What Is Ritual?

February 11, 2015 By

Sarah Perry  is a resident blogger visiting us from her home turf at The View from Hell.

If we should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex?

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture II

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khlysts

Khlyist ecstatic ritual

What is ritual? The religious studies scholar Ronald R. Grimes presents six pages of short definitions of ritual as an appendix to his The Craft of Ritual Studies; they make for fun reading, but also suggest a hopeless confusion surrounding a tempting and fascinating topic. William James, in his 500-page Varieties of Religious Experience, provides for us, instead of a single essence of religion, what he calls an “apperceiving mass” – plentiful examples through which the nuances of the matter will gradually reveal themselves. Since a blog post is hardly the place for such an “apperceiving mass,” I will attempt instead to define ritual within a tidy framework, keeping in mind that any such reduction will necessarily miss some of the important aspects of a major human domain. Nonetheless, I do think my simple model provides insight into the nature of ritual, and helps us to make sense of the seemingly irrational behaviors of other cultures, as well as the ways in which modern Western culture is itself a strange, ritual order.

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The Heroine’s Journey

January 28, 2015 By

What are women afraid of? Why do women matter? How are women useful? Do these questions have gender-specific answers?

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says that a hero is “someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” He goes on to distinguish between physical heroes, those who do deeds, and spiritual heroes, those who “[have] learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”

This is a grand and beautiful model. And especially when we just leave it at “someone who has achieved something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience,” it works very well for a hero of any gender. But when Campbell gets into the specifics of what counts or is celebrated as an unusual achievement, or how that achievement goes about getting done, I start thinking “well those are pretty unambiguously good achievements, but they’re also pretty male.”

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Let’s Play! Narrative Discovery vs. Expert Guides

January 21, 2015 By

Ryan Tanaka is a resident blogger, visiting us from his home turf at http://ryan-writer.com. The latest musical work that inspired this article can be found here. (Animated music video!)

If you’ve been watching South Park’s recent episodes, you might have noticed YouTube commentator PewDiePie making a few cameos here and there near the top corners of your screen.  South Park is typically known for its brutal treatment of celebrity and public figures, but surprisingly, PewDiePie was portrayed in a very favorable light this time around: as the protagonist that saves Christmas and the future of entertainment as a whole.  (No spoilers here, just watch the episode for yourself.)

For those unfamiliar with PewDiePie’s work, most of his videos consist of “Let’s Play” videos, where he literally sits at his computer in his bedroom, playing video games in real-time as he makes commentary and jokes to go along with it.  Most of the dialogue is unscripted and improvised, with him simply reacting to the things that happen on screen.

PewDiePie

“What the fuck is that?  What the fuck?” ~[PewDiePie, pretty much every episode]

Regardless of your opinion of PewDiePie himself, Let’s Play videos are more than just a passing fad: it’s arguably the new paradigm of how game commentary will work from here on out.  It has been wholeheartedly embraced by the indie gaming community and the younger generations of our time, even as critics continue to label the medium as being dumbed down and superfluous.  Commentators may occasionally overreact or throw some acting in there for good measure, but the fact that these videos are filmed in real-time helps to keep the experience of it authentic and genuine — something that tends to be missing in today’s sarcasm and irony-ridden cultural environments.  (Personally I prefer watching Markiplier’s channel, just as a matter of personal taste.)  A good portion of game commentaries are admittedly geared towards juvenile and slapstick humor, but there’s something cathartic and reaffirming about watching these videos as they progress through the game at their own pace.

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On the Design of Escaped Realities

January 16, 2015 By
This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Thinkability

Human beings have this amazing ability to retreat from reality without knowing precisely what reality is, in which direction it lies, and how to solve the converse problem of deliberately approaching it. We have gotten so good at this game of retreat that we’ve even managed to define an entire frontier of virtual reality to explore without quite figuring out what the non-virtual beast is. A question of particular philosophical urgency today is this: are virtual realities currently being designed in 3d game studios going to be more or less of a retreat from reality than the consensual fictions of the past, such as 2d games, novels, sporting events and religious mythologies?

I’ll offer a clear candidate answer later in this post, but it seems likely that all fictions — and fictions may be all we have — are retreats from reality rather than approaches to it.  This is very strange if you think about it. How can we be so good at retreating from something while simultaneously being really bad at approaching it? It’s like we have a compass that reliably points away from reality, but is incapable of pointing towards it.

Reality — which allegedly exists, despite the lack of credible witnesses — is mysterious. I’ve met people claiming to have experienced it, but it turned out they were all lying (especially to themselves — people in this business of “seeking reality” often manage to project their own desire and capacity for moral certainty onto their experienced universe, but that’s a polemic for another day).

The only marginally useful non-nihilistic idea about the mystery of reality that I’ve encountered is that it comprises three irreducibly distinct aspect mysteries: physical, mental and platonic-mathematical.  Roger Penrose made up this useful (and whimsically paradoxical) visualization of the triad in The Road to Reality.

3worlds3mysteriespenrose

Whether or not this triadic view is metaphysically the soundest one, it is a useful starting point for studying escapism.

Escapism. That’s the word we’ve made up to talk about the game of retreating from reality. We routinely accuse each other of indulging in it, and in polite company, avoid calling out each other’s preferred escaped realities. An escape is the opposite of a crash. It is a deliberate entrance into a simpler reality, as opposed to an unplanned entrance into a messier one. An escaped reality (in the computer science sense of the world you escape to, not the world you escape from) is the opposite of a crashed reality. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are both varieties of technologically mediated escaped realities. So, for that matter, are gated communities, religious festivals, sporting events and other experiencable environments based on more technologically primitive mechanisms.

This deprecation of  escape as a disreputable behavior is unfortunate. Not only is escapism our best proxy for studying how we engage reality (short answer: backwards, in the rear-view mirror created by our fictions), there is an argument to be made that perhaps all existence is escapism. That the only realities (plural) we are capable of inhabiting are escaped ones. If this strong view turns out to be true, then the only way to directly experience reality would be to die. The ultimate crash.

But let’s start with a more familiar notion of escaped realities, of the sort associated with movies, novels, video games, religions, meditative practices and collecting stamps.

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Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture

January 8, 2015 By

Sarah Perry is a resident blogger visiting us from her home turf at The View from Hell.

A selective sweep occurs when a new, beneficial gene mutation appears and quickly sweeps across a population, erasing the genetic diversity that existed prior to the sweep. Similarly, languages have “swept” across continents as the cultures they belonged to gained unbeatable advantages (often agricultural or military), resulting in losses of language diversity from earliest human history to the present day. Today, half the population of the world speaks one of only thirteen languages.

These are not controversial claims. More controversial is the idea that human prehistory (and even history) hosted a wide variety of human consciousness, not just language, and that these disparate kinds of subjective consciousness were destroyed upon contact with new forms of consciousness. Most dramatically, Julian Jaynes famously argued (in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) that human consciousness changed drastically in the past few thousand years, from an archaic bicameral form in which one side of the brain shouted orders and the other obeyed, to a modern, introspective form. My claim is not so extreme: I simply argue that there are and have been many forms of human consciousness, varying in particular ways, that we retain the “hardware” capability for many forms of consciousness, and that humans are constrained into particular mental states by their cultures, especially through group ritual (or lack thereof). In order to explore this claim, it is helpful to think about our own form of consciousness in detail – a form of consciousness that is novel, contagious, and perhaps detrimental to human flourishing compared with more evolutionarily tested forms of consciousness running on the same hardware.

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Black Mirror as Hell-Is-Other-People Futurism

January 1, 2015 By

Over the break, I watched Black Mirror, the highly acclaimed British futurist show.  I am tempted to call it a tech-dystopian show, but it isn’t quite that. To count as dystopian, you need a corresponding utopian vision that has failed or is stillborn, and the show doesn’t offer or suggest any. People have also been comparing it to The Twilight Zone, but I think the comparison is off.  The what-ifs of the Twilight Zone are about the nature of the world, in the sense of what if the Earth were spiraling into the Sun? The what-ifs of the Black Mirror are about human nature, as in what if all our relationships are based on lies?

The shows differ in their humor content. Black Mirror is humorless right now, but I suspect The Twilight Zone was at least a little funny back when it first aired. More to the point, while The Twilight Zone has acquired significant camp value (in Sontag’s sense of failed seriousness) today, somehow I don’t think Black Mirror will seem campy in a few decades; merely obsolete like old documentaries. This difference in humor content is significant in a way I’ll get to.

So what we have here is a dark but not dystopian show. A show about a steady loss of innocence through increasing knowledge (enabled by technological evolution rather than a fall from Eden), but not about apocalyptic collapses. A show that is not anti-technology per se, but about the idea that technology makes life easier in part by forcing harder, if rarer, choices upon us, as the price of automating simpler, more commonplace decisions. About going from moral mediocristan to moral extremistan.

It’s not quite a must-watch as far as the entertainment value goes. It has the ponderousness of a lecturing professor. But it’s a must-watch in the sense of cultural homework.  People will be using the show as a reference point for talking about the emerging future for at least a few years.  The conclusion most will jump to is that this is a show about tech dystopias, but it is really a show about the theory that hell is other people. The futurism angle is that information technology makes this particular kind of hell more possible.

I don’t have spoilers in this post, and you don’t need to have watched the show to read it, but if you don’t want to hear a theory of the show before actually watching it, come back later.

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Learning from Crashes

December 18, 2014 By

I came up with a neat and compact little definition of a crash as a result of the recent ongoing obsession with the idea we’ve had around here. A crash is an unexpected subjective reaction to an unexpected real-world outcome.

Both parts are important. If you have an unexpected outcome to an activity, but are able to just roll with it without experiencing any mental states you haven’t encountered before, it isn’t a crash. Having a flight canceled isn’t a crash. It’s simply a contingency that you deal with by replanning your travel. Annoying, but hardly a case of unexplored emotional reaction territory.

Equally, having an invisible and private emotional meltdown with no visible external trigger events is not a crash (though it might lead to one).

A crash is something like a failure, but more general and less loaded with negative connotations (think “crash a party”). You can generally predict the kind of emotional reaction in a failure, but not the degree. A crash generalizes this idea: with a crash, both kind and degree of emotional reaction are unexpected. So unlike failures, crashes can be both positive and negative, and are invariably interesting, which to me is a more interesting feature of a situation than its emotional quality.

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Striving, Surviving, Suffering and Slacking

December 11, 2014 By

The more I learn about the life stories of others, the more I tend to view mere survival as an accomplishment in the median case. This is an odd view of humanity, but an accurate one for the vast majority. We are misled about the actual difficulty of basic survival because societies are built around highlighting and celebrating the two ways you can react to easy conditions: striving and slacking. Striving leads to accomplishment, which we celebrate by according high status to the accomplished.  Entitlement leads to visibly enjoyed leisure, which we celebrate in a different way, by sanctifying it into a utopian view of the “good life” a given society offers. Societies advertise both by way of marketing themselves. What is generally swept under the civilizational carpet into invisibility are two other behaviors that are responses to hard conditions: surviving and suffering. These four kinds of behavior form a convenient 2×2 on which you can plot your life in a useful way.

lifeTrajectory

The x-axis should be self-explanatory: it takes subjective hardship as a serious thing, but not as an absolute thing. Smarter and dumber on the y-axis refer to intelligence in the sense of capacity for pure Darwinian survival — a Hunger Games definition rather than IQ.  Note that being further north does not make you smarter. It means you’re getting smarter faster. These definitions make the entire diagram subjective.

Striving is getting smarter in good conditions. Surviving is getting smarter in bad conditions. Suffering is getting dumber in bad conditions — a progressive failure to continue existing. Slacking is getting dumber in good conditions.  Try drawing your life on this 2×2. Note that equal intervals of time will not map to equal lengths on the path. The trajectory tracks your story of adaptation, not your story of aging. When it comes to adaptation, as Lenin remarked, there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.

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Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground

November 20, 2014 By

Earlier this year, I turned forty.

I’ll give you a moment to choose between “crap I’ve been listening to an out-of-touch old dude who looks younger than he is” and “crap, I’ve been listening to a ponderously self-important kid whose picture I never bothered to look at.”

Forty is an milestone in the middle of the uncanny valley of life. At forty, you’re supposed to be silently suffering the mistakes of the previous generation and making mistakes for the next generation to suffer. It’s a time of life to be shutting the hell up and doing Real Things in short.

Some of my old college friends are doing that. And making obscene amounts of money, collecting titles and stuff.

Failing that, it’s a time to be raising kids by way of apology for not doing Real Things (implicitly hinting that your kids will do Real Things, which seems to involve teaching them to play the piano for some reason that has never been entirely clear to me).

Many more of my old friends are doing that. Clearly, the next generation will not suffer from a lack of piano players.

Forty is not an ideal age to be blogging. Because it’s not an age anyone is particularly eager to hear from. At twenty-five, you’ve got inspiring dreams and ideals to share. At fifty, you’ve got complete stories to tell and lessons to convey.  At forty, if you’re not overworked and too busy to blog, you’re just a distraction for everybody.

As far as I know, none of my old friends is blogging. One is a journalist, but that’s different.

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The Design of Crash-Only Societies

November 14, 2014 By

Ryan Tanaka is a resident blogger, visiting us from his home turf at http://ryan-writer.com.  The improv session that inspired this article can be found here.

Blue Screen of Death Windows 8

Crash-only software: it only stops by crashing, and only starts by recovering.  It formalizes Murphy’s Law and creative-destruction into an applicable practice, where the end-of-things and the worst of outcomes are anticipated as something to be expected as a routine occurrence.  When done well, however, it has the potential to make software more reliable, less erratic, faster and easier to use overall.

But there is also a social component to crash-only designs that has yet to be fully explored: the potential for using these ideas to develop practices for building communities and social applications online.  As the worlds of tech, politics, and culture continue to collide, the demand for alternative modes of communication will likely continue to rise.  Crash-only designs hint at possible new approaches toward community and content moderation on the web, expanding the means and methods by which online content and interactions can be organized more effectively and intuitively.

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