I don’t think silly little routines are that silly for most of us, if they are not harmful, and if they reliably produce a positive feeling.
For years, where I used to live, my kids and I would make an X on the door when we left. One of my kids started it, and we kept it up.
One of my daughters, when I dropped her off at her mom’s house, she would wave and say goodbye, and I would pretend not to notice. Then she would do it a second time, and I would say goodbye, I love you. We did this every time for perhaps ten years. It was a routine.
You could look at this and say it is fully arbitrary, which it is, which indeed most human rules of social engagement are, to at least some extent. Suits are arbitrary, and could just as easily be karate gi’s, or for that matter even dresses. Men could wear dresses, and women suits. Dresses, then, would be masculine, and suits feminine. Those who point out it could easily be one way versus another are right, in some sense.
But we all are wired to want consistency. We are wired to want patterns in our existence. It would bother a lot of people if you changed Christmas to July, and American Fuck You Britain Day to December 25th. Or 23rd, just to fully fuck with the system.
People with OCD take this too far, but could you not see a parallel between a person washing their hands repeatedly and a bird building a nest, one twig at a time? I suspect we all have the wiring for OCD, and that in small doses all of us find it gratifying.
This is the nature of ritual. I took a class in college with a guy named Frits Staal, who wrote a book on ritual (and the Agnicayana which I mentioned somewhere not too long ago) called “Rules without Meaning”.
What I would argue is that the meaning derives precisely from regularity and predictability. Walter Cronkite, for example, was a soothing presence for many years. No matter what the news was, there he was to tell about it. He was a fixture, something regular.
Catholic Mass is no different. Despite all the revelations about not just pedophile priests, but a Church which more or less wittingly, consciously allowed them to commit hundred more crimes AFTER they had been identified, the vast bulk of those termed the “faithful” continue to come every Saturday night or Sunday, to receive the Eucharist, to sing the hymns, to perform the ceremony.
In a world of randomness, ritual creates order, or at least seeming order. It is perhaps one of our most important bulwarks against it. I would argue ritual is actually more important than belief.
Which, in turn, makes me think of the Bridge over the River Kwai. Alec Guinness in effect creates a religion of his bridge. He is its chief Prophet.
And here is a larger point, I intended to make several days ago before some bright shiny object (best line from Third Rock from the Sun) distracted me:
The Beatniks, then later the hippies, the “counter-culture” of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and beyond, really really thought that creating a new culture would be easy. All we had to do is all drop acid, or all get hip. All they really needed to do was love the world and nature and Vishnu and Hari Krishna and Buddha and a revamped Jesus Christ and all would be well. The squares would all become wheels.
In the only truly interesting passages in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” Hunter S. Thompson talks about this, how he and the people around him in the first half of the 60’s really thought that they didn’t need to do anything, that this cosmic, holy shift would just HAPPEN.
When it didn’t happen, all of them started drifting apart, as groups, and within their own psyches. The old Hunter S. probably never forgave the younger Hunter S. his naivete.
But cultures are like evolving projects where every passing person leaves some little thing, and the whole thing grows, slowly, unevenly, and completely irrationally, but where at all times there are ideas, and themes, and special places and times, which all of us can root ourselves in. The Hippie Culture/counter-culture had none of that. They have Woodstock, where everybody was high for 3 days, utterly unprepared for the basics of life, and where most of the people who were there can’t remember most of it.
They have no Christmas. They have no First Communion.
And to be clear, the French Revolutionaries tried to create all that. They created new festivals, a new calendar, new ways of addressing each other. None of it worked, because it was inorganic. It was unconnected to the past. So they tried to force people to accept it, through violence. In effect, this was the policy of Pol Pot, too, who wanted to simply kill everyone who wasn’t on board with everything new beginning in Year One.
Civilizations need time to grow. They need solid seeds, and they need time. And they need trust. In all these revolutionary projects. they are asking literally everyone to abandon what they know, in favor of what some borderline or actual sociopath with zero people skills or empathy thinks they should embrace.
From Burke onward, I think all intelligent people have recognized that cultural change happens from within. What was, is turned in a new direction, but without getting rid of the old. This is the essence of Conservatism, as I understand it: you do not reject change, but you simply do not accept the need to fully separate from, to build walls against, the past.
Take the Civil War monuments. OBVIOUSLY they are not hurting anyone. Smart people look at them and learn from them. That was a nasty, long, vicious war. Americans killing Americans, and the blacks not all that much better at the end than the beginning, and a generation of skill, intelligence and talent killed particularly in the South.
All Americans could look at these monuments, at Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, and remember and realize the perils of abandoning dialogue, and embracing violence. We can remember that that war seemed easy from BOTH SIDES. The South seemed to think they would have us licked in a month, and on the Union side only Winfield Scott seems to have understood that Richmond was much farther than 50 miles (or whatever it was) from Washington. The route to Richmond began in Mississippi. The war would be long. He knew that, because he was a man of immense intelligence.
Once violence starts, it is so hard to stop. This is what I think all conservatives see, or at least should see. Sure, you can pop that little sissy with the big mouth. Then what? There are no easy enemies in developed countries filled with educated, skilled people. There are no easy wars among roughly equal enemies. We don’t want to be shooting each other in the streets, and if I had to guess, I would suspect the Leftists have an advantage on the cyber side, which is a very important terrain of battle, perhaps critical, although of course we have a lot of veterans with skills in this area.
I guess what I am saying, is we can study HISTORY, what actually happened. We can look at people who were happy one moment war broke out, and burnt out shells 4 years later. We can look at prosperous communities that were struggling to feed themselves after the fire of war came through.
We can say: they were not so very different from us, were they? We all think more of ourselves than we probably should. It’s most likely adaptive in most contexts. But where violence is concerned, look, look, and look again. “Violence is the last recourse of an exhausted mind” is a quote a friend of mine once shared. This quote was apparently a favorite of his father, who was Mafia. Even the Mafia would prefer intimidation, or bribery. Or both. Because they are SMART. No smart person goes to violence as anything but the last possible alternative. Asimov’s version, which I think I recall correctly some four decades after reading it, is “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”.
OK: this last little rant is off topic, but given how hard Democrats–foolishly, for all the reasons I just mentioned–seem to be wanting a civil war of some sort or other, I thought this all worth saying. They are dressing up in all black like Italian Fascists. They are carrying clubs, wearing helmets. They are attacking random people. As groups, these Antifa gangs could be rolled over by equal groups of veterans in a heartbeat, but in many places the government seems to be on their side. All of these things should give thoughtful people pause.
When it goes to violence, if it goes to violence, some genuinely good, deep, important part of our national soul will have suffered a deep wound, and none of us who ACTUALLY love this country can or should countenance this lightly or easily. It’s an ugly tragedy, if it comes to that. It’s a major loss.