The Death of Ritual?

look no farther than the family dinner...

One of the biggest organizational flaws I see in startups (who pay my bills) is the lack of ritual celebration, not only of new employees but also of hitting objectives.

Often, the CEO is way too results-oriented and almost financially obsessed. He just moves on to the next ‘problem’ like a manic mechanic. In some cases, these leaders were bankers in a prior life! They just don’t understand the power of ritual to motivate the behavior that creates great numbers. Or are they that ignorant?

One of the lingering downsides of pure remote-working office cultures is the lack of weekly office rituals that humans need to feel bonded. Liking a company's LinkedIn post simply doesn’t activate the brain like a weekly lunch/employee recognition/birthday party.

The Death of American Commensality

When I was a consumer researcher from 2002-2009, living 4-5 nights at a time in hotels all over the United States, one haunting finding emerged from hundreds and hundreds of interviews about quotidian American foodways.

At some point in the 1990s, the American family dinner started withering away as a mutual, daily obligation. By 2010, it had been reduced to a sometimes/when we can event.

And forcing everyone to share the same food was the first thing to go.

Most families I met with educated, working mothers had given up on forcing a daily sit-down ritual disbursement of gate-kept and freshly cooked food. Even once a day had become too much.

Recently, a friend told me they have “no way” to get their kids to eat dinner with them unless they force everyone into the car to eat at a restaurant. Bizarre.

The fragmentation of dietary preferences and peccadilloes has reached strange heights, especially among the upper-middle-class.

Anthropologists call meal-sharing ‘commensality.’ There are a couple of styles of commensalism, and I think India is responsible for most of the variants. Traditional Indian families of all faiths serve the male head of household first, then any elders, then the children, and finally the female cook. I witnessed this multiple times as a guest, where I ate alone before the male head of the household. It’s called serial commensality because it is the status-ordered sharing of the same food. And you have to sit nearby as the rank above you eats. You can’t be off playing video games until your turn. Face. Palm.

American dinner traditions among Euro-Americans tend to have favored eating the same food simultaneously. Call it democratic or unsophisticated. It is what it was.

Today, family dinner is not only not universal but also becoming very rare for working parents with over-scheduled kids. Weekends tend to be when a shared family dinner happens, if at all. Family households of all kinds are a minority of households, though that can’t explain why this ritual has crumbled.

As soon as a fixed dinner time got thrown out sometime in the 1990s, the entire ritual edifice began to erode quickly, including submitting to one person’s choice of meal. As dietary preferences began to individualize in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it became difficult for most parents to cook a shared meal for 3+ people. Not impossible, but a pain. Plenty of parents cook multiple dishes to cater to individual tastes. The iron fist of commensal discipline disappeared. I don’t recall there being any option in the 1980s.

We ate whatever Mom cooked and Dad handed out. And dinner was almost always between 5:30 and 6 PM. I know because I could never watch 3-2-1 Contact on PBS at 6 PM. Or was it The Electric Company? Can’t recall. I don’t recall complaining about this either, but I may have.

As restaurant spending grew and grew in the 1990s and 2000s, I inferred that the increasing frequency of restaurant going (a place where individuals always get exactly what they want) slowly poured acid on the commensal family dinner. It became a growing competitor for the family dinner itself, even on a random Tuesday.

Here’s a family dinner where everyone gets what they want! And you don’t have to cook! And, look, you’re tired anyways! And so, the family dinner slowly retraced to “when we have time” or “when it works”

But, over time, a new variant of the family dinner has appeared. It is a skeletal version of any traditional family dinner in any culture. Multiple meals. Served sequentially. As they are finished. And taken to a chair or a bedroom for private dining! It’s almost like a business hotel with room service!

Am I laughing or crying? I can’t tell. Because I lost any effort to force a daily dinner years ago. That’s how powerful social change is and why it can be terrifying for any individual. Or just saddening?

Notes on Byung-Chul Han’s Important New Book

My literature review for my next book stumbled upon a very important new philosophical critique of the modern world. Essentially, Byung-Chul Han beat me to the punch. I’ve recently been muttering about the decline of ritual in modern life outside of professional/technical settings (related mostly to safety).

“Today, narcissistic disorders are on the rise because we are increasingly losing the ability to conduct social interactions outside the boundaries of the self.”

This is not good, if true, because:

“Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.”

But, it’s not that we are too selfish to engage in ritual. The problem, as he points out, is much worse than that:

“Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity.”

And I can point the attack on the conformity of any kind to a specific, highly educated slice of the Baby Boomer generation who revolted in the 1960s along multiple axes. Some of it led to social goods like better access to abortion services, birth control, and a badly needed critique of the sins of the patriarchal father (so to speak).

But as Byung-Chul and others have pointed out, the mythical ‘60s was not a transformative revolution intended to replace prior conformities. The Baby Boomer Left offered up nothing to replace what was taken down. And when they did, we witnessed temporary hippie settlements and horrifying dystopian experiments that led to physical and sexual abuse (and, in one case, mass suicide).

It turns out that the folks who burn the house are NOT the ones you want to build another one. Go figure.

Once the constraints of mid-century modern social conservatism dissolved, everyone got distracted from pursuing their individual liberties. I’m being sarcastic more than judgmental of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. I’m no prude myself. But, all of this set the primal conditions of possibility for a post-ritualized, purely consumer society lacking any sense of the sacred in everyday life.

“The society of authenticity is a performance society….Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self.”

I can go farther here than Byung-Chul does. Many Americans use the word “ritual” (incorrectly) to point to personal routines or habits. We desecrate the very word that marks the physical perception of the sacred by mis-using it.

I would argue regular ritual participation is a critical civilizational check on the selves of all individuals, a necessary containment mechanism to manage the consequences of Homo Imaginari. Why? Because ours is a brain built for fantastic imaginings, even wild conspiracies, that form the most threat in a de-ritualized, hyper-individualistic society. Sound familiar?

This is why ritual is found in most highly regulated professional activities like a) launching a spacecraft, flying a plane, and bedside patient care in a hospital.

But, in ordinary life? Ritual has mostly vanished.

Or, it survives as monetized recreation, such as Disneyland, riding a rollercoaster, etc.

But since you are the customer in these examples, the ritual is far from really mandatory or sacred. It is faux sacrality, even if it is moving.

I’m working on alternative rituals for a modern, post-religious age. I suspect they should all revolve around nature, the one source of awe that inspired the creation of all religion and the one we have access to without cumbersome ideologies.

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