OK, let’s try coming at this from a slightly different angle…
There is this quality, which human cultures can invest in particular roles and objects and spaces and behaviors, that we call Sacredness. It’s hard to pin down exactly what Sacredness is – certainly Jonathan Haidt botched it very badly – but, well, we know it when we see it. It’s the thing that makes something powerful and meaningful in-and-of-itself. It’s the thing that makes weddings and funerals and Christmases automatically full of predictable kinds of resonance. It’s the thing that grips at your soul when you see a [cathedral / redwood tree / rocket-ship launch / insert your favorite cultural holy symbol here].
Sacredness is an enormous force for good in the world. It kindles wondrous flames in the heart. It brings us together in the mutual experience of that kindling. By and large, we should wish for there should be sacred things.
But there is also a terrible problem, which is this: Sacredness exists only in shared concept-space, and thus it demands homogeneity of us. You have to have the same background as everyone else, or you can’t appreciate the ritual; you have to do the ritual the same way as everyone else, or it won’t hit the right notes. On a macro scale, this is the kind of thing that pushes divergent cultures into war, because people will kill and die to ensure that the Sacred Thing stays properly Sacred. On a micro scale, it means that you have to be on the same page as everyone else, because that’s the only way to wash your soul with Sacredness. If the ritual just doesn’t work for you, because you’re weirdly-shaped in whatever way, then you’re totally fucked. Even if the ritual does kinda work for you, you have to go back to it whenever you want Sacredness in your life, and maybe that’s not exactly what you want to be doing – maybe you have your own projects, your own interests, that matter more to you – but tough shit, those things don’t mean anything to anyone, go put on a wedding dress or a Christmas sweater if you want to have any shot at experiencing the magic.
This problem cannot be completely solved, even in theory. Sacredness has to exist in shared concept-space – it’s the sharing, the collective-recognition and collective-reinforcement, that produces sacred power in the first place. It’s already (more or less) true that, in the privacy of your own bedroom, you can be and do whatever you want. Somehow this fails to satisfy, at least by the standards of cathedrals and rocket-ship launches.
But we can find a middle ground. Or, at least, we can try. We can create a shared cultural vocabulary, a universally-accessible suite of understandings, that allow us to invest Sacredness into each other’s private individual selves. We can say “you are not who I am, you do not do what I do – but I see who you are and what you do, and you are a part of the glory of the world, and I honor you.”
The rituals can be built to allow for tremendous amounts of variation and customization.
This is pretty much what I want from the world.
Sacredness is the concept that gets you past empty contractarian liberalism.
It’s very easy to say “yeah, whatever, man, do your own thing, no skin off my nose.” But it turns out that getting to do your own thing is the beginning of what’s needed, not the end. The world is full of people who are wholly empowered to do their own things, and who have been driven to violent madness by the despair of their lives. No man is an island. We want to do our own various things, and have that matter.
Identity is the concept that gets you past the madness of ideological combat.
You want to be the person you want to be – which is reason enough for you to follow your path, and reason enough for the world to honor it. You don’t have to prove that you have some special Objectively Approved Justification. You don’t have to prove that your dream is especially important because you’re oppressed, or saving civilization, or battling the powers of Hell, or anything. It’s enough to be a human working at a dream.
Which is a very good thing. Because it turns out that trying to establish the Objectively Approved Justification for your particular shtick is almost certainly going to lead to war.
Huh.
I think sacredness in this sense is exactly what I’m opposed to. I don’t like the idea of the sacred, or these shared meaningful-objects.
And I find I’m confused because I completely agree with your last section. But it seems like the way you get there is to reject sacredness and the search for meaning.
Well, OK. What else you got?
That’s flip, but I do mean it seriously. Sacredness is, in the end, responsible for most of the good things in our lives – or, rather, for most of our ability to find things good. Lots of little hedonic joys come and go, and moment-to-moment they add up in a utilitarian sense, but the things that stick with us and keep providing psychic value are sacred things. Your wedding, Christmas morning, that Magical Resonant Moment you spent up on the rooftop watching the sunset…or your (narcissistic) identity, which is basically a little religious totem that you keep inside your head, allowing you to map yourself onto a portion of the divine…etc. etc. etc.
(SIDEBAR: Speaking as someone who has them to some extent, I’m convinced that this is also how autistic-style special interests work. It’s not just a matter of “oh, I happen to keep on finding facts in this particular domain super cool” – the domain itself becomes sacred, and beloved, and this sets up a feedback loop of psychological reward as you keep on exploring it.)
Without this technology, we’re left with…the hedonic treadmill. The chase for ever-more-potent highs, ever-more-satisfying victories, as the joys we’ve already won become stale and boring. Joy, by itself, isn’t built to last. I am not content with this plan.
you seem to be differentiating between things in weird ways, going from sacred rituals that require a shared concept space to autistic special interests which don’t seem to at all.
what about people that enjoy a good walk or a cup of tea; they aren’t trapped on some hedonic treadmill where they have to walk longer and longer to get the same rush or directly inject gallons of tea into their veins
I am differentiating between things in weird ways. I think that the particular lines I draw to delineate these concepts are useful lines, so I’m trying to spread my way of thinking about such matters.
Special interests are very satisfying for the people who have them. They are not, under normal circumstances, completely satisfying – at least not on their own – precisely because they don’t operate in shared concept-space. They are lonely, and by-default-unrecognized, and because of this there is a hollowness to them. Which is why there is such phenomenal joy when it turns out that a special interest can be communicated, or (better yet) shared: the power of the rite is finally being acknowledged.
(These observations apply to, uh, people on the relatively-social part of the special-interest-having spectrum. I am not remotely qualified to comment on how things work as you move towards extreme disconnectedness.)
If you don’t have a Private Sacred like a special interest, then you’re stuck either (a) trying to use a Public Sacred, which is great but has the aforementioned major potential problems, or (b) trying to wring your joy directly out of the environment in an unmediated way.
Which does not work very well even in the medium term, I find, let alone the long term.
Long walks and cups of tea are great. They can make you really happy while you’re enjoying them, at least if you’re in a primed-to-enjoy-things kind of mood. But they don’t stick; once they’re gone, their hedonic value goes down to nothing almost immediately. The snarky framing is “no one, on his deathbed, reflects with satisfaction on all the tea he drank.” The less-snarky framing is that, if you’re trying to keep your life satisfying by filling it with Nice Moments, you’re going to burn out your Nice Moment Generators really goddamn fast. The world just isn’t designed to provide you with a constant stream of even moderately-pleasant inputs, let alone a constant stream of inputs pleasant enough to ward off the creeping existential despair.