Is Ritual a Tool for Resilience?
This is what Josef
Pieper often wrote about this sixty years ago, in his "Leisure, the
Basis of Culture," and "In Tune with the World." He just used a
different vocabulary, calling efficiency "work." He argued that
contemplation/worship are "inefficiencies" that make us resilient human
beings. For him, the Eucharist was the central rite in which human beings needed to participate. Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks makes a similar point in his brilliant essay, "Markets and
Morals." He argues that here are things that are necessary to "dampen"
the efficiency of economic calculation: Sabbath, family, education,
ownership as trusteeship, and the law. Without these "inefficiencies," the market self-destructs.
Is Ritual a Tool for Resilience?
I’m an alumnus at Sinai and Synapses, a New York-based organization that brings together scholars and religious professionals
to study problems related to religion and science. Last week I traveled
to New York for an alumni meeting, bringing together current and past
fellows for conversation, presentations, and lectures. Our topics of
discussion ranged from astrophysics and special relativity to science
journalism and education. My own talk and workshop were on a topic I’ve
been kicking around for a while:
the relationship between religion, ritual, and cultural resilience.
Specifically, I explored whether cultural ritual and non-empirical
beliefs may be under-appreciated ways of dampening our exploitation of
natural resources, by lessening the efficiency of our human economies.
The word “resilience” is used in a lot of different ways. In
psychology, it refers to individuals’ ability to respond adaptively to
stressors – to bounce back from setbacks, traumas, or negative events.
In environmental science, by contrast, the ecologist C.S. Holling
famously described resilience in terms of adaptive flexibility in
complex natural systems. In my work on religion and cultural resilience,
I have in mind something closer to Holling’s view. Instead of focusing
on the ability of social systems to “bounce back” and return to previous
states, I’m interested in the ways that they change in order to keep
persisting.
Resilience vs. Stability
Let me explain. Resilience might sound like a synonym for
“stability,” but Holling distinguished the two. For him, highly stable
systems were those in which key variables stayed within fairly narrow
parameters over time. If the ratio of predators to prey in a certain
ecosystem is always 1:5, that ecosystem would be stable. A resilient
system, though, probably isn’t always a stable one. Rather, resilient
systems can exhibit large changes in quantitative relationships: the
ratio between predators and prey is 1:3 one year, while the next it’s
1:15.
These large quantitative shifts in the key system variables actually make the system more robust. Why? They enable it to make nonlinear
jumps between different (relatively) stable configurations. Having
different potential zones of stability, in turn, makes it possible for
the system as a whole to survive a greater variety of shocks and stressors. Paraphrasing the pioneering ecologist Lawrence Slobodkin, Holling wrote that
evolution is like a game, but a distinctive one in which
the only payoff is to stay in the game. Therefore, a major strategy…is
not one maximizing either efficiency or a particular reward, but one
which allows persistence by maintaining flexibility above all else…The
more homogeneous the environment in space and time, the more likely is
the system to have low fluctuations and low resilience.
Efficiency, then, is often the enemy of resilience. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, entitled “The High Price of Efficiency,”
helps illustrate why in economic terms. In our contemporary,
21st-century economy, businesses prize efficiency above nearly all else.
Efficiency means low waste and minimal “friction.” It means exploiting
economies of scale and reducing regulatory barriers. These phrases
probably all sound great to many habitual readers of the Harvard Business Review, but the article’s author, Roger L. Martin,
cautions that too much efficiency in business can lead to monopolies
and economic monocultures, which are intrinsically vulnerable to shocks:
A superefficient dominant model elevates the risk of
catastrophic failure. More than 80% of all almonds are now grown in
California – so one extreme local weather event or one pernicious virus
could destroy most of the world’s production.
Scary, isn’t it? Especially given that extreme weather events are, uh, not becoming less common these days. Martin goes on:
In our quest to make our systems more efficient, we have
driven out all friction. It is as if we have tried to create a perfectly
clean room, eradicating all the microbes therein. Things go well until a
new microbe enters – wreaking havoc on the now-defenseless inhabitants.
A classic example of an economic monoculture is midcentury Detroit.
Here was a very large city – at its peak, the fifth-largest in the U.S. –
almost entirely dominated by a single industry, automobile
manufacturing. When hard times came for car manufacturers, the entire
city suffered. It didn’t have any alternative industries to turn to.
There wasn’t much adaptive flexibility in the system. Partially as a
result, Detroit’s population cratered, and much of the city is now
vacant, weeded lots.* Colloquially, this is the risk of putting all your
eggs in one basket.
Friction vs. Efficiency
An antidote to efficiency, according to Martin, is friction. Friction
refers to the elements of a system that prevent it from narrowly
maximizing only a single variable. It often takes the form of negative
feedback loops – forces that dynamically balance different variables
against one another, preventing any one of them from straying too far
outside set parameters.
In a forest ecosystem, for instance, the population of predators is
bounded by the the population of prey. Predators naturally want to eat
as much prey as they can, but if they’re too successful at hunting, then
the population of prey will dwindle to the point where it can’t support
them anymore. Then, the predator population declines in response.
This is friction. The predators want to maximize the amount of fresh meat they eat. But they can’t. The system won’t let them.
Human relationships are rich with sources of friction. For example,
if you’re married, you know that you can’t just narrowly focus on one
single thing you want from the other person. Whether it’s sex or
emotional support or money or whatever, the nature of marriage is such
that different interests are balanced in tension against each other. So
if you want, say, sex, you can’t just demand sex. You have to stay in
touch emotionally. You have to plan date nights. You have to do nice
things for one another that seem, on the surface, completely unrelated
to sex.
These relational requirements are propped up around the desire
for sex, tempering and often putting brakes on its immediate
satisfaction. What would happen if those sources of friction weren’t
there? Well, the entire relationship might quickly become centered on
just that single need, becoming the equivalent of a monoculture. Here,
again, the relationship would become massively less resilient. (This is
an understatement.)
In a resilient relationship, there are a lot of working parts, goals,
and patterns. This variability enables the relationship to change and
adjust to different stresses. When one spouse gets sick, sex might take a
backseat while other ways of relating – bedside caring, watching comedy
shows together, etc. – are temporarily prioritized.
By contrast, a relationship built on one thing only is, by
definition, not capable of adjusting to circumstances where that thing
isn’t available. It’s all-or-nothing. So if you’re hoping to efficiently
maximize a certain core payoff of a relationship – reducing or
eliminating any friction that hampers the most direct possible route to
getting what you want – you could be setting up the conditions for
relational dysfunction or even collapse.
Ritual and Religion: About as Efficient as an Italian Bureaucracy
Psychologists and other social scientists describe ritual as “goal-demoted.”
This is a jargony way of saying that it’s often not clear at all, from
the outside, what performers of a ritual are actually trying to
accomplish. A good example is communion or eucharist
among liturgical Christians. It seems to be sort of a meal, but not
really. Nobody eats enough to get physically satisfied. The priest
carries out all kinds of motions and recites phrases that have no obvious physical effect. What on earth is going on?
Well, among many other things, ritual is a source of friction against
efficiently satisfying fundamental priorities. Even a quick and
perfunctory ritual like saying grace before a meal puts a kind of
behavioral check on the most basic reason for sitting down at the table
in the first place: to get the nutrition into our bodies. The ritual
seems to actually get in the way of achieving the practical goal at hand.
Similarly, weddings cost a lot of money and demand a lot of emotional
and other kinds of investment. For what? To make sex and procreation
possible? Well, no, because those things are perfectly physically
possible without marriage. Rather, the wedding ritual historically put
up an impractical barrier against the speedy (read: efficient) satisfaction of exactly those goals.
So, by demoting practical goals, rituals introduce (apparent)
inefficiency and friction into social systems in a particular way. They
make it difficult to rush directly to the consummation of discrete
appetites or utilitarian goals. They introduce redundancy and complexity
into human affairs, which often frustrates our immediate desires but,
potentially, may increase the robustness and resilience of our
relationships over the long term by preventing domination by
single-issue, utilitarian priorities.
Again, look at marriage. If you have a lot of little shared rituals –
regular date nights, shared nighttime routines, regular religious
attendance – then the fabric of your relationship has certain
redundancies and checks built into it. These rituals aren’t efficient.
They don’t connect practical means and ends in linear chains. Instead,
they ensure that, say, if one aspect of your relationship suffers or is
temporarily unavailable, other core processes will continue and can even
be ratcheted up to compensate. Your relationship may not be stable, but
it’ll be resilient.
Ecology
Let’s zoom out. The story of industrial society is one of increasing efficiency, in terms of maximizing
economic outputs and exploiting resources. It’s also a story of
decreasing friction and redundancy in the form of fewer and less stable
traditions. In other words, it’s a story of secularization. Put crudely,
as inhabitants of industrializing societies abandoned their inefficient
and “goal-demoted” traditions, they liberated themselves to focus more
efficiently and effectively on productive pursuits. Technological and
scientific innovation flowered.
So critics of religion are, in many ways, correct to complain that
religion and conservatism encourage conformity and suppress innovation.
That’s sort of the point. But here’s the thing: before the innovation
explosion of the last two centuries, we didn’t have a climate crisis, a million species going extinct, or a hole in ozone layer. We didn’t have mass deforestation in Brazil, nor did we have gajillions of tons of plastic fouling up every cubic centimeter of the ocean.
Of course, we didn’t have a life expectancy in the high 70s, vaccinations against measles and polio, or the Green Revolution in agriculture, either. Nor did we have footprints on the moon or general anesthesia.
So let’s not get too dewy-eyed about the pre-industrial past. But the
terrible fact is that the very processes of efficient technological
advancement that produced the bountiful fruits of the Industrial Age
also made our social and ecological systems massively more unstable and
lacking in resilience, by maximizing economic extraction over countless other variables.Now we’re aware of the massive environmental damage we’ve caused.
Many keen-minded thinkers argue that technological advancement, having
caused the problem, can solve it too.
We can innovate our way out of the ecological crisis, they insist.
Alternative energy solutions, desalination plants, and biodegradable
plastics will allow us to carry on our industrialized way of life
without making such a mess of things environmentally.
These dreams of technological progress mostly assume that our primary
civilizational goal will remain the same: namely, maximizing the
efficiency with which we can carry out productive economic activity.
“Efficiency” itself is even an environmentalist buzzword: think about
the upper middle-class cachet of energy-efficient homes, efficient cars, efficient appliances.
But it probably won’t be like that. In order to balance a runaway
system, you can’t just accelerate its runaway trends. You fight a fire
by dampening it – literally. So what would dampen, rather than accelerate, the runaway cycle of efficiency and innovation?
The answer, as unpleasant as it might sound, may be to divert energy away
from economic and technological activity. I think we should take
seriously the possibility that traditional ritual behaviors are inherent
sources of corrective or negative feedback in social systems that
otherwise tend toward runaway compounding cycles. Again, think about how
inefficient religious traditions are. Fasting all through Ramadan is not efficient. It makes people sluggish and hypoglycemic. Jewish High Holidays aren’t efficient, with all their hours at temple and fasting and breast-beating. Religious buildings aren’t efficient: look at all the unnecessary decorations, stained glass, turrets, steeples, and carvings!
What’s more, when humans partake of ritual behaviors simply because
they believe it’s important to do so, they force social and behavioral
variables to return to certain set points at regular intervals,
regardless of whatever else might be happening. Did the summer crops
fail? You hold the harvest festival anyway. Did a tornado come through
town? You take a few hours off from cleaning up to attend Sunday
services. Are you feeling elated that your political candidate won? You
still go to temple on Friday night. And so on.
(This aspect of ritual can sometimes take remarkable forms. Many Jews in Nazi concentration camps continued to hold prayer services even in the face of near-certain demise. By contrast, it often also doesn’t work like this. Many people only go to religious services a couple of times a year,
and reluctantly at that. But when ritual is truly adhered to, as it is
by the most committed members of any congregation or community, it tends
to have this unvarying, steady character, which works to dampen or
correct other feedback loops in the social system.)
Resilience and Conservative Loops
A half-century ago, the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson drew a similar connection between conservative behavior and certain kinds of systemic resilience:
when we talk about the processes of civilization, or
evaluate human behavior, human organization, or any biological system,
we are concerned with self-corrective systems. Basically these systems
are always conservative of something.
In other words, a system that attempts to maximizes its own survival
over all other variables is self-corrective. This definition echoes
Roger L. Martin’s concept of resilience. Bateson further warned that
in a balanced ecological system…any monkeying with the
system is likely to disrupt the equilibrium. Then the exponential curves
start to appear. Some plant will become a weed, some creatures will be
exterminated, and the system as a balanced system is likely to fall to pieces.
We certainly live in an ecological system that’s no longer balanced,
and many people who study the environment are warning that it’s
threatening to fall to pieces. Our social systems aren’t looking quite as robust as they did a few years ago, either. The efficient maximization of economic growth and innovation has probably contributed to both of these problems.
The solution may be, as Martin recommends, a reduced emphasis on
efficiency – and an increase in resilience. I don’t know whether ritual
really could produce this change. But it seems to have many of the right
characteristics: a self-corrective periodic looping structure, massive
redundancy, and a dampening effect on practical efficiency. The problem
is that resilience, while appealing to modern minds as a concept, is
often highly unattractive to those same minds in the flesh. We’re taught
to value economic and practical efficiency from our earliest years. Our
highest-paid and most prestigious fellow citizens work in buildings
that are the epitome of sleek functionality. We think of, say, village festivals and old religious rituals as out-of-date and quaint, if not illiberal and irrational.
So talking up the value of inefficiency and ritual to modern people, especially successful
modern people – those with graduate degrees and glass-walled condos and
passports full of stamps – is an uphill battle. Such people are the
prime beneficiaries of our culture of efficient resource extraction,
efficient production, and hyper-efficient mobility. But at some point,
we will need friction to make a comeback. Ritual may be a way of
introducing useful friction into human social systems voluntarily. The
“voluntary” part seems a lot more desirable than the alternative.
_____
I recorded a podcast with other Sinai and Synapses fellows on this
topic while in New York last week. Stay tuned. I’ll post it when it
goes live, probably sometime in the early summer.
Also, in the workshop on this topic, other Sinai and Synapses fellows pointed out that ritual also produces efficiency, in the sense that it can streamline social interactions
and increase people’s ability to predict each other’s behavior. Which
is a good point. I hope to return to this topic as I keep thinking about
it, but for now I’ll just emphasize that I think ritual produces
friction against economic efficiency specifically.
_____
* Racism, especially including redlining
– the refusal by real estate agents to sell houses to black families in
desirable neighborhoods – has also been a major contributor to
Detroit’s problems, since it fomented racial resentments and produced
large pockets of concentrated poverty. Again, though, this is an example
of a system’s resilience being impaired by a certain kind of
efficiency: specifically, white families’ monopolization of desirable
real estate, for the sake of maximizing their
own wealth and stability. In other words, whites worked to remove any
barriers, or friction, against the maximum possible extraction of wealth
– a single, narrow variable – from the complex urban ecosystem around
them.
