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.
change the world or change your brain, it’s always tough to say which is more difficult.
My experience is people do reflect on their deathbeds about all the tea they drink. It is possible this is more about tea they drank in company of various loved ones or sometimes in the context of no longer being able to do basic things like go out and have tea on their patio - but there is plenty of reflection on ordinary every day rituals/joys. That being sad I do think people differ in how much these ordinary things can feel sacred (or satisfying) not just from person to person but also at different stages of their lives - though then again the same can be said for the really big sacred things too.
I bow to @rasienna ‘s knowledge of deathbeds, to be sure.
I would say I agree with @balioc factually but not ethically here.
Drinking tea, or going for a walk, is supposed to be good in of itself. You might later be glad at all the tea you drank and moments that were good for themselves, but that’s just being at having fulfilled a terminal value.
Whereas Sacredness rituals are intended not only to make you feel awesome now, but specifically to spur the community onward into… something. Maybe getting out and knocking on doors for their candidate, maybe being kind to each other and recognizing the last year, maybe a war, maybe just getting through the week to the next service.
The point is they are supposedly a glimpse of the sublime, and not the end in of themselves. As such, they can be much more addictive than rituals that fulfill a terminal value and nothing more.
Now, maybe balioc intends to design rituals more like “things that are good for themselves and don’t need any higher claim,” but that’s a hard road to haul and I think that’s the actual problem the post rationalists face with regard to “it’s hard to build a ritual that feels as satisfying as people who are doing this because they believe it.” Specifically the thing they believe is that it will get them even more. (Even more jouissance, IMO.)
Huh. This framing of the Sacred is so ass-backwards, at least from my conceptual position, that I’m honestly not sure how to respond.
The Sacred is a terminal value. It is the archetypical terminal value, the thing at the end of your production chain. It’s the Big Numinous Thing that fills people’s attempts to portray Heaven, or Valinor, or whatever your end-of-the-production-chain moral output is.
…and, in ordinary circumstances, it’s so reductive that it’s hard to see how it could be anything but terminal. The rite is what it is, and doing the rite properly is its own reward. Why do you feel that sensawunda when you see a rainbow? Because it’s a rainbow, dumbass. Why is that expensive hard-to-wear-anywhere wedding dress all special to you? Surely you could have had the same marriage to the same dude in something else? Yeah, but it’s my fucking wedding dress, what do you expect? Why does it push all these emotional buttons when you find yourself dancing in a big dimly-lit room? I dunno, that’s just what dancing is.
You can try to use Sacredness as a social tool to advance concrete causes. Lots of people do, all the time. But this is no more inherent to its goodness-nature than “being given out by the recruiters for the Campus Republicans” is inherent to the goodness-nature of cookies.