 2 years and it's haunting to think that only one race is seeing members of the community die and move onto the Promised Land.
3
I like this, but please, no more standing ovations, especially during the president's State of the Nation address.
3
I should think that a small "c" conservative commentator for the NYTimes would be entirely opposed to more time off, more none productive time, more opportunities and excuses for the lazy to do less. In corporate capitalist America, don't we measure productivity and its relationship to hours spent on the job? What Mr. Brooks is espousing here sounds absolutely socialistic.
It's ironic that you published this on Earth Day. If ever there was a day deserving and in need of ritual this is it. Perhaps if human life survives another 100 years we will have a ritual that celebrates the life and works of James Hansen and Greta Thunberg
1
I think there's an app for that.
25
@David Rea I'm kinda tired today, then I realized there's a nap for that.
2
We are no more a "people" than we are a single society.
We are a pyramid, and at the bottom, people suffer and die.
David Brooks' Republican brethren have spent decades splitting us up, to divide and economically conquer us.
Hugh
4
I think that David Brooks' Republican Party has just defined a whole new set of rituals regarding President Trump's proven efforts to obstruct justice. Deflect, Deny, Degrade.
4
I think the lack of ritual is an important failure of modern, secular, American culture overall but particularly for males. There is no secular moment in a males life when he is no longer a boy and is now seen as a man. There is for Jewish males but not for the rest of American males.
Both males and females have high school graduation which is a ritual signifying transition from child to adult but since it is only for those that graduate and practiced in gender equality it fails to serve the purpose of a ritual.
Females have their period before they graduate high school. While the physical aspect of a period is not a ritual itself the result is similar to one. When a female has a period it signifies that they are no longer a girl but a woman. They ask for advice and guidance from older women when they get their period.
At no point in a males life is their a moment when that boy no longer is seen as a boy but a man. Unless one considers how young males are led to believe that they are not a man until they have sex. This belief leads to toxic rape culture. Young males are told they aren’t a man until they have sex. Therefore, they see having sex as an act that signifies their transition from boy to man and not an intimate act between two equals. The female is only necessary to complete the ritual, not a person to build an emotional connection too. I believe that if young males were to have a ritual to signify their transition from boy to man their would be less rape.
1
Over the last several months I have read a number of columns, by David Brooks, wildly varying in topic, that I have the same response to. The community building structure that he seeks exists. Its called New England Town Meeting. Town meeting is allegedly a process of governance but it is really a ritual celebration of community. It is the time when we come together to solve our problems collectively, but its importance is in the coming together to solve problems.
48
@Stephen Arnason David should come to a New England Town Meeting. They often last until well past midnight, sometimes over multiple nights. Ladies bring their knitting. High school kids have attendance as homework. They require hard work and sadly may have low percentage attendance. They can be very painful as they vote on increasing costs to voters and voting down some treasured hope. So political ritual and to vote you must physically attend and speak in person before your fellow residents.
26
Rituals are the ancient means for transferring knowledge and custom. Part of the recipe for making gefilte fish is replicating mom's choreography who was in step and in tune with her mom's. Knowledge through gesture. I suggest you take a Dalcroze Eurythmics class or sign up for dance. Knowledge, nowadays isn't teacher-dependent, if you've got an iPhone and the Internet, each of which are rites of passage of the child into the real world.
2
Just like a conservative to want to put everything, even fun, into a box. Most of the best moments in life happen spontaneously. Loosen your tie and release your inner, thwarted hippie self.
5
Creating rituals because we need them reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional state assigned extended families (you were a Daffodil 11 or whatever).
2
You like rituals. Fine. You go with that. Leave me out of it. I do not want a welcoming party when I move into a new neighborhood, and I do not want a gold watch and sentimental waste of time when I retire. Leave me alone, and we'll get along just fine. For me, rituals are for people who lack imagination.
5
There's something a bit false and even a little dangerous about calling for more rituals. The moral vacuousness of the modern GOP agenda is what is destroying society.
5
How utterly Confucian! Confucius lived in a disordered time--the late Spring and Autumn period (late 6th and early 5th centuries)--when the order of the early Zhou era had deteriorated into competing principalities, accelerating warfare, growing commerce and advancing secularism. He called for the restoration of ceremonies and rituals that had once been the religious basis of political authority and social order and that had since fallen into disuse. By restoring the rituals of the past and the decorum that their performance inculcated--even without their religious connotations--a disordered society could right itself. Reforming character through ritual was the key to social harmony. Confucius' teaching, however, never gained little footing in his time, as the incipient Warring States period found Legalism's hardcore realism better suited to the ambitions of the day and ultimately to the triumph of Qin authoritarianism. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
1
Religion is a matter of symbolization: joining what is beyond our ordinary world of sense and reason to this ordinary world of sense and reason to form a meaningful whole. There are three basic kinds of symbolization: symbolic communication or myth; symbolic places; and symbolic behavior or ritual. Different cultures symbolize differently. We moderns have some symbolic places. Notre Dame would be an example. However we don’t have that many. We are basically a mythical people. That’s why we’re obsessed with things like narratives and freedom of speech, communication for communication’s sake. What we really don’t have is ritual. Evidence of this is that we almost always change our holidays (holy days) to either a Monday or Friday for administrative convenience. And what boss is going to let an employee off for three days to morn his dead father? I even heard of one man who said he couldn’t attend his own funeral because his calendar was all filled up. Seriously. We are so busy. How many of us keep holy the Sabbath by imitating God and doing nothing? Rituals take place in sacred time, not in our ordinary profane time. But we are so obsessed with speed and efficiency that we don’t have time for life. We might do well to listen to an Ibo (West African) proverb: “Always being in a hurry does not prevent death, neither does going slowly prevent living.” Or to the wisdom of an African chief: “The clock did not invent man. Give this thought. It is deeply philosophical.”
Over the last few decades, as we've included less and less humanities in school curricula, we've turned out a harsher, less wise society. Dr. Robert Sternberg calls them "smart fools."
A well-read society, one that is steeped in culture, history, philosophy, the arts, comparative religion, etc. is a more thoughtful society, one that doesn't need prompting to perform big and small acts of kindness. It doesn't need to be reminded to be kind and generous.
Those, in such a society, are not rituals but natural responses.
We are as far away as can be at this moment in time... We've become a cross between the Ferengi and Cardassians, with nary a Betazoid in sight...
With morality comes lasting peace. With perfunctory rituals, we lose meaning and sink from there.
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Things Trump Did While You Weren’t Looking [2019]
https://wp.me/p2KJ3H-3h2
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Things Trump Did While You Weren’t Looking [2019]
https://wp.me/p2KJ3H-3h2
When my father died, I was 23 and old enough to understand society's grieving rites, but I just wanted to be left alone. Shaking hands with everyone at the funeral home and "circulating" reminded me of a bad combination of sorority rush and a political rally.
14 years later, a friend's father who had been a personal mentor and a friend of the family died under much more tragic circumstances. I sang at his funeral mass with my mother and cried the whole time, but afterward I felt that I could lay my grief to rest. There was closure. I finally understood and I think silently I put to rest the last true grief for my father, too.
1
Is it too early to begin planning for Trump’s departure from the White House?
I fear the time is already growing desperately short.
I envisage the declaration by Congress of a great national holiday, ten days of night and day celebrations, military parades with jet plane overflights of the Capitol Rotunda, hundreds of marching bands replete with with high-stepping drum majors and baton-twirling majorettes, floats manned and womaned by Hollywood celebrities, open-air concerts by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, fireworks over the Potomac and the ringing of church bells throughout the land.
All of this culminating in a solemn ceremony on the White House Lawn in which residents of Puerto Rico are invited to throw cheap paper towels at him.
Of course we will also need to begin planning angry protests demanding the expulsion from office of the awful Pence, Trump’s unindicted partner-in-crime, but let’s leave that for another day.
First, we must have our celebration. America has earned it.
4
Is it too early to begin planning for Trump’s departure from the White House?
I fear the time is already growing desperately short.
I envisage the declaration by Congress of a great national holiday, ten days of night and day celebrations, military parades with jet plane overflights of the Capitol Rotunda, hundreds of marching bands replete with high-stepping drum majors and baton-twirling majorettes, floats manned and womaned by Hollywood celebrities, open-air concerts by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, fireworks over the Potomac and the ringing of church bells throughout the land.
All of this culminating in a solemn ceremony on the White House Lawn in which residents of Puerto Rico are invited to throw cheap paper towels at him.
Of course we will also need to begin planning angry protests demanding the expulsion from office of the awful Pence, Trump’s unindicted partner-in-crime, but let’s leave that for another day.
First, we must have our celebration. America has earned it.
2
A critical factor that drew me into a lifetime of Zen, was that at seventeen, I stumbled upon the great Zen master Dogen's fascicle: Rules for the Lavoratory, in his masterwork, Shobogenzo.
The Rules are a short philosophical writing, bundled between a couple hundred works on the the nature of reality.
They are rituals for the 13th century monastic water closet. Placement and undoing of clothing, cleaning yourself, the use of tools, and so forth. Ritual as life. The teachings extend everywhere.
So, if we honor social ritual, shouldn't we, for every cozy midnight mass, have rituals for the first night we are homeless, first unjust police intrusion on a black adolescent, or the first time we have gravel throw at us because we are gay?
How about that first trick we turn to avoid eviction? That moment a dropout realizes their illiteracy means they can't work at McDonalds?
Why did Zen Master Dogen bother with Rules for the Outhouse?
Because our reality includes every grain of sand.
Every single being.
Our reality excludes no one.
The teaching of the Ritual for the Toilet is that the suffering of others is precisely our own.
2
Town meetings do a lot of this.
11
When my wife and I became believers, rituals became extremely important. They sometimes involve large gatherings to worship, which often includes, song, dance and breaking bread and drinking wine and remembering the one who sacrificed for us. New members may be prayed for with laying on of hands. Further, smaller rituals become even more important than the large worship gathering rituals. The weekly home group studies Scripture and we pray for one another. The small group becomes family. We learn to trust each other and therefore become free to become vulnerable to each other and learn everything about each other. This allows us to pray effectively and seriously for each other. We have fun and have parties occasionally together, with wine, beer and great pot lucks. The rituals become most important at Easter, Passover and Christmas. We care deeply for each other and visit our sick brothers and sisters, carrying food and other assistance. These smaller rituals become life affirming and wonderful and part of almost every day.
1
In Brooks's romantic haze, rituals are religious or quasi-religious. He claims an inclusive, cozy view of life, based on lots of reading of pop sociology and his own "tours" of the heartland. It's all sort of 1950's-ish.
He's not all wrong, just mostly wrong. I am a deeply content, non-believer with abundant rituals to embrace. My wife of 49 years and I celebrate birth and honor death. We have holiday "rituals" that we follow like communion, without ever mentioning "God." We pick up our granddaughter after school and have her snack and conversation waiting at the kitchen table every day. We care for our grandson on Tuesdays and follow a comforting, loving sequence including a pre-nap story.
Rituals needn't be sectarian or serious. They are the small comfortable, comforting certainties that accompany each day, each holiday, each transition.
The beauty of this approach to ritual is that one need not suspend rationality or subscribe to any dogma.
5
"...they say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..." I believe these are John Lennon's lyrics. Mr. Brooks you are a dreamer and that's why I like reading you. Forming meaningful community outside social media is a hard sell these days. I myself like ritual. The ritual of fireworks on the 4th of July. Thanksgiving without football (and I'm a fan) and then the hightailing it off to the stores the minute they open to buy stuff no one needs and save retail before Amazon takes everything over. So much for Thanksgiving. Also I like the ritual of dressing up for special occasions. I was one of 3 women who wore a hat to church on easter, but I felt good and many complimented me on the hat. Ritual in religion is one of its draws wether just sitting quietly in a Quaker meeting house or attending high mass. Doing away with ritual comes at a cost. Our minister decided to do away with palms on Palm Sunday. We read the gospel about the laying down of cloaks not palms. Well they don't call it Cloak Sunday and a lot of us missed those simple palms that represent an important day in Christianity. I hold onto what rituals I can of my past and get meaning from them. New rituals that go beyond the insular family are going to be too difficult to create in this mad environment we live in now.
1
By my thinking, a ritual is a symbolic gesture that serves no practical purpose. No one says a doctor is performing a ritual when they wash their hands before surgery. A priest washes his hands before the alter every Sunday though. That's a ritual. We don't need an excessive amount of rituals. They are, by definition, symbolic.
However, there are rituals for more mundane events. When was the last time you moved? Our local ritual is buying pizza and beer for everyone who helped you move. Pizza and beer is a symbolic way of saying thank you. The neighbors are welcome as they inevitably stop by to say hello.
I might unload the term a little bit though. Instead of rituals, secular society has traditions. We go camping with a big group of friends every winter to celebrate one birthday. We have a block party every summer to celebrate another one. Those are our traditions, not rituals. Our tradition is the moving family buys pizza and beer for everyone helping.
The rituals David suggests generally revolve around "sharing" (happiness or grief). Today's social media seem to drive society into self imposed silos in which interaction is often destructive (or harshly critical).
I agree society needs to empathize more. Sharing rituals can be a foundation for such empathy. But modern sharing needs to be much more inclusive than just among religious devotees of a single sect or cultural island.
Today we need rituals that transcend ethnic or religious boundaries since our societies are (despite furious attempts by some to thwart it) becoming multi ethnic and multi religious.
Tomorrow's community leaders need to consider how to broaden the base of celebrants for the meaningful "rituals" of the future.
I really like this premise here but feel like this falls into the Brooks pattern of promise weakly delivered with overly broad and unsubstantiated generalizations.
So I would like to add a thought - that participating in rituals is not where their benefits begin and end. I think there are some fantastic rituals where observing can be an uplifting and unifying experience. For example, I was lucky enough to attend a federal judicial investiture. The ritual there is that family, friends and colleagues stand up and talk about the personality and history of the person being elevated a job so honorable that the honorific is "Your Honor." It was a uniquely inspiring experience to hear about a great person and see that they were being trusted with such an important seat in our society.
During and after the ceremony, I was thinking that judicial investitures should be televised (on C-Span at least) so that everyone could have access to the inspiration and pride in our system. Great rituals don't have to be "invitation only."
1
I'm all for the kind of rituals, private and communal, that David Brooks mentions. But so many of our time-honored rituals have been eviscerated by heedlessness, overuse and exaggeration. Automatically giving a standing ovation to every performance in a theater or concert hall is not honoring the performers, it's slavishly obeying a social command. Dining out in restaurants every night, rather than cooking a meal in your kitchen or inviting friends in for dinner, devalues the ritual of making and breaking bread. Ushering in the Christmas season with Black Friday, not to mention filling shopping malls with the canned sounds of "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer," denatures what was once many Americans' most cherished holiday. Rituals regain significance when they are intentional, not unthinking.
3
This a very thoughtful piece that raises numerous questions about the ever widening fissures in American society. I hope David will tackle the question he poses in his concluding sentence - why, why?
1
A modern collective ritual must have happened in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. How else to explain their community in welcoming refugees, finding them a home, school, and work. Many citizens participate in various stages of this communities welcoming the strangers with the hope we will be friends.
5
Yes now more than ever, we need plenty of rituals.
But the one really important ritual that we missed was the funeral ritual for our noble experiment in popular government, where our new birth of freedom died in it's infancy, and our government of, by and for the people perished through an ironic and yet ongoing execution of greedy, short-sighted and cynical manipulations of our naive political system by the power of Corporate wealth and our very own Republican Party.
12
Well, we have plenty of family rituals and some social rituals such as celebration of Thanksgiving. But what we sorely lack is a ritual for moving from childhood to adulthood. Graduation ceremonies that have slipped down to Kindergarten have made that ritual relatively meaningless. Getting your Drivers License is one to a degree as it involves adult responsibility. I am one who is for some kind of civil service for citizens who reach the age of eighteen. But that to is fraught with problems. Ideas?
6
When our 25 yr old daughter left her natal city with her then boyfriend I could not imagine the moment of our leave-taking. On a cold January night her 2 brothers, father and I went to her house and, with their car packed and ready to leave, sat on her boyfriend’s porch. The five of us each said a few words about what our family with her in it meant to us, tied red Korean cords around each other’s wrists, and vowed to keep them there till we were together again. A poem was read. Hugs happened. We celebrated our family unit, and ceremonially released her to the other side of North America. It was the best thing that I could have imagined to get us all through a hard time, and it was a deeply symbolic ritual for all of us. I think human beings have been making rituals since there were human beings. It’s who we are.
12
I like the ritual of having a mortgage burning party after one pays off their mortgage. I haven’t heard about anyone holding one in many years, but it seems like a great thing to celebrate with family and friends.
10
I visit Taiwan for months every year. I found the social architecture of which you yearn.
Villages and in big Taipei neighborhoods people remember me, invite me into their shops for tea and smiles. They care not much that my Mandarin is poor and vocabulary small. The smiles are genuine, the gestures heartfelt. They often offer gifts, we exchange them.
These annual reunions become social affairs with strangers becoming new acquaintances, suddenly. It is a patchwork community of villages inside a population of almost 24 million dear people. People take their 40-year old democracy seriously and are passionate about staying independent from Communist China.
So their love affair with freedom and Western-style liberal values is something to celebrate often, in both small and grand rituals, mostly spontaneous. They want to celebrate as long as they are able, and I support them will all my heart. I share with them hope and because of it, we are united.
You see, there are no celebratory rituals in Tibet and fewer and fewer in Hong Kong. The communist party is no party.
10
I'm not much for the Hallmark Moment.
At 70, I've watched ritual crash and burn in this country.
Memorial Day.
Fourth of July.
Christmas.
Thanksgiving.
Those were the biggies.
And then, they became Hallmark and re-scripted.
Take Thanksgiving..... please.
For most it has become alt-X-mas. Do you fly home for Thanksgiving or for Christmas? Can you afford that ritual?
Can you stand listening to halftime?
When did Thanksgiving become a sporting event?
Memorial Day? We now cremate. Burial is too expensive. Besides, there is no more 'sacrifice' to honor. It's an all-volunteer army.
The Fourth? Baseball parks now do fireworks and since 40% of this country is all for dissolving the Constitution and is rabid to keep all females from equality and choice, it has truly become a sham.
"More ritual"?
Earth Day was yesterday. I goggled 'micro-plastics' and dead whales, starved to death because their stomachs were hard-packed with plastic bags. So, I went to Trader Joe's because they have cornstarch biodegradable bags. That was my contribution to Earth Day.....
And that is what 'ritual' is: a contribution to society, to bettering the group.
It's not a Hallmark moment.
It's not a sporting event brought to you by some multi-national.
Yeah, I can get behind making Voter's Day an actual event..... but I'd rather see National Vote By Mail so that we can by-pass all those lines and needing a ride and a baby-sitter and half the day off from work and.....
8
The problem with modern invented ritual in the US is its subversion by the almighty dollar that has even co opted and subverted religious ritual in many cases. Create a ritual and someone comes along and figures out a way to create consumption along with it. Note the increase in consumption for Halloween or any other holiday these days. On the other hand, both a potlach and pot luck celebrating some event is more in line with a true community celebration. We are creating more ritual as well. Remember the good old days when graduation from high school was an event? Now there is a graduation ceremony from kindergarten, elementary school and middle school. Enough already.
11
The importance of ritual is due to the underlying use of narrative on which we base the meaning in our lives. Rituals provide the chapter markers between, delineating and clarifying the narrative.
5
There should be more kitsch!
1. First we bring a tear to our eyes by focusing on some symbol or person or object. A flag, a baby, a sunset.
2. Then we dredge up another tear by focusing on our emotional response to that focus. Ah, country, life, nature...
I like simple rituals like stopping for red lights, holding doors for others, or simple acknowledgement of the existence of others. Or speaking the truth.
8
No nature based rituals on your list? The first flowers are celebrated in some cultures. Our New England leaves are what Columbus/Indigenous Day is about. Midsummer needs to be brought back after the Puritans expelled it long ago.
10
When I lived in Spain, I marvelled at how everyone respected the siesta and all the idiosyncratic traditions and public rituals that define "Spanishness". My friends and family who were business owners explained that no one would dare violate these traditions by, say, keeping their store open while all others were closed, because that would be the end of your store. In the USA, our freedom to make money 24/7 is the enemy of public traditions and rituals that fade as they are commodified and then consumed by our religion of unfettered capitalism.
17
I find my own rituals. I am not built for participation in large public ones, especially religious ones. That is my right as an American.
2
Mr. Brooks makes some valuable points, but doesn't focus much on root causes. Rituals require time, leisure and a bit of extra money. For Americans who live lives like pages printed without margins, time - and the leisure to spend it in ritual - are in short supply.
8
There is nothing wrong with rituals, the problem is the abuse of them.
Re the military, in Vietnam the returning soldiers were not welcomed back with rituals, they were viewed as killers despite the fact many were drafted and did not want to go.
Now we have similar illegal wars, people volunteer and they are hailed as conquering warriors.
4
I heard somewhere that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Although it can get complicated when needing slides into needy.
2
Ritual like everything has a dark side and a down side. Gangs have rituals. Many neighborhood based common strivings involved covenants, such as real estate covenants, intended to keep one group in power and other groups out. Rallies are rituals.
6
Rituals are often about preserving a cultural or racial heritage. I recently attended an Italian function honoring a friend. The 250 people spoke almost entirely in Italian, ate Italian food, played Italian music, portrayed an Italian flag and actually more sang the Italian national anthem than the American anthem. My first reaction- how wonderful to see immigrants celebrating their heritage and retaining their culture. But my second thought - how would Americans react to a Muslim group holding an identical event, speaking a different language, eating different food, singing a different anthem and praying to a different God. Americans will only accept Judeo-Christian rituals. Freedom of religion is no more.
11
We have lots of 'Rituals' in the international community on site where off the cuff, I remember a busy work day when an interruption took place at 4:00 p.m. with cake. I whined to myself before joining. A few colleagues and I stood around a table adorned with flowers, waiting for the celebrant. Braveheart here finally asked 'who is this for'. For you, was the reply. It was the end of a consultancy assignment, and I had to shift into party mode, spick spock, to quote Mary Poppins. Regardless of Gender, everyone received a big bear hug and lived to tell the tale.
'Thanksgiving' leaves this celebrant slightly cool, except when a neighbor whom I had never met, showed up at the door with a traditional no-fuss menu on the plate, and gave true meaning to the above.
An invitation to attend Passover with a devout neighbor at his family reunion comes to mind, and a wedding invitation for the daughter of a Muslim friend equally devout comes to mind.
Mr. Brooks, while I continue with my masterpiece 'The Beauty of Tenderness', it would be an act of kindness if you were to share your Day of Birth with some of your admirers to place on our calendar of happy events.
Remembering House Speaker Boehner who mentioned that it is not always Christmas with nuts and treats, a reminder on your part to thank friends who chimed in for Easter; one will be a translation from Mao into English, and thank you again for keeping our spirits lively in the mist of a troubled Spring season.
1
Thank you! Beautifully expressed. As a coach, I often invite my clients to celebrate: successes, failures, passages. Each contributes to a full life and to the journey we are on.
8
Rituals need not be religious to be of significance. There is a secular spirituality to finding a common interest through celebration and even simple human contact, one which binds us together instead of tearing us apart.
One need only consider the old Willy Loman, classic type of sales ritual, which has largely been replaced by online shopping requiring no personal connection except one between eyes and screen, and fingers and keyboard.
Technology has facilitated new shared but far more detached rituals, made possible through connections that are physically distant if not altogether remote. A Facebook or Pinterest post, a video Skype conversation, an email or text message. All have become visual-only rituals of their own kind, frequent if not constant in nature, and a way to facilitate a sharing of events that in the past required and benefited from the presence with others.
But they are not, as Mr. Brooks correctly points out, the same. Sometimes, sadly, they separate us emotionally by facilitating remote arguments between people who will never meet, or who decide never to meet again.
While I am tempted, at least up to a point, to suggest that protesting e-connections and e-rituals is a form of neo-Ludditeism, it is more the case that life has created far easier ways of assembling than being physically present to share experiences by being in the same place at the same time.
What is lost is the element of human touch and the conviction that it matters. It does.
3
I fear we are in a post-ritual culture as, rightly or wrongly, many rituals are seen as being exclusionary. Even the simple awarding of trophies to the winner of an athletic competition has been seen as causing pain to the losers, leading to participation trophies. But there is hope: I look to things like the growth in farmer’s markets as an example of a celebration of the hard work of local citizens and for my wife and it is a ritual to stop at farmer’s markets when we travel.
And, of course, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a warning sign of what happens when rituals go bad.
5
I want to applaud the growing largeness of David Brooks's vision. I have watched his slow evolution with amazement. His once-staunch conservative columns gave way, under Obama, to something more politically ecumenical. But his shock over Trump's election has pushed him outside politics, and he has now assumed the role of something like the nation's spirit doctor, searching restlessly for ways to repair what has been destroyed, mend what has been rent. In his recent columns about the need for civic comity, for builders and connectors, for community and national ritual, he is doing nothing less than attempting to find ways to restore to us what has been stolen over the years -- a sense of one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Even if each of us defines "God" differently, the urgency of the phrases still resonate. The scalpels of identity politics and political correctness on the left, the ruthlessness of race- and identity-based attacks on the right have indeed fractured us, in fact, splintered us. Brooks's mission is nothing less than an attempt to bind us together again. I wish him all good luck, as well as the attention and willingness of all of us to listen.
78
@Skeptical, but hopeful. Well said!
1
@Skeptical, but hopeful
I am in total agreement. I, too, am very much enjoying reading Mr. Brooke's philosophical/sociological columns.
1
Yes, rituals can bring people together, can’t they? Everyone involved can participate. Those hands on rituals make memories. The rituals are like a bind that we look forward to with passion for more than just ourselves.
Then came electronics! My oh my! Families can’t even have a ritual of going to a restaurant for a meal without bringing their phones to the table, conversation lost in numbness of clicking on plastic, faces buried.
How about a ritual of taking a day here and there of no electronics and just doing something human together? Now that would be something worth remembering!
11
I've never liked symbolic events.
We have weddings and burials, and in the Catholic tradition, Masses for them. The ritual comes with the Mass. Those - which in Catholicism line up with life pivot points - are sacraments, the ultimate rituals.
But did the graduation ceremony from high school, or even college, really improve the achievement, or truly honor it? And who did the ritual serve more, the graduate or the school? I was well aware of the effort of my achievement without the long speechifying.
Does a ritual, like swearing in a President, have meaning if the ritual is there, but the intent to honor it not?
Brooks is struggling to find community in our modern world, in which we are more an more in living close together in separation. We work long hours, seldom see our neighbors, or even hear their kids.
I don't know it is ritual we need - symbolic ceremony- or just the completely non-symbolic act of showing up. I'd rather see real action in place of ritual - people recruiting returned vets for jobs; people rewarding achievement with opportunity. People forming community through action.
Ritual is easier than action.
18
@Cathy Well said, Cathy. Life is asymmetric, therefore the measure of community is how to do we respond and take care of one another when natural disaster, illness, and other unforeseen hardships occur. Rituals and rites of initiation and passage are nice, but symbolic gestures without solid building blocks in a community are rather empty.
3
@Cathy at least its a step in the right direction and if its inclusive its meaningful.
2
"Towns are built when people make promises to one another, hold one another accountable and sacrifice together through repeated interaction toward a common end."
Yeah, sounds wonderful. Problem is, we have this society that glorifies the notion that a few people get all the goodies and everyone else gets zilch, where the all-too-accountable 99% do the sacrificing for the benefit of the unaccountable 1%. Doesn't exactly promote cooperation and mutual respect, now, does it? Solve that tiny difficulty and Mr. Brooks will find it a lot easier to realize his vision.
11
Back in Brooklyn we had a returning-home-from-Veit-Nam-event for every solider I can remember. Dozens. Guys from the church and the neighborhood; some we knew, others we didn't. Their parents were WW II vintage and this is what you did.
It's already a thing.
6
@Mike B
"Vietnam"
There is a lovely ambiguity, a largeness and inclusiveness to rituals. Kinda the opposite of, say, Facebook.
15
Voting Day as a national and local holiday is the best idea for a new ritual that I've read in these comments. David, why don't you work on getting your conservative community to adopt it? We should all take the day off and celebrate American democracy in action. Encourage everyone to vote. Make the mattress stores (and other businesses) close for the day, since the idea is that every citizen is free to exercise the franchise. Except for the poll workers, police, firemen, hospital workers, etc. -- bless them and give them alternate days off during the two weeks around Voting Day when, yes, voting will also be allowed.
25
@Thomas
Mitch McConnell has already pronounced on this and all similar ideas: they are "power grabs."
There are a lot of rituals around cancer treatment. In some hospitals there is a ritual of ringing the bell after people finish radiation treatment. Some people like it, and some people do not. For people who are receiving curative radiation, such a ritual makes sense. But people also receive palliative radiation, and there is not a lot to celebrate when they finish. Interestingly, there is no bell ringing in chemotherapy suites. The ritual of joining in walks or races, of wearing colored ribbons to designate your cancer, of calling oneself a survivor, of engaging in physical feats, of doing a Livestrong exercise program -- all of these are common rituals. People plan celebratory trips or religious pilgrimages to commemorate the end of treatment or the anniversary of learning they had cancer. Support groups develop their own rituals. I am unimpressed by survivor culture and its corporate rituals (I take to heart the slogan of Breast Cancer Action to "think before you pink") but two months after I finished ten months of treatment in 2016-17 I had two open houses to thank my community of support (I have a small apartment and a large community) -- although I still had side effects from treatment, and it would take several more months before I was able, psychologically, to re-enter daily living with confidence and embrace living with the uncertainty of recurrence. What is interesting about cancer rituals is their spontaneity but also the great need to enact them.
6
Unfortunately, the rituals we are all most familiar with today are those in which we are forced to come together to mourn instead of celebrate. The tragedies of mass killings of school children, festival goers, neighbors gunned down by their neighbors as well as by those sworn to protect them,children thrown into cages and too many others typify the insanity, the dystopia, the violence and the hatred we now face countless times daily that divide us yet still somehow have also brought us together recognize the ritual of consoling one another.
Yet this too shall pass so that we can once again return to celebrating what's best about our country instead of what's worst.
Vote.
That
9
From Andre Dubus II: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love".
6
David, David, David - this "culture's' rituals are Black Friday, big-time commercialized spectator sports, head stuck in the phone, and road and political rage. Our alienation from ourselves and fellow human beings is ripe for the age - and doom - of artificial intelligence. One upside of artificial intelligence: there will then be some intelligence present.
10
Heh. I'm Russian Orthodox. The one thing I do not need in my life is more ritual. By my count there are around 19 services authorized in the typicon for Holy Week (we are a week behind Roman Catholics for Easter this year). Many of those services can last for hours. I will likely hit two of them before the big one. Easter services start around 11PM on Great Saturday and end around 4 AM the next morning. But I'm not complaining. It brings everybody together and afterwards we all go to the church hall and break the long Lenten Fast with a giant pre-dawn feast. Just the thought of beef and bacon after eight + weeks is enough to make me light headed.
5
The only ritual our profit over people society wants is for you to pay for every social and medical interaction you have.
11
One of our earliest rituals as humans was Shunning. I would like to see a movement start to Shun any politician who we know is lying to us. It could start with Mr Trump and the lies he constantly tells only to be retold by his enablers in the Congress. They can read the report just like we can.
18
I believe Mr. Brooks may be onto something. There should be a ritual for people with a slightly different worldview that allows them to find commonality and work from there; a CIVIL body politic. Imagine the things that could actually get accomplished locally, nationally, and globally.
1
There are a lot of rituals and communities that David knows nothing about. There is a vast world of people who do not fit the ideal nuclear or mixed families of the ideal neighborhoods of David's imagination. People who have been cast out by not meeting whatever social norms those places represent really don't want a ritual with them. They have made their own in other places with like minded souls.
8
I love ritual. As I started reading comments, I was taken aback by how many people were opposed to celebrating the big things in life like a graduation, let alone the lesser ones. I live in a very old, and very pedestrian neighborhood. I practice the ritual of saying good morning or afternoon to everyone I meet while out walking. Some don't make eye contact or speak, but some stop to chat. Life always feels better after those chats.
7
@Maureen Some people are anxious or misanthropic or insomniac or suffering from the effects of medication and might view forced social encounters with trepidation.
It's nice to say hello to everyone, but it's also nice to bear in mind that not everyone in the public space wants, or is in the right frame of mind, to talk to you.
4
And a ritual for every 90-hour work week. Which leaves no time for. well, rituals like neighborhood BBQs.
5
I lived in Japan, where they do have rituals for many aspects of everyday life, and these rituals do appear to have a positive impact on people and groups, so I was nodding my head in rare agreement with Mr. Brooks, all the way until he started discussing the “greater need” for “collective” rituals. First of all, almost every ritual is almost by definition collective. But Mr. Brooks had in mind his ever-present old bugaboo that neighborhoods and random community organizations should somehow be the primary management structure of the entire US nation. Multiple neighborhoods should get together, redraw their boundaries... what? Restructure US city, county, state and federal laws?
Community barbecues and team-bonding events are great, better if they’re fused with ancient historic traditions, the way the Japanese rituals are, but they don’t take the place of national identity and laws. Japan doesn’t have independent neighborhood city-states. Their very nice rituals exist within the framework of the Japanese society, and the Japanese nation, to which the people famously have a strong sense of belonging and connection. The Japanese people also have a strong connection to the organizations to which they belong. But again, these rituals do not supplant national laws to address poverty, homelessness etc.
In summary: rituals good, let’s have more, nice little idea. Collective neighborhoods making law and managing our lives? Weird throwback to 100 or 400 years ago. Not recommended.
12
There should be a ritual for when a columnist says the word ritual twenty eight times.
Personally, I don't think our problem is not enough celebrating. It's probably the reverse of that in our society that in many ways has become decadent.
11
I have always avoided rituals. I didn't go to my graduations - high school, college or graduate school. I didn't go to my retirement party. It is my way of moving on and not looking back. I do like a well written obituary though.
21
@Jack
Yes, you are correct.
After 30 years working for a hospital in the intensive care
unit, being on call every other night to be available for
life threatening emergences , I found a place to work with much less stress. I met with the CEO of the hospital to inform him of my plans to leave. The celebration of my years of work there was a single statement that went something like this,
"Oh yes you have been working here since 1976"
That was the sum and substance of his idea of the appropriate celebration ritual of my work at that institution. I accepted that and moved on.
The truth is that we are on our own in this life for better or worse. I moved on. That is the essential truth about America. Rituals not withstanding.
2
“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you. " - Campbell
Gee, Dave - this statement was published over 30 years ago, back when you were collecting data on "bourgeois-bohemians."
" We live in a secular society where rituals are thin on the ground. " Yes, we live in a pecuniary, mercenary society defined by the bobos and their overlords, the investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and corporate raiders.
These guys manage the world with data. And the preeminent unit defining that data is dollars.
Atheism holds sway in good measure because religion does have proof in data and reproducible results.
Before you have a ritual you must have a myth or a numinous philosophy to base it on. In a capitalist, consumerist, post modern system, that's not going to fly.
So David, you will have to invent a new myth, and a ritual to underscore it. This will be difficult because not only will it not involve the pecuniary, but it will not be heavy on rational thought or the phenomenal.
Hoi polloi caught in the constellation of consumer goods will not tolerate what Immanuel Kant called "noumena," things that can be thought but not known.
We worship stuff, not intangibles. That is it.
7
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth
correction, it should read "because religion does not have proof in data and reproducible results. "
1
When I was in the Army we sometimes practiced Change of Command ceremonies for days to ensure we sent of the old general right and welcomed the new one. The generals themselves didn't participate in these practices, there was usually someone else standing in for them, a Sergeant Major or something stepping up to the microphone simply saying "remarks complete" where the general would make a speech. This "stand in" role is exactly what rituals are. They stand in for knowing what to do, serving a useful role only until we actually know what to do. We should get to where we don't need them by learning to know what we are doing.
I agree with David and yet I wonder about my personal distaste for almost all the rituals in my personal history. Empty & forced ritual is worse than no ritual at all. Rituals based on beliefs and assumptions I do not share.... And yet it goes deeper than that. I even had distaste for the Boy Scout rituals I went through on my way to becoming an Eagle Scout. Why? No community exploration of meaning. The unexamined ritual is not worth having.
15
Rituals connect past to present and present to future. They also connect us to others and, through the ritualized act, transcend time and place. Without that connection, we lose the threads of our shared history and culture.
A ritual as simple as having schoolchildren say the Pledge of Allegiance every day powerfully connects today’s young students with those of decades ago, in the same classrooms, saying the same words, promising across the years and the generations to continue to support and honor “the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The words and the act of saying them are a simple yet powerful way of reminding ourselves how fortunate we are to be here, in this country. Despite all of our challenges, we are one nation, blessed by our Creator, free to worship and live as we choose.
The generations before us, many of whom immigrated here from other nations, perhaps understood and appreciated this ritual better than we do. Some in our political class might do well to re-examine the words behind the ritual and actually think about what they mean, why they resonate ad whether their actions are consistent with the pledge they have made most every day since they were children.
4
In a commercial society, rituals become excuses for conspicuous and competitive consumption,and are invented or modified by merchants to sell stuff. Any original noncommercial meaning is diluted or lost, or done away with if it inhibits spending.
Diamonds are forever because De Beers spent a lot of money on promoting the idea.
Modern suburban communities are planned by developers with images and rituals and history that can be bought or bought into, as real as distressed furniture.
Rituals not involving spending are just raw material to be turned into rituals that do. And any and all raw materials must be exploited; not doing so is leaving something on the table, the ultimate sin where money is concerned.
Rituals are safe only when the power of money is broken or limited. And in this country, that would take a revolution in which the existing powers would lose some of their influence.
16
I was elected President of my Community Association ten years ago. Before then, most people in the neighborhood hardly knew one another. One of my first acts as President was to start annual community gatherings (spring ice cream social, Labor Day picnic, Oktoberfest). These events have since become ingrained in our community. As a result, almost everyone now knows each other and their their children. We collectively have improved our three-acre common property. A monthly book club started. And yes, we celebrate each new neighbor with a welcome basket, and party. I have come realize the desire for these rituals were lying dormant before...they just needed a spark to awaken.
18
@John Casana It's best not to know your neighbor too well. Familiarity breeds contempt.
How do you have rituals with most of the population staring at small screens all day completely oblivious to anything around them? Where is the societal awareness anymore?
27
There is a dark side to rituals that David Brooks neglected to mention. Rituals can be the mortal enemy of change and innovation.
Historically speaking, rituals have been cynically used by totalitarian institutions, both secular and sectarian, to maintain the status quo. No matter what the context, rituals tend to stress the superficial aspects of process and appearance, not substance.
49
My feelings about this are strong but conflicted. On one hand, I believe that a healthy society requires strong community ties, and ritual is a powerful means of nurturing them.
On the other hand, I have had more than my fill of empty social conventions and the mindless dogmatism they breed. As for community... in my experience it has been an illusion. When the chips were down, my communities either melted away or stayed around to do positive harm.
I am left with a gut-level negative reaction to the word "neighbor." My idea of a good neighbor is one who lives far enough away that I never have to see or hear them.
So I support community and ritual in principle, and detest them in practice.
10
My favorite part of the article is regarding what we do with the few remaining rituals there are : "we tend to overload them and turn them into expensive bloated versions of themselves." This is why I lost interest in Christmas. It became a very, very long holiday that begins after Halloween and is not a ritual at all but just a marathon.
64
@Berry Shoen
And weddings have ceased to mark an actual transition and become, instead, a humongous party (requiring enormous outlays of time and money on the part of the guests) held when the couple decides they now have enough time and money to hold the party -- never mind that they already own a house together and maybe even already have children.
And funerals -- often held months after the death, with no connection to the mortal remains.
There are understandable reasons for these changes, but they do signify a loss of connection to the actual transitions.
2
Having studied language death, it was impressed upon me how horrible it is to have an interruption of cultural transmission between generations.
If you're from a powerful culture with governments and other institutions supporting it, rituals make people feel a bit more together, but there's millions of possible ones to choose from floating around all the time, with copious written materials describing them so even if we quit all of them all at once, we could pick them up again later.
But for people who say, were forbidden from speaking to their children in their native language or telling them old stories (or merely implicitly suggested that they shouldn't, for the child's own good), a few scant rituals are sometimes all that stand between a proud and optimistic future and a malaise and alienation that can last forever.
And this is from someone who grew up thinking rituals were all a bunch of hooey, since they didn't serve any practical purpose I could see. Now I know it's only because I was lucky enough to be born into a secure, literate culture with institutional support.
1
Rituals are a celebration of social cohesion and a world we celebrate. I had that world as a kid--every step up the ladder of achievement was a reflection of a good world I was asked to support and improve.
The current order is no longer something to celebrate. Rituals are on hold. We will create a better society and then we can return to celebrating.
I support the ritual of reviewing the findings of the Mueller Report, with testimony before Congress. This informational and educative ritual should then lead to the collective ceremony of impeachment.
50
@Aras Paul, Thank you. You are a good person for thinking this and have the hutzpah to write it.
2
This is a really lovely article coming in the middle of Passover.
The first night of Passover in Abu Dhabi was a bit of a miracle. People who were strangers to one another and in a strange land spent a 4-hour evening performing a ritual that each knew from their own life and country. Brazil, Argentina, the UK, the US. There was a children’s table but none of the children sat at it. They were all drawn to their parents' laps and the profound spirit that hung in the air in the songs and recitation. In a swirl of the past, present and future, one could feel the memory of each person and the memories of their parents and grandparents being absorbed by the children. At the end of the evening, we hugged and kissed goodbye like old dear friends.
12
Re: Rituals. Depends
The Marine Corps had many, some would say too many. Rituals generate cohesion but they also brainwash. It's a fine line
26
But of course. The Constitution's under siege; the GOP has seceded; Trump published an Enemies List...and David Brooks takes cover in his usual template:
1. Make an obvious platitude sound like a breakthrough: There Should Be More Niceness!
2. Quote a couple of other people, the more obscure the better: as the poet/forklift operator Raphael Hythloday is widely remembered to have said...
3. State something we already know with stentorian gravitas, so it sounds original: Rituals encourage you to be more intentional about life. Wow, like, deep.
4. Never underestimate how impressive it is to quote the book no one else will ever read. "Ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require." Isn't that the plot of every movie since "Star Wars"?
5. Rise to a crescendo of the mundane stated like a Zen koan: We’ve become reasonably present-oriented. What precisely is meant by "reasonably present-oriented" we can't say but don't worry, no one read this far.
128
@Next Conservatism
Typical Brooks bashing: accusing him of only saying what’s obvious and presenting platitudes as if they were daring discoveries.
The charge would stick if it weren’t that nine tenths of the wisdom of the human race is contained in platitudes. Its expression in words has been flattened featureless by mindless repetition, but occasionally someone like Brooks tries (not always successfully, I admit) to breathe life back into one of them. You will recall Doctor Johnson’s, “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
13
@Next Conservatism And don't forget the other essential element of a Brooks column: Turning a blind eye to the political, ideological, and economic drivers of the slow-motion disaster that is happening to our country, and pretending instead that our problems are all due to a vague social malaise with no specific cause. The advantage of this strategy is that it absolves Brooks--and us--of the responsibility to do anything concrete and likely controversial, such as demanding impeachment, mounting lawsuits, or (horrors) campaigning for a Democrat.
41
@PL, the comment below yours by Karl more accurately describes the primary essence and strategy of this column and many similar ones by Brooks
8
In high school, my friends and I started having a bonfire every October. It started as a birthday party and as an excuse to take advantage of some of the last good weather for the next 6 months, but it became a way to mark the season and the passage of time. As we all graduated and moved away for college, it became a chance for us to stay in touch, to return to our hometown and see what (and who) had changed and what hadn’t, to reflect on how we’d changed and how long the current us would last. It died out as we graduated college and all moved even farther away and it became financially impossible to return every year. Only in retrospect did I realize how important it had become to me and how much I would miss it. Its end was inevitable, but also itself a mark of us moving into the next stages of our lives.
I now find myself an expat, in a small but tight community of fellow English speakers. We’re divorced from many of the rituals we had grown up with, and so we’ve had to make a conscious effort to preserve the ones we want (Thanksgiving potlucks, Christmas gift exchanges, summer barbeques), adopt the new ones around use (local festivals, holidays from friend’s different cultural backgrounds), and create our own new ones. I’ve found the most invaluable ones the welcome parties. It’s hard to know how to join a new community, and offering a hand out makes building the new relationships a million times easier and faster.
12
One very simple ritual that can add a little dignity as well as heart to a social gathering is offering toasts, a wonderful way to pause and share in someone's appreciation of another. It may feel awkward and formal to those who are new to it, but it truly feels good when we are able to express our gratitude openly and share what becomes a sacred moment with others.
3
I can't help but think of the opening song to the show "Fiddler on the Roof", a song called "Tradition". It is a peon to rituals. A celebration of the stagnant. In the course of the play a devout man deals with the ever changing world by clinging to the past's comforting surety. He must change or his daughters can't. The musical tackles many subjects, love, oppression, history, religion and the capacity for human growth. It shouldn't surprise anyone that love conquers all but, in order to, it has to smash rituals by replacing them with, equally, compelling arguments. I'm all for rituals, as long as they continue to reflect the love that made them rituals in the first place.
3
Transience and totalitarian homelessness makes the notion of community compacts absurd: the low incidence of home-ownership guarantees alienation; the pursuit of better job opportunities uproots people more than they ever did. To have ritual in community is to need community. In the land of Amazon, who needs neighbors?
2
We need the support of going through something together, and the comfort that rituals’ certainty brings.
4
Rituals: nice idea. But . . . Rituals have been destroyed by commercial greed. Each of the sweet, friendly events of the past has morphed into a scripted competitive exercise. Think about Proms (Limos, clothes) Valentines Day (How much do you love me $$$) Halloween (candy, decorations, manufactured single-wear costumes). What used to be fun, creative, playful times have been turned into glamorized performances promoted by mega-buck marketing.
I vote for low-key spontaneity.
91
These are some lovely thoughts and ideas. But, we're all so busy working 2 or 3 jobs (or more), or running to pick up the kids from day care, leaving very little time to develop and participate these rituals, my dear Mr. Brooks.
17
@Winifred Haun...Start by making room in your busy life for very personal family rituals . How about a little family celebration for a child's accomplishment ? Yesterday was Earth Day , a wonderful occasion to create a special meaningful little ritual just for you family ? Children will enjoy them when young , may resent them when older , but eventually cherish the memories when they are adults . Perhaps nostalgia is coloring my memories . I grew up in post war Germany , circumstances were really bad before they got better . The struggle for survival was harsh yet what I remember best are the celebratory spin our parents managed to put on little events , the first harvested vegetables from the little plot , the yearly August viewing of the Perseid Meteor Showers , Fall story telling by the fire of the wood stove to save electricity , getting a hard boiled egg as a special treat for a good report card , the bottle of soda to share when there was enough money in the budget to finally acquire that matching set of glasses . Those little celebration amounted to family rituals , they nourished our souls as rituals big or small , done right , tend to do .
There is a fundamentalist strain among many Americans, both religious and non-religious, that can make ritual difficult. Well intentioned greetings and statements of all sorts seem like they can offend an almost infinite variety of individuals for just as many reasons.
Rituals can be simple, fun or silly, relatively meaningless, just something you do to show we're all in it together. But we all seem to take everything much too seriously, even our rituals.
An Irish friend once lamented Americans' general lack of ability with small talk. If you make a light comment on the weather to a stranger you risk hearing all about an unfaithful spouse or a disappointing child or an unhappy workplace.
We all need to just lighten up, slow down and enjoy each other's company a little bit more.
4
It is confounding, how many have misunderstood the meaning behind his thoughts on daily small rituals. It is not a better Bar Mitzvah, Mass or Election Day. He is talking about a Community Garden for our children to come to every day and share veggies or plants. A book exchange at the library for literacy, free for students. A dedicated community center for free lunch..a Summer fair, with sack hop races, and games. Small regular community building events, that unite us, no matter what your political leaning may be.
15
Brooks is entirely right about this. Most of his examples support his own conservatism though so I would add a few more. How about a ritual for coming out. How about a ritual for leaving an oppressive work situation. How about a ritual for leaving a marriage that is soul killing. The concept is good, but we need to expand Brooks' scope.
17
Rituals gain their significance from convention and common practice. We live in a time when the unconventional is valued and independence shows strength. Character is built from uniqueness, not conformity or following a common script. It's every man for himself, every female on high alert for the daily offense, every child squirreling away private nuggets in their small online tree.
Ritual implies agreement and shared choreography. We have neither the inclination or role model to work from. We have disrupted ourselves to the point that it's hard to find meaning, especially in ritual that rings a bygone bell.
3
Shedding old rituals is not entirely a bad thing. It is largely a matter of increasing affluence. For example, my parents grew up quite poor and they could only afford meat and cake on special occasions such as birthdays or festivals, so of course those occasions held greater meaning for them. A big life milestone like a new job might be celebrated with a dinner at a restaurant. Now most people can afford meat and cake every day if they want it, and spending on food at restaurants recently exceeded spending on food at home for the first time ever. Thus, ritual celebrations don’t feel special for me the way they did for my parents because they don’t involve much more than what I do on any normal weekend. You could lament the demise of rituals, but I choose to celebrate how our greater affluence lets us enjoy little luxuries every day instead of just on special occasions.
1
David Brooks - - You've been in the Big City too long. The small New England towns still have an annual Town Meeting, where neighbors gather to enact ordinances and pass a budget, most importantly, to renew old friendships or grudges, and to argue points often for the unstated purpose of cementing the feeling of community that might exist in a town where many families have lived for generations. I can attest that even newcomers can, if they wish, be drawn into that community by participating in this ritual.
4
Sorry david, but rituals are what we all do, in a more secular way too.
We get together as family, each and every year to celebrate holidays (whatever those may be to each family), we gather for weddings, and birthdays, anniversaries, and funerals, too.
They all count as "rituals".
As a civic society, we do it as a town. We gather to celebrate and honor - Memorial day, 4th of July, Veterans Day, our own town's anniversaries, our own little corners of the world annual celebrations. We are constantly celebrating "rituals".
Ritual is a custom, religious or not.
You could almost count election day as a ritual!
One chooses to participate, or not. But it is a ritual too.
4
Great piece! I'm from a small town in Nebraska, and I can think of several such rituals.
After high schoolers graduate, the parents typically have a small party. Friends and family bring gifts to help the graduating senior start their life.
On Friday nights during the fall, a good chunk of town gathers at the local football field to cheer on the home team. We sing the national anthem together and watch as the team begins the game in prayer.
Each year in December, hundreds of people in my town donate gifts to the local gift drive. Some 200 of us get together the Sunday before Christmas to wrap them all. Then finally, on Christmas morning, gits are delivered to some 100 or so families. I don't remember a single year growing up when we opened our presents before we had delivered our assigned delivery to a family in need.
Small towns are full of these traditions/rituals, and it means the world to me to have grown up in one.
5
A teacher once told a group of us to be alert the moment we first came into waking consciousness in the morning, as this was a special moment, pregnant with possibilities. 15 years later, exploring this transition with a group of 12 people over the course of 6 months, teaching them to move seamlessly from waking into dreaming without any loss of awareness, I came to deeply appreciate my teacher’s profound wisdom.
A number of fellow students kept up other of this teacher’s suggestions; meditating 30 minutes close to sunrise and (not quite as close) to sundown; maintaining a set of rituals that go back, unbroken, over 5000 years in Asia.
Walking, or running, or engaging in some other kind of conscious movement is another ritual our teacher inspired us to keep, followed by a quiet mindful breakfast, and some “lectio divina” (‘Divine Reading” in the Christian context, but atheists can equally engage in deep reflection on some multi-layered text, and even challenge themselves to bring the same contemplative mindset to the stories in the NY Times of that particular day.
Bringing this kind of attention to each moment makes every act of the day a ritual, every inhalation and exhalation, ultimately.
As Swami Rama Tirtha told his American audiences at the turn of the 20th century, “Every day Christmas Day; every evening New Year’s Eve.”
He wasn’t speaking literally - he was drawing on his tradition to suggest how all life can be a sacred ritual.
6
"The philosopher Abraham Kaplan calculated that over 60 percent of Judaism’s 613 commandments involve physical ritual: lighting candles, ritual baths, etc. These deeds are a kind of language, a way of expressing things that are too deep for words."
Maybe so, but the world is simply not pro-Judaic. Mostly the opposite, with all that that entails and suggests.
5
Yes rituals are important because they mark a transition in life whether personal or as a group! Groups often have an initiation ritual, or a officer installation ritual. A minor point David, a rosary is a prayer, the Mass is a ritual,as is a Baptism or Confirmation. Just sayin.
2
@Teneo As an Episcopalian who uses an Anglican rosary in addition to other forms of prayer (spontaneous and reading the liturgical prayers) I would say that the rosary is ritualized prayer. Just sayin.
Something in me resists rituals, where everybody has to do the same thing together. Although I admire Judaism, that's why I don't go to temple - I don't like saying the same things over and over again, in ritual form with other people. But I do enjoy the Passover Seder, which is a ritual, but with room for discussion and variation.
9
@J.Sutton
We have shed most of the rules in our quest for freedom and individuality as Mr. Sutton suggests. So the rituals have become optional and will fade away. The falling off of ritual is (imho), linked to the absence of belief in God. Mass community rituals took root over centuries because people were told they MUST perform them. They were COMMANDED to practice them. They would be punished if they did not perform the rituals. The crops would fail and they would starve. BELIEF in an all powerful God who organizes our world is the essential ingredient. And for many of us in the west, belief is gone and can't ever return. OPINION and opinion pieces can't substitute for belief.
2
@J.Sutton
Viva individualism and non-conformism!
There is a very simple response -- conservatives, both here and in Europe, and Republicans in the United States, are working to destroy the rituals that hold our society together. Until both David Brooks and the news media directly identify
conservatives as directed toward the destruction of the American community, there is no hope for this conversation.
11
@billp59 Your politicizing, when he recommends a shared community experience. He states find a place meaning an actual spot in the community to celebrate the shared belief of 'Our community is"...not a party politic. It is broad and sweeping and meant to create a memory.
2
I don't know, David, but it seems like you're waking up from a long sleep. When my significant other was in the military (Cold War) there were "hail and farewells," along with change of command ceremonies and all the rest of the rituals based on military service. Scouting offers plenty of rituals for kids; in fact, it is paramilitaristic in that way. Kids' sports teams have rituals, including awards ceremonies that so many people complain about (e.g., participation trophies, which when you think about it, are just like participation ribbons and awards in the military!) Many communities, whether it's a church community, non-profit organization, academic community, and so on, have their own rituals. Is it possible that these organizations leave out too many people?
3
Rituals were most often organized by women. One might be able to follow a lessening of rituals (block parties, welcoming parties, celebrating life's passages, etc.) with the increase in the number of hours women work outside the home.
11
@Corky Smeyak
Good point. A few years ago I told my husband I would no longer be solely responsible for buying gifts, arranging celebrations, sending cards and especially all the Christmas craziness...
5
I recommend The Analects by Confucius. He was perhaps the first to explore the central role of ritual.
1
@UncleStevie--you should probably have elaborated: ritual was necessary because it makes us civil and protects us from our tendency towards evil (doing selfish things).
@Minmin-Good points. I also suspect that, along with filial piety, ritual puts us further on the road toward becoming a sage.
Structure is what Brooks craves. Rituals unless spontaneous and personal become dry as toast.
In any event the very best organized ritual this country has takes place every four years on January 20 where the peaceful transfer of power takes place with the inaguration of our President.
If Trump, his grifters and his enablers in the Republican party are replaced with just a semblance of the former presidents and a Democratic majority it will be a time of national renewable.
37
Mr. Brooks pleads an old adage: "Substance without symbols becomes extinct, symbols without substance live forever". (Quote from memory of an editorial in weekly "Science" of many years ago).
Welcoming ceremonies of one kind or another are indeed symbols of good will and affection.
As to myself, being a private person, I would not have liked any fanfare, if I was moving into a new neighborhood. My wife and I keep separate surnames and, after 28 years in the same house, probably only one family of neighbors knows our individual names. The rest mix them up freely.
3
We do not always know how to act under particular circumstances.
Some people are better at this than others.
Ritual helps us along. It provides a framework.
Many ritual systems are dynamic, allowing one to create within the framework.
Ritual might originate in religion but was and is not just limited to it.
Mr. Brooks is correct as to the societal binding nature of ritual.
However, ritual is like clay; what we create with it, even within the basic framework is our doing. There can be good and there can be bad ritual.
Our call; we should use the power of ritual wisely, as Mr. Brooks suggests here.
9
Rituals are Important, I’ll concede that.
But manufacturing rituals for the sake of a cohesive society will find little support; rituals come from a heartfelt need to express something as a group.
I don’t know what those would be at the moment. But authentic rituals will occur spontaneously, not by fiat. No matter how hard Hallmark tried, Grandparent’s day has never amounted to a hill of beans.
9
I think there are many rituals, but for them to have meaning, there has to be a community that embraces them. American individualism tends instead to celebrate personalization over community.
13
Every morning and every evening, for as long as I can remember, my wife and I hug and kiss. We call it the "good fit". It's a ritual we started in our 20's. And now in our 70's it's the same, the hug, the kiss.
David, your right, we need rituals, but they don't have to take place with more than a community of two.
16
I am a member of a service organization which meets monthly. We have a prescribed ritual before we conduct our business meeting or social event. We begin with a spiritual blessing, we also pledge allegiance to the flag and then other parts of the ritual follow. The ritual unifies the group and reminds each individual that as a volunteer service organization our strength is our shared commitment, strength in numbers as it were. I think when new volunteers join our organization they are surprised at how serious the members are about the ritual. But it grows on the new participants as they observe long time members reciting the ritual from memory and with passion. As a lapsed Catholic I enjoy this organization very much because I can participate in the ritual, do good works and not be hypocritical. When someone asks me what religion I am I now I say, “I am a volunteer.”
1
You know, when I got married in Thailand I went through the northern Thai rituals, which involved formalizing the son leaving his parents house and moving to his wife's family's house (that's the tradition in Thailand). Of course, I was actually living in an apartment by myself at the time. I wasn't Thai, after all (and these days some young Thai people live on there own, but that a recent exception). A few days after our wedding I cleared out the last items at my apartment, and I was about to leave and turn in the key. That's when it hit me: I really wanted a ritual. I wasn't just closing the door on my apartment. I, at 32, was closing the door on bachelor life, on my single days. I would never live alone again. I was happy about it, absolutely. But I was, hopefully, taking a last look at the last place I would ever live in alone, until perhaps the day I would be an elderly widower, again hopefully (and hopefully not ever), decades away after many more life transitions. I slowly closed the door, memorizing the exact moment I saw that room disappear and heard the door shut. I would have really liked a real, formal ritual with someone more than just me there. Luckily, it wasn't long before the first family ritual came along at my new home.
12
David, why are all you conservatives (or pseudo-conservatives, such as yourself), so obsessed with rituals? Is it the critical fallback position to ensure the illusion of safety and security in an insecure world? I am an active, practicing Catholic. As one discovers in Catholicism over the years, the rituals can (but do not have to) become stand-ins for actual belief, true faith -- what I call "rabbit's-foot Catholicism." Touch the rabbit's foot, that's good, now you're safe, you checked-off the Lord's to-do list for you, all's well, etc. Readers can think of dozens of other, similar examples, sacred and/or profane. The problem is that rituals in that vein take the place of thinking and lead to blind obedience to institutions, organizations, and leaders. But not to ideas so much -- such as spiritual contemplation, or exploration of new worlds, or embracing the uncertainty of existence. Rituals have their limited place -- very limited. Because too often they stand in the way of embracing life and change and emotional and spiritual growth, whether within a faith tradition, patriotic identity, or understanding the diversity of life by standing in your neighbor's shoes.
17
Shall we make rituals great again, or not? I think not. Rituals, if we observe correctly, are tribal at heart and their very inception was not only to cement bonds in a group but to also decide what is ours as opposed to yours, speaking in cultural terms. But isn't that the beginning of bias, grandstanding, ridicule, oppression? Do compare the rituals of a puritan European group with those of an African tribe. The first would call the latter savages. Thanks to... rituals.
In a globalized society which we now live in, and which will prevail in the future, to speak of rituals is a moot point.
Folks of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures do mix and intermarry and what they do when they celebrate is just that, they celebrate and do so in miriad ways; with food or flowers, speeches and awards, and so on.
Societies are changing and we should indeed allow good old traditions to live and inspire us, but also allow for a freer flow of customs to engender new, fresh, spontaneous and rewarding forms of social interactions to help us enjoy the special moments in life and transform them in lasting memories that will inspire others, regardless of the tribe they belong, or neighborhood, or language, color, sexual orientation...
7
I am tired of people who boil you down to Republican or conservative, and continue to snipe at you in spite of the fact that you are more than those two categories of thought. You have evolved into a complex and, therefore, more real and authentic person. We should all be grateful. That evolution is reflected in what you wrote about today. Ritual is important--whether it is as mundane as washing one's hands before eating or shaking hands upon meeting somebody or saying aloud one's gratefulness about having an important person in one's life, someone who is dead or alive. Personally, for me, the most meaningful ritual I do each day is to greet the rising sun and my late wife with spoken words of gratitude. Prayer, some would call it. Whatever it is, it is inspired by awareness and honor and gratitude. Ritual doesn't need to be grand, but it needs to be meaningful. And I find you to be searching in meaningful ways toward personal and cultural growth--something we all need to do. Thank you.
34
@Molly Thank you!
We have collective rituals: they're called sporting events, Black Friday shopping, etc. Rather than the spiritual rituals Mr. Brooks longs for, these are spectacles, often driven by consumer culture and tribalism.
Rituals can't be manufactured to fit a societal need; rather, they spring from the values of the society. And what we value now is capitalist culture and technology, as well as spectacle in entertainment, shopping, sports, and even politics. Corporations don't care about rituals, because capitalism is about manufacturing and fulfilling individual wants and desires. If we lament the loss of rituals in American life, we need look no further than consumerism we lovingly embrace.
153
I come from a large Irish Catholic family. My paternal grandfather was one of 12 children. Half of them immigrated to the US and the other half stayed in the Old Country. When one of the American brothers or sisters died, the Irish relatives would visit New York or Boston, wherever the funerary rites were taking place. After the wake, funeral Mass and burial, everyone would gather at a relative's house for a party--a kind of second wake without the deceased present but featuring hours of storytelling, eating, drinking and singing. The festivities typically ended with a loud argument between two family members airing old grievances. Those particular individuals wouldn't speak to each other until the next funeral, wedding, christening, etc., when the slate would be wiped clean and the cycle would begin again.
These days my siblings and I live in various regions of the US. There are so many of us we rarely have the opportunity to be together all at the same time. Funerals are usually the reason when we do, but even so we enjoy each other's company immensely. All of us are Democrats married to Democrats with Democratic kids, so we talk politics. All of us are current or lapsed Catholics, so we vie to out-scandalize each other with blasphemous jokes. There's lots of drinking and reminiscing, but no fighting. That particular ritual has disappeared from the family repertoire for some reason.
46
@Carson Drew Thanks for the memories! We are not family but my family is quite similar!
2
My Grandfather belonged to a number of civic associations which went into decline after WWII with the increasing popularity of TV. People stayed home to watch Lucy instead of going to the lodge on a week night as it was easier even if isolating. Technology has been pushing us apart for decades.
20
Lovely piece. As a young adult, I honestly prefer not to create a life map of where I have been and hope to go, and present it to my peers on Instagram or any other social media platform. We need to come back to that human touch, that human interaction that many of us yearn. I prefer to get together in front of a bonfire, laugh, cry, vent, reminisce, explore and speak of our futures together
28
I agree with the premise and like it a lot, especially the passages of life and the affirmation of community. The reality is that it has taken me year just to gather a couple of families to sometimes come together for a dinner party. I know that there are areas in this country where an easy and reflexive neighborliness exists, but in middle class suburbia, we are consumed with work, family and our material lives.
Taken form this angle, our lack of ritual appears to be more of a symptom of our own inner imbalance and social decay that a solution to it. Perhaps ritual could help us to rebalance our lives, but I fear it is more likely that we will need to rebalance our lives before there will be room for the kind of creative and restorative rituals that Mr. Brook and I long for.
4
David is looking for rituals to help cement a community, but he's putting the cart before the horse. You need a certain critical mass of like-thinking people for a ritual to take hold. They might, in rare circumstances, arise spontaneously, but again, there still has to be a group memory to perpetuate them. In this fragmented, transient society there is rarely enough time for anything develop organically before everyone has once again dispersed into the ether. That's why the only secular rituals we still have are obscene spectacles like the Superbowl, and an endless onslaught of vapid award shows. What we have is ancient Rome, minus the religiosity.
These wishes stand a much better chance in a static, rural environment, where they already exist to a greater degree, than an urban one, where people are more likely texting someone 1000 miles away than talking to the human standing right next to them on the checkout line. In my NYC experience, a soldier could be returning from active duty, and have lived down the hall their entire life. I would never know it.
11
How about invoking, now, a “ritual” wisely imbedded in our Constitution by our founders that should only be resorted to at times of great internal peril, like the present unacceptable circumstances that threaten the foundations of our representative Democracy. It is called Impeachment, and meant to remove a societal cancer while restoring a healthy moral equilibrium to our federal governance.
28
@John Grillo Bell, book, and candle, that's what we need.
The "bell" is a call to assemble, the "book" holds the standards which have been violated, The "candle," knocked over, symbolizes death. This is a ritual like none other.
5
The military is pretty good at rituals: marches, promotions, deployments, returns and military honors at burials. My brother told me it was different during Vietnam war-he flew home from a year in Europe with the Army with some guys coming home from Vietnam with distant looks in their eyes, and they all got out of uniform as soon as they could in the US so they wouldn't be jeered at. My son's national guard colleagues who deployed to Afghanistan had departure and return ceremonies. The simplest ceremony was when he took oath as an officer in a local armory with the battle banners going back to the Battle of Long Island/Brooklyn-when the Maryland militia held the line to save Washington's troops to fight another day. I will never forget it.
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Thank you Mr. Brooks for reminding us that we are all human and we need interaction. It always feels good to go to weddings, graduations, even funerals (in fact, this is the only way we see our friends). Thank you.
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While I understand that the familiar can bring comfort in varying degrees, most of our standard rituals have long since been commerrcialized, thus stripping them of any social or moral meaning they might once have possessed by substituting vast material expenditures for genuine feeling.
I think of weddings that cost families in the tens of thousands. Or especially sport-related rituals like football or baseball, which millions observe, but where meaning beyond simple winning or losing or belonging to the right tribe has always been hard to find. Not coincidentally, here again commercial aspects dominate.
If we're searching for real meaning, I'd suggest we will not find it in rituals, something done by rote, whose intended meaning, whatever it might be, will inevitably be bleached away by repetition and time.
Instead we might institute the rite of thinking about things. Unlike most rituals, thinking might be uncomfortable, but is not anodyne.
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@Ken Winkes,
You forgot to mention the cost of funerals. Jessica Mitford wrote an amusing, yet serious novel of the financial burden of the above taking place in America. My neighbor, a staunch republican, has informed this reader of 'natural funerals' that are in vogue, and it is enough to make you feel uncomfortable about attending a picnic in the forest.
Children often hold the key to successful rituals. At the moment, they are out playing and away from the chaos and confusion of the daily news.
Mr. Brooks is a 'thinker', and it is one of the many reasons his essays are to be enjoyed.
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Mr. Brooks, this is poetic, and simply beautiful. What’s gotten into you ? Lay off the political writings, and concentrate on Life.
One suggestion for a new ritual : a celebration of Voting, for actually participating in this great experiment. Bonus points for throwing off the chains of the GOP, and becoming a rational, compassionate, decent person.
Hint, hint.
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@Phyliss Dalmatian
I was going to suggest the same thing, but you beat me to it.
Election Day should not only be a national holiday, but it should be a day on which we all celebrate this most precious right with other group activities in the manner of the Aussies, whose election days are famous for Democracy Sausage cookouts (we certainly could do a hot dog/hamburger/chicken/veggie/ethnic choice barbecue of our own--we've already got plenty of practice at it other times of the year).
Of course, it'd help if we weren't trying to discourage certain groups from voting--something the Aussies take a dim view of, to the point of making not voting a fine-able offense.
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@Phyliss Dalmatian
Priceless column and priceless comment. Thank you both.
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@Phyliss Dalmatian
Hint hint: everyone's vote counts.
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There should be a ritual where the elite would get together and atone for rigging economy so that they can gain even more wealth. They would also vow to ending of wars for profiteering. They should admit the damage they have done to our world by their hoarding of wealth, and vow to fix it. The world would applaud.
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@steve Perhaps part of the ritual would be for the non-elite to get together and decide what responsibility they have to make society better from the ground up. Perhaps part of the ritual would be a promise not to blame all of society's woes on someone else, to refrain from name-calling and demonization of others.
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@My friend in Shenzhen City, this "non-elite" NYC teacher and divorced, free-range father of 2 (18-17) boyz, as well as all my "non-elite" friends get together and take responsibility in our DAILY RITUAL, which we call work. When elites hangout with me and my kind they either get worried about the size of their "you-know-what", or they realize the ritual my friends and I have does not end like Shirley Jackson's most famous short story and we all drink a craft beer. "non-elites" are you and I
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I don't know what gated community Mr. Brooks lives in, but the communities where I reside and the ones to which I contribute are awash in rituals as are a majority of the civic institutions and organizations around me.
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Yes. Agreed.
But there is something hide-bound and un-imaginative in the American psyche. The "approved" behaviors are all commercially endorsed.
(Even when I was a kid there were still some of the old ways left, decorating the Xmas tree, or Spring Cleaning. Mom was the boss all weekend. The windows were thrown open, the wreakage of winter disappeared. We did what she said, the same things year after year.)
The first benefit of your advice would be to get the people to lighten up. To dance in the light of the moon, or to smash a favorite pot and bury the pieces under an ancient tree, or to sit up all night, a wake for one's forgotten ancestors, without regard for what the neighbors think would be a real accomplishment.
I'd love to hear what sort of private rituals other people participate in, alone or with loved ones.
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As disheartened that I am right now in the Catholic Church, I must say the rituals during the Mass and the Sacraments exemplify beauty, sacredness, and spirituality. To this day, I try to go to Sunday Mass regularly. When I attend, I see a community praying together; I think about my dear parents now passed on and my to-this-day friends going to Catholic high school together in those unfashionable uniforms, laughing and crying with each other.
Perhaps, one of the most beautiful rituals that I have seen was the burial of our dear friend Rabbi Michael. Its simplicity and solemnity was ethereal. There was a connection between those who were Jewish and we who were Gentiles. We prayed the Kaddish together in Hebrew and English. We walked around the lowered plain-wooded coffin and tossed the earth's soil upon it. Yes, rituals remind us of how connected we are in spite of differing spiritual beliefs, races, and ethnicities. I can not imagine a life without them.
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When I lived in Thailand, I was always fascinated by how quickly and seamlessly Thai people could slip from the mundane to the ritual and back again. I remember being in my girlfriend's (now wife's) car with her and her father one Thai Father's Day. After chatting for a little while, she took out the flower garland traditionally given on such occasions, and slowly handed it to him with both hands, as he slowly accepted it with both hands. She then made the gesture of respect as he held up the garland and chanted. Then, a few minutes later, she was driving and they were talking about this and that again. A life-altering ritual is was not, but it was a moment to "Pause and reflect," one I saw over and over again.
On another occasion I saw 100 12 and 13 -year old boys being ordained as Buddhist monks for a week. That was a major life transition. They not only learned self-discipline and sacrifice, but community service as well, as the temples are an important part of the community. It didn't hurt that it was the local Catholic school that sent 100 boys to be ordained at the temple to celebrate their 100th anniversary. It announced their integration with the Buddhist town they were a part of.
A year later, when by now wife's grandmother had a blessing for the addition to her son's house built for her, the temple monks came for the ritual blessing. Among them were a couple of the boys who had decided to remain as monks. They had found a calling, at least for the time being.
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Other countries have rituals. We used to have them too. There once was a line between childhood and adulthood. It's been obliterated. In Japan, when a child attends her first day of school. It marks both the beginning of the school year for a returning student and the start of a new stage of childhood for a new one. We don't do that here.
The one ritual we have in America is none because work is taking precedence over life. Businesses own us even if we don't want them to. They underpay us to the extent that many people wind up taking second or third jobs to survive. Please explain to your readers how they should create rituals when they haven't got enough time to sleep.
If we want to have a cohesive civil caring society in America we need to create one. And it needs to start at the very top or it's meaningless. As an average American I find myself feeling like a fool when I'm nice to people. Why? Because my politeness is almost never reciprocated. Multiply me by a couple of hundred thousand Americans who are treated the same way and you can understand why we don't have a civil society any longer.
We need inclusive rituals. Religious rituals won't do that. We need to stop making everyone who disagrees with us the "other". But again, that too has to come partly from the top.
4/22/2019 7:30pm
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@hen3ry Should "underpaying" businesses take the rap for people seeking 2nd and 3rd jobs, OR, are folk driving themselves to rampaging desire for more stuff.
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@hen3ry
Another excellent comment, though I would suggest that the way to change it is not by starting at the top, as if we are merely automatons who must act in the manner set by our "betters". Because Trump is wretchedly crude and all the rest, then there is not hope for us all, and we are doomed to behave the same way?
I, for one, do not look to ANYONE in DC to be my moral, ethical or civic compass. I don't need a politician to tell me what to think, how to dress, what to eat, have their picture on my Facebook page, or any of the rest. We should set the bar, not them. We end up changing the top when we generate enough momentum to purge those bad characters (and not keep them just because we prefer an R to a D, or vice versa) and to put in to place that better model the values and rituals being discussed here. A tough assignment, to be sure, but I weary of the "there's nothing we can do" thinking.
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@Heckler
Yeah, shame on those greedy hordes and their rampaging desire for food and medicine, for themselves and their children. Oh, and housing - the should be happy to work a single job which provides just enough to cover the rent, right? Anything else is "rampaging desire....."
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Many of the rituals most treasured today -- including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, the white wedding -- are anything but timeless. These are historical inventions. Like our nineteenth century ancestors, we have it in our power to create rituals that speak to our own psychological and cultural needs: to mark transitions, offer opportunities for reflection, express reverence and respect, and reassert a sense of community and connection. -- Steven Mintz, University of Texas at Austin
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@Steven Mintz
You have rightly hit on an important aspect of rituals.... the creation of tradition. I remember reading in grad school a book by Hobsbawm and Ranger: The Invention of Tradition. It detailed the building of traditions to strengthen identity and community: the British Monarchy, Scottish Highlanders, Victorian India. These rituals helped rally patriotism and build resistance, but also to repress as well.
One of the more important reasons for the invention of rituals is the solidarity it can build amongst communities that come together across racial and religious lines.... witness the power of sports across the world to galvanize communities and nations; the role of the underdog team to garner support beyond its base; the thrill of a small market team slaying a perceived Goliath; thrilling Olympic miracles...etc. Importantly, rituals repeat themselves (requiring the work of adherent believers the first few times out). US college football and global soccer is rife with amazing rituals. Rituals have many positive qualities, but caution is needed in their power to create alterity and exclusion as well.
By far my favorite ritual belongs to medieval Siena, Italy where the Palio horse race around the central plaza was initiated to settle neighborhood/parish disputes peacefully through good natured, if not passionate, competition (and to replace brutish bull fights). Let's build that type of voter participation and neighborhood competition ritual here.
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@Steven Mintz:
Queen Victoria was the first known bride to wear a white wedding dress.....
Halloween was a "real" celebration.....see Samhain!
Thanksgiving goes back to an actual event.....as does Christmas, (though its heavily related to Mithra worship....)
BUT the problem I see is that all these have been so commercialized and made profit oriented, that they've lost whatever legitimacy they once had.
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