We’ve got problems. Serious, global problems. In order to solve them, we have to develop new techniques outside the mainstream ones of using specialized knowledge and the mechanisms of capitalism. One of these techniques must be a shift to a more holistic view of society: we need to understand how society functions not just atomically as a collection of individuals and technology but as a whole, along with all its emergent behaviors.
And if there is one emergent behavior of groups that is as old as time itself, it is the ritual. Ritual behaviours are behaviours that are collective, symbolic, and according to psychological research, useful for promoting group cohesion, affirming group values, and establishing group identity. Rituals evolve and are integrated into our mythology.
However, rituals are not all good: just like biological evolutionary traits, if the environment changes, rituals can become maladaptive and start to accrue negative effects, which in turn are often hidden because of the strength of the mythology behind the ritual. For example, I would argue that Christmas in many countries is a ritual that has taken on maladaptive characteristics because it has been subsumed into consumerism, promoting tremendous amounts of waste.
There is a much more interesting example: science. I claim that science itself has taken on ritual characteristics. Of course, this doesn’t mean science is useless. On the contrary, we definitely need to understand the basics of climate science if we are to understand how to mitigate the climate disaster, for instance. But the scientific method and the body of knowledge of science is rather different than the practice of science itself, which has become largely ritualistic.
Why is science ritualistic?
If we actually look at the daily practice of science, we can see many aspects of ritual. First, it is expected that we simply discover things now. That science is good has become a truism, or a part of the mythology of science. Children are expected to take an interest in STEM fields, and scientists themselves are expected to stay within their field, furthering their body of knowledge no matter what.
Second, many bodies of science seem crucial in our plight to solve problems, but they don’t actually solve anything. Climate science continually develops complex models and new predictions, and we really have done nothing with that knowledge. The CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise: we have not made one dent in flattening that growth curve:
Thus, scientists effectively discover crucial facts about how we are destroying our home. The discovers are lauded as important, given media time, and yet the world keeps going as it always has. Even mainstream environmentalism reflects this: their only solutions is further economic growth, disguised with ideas of green energy. That is what happens in general with science: the impact of its discoveries can only be made within the narrow parameters of global capitalistic growth.
Yes, science is not purely a ritual. It is motivated by other practical concerns: economic development, technological development, cures for diseases, and the like. So you might argue, it’s not a ritual but a response of a people that are thoroughly trained in specialized thinking.
But the curious thing is that the psychological drive to continue scientific investigation is indeed ritualistic: students spend a certain number of years to be indoctrinated into scientific society, pursuing specialized questions they themselves would never have asked. They write scientific papers and go to conferences. They must follow specified lines of reasoning based on previous lines of reasoning. In other words, the actual practice of science is ritualistic because it follows a highly mechanized a pre-prescribed path. Moreover and crucially, those who do so do it without much question: there is little autonomy in science because one must stay closely in their field and continually apply their knowledge in their field.
Is this not highly pathological? If we were solving a problem in a small primitive society, would we not try and device solutions to our problems and continually ask if our methods or techniques are appropriate? Science does not do this: they set up a laboratory and pursue their subject of study regardless of whether their study pertains to any sort of problem at all. Of course, I am not arguing against basic science: the pursuit of questions out of curiosity in itself is not a bad thing. But the institution of science as a whole merely uses the curiosity of scientists in order to further the ritualistic practice of science on a societal level. Indeed, within the walls of science, curiosity is tightly controlled: it still must conform to the standard path of building upon existing lines of previous research and inevitably become more specialized as time goes on. You can imagine a drug that robs people of all curiosity and yet pushes them to further science. Nothing much would change, I think.
Yes, we cannot call science purely ritualistic as some rituals are, such as prayers with incense. But science as it is practiced today is ritualized so that people as a matter of course become interested in it. And that’s not surprising when we look at the key functions of rituals: group cohesion, group identity, and the affirmation of group values. The extreme difficulty of the climate crisis along with the expectation of science to solve it with technology has induced the ritualization of science, because scientists themselves, facing all this pressure and even accusations of uselessness psychologically need to have a high level of group cohesion to counteract the psychological pressure of the times. Ironically, the ritualization of science in this manner has rendered it all the more impotent because its own rituals make it incredibly resistant to change for the better. This is compounded by the fact that the general populace look to science and technology as a religion more than anything else.
The relation to technology
This phenomenon is all the more reflected in our society itself when it comes to technological development. Do we actually need more technology? Is your life improved by 3G, 4G, or 5G networks? 8K video? Yes, you might find these things amusing, but if you didn’t have them and never knew about them, would you be worse of compared to the situation of having them? No. They are useless in the worst possible way: not only do they cause environmental damage to develop, even with a thousandth of the developments we have today, we’d still have more than enough intellectual amusements to last a lifetime.
So, we just get new technology because it’s there. Yes, technology grows directly because it provides marginal gains and this motivates its widespread adoption. That phenomenon in itself is not ritualistic: rather, the ritual nature of technological development refers to our own psychological mindset. So, while the development and use of the technology may sometimes be motivated by practicalities like curing diseases and solving real-world problems, the general milieu that encourages technological development in the first place in terms of the genesis of technological innovation is ritualistic: we gravitate towards it because it has become entrenched in our way of doing things.
And that is extremely dangerous because ritualized behavior implies a blind spot, making us unable to see when that behavior becomes maladaptive.
Yes, people go after knowledge because they are innately curious. But that is not a sufficient condition for technological development. Indeed, one could easily imagine a society that does not develop much technology but still has abstract sciences and arts for the curious, and it is absolutely clear that artistic pursuits without technological development is sufficient to satisfy our intellect. Yes, people have an innate desire to build things sometimes, but that desire can be directed in many ways other than continuous and paradigm-changing technological development on the level of global, unsustainable capitalism.
This entire argument does not invalidate the thesis that technology is deterministic, that it has a momentum, or that it has autonomous characteristics arising as emergent behaviors from its collective, growing mass. On the contrary: it merely provides a psychological view into the agents that further technology, namely, us. In short, there is simply no cognition in the development of science or technology when it comes to the actual decision to go ahead with that development. No wonder we have so much mental energy and potential to develop such advanced things: we have completely relegated the difficult social decision to create such a destructive society to ritual, the very nature of which is only increasing our resistance to the very change we need!
What should be done?
I am not advocating for the destruction of science. The answer to a diseased institution is usually not immediate destruction. Moreover, human endeavours usually develop ritualistic aspects and the goal is not to destroy the ritual. Rather, the goal is to think about the psychology of the ritual so that we can understand the weaknesses that arise from a lack of change due to the existence of the ritual.
In other words, using the framework of understanding the ritual in science (and in general, in society), is one of the crucial steps to understand how we can evolve to move past the current serious problem of unsustainable global capitalism. And this is so because global capitalism, while at first glance is something that has arisen out of what some call the period of “rational enlightenment”, is actually highly ritualized in a variety of ways that in turn goes against serious, but necessary change.
Thus, the understanding of the ritual is a wake up call: it is a call to redefine the nature of what science is, why we do it, and how we can modify it to change course to minimize the catastrophe of unsustainability. The world of science needs to be more than just a collection of specialized workers subservient to the capitalistic system: it must transform itself into a body that takes action and investigates, much as a detective doesn’t just find killers but catches them.
It would be foolish to completely prescribe a new set of practices that would make science better, for true and lasting change cannot come about through a single revolution towards a single goal. Rather, we must all tear down the foundation of enlightened inquiry, examine the unconscious ritualistic behaviour of our times, and create something new for the hardest challenges humanity has had to face.