In Defense of Thoughtless Ritualism

Bad Religion is Actually Better Than You Think

“How can all these people go to Church or Synagogue every week and say these words that they don’t understand or seem to believe in? They don’t seem religious. They seem like they are just going through the motions and yet they show up without fail. Why?” I get this type of question a lot and so here is my attempt to answer it. What you call “bad religion” is actually better than you think.

I. Matter over Mind

If you ask many a talented artist to explain their work or their thought process behind it, you’ll find the answers inarticulate and unsatisfying.

The same goes for athletes:

INTERVIEWER: How did you score that amazing three pointer right at the buzzer?

PLAYER: I just put the ball in the net. I did what I had to do. We worked hard as a team. I just felt it. And also, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without God. So I want to thank God for helping me make the basket.

Whether you take a surfing lesson, a yoga lesson, or a music lesson, the advice is always the same: “Don’t think too much about what you are doing, just do it.”

In pop psychology, the theory is that masters operate in a state of “flow” where the mind is quiet.

Hubert Dreyfus, the longtime Heidegger scholar, pointed out in the ‘60s that AI might be good at computing things like chess moves, but would make for a terrible ping-pong partner. The reason is that AI is not embodied. It lacks “being-in-the-world.” Isn’t it incredible: the calculus needed to hit a ping pong ball well is more complicated than what most advanced mathematicians can do, and yet even a child can perform the act. Which suggests that our bodies “know” calculus even if our minds do not. To get on in the world requires tacit understanding of “how to” which is very different than theoretical understanding.

Do you want to be like the AI waiting to do calculus before hitting the ball or do you want to hit the ball and learn calculus later? Art, religion, and sports all work the same way—they require worldliness first and understanding secondarily, if at all. The best pingpong players needn’t be good at math. Judging their sincerity or excellence in ping pong by their understanding of math is a category error.

Socrates makes this very point in Plato’s Ion. Rhapsodes know how to move and inspire but they have no understanding of the things about which they sing. This is supposed to be a diss—but I’d flip it: You don’t see people going to philosophy concerts, or gathering around a bonfire to talk about what knowledge is.

Religious people who go through the motions of ritual without depth of understanding are no different than most people who are perfecting a craft.

II. Moral Progress

The Biblical prophets were concerned that religious people were missing the forest for the trees, bringing sacrifices to the Temple but failing to internalize the moral teaching it was intended to inspire. So let’s accept that going through the motions is not the ideal—at least in some cases. Still, did the prophets teach that the people should abandon ritual and just be moral? No. They simply thought the ritual was not enough if not accompanied by long-lasting behavioral change.

You could argue that a sacrifice brought without the right intent still functions as a call option on the possibility of finding meaning in it later in life. We don’t expect children to be fully moral, but to develop into moral agents. In Kohlbergian terms, kids move from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional moral judgment. The prophets are talking to conventionalists, but here’s the key point: you can’t get to post-conventionalism without first being conventional. You need the routine and the rules before you can bend them or look for exceptions to them.

The same is true at the generational level. Perhaps it takes hundreds or even thousands of years for a cultural norm to stick. If you wait for everyone to understand why human sacrifice is wrong it will take even longer to abolish it. But if you just create a society in which people find it off-putting or abominable, eventually people might then come up with a story like: X is wrong for reason Y.

Zohar Atkins @ZoharAtkins

Moral and intellectual evolution is the result of dull, meaningless, repetitive motions, as in The Karate Kid waxing on and waxing off, compounded over millennia.

III. Discipline

I’ve been sending out a Bible commentary every Friday for 3.5 years. I don’t always feel like writing. Sometimes, I’m uninspired. Sometimes, I’m sleep deprived. Sometimes, I’m sick or have a head ache. Sometimes, I’m rushed. But I do it. Quality varies, but focusing on the quality of any one essay misses the point, it’s the sum total of my consistent efforts, not my outputs, that makes the activity worthwhile. Likewise, feeling is overrated. Did I feel good or not during or after writing? Who cares. I did it. Each time I do it I increase the likelihood I’ll do it again, and that adds up. Don’t underestimate the power of reps. Perfectionists waiting for the right conditions to do something will lose out on the opportunity of just taking action. Ritual life is the exact same way.

Does religion make people happier? Does it make them better people? Does it enhance their understanding? Even if the answer were no in most cases, it would be a misunderstanding of religion to judge it by these impoverished metrics. Religion is a discipline. If you judged it by anything else, the discipline would go away and we’d all fall off—in many cases, secularism can be thought of as akin to pointing out that because it’s raining outside you should go for a run another day.

IV. Long Term Investing vs. High Frequency Trading

Religion isn’t one thing. It’s many goods bundled together. People who show up again and again understand this. They understand that even if they get little meaning out of a particular act, the opportunity cost of tweaking it is a loss of the entire system. Removing one pillar might not cause the house to collapse, but who wants to risk it? If the pillar isn’t odious or harmful (reasonable people disagree on how to assess this), better to leave it.

Take a metaphor from finance. You can be a long-term buy and hold investor or you can be a high frequency trader. High frequency traders want to look at every single act and get the best deal. Long term investors don’t care if the stock goes up or down because they believe in the fundamental value. Why should I keep Shabbat tonight if my favorite rock concert is playing and all my friends are going—this is the logic of high frequency trading. Better yet, I’ll do Shabbat and then go to the concert—why not have it all. But you might find the integrity of your Shabbat is worn away by making these micro decisions and that it is better just to be Shabbat observant and miss the occasional concert. That’s the long term strategy, which is about minimizing the number of decisions you have to make. Make few decisions and make them count; it’s less stressful.

Here’s a meta trade to think about: do you want to be the person who makes lots of decisions in a day, litigating the morality and intellectual honesty of your every act, or do you want to have a few criteria every year by which you decide what to grow, keep or trim?

V. Ritual is an Heirloom

If you find something that you can buy and hold you don’t want to sell it when you die, you want to bequeath it for generations.

In 100 years, I want my great-grandkids to look forward every week to Shabbat dinner. I want my great-great-great-great grandkids to observe Passover seder, to love Torah study, to find familiarity and depth in the sound of the shofar. And guess, what? There’s a good chance my wish may come true. Why? Because Judaism is Lindy. It’s existed for thousands of years. Inventing your own rituals and transmitting them at scale is very difficult. How are you going to get 20 million people in a hundred years to all look forward to doing something that is not currently done? Even if the thing works for you and your local community, it’s probably not going to find mass adoption. Religious rituals work precisely because their meaning is not overdetermined. They work because they inspire mass observance, which creates the plausibility structure—the network effects—for their continued success.

Are many religiously observant people just mindless drones? And is that bad? Maimonides might say yes it’s bad relative to the ideal. They’re not elites. They’re basically just heathens in religious clothing. Still, in their defense—separate from all the other arguments above—they are foot soldiers who make the continuity of tradition possible. Without them, there would be no elites, no deeper understanding, no possibility for study. We owe the people who show up a lot of gratitude. We meaning making brooders and intellectualists who need to weigh all the arguments and study all the sources stand not just on the shoulders of giants, but also on the shoulders of simple, regular, unthinking folk whose normalcy makes our endeavor possible.