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I seemed to have missed the part in the article where the author explains why long rituals matter. If you want an answer, I think it's because they help us cop

I seemed to have missed the part in the article where the author explains why long rituals matter. If you want an answer, I think it's because they help us cope with death. By participating a ritual that predates us and outlive us, we feel like our actions help maintain something that will still be there when we are gone. We commune with the ritual to be part of something bigger and longer-lived than ourselves.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neltnerb 5y ago
Events to encourage social cohesion seem like an obviously good thing to me, and having them annually seems to be very helpful for people in consciously experiencing the passage of time. Grieving, spending a moment looking forward, stuff like that. But some data would have been neat.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm not fond of religion, wasn't raised in it but you know religion wars, scandals, etc. But one day I realized that a lot of 'modern life' was being laid on a couch alone watching low level distraction and ads. Suddenly, the idea of sitting with you neighbors listening to latin spells from a wiser (allegedly) person felt like quality time.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    We're definitely missing a "secular religion", as an alternative to the preposterous and regressive superstitions that billions partake in.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      few ideas: i guess we won't go to religion but maybe groupism (just being together) also i often think climate change will force that on us, less means and more challenges => deeper social link (unless violent political structures win first)
jkhdigital 5y ago
I was looking for that as well. Your simple and correct answer is also why people tend to spend much of their lives raising families, and—in my opinion—why a world with fewer children and fewer parents is a dark omen for the future of humanity.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  From the evolutionary point of view, people who are choosing to be childfree to better enjoy their life without child raising responsibilities are doing a humanity a favour: they are removing their defective genes from the genetic pool.
  - ljm 5y ago
    This actually would have sounded better if you said you don't think highly of childfree people, rather than tilting it towards eugenics.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Some people don't like how some facts sound. That doesn't change the facts: it is definitely eugenics, willingly done by the childfrees themselves.
jacobr1 5y ago
> If you believe that the long view matters, ask yourself: what will carry forward these ideas after you and I have left the stage? Multi-generational thinking is, after all, a multi-generational endeavour. So the argument is that to preserve a tradition of long term thinking, rituals would enable the propagation of a community that shares similar goals.
Sosh101 5y ago
I'm not sure it's about death. Organised religion dulls that fear, but I think that ritual existed long before any promise of a savior from death existed. I think it's main purpose is to syncronise large groups of animals that are naturally only social in smaller groups. EDIT: Though re-reading I do take your point about legacy.
- mbg721 5y ago
  My take on it, which I think is in agreement with yours, is that rituals help humans to get beyond just their natural instinct for self-preservation, by participating in specific things that bond them with many other people and often last longer than a human lifetime. So death is part of it, at least implicitly, but I would frame it more around humility or a sense of perspective.
  - Sosh101 5y ago
    Yes, I think that ritual is something like collaborative art. People feel good when they play a part in something beautiful. And as I think you alluded to, seeing something greater than yourself can be a very inspirational thing.
efitz 5y ago
It was in the 5th paragraph: “Rituals are often coupled with pro-social beliefs, such as the importance of community, generosity and being good. And through repetition and long-lived observance, they are a human behaviour on which these ideas can travel across decades and centuries.”
- AnthonBerg 5y ago
  This recalls a particularly beautiful paper from this year: "Relative to other species, humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate—we are willing to incur personal costs to benefit others, including strangers, and people who we will never meet again [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] (see Glossary). These abilities are thought to arise from complex systems of shared moral intuitions about what is “right” or “good” that are culturally transmitted across space and time [8, 9]." From a paper on the human prefrontal cortex in Nature Neuropsychoparmacology: The prefrontal cortex and (uniquely) human cooperation: a comparative perspective, Zoh, Chang, & Crockett; August 19, 2021 – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01092-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01092-5 It's a technical review paper on the brain structure from which the ability to cooperate arrives. I'm unable to judge its soundness and validity but it's an unusually beautiful paper; The abstract itself is beautiful enough that I'll add it here: Abstract: Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate relative to many other species. We review the neural mechanisms supporting human cooperation, focusing on the prefrontal cortex. One key feature of human social life is the prevalence of cooperative norms that guide social behavior and prescribe punishment for noncompliance. Taking a comparative approach, we consider shared and unique aspects of cooperative behaviors in humans relative to nonhuman primates, as well as divergences in brain structure that might support uniquely human aspects of cooperation. We highlight a medial prefrontal network common to nonhuman primates and humans supporting a foundational process in cooperative decision-making: valuing outcomes for oneself and others. This medial prefrontal network interacts with lateral prefrontal areas that are thought to represent cooperative norms and modulate value representations to guide behavior appropriate to the local social context. Finally, we propose that more recently evolved anterior regions of prefrontal cortex play a role in arbitrating between cooperative norms across social contexts, and suggest how future research might fruitfully examine the neural basis of norm arbitration.
jollybean 5y ago
Yes, but a bit backwards. We recognize that are are part of something greater than themselves. And part of that might be helping to cope with death.
judge2020 5y ago
Most things we do seem to be in the strive for immortality - if we can't make our bodies last longer, we can do things that'll hopefully make our names and legacies last longer, thus we stay 'alive', influencing the world, for as long as someone remembers.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  One of my favourite quotes is that 'Everyone dies twice, the first time when their heart stops beating and the second time when they are thought about for the last time'
  - DougN7 5y ago
    I think about this often. I’m in my 50’s and probably one of the youngest people alive that remembers my grandfather well. When I’m gone, will he ever be spoken about again?
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Do you speak about your 5-greats grandfather?
gromitss 5y ago
It enforces pro social behavior. Something that doesn’t come to humans naturally.
travisgriggs 5y ago
My 2c. I think part of what makes humanity transcend much of the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to build on the past through the generations. We do it through oral/written tradition/history, etc. I think these “silly” mythological rituals help bind generations. Generational angst has always been a thing, but I worry that it’s grown worse of late than in the past. But I have no way of quantifiably proving that. I view this idea (generational evolution being the hook that powers our progress) as a basic abstraction of the final verse found at the end of the Old Testament “He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” You can take the rest of the OT myth|doctrine and throw it out or love it; I think this idea stands on its own. The HN community often discusses the future, and we bemoan the lack of forethought for future generations. I think this is important. But I also think sometimes we don’t connect with the past in ways we should. We should learn from our history. We should honor the good those in the past have accomplished. We should cut them some slack, avoid over projecting, and do our best to make the next generational version better. To me, these silly traditions play a part in strengthening those ties in both directions. They may seem irrational in many ways, but the universe has more irrational numbers than rational ones, so I’m ok catering to a little bit of balanced irrationality.
- hattmall 5y ago
  Prosecuting the past is one of the most useless expenditures of energy possible. Instead of pursuing some beneficial or productive avenue we have people today who are organizing and protesting over the actions of people who are literally dead. I think this has to be a unique point in the history of humans where as instead of trying to make some change geared towards bettering things for future generations we have energy being expensed towards just being mad about the past.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    When people are just following the rituals then it’s not a protest over actions that happened in the past by people since dead. It’s a protest of the continuing harm being felt by those groups. It’s also a recognition that those problematic self sustaining rituals are sometimes hard to see from the inside.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neltnerb 5y ago

Events to encourage social cohesion seem like an obviously good thing to me, and having them annually seems to be very helpful for people in consciously experiencing the passage of time. Grieving, spending a moment looking forward, stuff like that. But some data would have been neat.

agumonkey 5y ago
I'm not fond of religion, wasn't raised in it but you know religion wars, scandals, etc. But one day I realized that a lot of 'modern life' was being laid on a couch alone watching low level distraction and ads. Suddenly, the idea of sitting with you neighbors listening to latin spells from a wiser (allegedly) person felt like quality time.
- andrepd 5y ago
  We're definitely missing a "secular religion", as an alternative to the preposterous and regressive superstitions that billions partake in.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    few ideas: i guess we won't go to religion but maybe groupism (just being together) also i often think climate change will force that on us, less means and more challenges => deeper social link (unless violent political structures win first)

jkhdigital 5y ago

I was looking for that as well. Your simple and correct answer is also why people tend to spend much of their lives raising families, and—in my opinion—why a world with fewer children and fewer parents is a dark omen for the future of humanity.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
From the evolutionary point of view, people who are choosing to be childfree to better enjoy their life without child raising responsibilities are doing a humanity a favour: they are removing their defective genes from the genetic pool.
- ljm 5y ago
  This actually would have sounded better if you said you don't think highly of childfree people, rather than tilting it towards eugenics.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Some people don't like how some facts sound. That doesn't change the facts: it is definitely eugenics, willingly done by the childfrees themselves.

jacobr1 5y ago

> If you believe that the long view matters, ask yourself: what will carry forward these ideas after you and I have left the stage? Multi-generational thinking is, after all, a multi-generational endeavour. So the argument is that to preserve a tradition of long term thinking, rituals would enable the propagation of a community that shares similar goals.

Sosh101 5y ago

I'm not sure it's about death. Organised religion dulls that fear, but I think that ritual existed long before any promise of a savior from death existed. I think it's main purpose is to syncronise large groups of animals that are naturally only social in smaller groups. EDIT: Though re-reading I do take your point about legacy.

mbg721 5y ago
My take on it, which I think is in agreement with yours, is that rituals help humans to get beyond just their natural instinct for self-preservation, by participating in specific things that bond them with many other people and often last longer than a human lifetime. So death is part of it, at least implicitly, but I would frame it more around humility or a sense of perspective.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  Yes, I think that ritual is something like collaborative art. People feel good when they play a part in something beautiful. And as I think you alluded to, seeing something greater than yourself can be a very inspirational thing.

efitz 5y ago

It was in the 5th paragraph: “Rituals are often coupled with pro-social beliefs, such as the importance of community, generosity and being good. And through repetition and long-lived observance, they are a human behaviour on which these ideas can travel across decades and centuries.”

AnthonBerg 5y ago
This recalls a particularly beautiful paper from this year: "Relative to other species, humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate—we are willing to incur personal costs to benefit others, including strangers, and people who we will never meet again [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] (see Glossary). These abilities are thought to arise from complex systems of shared moral intuitions about what is “right” or “good” that are culturally transmitted across space and time [8, 9]." From a paper on the human prefrontal cortex in Nature Neuropsychoparmacology: The prefrontal cortex and (uniquely) human cooperation: a comparative perspective, Zoh, Chang, & Crockett; August 19, 2021 – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01092-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01092-5 It's a technical review paper on the brain structure from which the ability to cooperate arrives. I'm unable to judge its soundness and validity but it's an unusually beautiful paper; The abstract itself is beautiful enough that I'll add it here: Abstract: Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate relative to many other species. We review the neural mechanisms supporting human cooperation, focusing on the prefrontal cortex. One key feature of human social life is the prevalence of cooperative norms that guide social behavior and prescribe punishment for noncompliance. Taking a comparative approach, we consider shared and unique aspects of cooperative behaviors in humans relative to nonhuman primates, as well as divergences in brain structure that might support uniquely human aspects of cooperation. We highlight a medial prefrontal network common to nonhuman primates and humans supporting a foundational process in cooperative decision-making: valuing outcomes for oneself and others. This medial prefrontal network interacts with lateral prefrontal areas that are thought to represent cooperative norms and modulate value representations to guide behavior appropriate to the local social context. Finally, we propose that more recently evolved anterior regions of prefrontal cortex play a role in arbitrating between cooperative norms across social contexts, and suggest how future research might fruitfully examine the neural basis of norm arbitration.

jollybean 5y ago

Yes, but a bit backwards. We recognize that are are part of something greater than themselves. And part of that might be helping to cope with death.

judge2020 5y ago

Most things we do seem to be in the strive for immortality - if we can't make our bodies last longer, we can do things that'll hopefully make our names and legacies last longer, thus we stay 'alive', influencing the world, for as long as someone remembers.

ithinkso 5y ago
One of my favourite quotes is that 'Everyone dies twice, the first time when their heart stops beating and the second time when they are thought about for the last time'
- DougN7 5y ago
  I think about this often. I’m in my 50’s and probably one of the youngest people alive that remembers my grandfather well. When I’m gone, will he ever be spoken about again?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Do you speak about your 5-greats grandfather?

gromitss 5y ago

It enforces pro social behavior. Something that doesn’t come to humans naturally.

travisgriggs 5y ago

My 2c. I think part of what makes humanity transcend much of the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to build on the past through the generations. We do it through oral/written tradition/history, etc. I think these “silly” mythological rituals help bind generations. Generational angst has always been a thing, but I worry that it’s grown worse of late than in the past. But I have no way of quantifiably proving that. I view this idea (generational evolution being the hook that powers our progress) as a basic abstraction of the final verse found at the end of the Old Testament “He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” You can take the rest of the OT myth|doctrine and throw it out or love it; I think this idea stands on its own. The HN community often discusses the future, and we bemoan the lack of forethought for future generations. I think this is important. But I also think sometimes we don’t connect with the past in ways we should. We should learn from our history. We should honor the good those in the past have accomplished. We should cut them some slack, avoid over projecting, and do our best to make the next generational version better. To me, these silly traditions play a part in strengthening those ties in both directions. They may seem irrational in many ways, but the universe has more irrational numbers than rational ones, so I’m ok catering to a little bit of balanced irrationality.

hattmall 5y ago
Prosecuting the past is one of the most useless expenditures of energy possible. Instead of pursuing some beneficial or productive avenue we have people today who are organizing and protesting over the actions of people who are literally dead. I think this has to be a unique point in the history of humans where as instead of trying to make some change geared towards bettering things for future generations we have energy being expensed towards just being mad about the past.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  When people are just following the rituals then it’s not a protest over actions that happened in the past by people since dead. It’s a protest of the continuing harm being felt by those groups. It’s also a recognition that those problematic self sustaining rituals are sometimes hard to see from the inside.