13 Observations on Ritual
And other responses to my 'dopamine culture' article
My article on ‘dopamine culture’ has stirred up interest and (even more) raised concerns among readers who recognize the symptoms I described.
One of the illustration went viral in a big way. And I’ve gotten requests from all over the world for permission to translate and share the material. (Yes, you can all quote generously from the article, and reprint my charts with attribution.)
But many have asked for more specific guidance.
What can we do in a culture dominated by huge corporations that want us to spend hours every day swiping and scrolling?
I find it revealing and disturbing that readers who work on the front lines (in education, therapy, or tech itself) expressed the highest degree of alarm. They know better than anybody where we’re heading, and want to find an escape path.
Here’s a typical comment from teacher Adam Whybray:
I see it massively as a teacher. Kids desperately pleading for toilet breaks, claiming their human rights are being infringed, so they can check TikTok, treating lessons as though they're in a Youtube reaction video, needing to react with a meme or a take—saying that silence in lessons scares them or freaks them out.
One notable difference from when I was at school was that I remember a lesson in which we got to watch a film was a relief or even pleasurable (depending on the film). My students today often say they are unable to watch films because they can't focus. I had one boy getting quite emotional, begging to be allowed to look at his phone instead.
Another teacher asked if the proper response is to unplug regularly? Others have already embraced digital detox techniques of various sorts (see here and here).
I hope to write more about this in the future.
In particular, I want to focus on the many positive ways people create a healthy, integrated life that minimizes scrolling and swiping and mindless digital distractions. Many of you have found joy and solace—and an escape from app dependence—in artmaking or nature walks or other real world activities. There are countless ways of being-in-the-world with contentment and mindfulness.
Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected—or frequently even mocked: Ritual.
I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.
Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person—who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)
I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.
I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.
Below I share 13 observations on ritual.
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
1.
The smartphone cannot be a ritualistic object. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Disappearance of Rituals, points out that the smartphone embodies restlessness. “It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life,” he explains. “The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing.”
So we shouldn’t be surprised when people get upset at smartphone use in ritualistic settings—concert halls, movie theaters, shrines, etc. They instinctively feel that the phone is the enemy of ritual.
I can imagine a situation in which locking up your phone in a box before an event becomes part of the ritual. But the opposite could never happen—turning on the phone would be the worst possible way to initiate a ritual experience.
2.
Genuine ritual is always embedded in a time and place, and cannot be uploaded or downloaded. Go ahead, get married online, or conduct your graduation ceremony via Zoom, but these experiences will feel hollow. The virtual world creates a hunger for real ritual in an actual physical community of human beings. No website or app can satisfy this hunger on its own.
3.
Memes are rituals drained of transcendence. They pathetically imitate the essential elements of ritual—repetition, symbol, shared meaning—but at the lowest possible level, namely that of a joke.
4.
The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context. But content always exists in tension with form. Ritual is the form we have abandoned in our relentless quest for content.
5.
Internet businesses feel this void, and try to fill it with pseudo-rituals. But the repetition of genuine ritual is now replaced by addictive scrolling and swiping. Those open-ended processes never achieve the sense of closure which is essential to all ritual—and actually aggravate the problems of a de-ritualized society.
6.
In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into something extravagant—not just for children anymore, but adults too. The same is true of Valentine’s Day or Mardi Gras and other ritualized occasions. They are pushed to extremes because people have so few embodied rituals in the digital age.
Many of these originated as religious observances, but are more vehemently pursued by those engulfed in secular online culture—because they need this release the most.
7.
Ritual is a source of stability, especially in our moments of greatest vulnerability—hence the rituals of mourning, coming-of-age, farewell, politeness, and remembrance. Poor and suffering communities are always the richest in ritual.
If somebody tells you they don’t need rituals, they probably own many expensive things. These are their substitutes for the relics of true rituals—but are, at best, temporary and inadequate replacements.
8.
If you created a community but eliminated all rituals of politeness and sociability, it would look like Twitter. Social media is the dark twin of ritual. It never achieves wholeness or closure.
9.
Economic interests fear genuine ritual, because it is not about consumption. Some ritual objects last for thousands of years. They are loved all the more because they are old and have never been replaced.
How can you make a buck from that?
It’s not impossible to monetize ritual—many people scheme endlessly over ways of doing this—but the profit motive coexists uneasily with it.
10.
When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own. Family rituals or daily rituals become sources of joy and stability. Even the simple aspects of our daily routine can serve as a kind of ritual—but we also need and deserve larger communal rituals.
11.
Artistic performances originated as rituals. I learned this firsthand when I wrote a book on the love song, and learned that it started as part of fertility rites and sacred marriage rituals. I suspect that rock concerts resemble rituals of prehistoric hunting communities, while country music evolved from the ritualistic songs of herders. Similar ritualistic origins can be found in ancient tragedy and comedy.
But the deconstructive techniques of postmodernism have used up these ritualistic elements as fuel. Postmodernism puts everything into question—that’s its purpose. But we pay a psychic price for mocking the forms and conventions that create a revered space for art.
12.
Even science originates as ritual. The essence of ritual, notes René Girard, is “that things be mixed together and that something be done with them”—and the goal is always transformative and empowering. This is where the scientific method starts. “If you look at techniques of winemaking, cheesemaking, metallurgy, all of the great Neolithic techniques, you will see they are all associated with the ritual,” Girard points out.
Just consider the elaborate funeral rites of the ancients—which spurred breakthroughs in everything from preservation techniques to pyramid building.
13.
When technology truly empowers life and promotes human flourishing, the results are ritualistic. When the goal is mere innovation and disruption (two words that are increasingly used in tandem by technologists), the exact opposite happens—science destroys ritual and hence destabilizes life.
The prudent society (or individual) recognizes the profound difference between these two types of technology, and chooses accordingly.
Closure, as Ted points out, is vital here. It is a structural part of all genuine ritual. A scroller never has closure on anything, which means he is de-structured, which soon enough produces de-struction - of attention, focus, meaning, significance. I'm reminded here of Hegel's concept of "bad infinity", which isn't infinity so much as endlessness - something quite different. What is more endless than a social media scroll? That is why articles like this are so helpful, because they encapsulate, limit and define, and thus enable us to get to grips with this toxic phenomenon in something like a constructive way.
My painting is ritualised. All my concentration is focused upon my work. My senses connect my intention to it. Every movement of the edge of my brush is simultaneously a part of a ritual and a ritual in and of itself.
I'm sixty eight years old now and I have conducted this ritual on most days for as long as I can remember. I am conscious that everytime I enact this almost daily ritual I am continuing the ages old deeply needful human action of leaving a physical mark upon space as an expression of what it is to be alive and present.
I tried dipping an old obsolete phone in paint a while ago to see what kind of marks I could wrest out of it by utilising it as a replacement 'brush'. Big gestures. Big Marks. Painting from the shoulder.
The result was ugly.
It got recycled.