Rituals
Here is the video this Critical Essay Addresses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_xJpVlry14
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In today’s society ritual persists as a plethora of holidays that don’t possess the same weight of religious significance that the rituals of the past had. The relationship between the past and the present is an important one so long as we care about the evolution of our species. The real use of ritual is significant as well because of the hidden thread that the video proposes runs through history an outlet for transformation and our complex relationship with the ever-changing world. I want to address these issues and offer a way for ritual to advance forward instead of devolving further into a sideshow whose fate is sealed by its own boredom.
This Youtube video from the amazing “School of Life” was produced in collaboration with another of my favorite Youtubers “Some Grey Bloke.” It claims the universal use of ritual is to “help, purge, grow, transition, reconnect to an idea, or guide to inner peace.” They claim the modern disconnect with ritual is a direct result of modernization and it’s focus on production and work as well as personal life. Therefore, it is argued, a key part of understanding modernity is to look at the evolution of ritual. The conditions of our lives today shape our understanding of ritual, so, like a proper philosophical argument, ritual promises to unlock a substantial piece of knowledge. What we also need to do is realize what that knowledge can offer us in terms of our own awareness and conditioning in order to take it as a cue to unlock our own perceptual habits.
During Saturalia the Roman population’s collective stomach is fixated on a purging. Roman citizens were allowed to do most anything for a few days and then went back to their normal lives. To think of a modern Hollywood example of this lawless ritual we could cite The Purge near the top of the list. Questions arise such as “Why is our society’s imagination so twisted as it relates to pure desire?” or “Is Hollywood’s interest in lawlessness purely a means to create conflict and therefore drama between people?” or “Does Hollywood possess an autonomous imagination or even reflect the imagination of the producers making the film?” As well as a number of other questions that may or may not be fair to propose to piece of art. One thing is certain: Hollywood’s ideas often come from places that are familiar and yet people will always be hesitant to assume the connections that Hollywood types rely on to keep their movies fresh. We could also say that ritual has significance today inasmuch as it accommodates the demands of modern life endlessly flipping itself inside out and adjusting to the variations of culture that is the modern world.
Yom Kippur was a time to review one’s personal actions taken over the past year and to consider any unjust actions you may have taken and how you may have hurt people as a result. It focuses on the inevitably sinful actions we commit throughout the course of our lives in order for atonement and blanket forgiveness. I often wonder about the idea of honesty and openness as it relates to understanding our own actions. I once imagined the future of the Internet back in high school, a place where everyone knew what everyone else was enjoying and learning about and experiencing. It seemed like an incredible positive development with the potential to connect people in all types of ways. What has happened is that it has led society toward more fragmentation. How can this be explained? It’s possible that the universal acknowledgement of sin or behavior puts too much focus on treating symptoms instead of causes. It becomes almost impossible to move from the conditions to the conditioned in its present incarnation. Words begin to lose their direct connection to action and instead are used to represent what is basically a change of mindset or intention on the part of the speaker. In this way we represent a progression of thought though nothing visible happens. We can see that Yom Kippur is effectively a ritual that touches on all the major uses described as the heart of ritual and is interesting in the metaphors it establishes that guide human action. Injustice and unhappiness are deeply related in their eyes as well as camaraderie and honesty. We can see in Jewish culture that there is a history of religious matters that is continuous and remains relevant to our current experience of right and wrong. It is hard today to recreate not only what’s stated above but also the concept that as soon as a word is spoken into the world as it relates to action the episode becomes immortalized or untouchable as people tend to settle for a type of respect for the personal weight that it carries. What we can see active in Yom Kippur is that a very personal sense of sinful behavior that vacillates between personal and universal as a function of the honesty of a society that is impossible to simulate for longer than several days. It’s possible that Yom Kippur’s temporary nature keeps its integrity intact. Do we not know that honesty leads to acceptance rather than purity?
If we compare the Muslim culture’s Ramadan to Saturnalia and Yom Kippur we can begin to see a clear thread running through ritual. Ramadan is all about fasting in order to encourage a purification of the soul as well as self-discipline and a humble respect for the less fortunate. It could be said that all of these ideas are just one masquerading as one-pointedness of the soul. Distractions are the enemy and are to be purged. This purge that exists in the excess of Saturnalia, the honesty of Yom Kippur and now the rejection of desire during Ramadan says something very important about our relationship with the world and the true meaning of ritual.
Identifying this as the true idea rather than the three attributes can be difficult but it’s worth a shot. Self-discipline and respect are ideas that are a lot more closely related than we realize. One might say that respect is the realization of the self as disciplined or in need of discipline. Or one might say that self-discipline allows us to respect the hardship of others. We think of them as different as far as respect is seen as directly related to admiration and self-discipline is an inherent characteristic that sometimes results in the respect of our peers. Simply by looking through the lens of language we can see the struggle of our evolution weighing on words and ideas from ancient history and forcing them into somewhat bizarre connections and probabilistic outcome-based understanding. Hume noted that knowledge was probabilistic and not based on the age-old certainty of the past but never could he say that the certain ideas of history didn’t have a genesis in purity.
Presenting language itself as a problem introduces the 50 shades of meaning that constitute the real understanding that can only be understood through language. Respect is not only admiration; it’s an appreciation of something the person you respect has done. So long as we equate these two words we make the mistake a small child makes when the pure admiration of their parents effectively leads them to behavior one could only ascribe to deep respect. The separation of meaning of these words puts pressure on parents to be more than just admired and dispels the meaning of self-discipline to refer to discipline or dedication rather than self-denial. “Respect” could one day come to mean the free wish of those who want something they see in others and take on a greater meaning than “admiration” which exists so that we can appreciate a wider variety of events and a higher level of ability than we could ever hope to achieve. Respect needs to make a return to its throne of actualization and truth and not as a final achievement of a life lived for reasons that aren’t appreciable to others.
This may be the most important universal idea of ritual. We can see that the new age of romanticism represents a movement away from ritual and into individual desire for personal space and time. “For many, rituals are tainted by being associated with the supernatural. That’s unfortunate; even in the hands of religions rituals have been guardians of very important states of mind…A ritual protects emotions to which we are sincerely inclined.” This quote is mostly accurate except for the exact definition of ritual. It’s a mistake to say that rituals “protect” much more than themselves and our inclination to preservation. Also, to say one is “sincerely inclined” is to say that at one point it meant something important to people but other things clouded our behavior. Ritual became part of the past because there didn’t seem to be any use for the religions purposes to which it was so often tied. Whether or not they served a more basic function is the real issue. Admiration of nature may be a type of respect but it is a respect of completely natural processes that often leads to viewing ritual as absurd because it cuts to its heart. What there is to admire in nature is the extravagant outlier who only has respect for being themselves. Ritual is a deeply human activity that can only be expunged not through admiration but from a far more rooted need.
Modern society doesn’t kill ritual by taking it away but by placing work at the heart of society. Help, purification, growth, transition, and reconnecting are all words we can use to describe the real reasons why we go to work. We help ourselves grow financially and continue to transition to higher paying jobs while reconnecting day after day which in effect leads to a type of purification of the soul. The last part about purification I think is true: purity is nothing more than complete adherence to a discipline and is relative by nature to the inclination of the person who seeks it. It is not something I think of as being consistent in a person but in a sense could be natural talent or ability or, namely, action. “Collective purification of the soul” is of no interest to modern industrial bosses but a redefinition of purification into work is currently quite successful. For these reasons, the School of Life makes the mistake of seeing modern societies as devoid of ritual when ritual is still at the heart of it. It is here that the School of Life identifies the rotting heart of ritual without seeing the other side, the outlet, if you will kindly continue reading.
When Nazi Germany is discussed we begin to understand the perversity of ritual and of modernism that represents a kind of pinnacle of history that is able to invoke all types of historical symbols and experience to provide for a new ritual. Nazi ritual exposes its populace to an intense flood of images and sheer power that commands respect and places all human beings at the mercy of their own capabilities. Conspiracy is best accomplished if you can convince your people that there is a conspiracy against them. But what is the true conspiracy? The conspiracy of ritual: the ritual of art, the ritual of speech, the ritual of gathering together and architecture. The video’s focus on the negative impact that ritual has on people overlooks the potential of modern ritual. That Hitler “hastens the modern suspicion of any ritual behavior” in an individualistic age doesn’t seem correct. Today we treat any individual ritual on its own merit without believing in supernatural effects. The Nazi ritual was focused on an idea that is so far-out and super-human as well and anti-human as well has historical incorrect that we must label their ritual likely as the worst in history.
What does seem correct is our transition to London 1966. Ritual and individualization grow independently of one another but find common ground in sport. When observing the ritual of sport we can identify the universal and the personal interwoven in space and time and see reality come alive before our own eyes.
It's at this point we arrive at a counterpoint to our progressive de-evolution to offer the intelligent-minded a plausible explanation for the necessity of ritual and its outgrowth from a basic and biological need. What ritual is, essentially, is a repetitive event that holds cultural meaning by creating a structure for bodies to flow across and become one with. We treasure our imperfect rituals of sport more the more chaos and repetition occur (baseball is called America's pastime or, alternatively, ritual). If we see a ritual repeated 162 times to arrive at the moment the season hinges on its meaning becomes of much greater significance for better or for worse.
To see how tired these grown men are brings up a strange and, I would say, dream-like connection to the devotion we have towards rituals. Resting our minds and bodies at the end of a long day, the modern human needs the rapid movement of sports just like most warm-blooded mammals need the rapid eye movement of sleep to have a restful night. We stress ourselves out without really knowing the why: without great and rigorous activity there is no great and sinuous sleep. Our minds truly are, as Hume proposed, waking dreams of incredible nonsense and delirium. Is our only solace the space between knowing that we're resting and the incredibly ingrained structures of our neuronal pathways. It may be that the self is the place where our perceptions take place, it is an experience that is whole and must take its time to reassure itself that everything is in place and nothing bad is happening. Like firing up a computer to make sure it's circuits are still intact our R.E.M. state is restful because our brain has experimentally exhausted the survival mechanisms and can truly rest.
Rituals may offer this to our waking life, with everyone watching for the outcome they desire rather than imagining natural and instinctual ramifications. We work to rest and enjoy treating rituals as a type of dream. What all of this essay amounts to is a plea for a new type of understanding as it relates to the forgotten cultural places that ritual has occupied. In the future I think proposing the positive impact ritual can have would be a very nice thing to write about. I also think that to not take rituals seriously and their repetitions at face value is another problem that is faced in our sports-driven society. And that space and time and dreaming are related in a way that can be applied to the modern ritual of sport.
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With that I thank you for reading. I hope you can consider a new ritual for yourself that will relax you. The more vigorous the better I suppose. I also encourage dreaming to anyone because it is definitely becoming a lost art for one reason or another. Another topic I plan to write on will be the loss of imagination. Imagination being a clue of the mind to draw conclusions. The major conclusion of this paper however being: individuality is a biological necessity and ritual must keep this in mind to be well-constructed in modern society. In addition, to properly conceive of ritual as having meaning we must bring the individual into contact with forces greater than itself to rectify its place. This cannot be over-looked by our society.
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Hemmingway's Criticism of Marx
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This passage appears in Hemmingway's 1933 short story "The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio:"
“Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn’t thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people, along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people.”
Hemmingway’s rant begins with a snide remark that still comes across lightly because his language is so unique. He is still in the territory of religion as opium, followed by music. His saying “Old mount-to-the-head” I consider a reference to Marx who, had he been an adventurous man like Hemmingway, would have had his hiking gear mounted to his head. He then assumes Marx simply wasn’t clever enough to consider music before bringing the hammer: “economics is the opium of the people.” This poses Marx is in an immortal battle against himself that he cannot win. He takes note of patriotism in Italy and Germany though if he were writing today would surly include America. Quickly he shifts to sex as the opium of the people. He elevates sex in claiming its opium for the best people because, knowing Hemmingway, life and love are both founded by risk-taking and confident individuals who place themselves in harms way and are able to bear the pains of love. Drink is an opium for similar reasons and radio is a cheap opium that is innocent and without consequences. Ambition, Belief, and Liberty all opium now that MacFadden has usurped its usage. Hemmingway’s belief in words turns into a waiting game for a new word. This Hemmingway has an interesting point where he leaps off and trails his way to the ironic notion that “bread is the opium of the people” (a point that might even cause my stomach to snicker to itself). Again, Marx has defeated himself but this time by providing opium to his people.
Where does the waiting lead? Isn’t it safe to say no matter how profound Hemmingway is being here that the wait is already over in a very significant way? Taking language as the basis for exchange, the thermometer of a general human awareness, the way Hemmingway means it in this passage, we are forced to consider the strong possibility that the known universe is already named. The true job of a writer lies in story telling and effectively getting a point across about life and experience. Writing as well as experience can draw new connections to words and give new meaning but it rarely creates new words.
Still, we can’t overlook the most important insight of Hemmingway’s rant: words change over time into new concepts that we take face value and continue believe uphold the basic idea they were created for. What we can do as writers is identify these changes and understand why people often arrive at a consensus for words that still retain their indistinct meanings. Hemmingway’s longing for a new distinct word is in fact the problem posed in a lewd disguise. A kind of Catch-22 we all believe in but cannot pull ourselves away from. That by words becoming distinct natural flaws in the use of language will harbor less confusion and we will have innocent progress in making each word sound perfect. Hemmingway would look back on the various eras of history as a time when man was incapable of taking the risks modern authors would today.
Our task should really be acknowledging the old words for all their cleverness and noting specifically the changes that have occurred over time as an evolution of language. Hemmingway takes the words of Marx literally and evolves an understanding all the while trailing off toward the final truth of bread as the opium of the people, a joke, but an Ernest one. However, the confusion of language we as readers need to be focused on is not the new re-phrasings of Marx but what he actually says. It is a fun exercise but only insomuch as it turns everything into a game and attempts to arrive subconsciously at a greater result.
His assumption that Marx hadn’t thought of music because it would’ve made a better argument is interesting but I think that still the effects of religion are deeply subconscious and hidden by unquestioning individuals so become much more powerful than we realize. Hemmingway’s assumption that we need new words is analogous to a free-market capitalist who continues to believe in evolution despite his inability to identify a need for a certain words beyond a return of the Truth.
So! What is the opium of the people? Why did Marx decide to use this term? To use this phrasing literally today is to unfairly take one piece of Marx and try to impose it on reality and criticize the various inconsistencies. This is what words do; this is what we try to make concepts do. This is what I have to do for this essay to have a point that opposes everyone else’s! Religion isn’t now the opium of the people because it is the motivation of the people. Religion gives us family values, work ethic, and a belief in an afterlife. You can never underestimate its sway on people if it promises an afterlife and is still believed in. Opium is the only thing on Earth that could have such a vast and devastating effect on the people or believers. The dream-world of Religion promises “Thy Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” This is the fair angle to assess Marx. In my mind, Religion today has a much more caffeinated, dopamine-related effect. The dream is so buried in our subconscious as that place we want to be. The only method we have to reach it is a highly disciplined, motivated, positive outlook on life and existence. Religion outlasts its competition because of the faith that people have inside of their souls. Religion is a word like any other that had the core principle of merging fairy-dream-land with earth but has evolved to become an idea with a distinct existence that philosophical efforts like Marx’s only appear as tinted windows on a classic automobile.
The opium of the people today could be called so many things. The numbness we have to one another’s experience due to being in a society based on communication is truly tragic. The words we use to express ourselves may be losing their meaning because we let them stand up on their own in front of people and just leave it there. Facebook is a vast coincidence, not a happenstance (a word that has all but disappeared). Communication exists in so far as you are giving new information, but collective subjectivity and identity is based on shared experiences that you relive again and again in new ways. Trying to relive an experience is normal, something we do every night in our dreams, but talking to someone about past experience is often difficult because it often colors the dream in a very distinct way. But does this mean we need new words or just a change in our own perceptions? Dreams may even cease as you try to market your own ideas: http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/110/selected-essays-of-robert-louis-stevenson/5111/a-chapter-on-dreams/. This transition into the new age is no easy birth. Constant fighting over technology (one in 10,000 inventions live on) and re-evaluations must occur. We need to think about words that may have been accurate representations that we altered because of their various implications and now forgot. We feel that having so many people around creates negative consequences for comparatively slight actions but the words that have consequence often carry too much weight for us to handle.
I wanted to convince you, reader, that our language cannot be thought of just like our economy or evolution for that matter. A thinking person needs to watch change as it occurs across time. This is what our earliest memories often are and it is also what our memories function as. Proper definitions of words are what people can get behind, but actually thinking about this is not what many people have time for now days. Identifying truthful words and discarding the husk for a glimpse of the future is Hemmingway’s real mistake. My task from now on will be to identify the changes (a couple of them in this essay) and to try to understand why we settle for words of little consequence like “innocence” instead of purity (one of them words). I intend my writing to take this path of revitalizing old forms and blending them in a way that is fun for people to learn from. With so many “Opiums of the People” out and about I hope that dreams will reconnect us with something primal inside of us that has great purpose but is masked over by a society of pure, innocent, progress.
THE STRATUMS OF EARTH: US ELECTION KEYS
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s aggressive, hot-tempered, fictional Professor Challenger once told his class “A surface of stratification is a more compact plane of consistency lying between two layers.” He told his students to remember it by heart because it would only become useful to them later. Oddly enough, the modern day Professor Challenger worked at UCLA on seismology, and also happened to be a problem-solving jack-of-all-trades. His name was Vladimir Keilis-Borok, and he was an expert at using the mathematics of pattern recognition to predict his earthquakes and also famously collaborate with another professor to create a highly successful method for predicting U.S. elections.
Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House have been predictive of every election since 1860. The basic idea is there are 13 Propositions and if 6 or more are false then the incumbent party loses election. The keys are as follows:
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Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
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Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
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Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
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Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
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Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
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Long term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
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Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
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Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
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Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
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Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
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Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
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Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
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Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
As an evaluation of Obama: Avoided scandal (+), Killed Bin Laden (+), Got out of the recession (+), Made major policy change (without congressional support) (+).
As an evaluation of Hillary: Couldn’t squash 3rd Party (-) or Bernie Sanders (-), E-mail scandal (-)
Methodology: Merging each election to these keys reveals a process where we can identify the collective behavior of a group of people over time. The keys are forged in the mind of Professor Lichtman but are expressions of political conditions and subconscious value judgments that are not universal but rather political. Like a nearly untraceable smell, the mystery of our personal decisions resides in our attempt to piece together various factors into a form that is correct to us. Elections speak to us and articulate new permutations of a set of repeating factors that have their own solidarity together and distinct from one another to produce a result that is shocking. Our subjective experience is all we know and we almost cannot believe that it could be so predictable.
Why does it work so well? In truth, each key has variability not just in each repetition of the election cycle but also in how it affects undecided voters. The undecided vote is a very sensitive group and any negative factors can send shockwaves through their psyche. Each key has its own consistency that flows through the entire population and affects us in measurable ways. Many of us weigh our decisions in habitual ways without every being able to identify exactly why. The undecided voters who believe in moderation also have anxieties about one ideology winning out or becoming entrenched. These keys show that ideologically based persuasion has become a poor method to woo American voters in the past century.
This could be due to our religious devotion and devotion to hard work.
Democracy? We can now view Democracy as functional as long as it appeases the populace. Each political party has its various methods. Republicans have recently become more divisive and Democrats have unsuccessfully tried to bridge the gap and gain disenfranchised Republicans. That didn’t work because the undecided voters aren’t ideological but care about these keys. When people get their arms twisted they always look directly to the future to figure out how they are going to work in the new world. Americans can see in their minds the solution to their ills and are demanding jobs. What does someone without a job want more than anything? A job.
How can an accident become inspiration? All life is interconnected. The way we categorize life and its principles of organization are often binary. (Computer code, Left and Right Brain.) All these stratums and expressions are coded inside of us but we only now know what the code actually is. You must believe something strange in order to reveal the order of nature. Luckily, once Lichtman and Keilis-Borok got together, their combined knowledge added up to something very significant. My view of life is that there is always an analogous situation somewhere that we can learn from. What Lichtman’s work reveals to us is that by using the incumbent party as the starting point and elections as an expression of performance he has achieved a new belief system of judgments that holds its weight for U.S. voters.
Specific keys:
1) Midterm elections: the last barometer of the party’s performance before the election. By then we have a very clear idea of the political landscape. Candidates are not likely to change much past the mid-term election point.
7) Policy change lifts up other keys. What you do as president is highly scrutinized and becomes what your known for, how they identify you, and how they identify an actively engaged President.
9/10) Military action is justified or not by its outcome. Americans are not pacifists.
Spinoza’s belief was that our emotions are identifiable expressions of doubt regarding the things we’re invested in. This system correctly quantifies the significant emotional investments and sets them up as the basis for judgment.