Hacker News Reader

Comment by buntsai | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the author on the centrality of ritual in 荀子. But I find the author's suggestion that we should invent new rituals hubristic and naive.

We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?

Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm.

The author needs to read the first few pages of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

View on HN

Fraternal societies (everything from "greek" societies in universities to the Masons and elk lodges) did this quite well until recently, collapsing membership along with other communal organizations.

I think we still have rituals. Rituals are often invisible to the participants, so it wouldn't surprise me if ours were invisible to us. I can't think of strong ones off the top of my head. Perhaps social media rituals, like posting certain content to "appeal to the algorithm".

I definitely think we have rituals that are somewhat invisible to us. There are ritualistic aspects to consumerism, for example.

From an anthropological perspective, ritual just means "repeated behavior with some significance". So yes they aren't going anywhere; you can describe most behavior that isn't strictly biologically necessary as a ritual.

There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals. S. Junger (https://amzn.to/4nSaxfY) and M. P. Some (https://amzn.to/4eB5sUW) do a great job of making this point from somewhat different (and non-eastern) perspectives.

"There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals"

Or that in the older days, people lived and worked mostly closely together. Now people live isolated, don't interact with their neighbor at all (I don't even know most of the names of them after 1 year) bring their kids to one place away, then go to work on even another place with again another set of people. So lost rituals maybe play a part as well - but mostly I see it just as a very uncommunal livestyle.

(but thanks for the book recommendations, they look interesting)

After virtue is definitely going on my reading list. The idea that we use moral language vacuously because we don’t share the same worldview as the people who invented it is fascinating.

I’m concerned about theories that state that a larger society-wide effort has to be made to bring ethics back to life though. This is because I’m gay and historically societies haven’t always had a great outlook on me. Maybe I could live in a world that had a coherent telos for gay men that didn’t involve them being stoned to death.

Same on the first part, the Wikipedia summary makes it sound like a very interesting read.

"We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?

That sounds sensible to me.

"Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm."

I don't know where that train of thought is going but the 1936 Olympics is generally considered a fact but not a happy one. Jesse Owens was a shining light there ...

"new rituals hubristic and naive."

I think the author handles this by pointing out the constant in change: human nature which does not change plus change itself.

In that context ritual symbology has a half life in human nature. It needs to be periodically made anew.

Ritual becomes form without substance or becomes corrupted eg.Martin Luther's grievances to the church.

As another writer (I believe Joyce) once analogized, periodically there's nothing left but to pick up the broken shards of colored glass from the cathedral and reassemble it making anew partly connected to past but mostly reconfigured to now.

Whence the 64 million dollar question here: why broken?

> Let us therefore just come up with a new set?

This is one of the purposes of 中国式现代化.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com