Tthe adjective “ritual”, from Latin via French, means related to religious rites. (A rite, according to the OED, is “a prescribed act or observance in a religious or other solemn ceremony”.) However, once it appeared, the word “ritual” could be used pejoratively to refer to things that empty is to be indicated. of authentic spiritual content. In his Ecclesiastical History (1570), for example, the martyr John Foxe complained about two letters wrongly attributed (so he argued) to the third-century Pope Zephyrinus: they contain “no way of teaching” but only “certain ritualistic decrees to no purpose”. Today one can speak disparagingly of some writer’s “ritual bowing” to fashionable norms, to accuse them of a kind of moral and intellectual cosplay.
Perhaps then we have long been a defender of the value of ritual, in all its style-over-substance glory? That’s what Harvard business professor Michael Norton aims to provide in his book, an amiable and distracting-enough essay in the genre of airport-friendly clever thinking. Although he notes the power of long-standing social rituals such as the wedding or the funeral, Norton’s interest is mostly in the other kind: “idiosyncratic behavior that can arise spontaneously”. From Rafael Nadal’s endless routine of ball-hopping and shirt-pulling before each serve, to a romantic couple giving each other ladybug-themed gifts, the message is that rituals can not only optimize athletic performance, but we can enrich lives in general, and strengthen relationships, to encourage attention to the moment, and – perhaps most importantly for the target audience – to trick one’s employees into being more happily productive.
Norton selects nuggets from psychology and social science research to build this case, and also describes his own research on the topic, which consists of a mix of large-scale surveys (on what kinds of personal rituals people perform while grooming, exercising or retiring to sleep) and laboratory tests, in which people are taught rituals and then asked to cooperate on tasks. It seems that imposing arbitrary rituals alone (clapping, chanting, whatever) helps a group of strangers become a team.
In this story, it is precisely the emptiness of rituals that makes them valuable as “emotional catalysts”, when they are not actually exercises in magical thinking, such as rain ceremonies. (Other animals may also be prone to magical thinking: pigeons have been observed to repeat a nonsensical action that was once rewarded with food in the hope that it will work again.) But when is a ritual not a ritual? Norton discusses family “rituals” such as choices about specific foods or Johnny Mathis records at Christmas, but it seems more natural to speak of them as invented traditions. (This maintains the author’s point that we can appreciate these traditions very deeply through what he calls “the Ikea effect”: if you build it, you like it more.)
I was tickled to hear that concert pianist Sviatoslav Richter always carried a pink plastic lobster backstage with him before a performance, but was it really a ritual or just a superstition? Meanwhile, if I do something habitual, but without any particular drama – for example, drinking two cups of coffee before writing a book review – it’s not a ritual either. As Norton notes, the “essence” of a ritual is how it is performed, not what is done. Perhaps one synthesis of such arguments might be that the idea of ”ritual” itself is a spectrum, at one end of which lies mere habit, at the other end ceremony.
Alas, rituals also have a dark side, and not just when they are explicitly satanic. The most troubling finding in this book is the facet of the ritual-as-social-glue: it appears that groups brought together with novel rituals in a research setting automatically view others who are taught different rituals as an out-group , less worthy of respect. In this light, the earth’s long history of religious wars seems less like a series of battles over real doctrine than just another part of us against them. Even so, the book’s overall point may offer reason for cautious optimism: in a disillusioned world, attention to tiny rituals can make some room for everyday magic.
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