The Death of Ritual - Updated

and initial reviews of my book - Our Worst Strength

Happy kids eating individually chosen dinner foods…at the table!

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 even bankers in a prior life! They just don’t understand the power of ritual to motivate the behavior that creates those great numbers.

One of the downsides of purely 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.

Rituals are a category of social practice where:

1. Formal roles exist (parent/kid, priest/layperson, sick/healer)

2. There is a mandatory, structured process in which participants exit transformed (symbolically, emotionally, or physically)

3. There is a formal authority structure.

4. Central authorities police process variations rigorously (lots of can't dos)

5. The inertia of 'how it has traditionally been done' matters a lot, a whole lot, even in non-institutionalized settings (e.g., on-island Haitian Voudon)

6. The motives behind rituals relate to enforcing communal harmony (rituals of adulthood, absolution of sin, healing the mentally ill, family formation, office collaboration, etc.)

One of the more ironic places to see decent ritual practice is an elite MBA program, known for introducing things like coed trust falls (and the like) to blend students into a uniform peerage (I saw this firsthand at the University of Chicago in 1996).

In professional sports stadia, we observe all sorts of ritual processes with surprising degrees of conformity (and censure for the overly drunk).

Ritual tends to follow the media and sports money in modern America. Otherwise, we do our own thing.

There is no better cultural site to observe the broken state of quotidian American ritual than the evening dinner in homes with young children.

Let me explain…

The Death of the American Family Dinner

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. At the time, we termed it the ‘restaurantization’ of the family dinner. After all, my accidental social history of Baby Boomer food behavior (gleaned from years of in-home research in the 2000s) suggests that Millennials were the first generational cohort to grow up with Moms cancelling dinner and taking them fast food routinely and not as a special family treat (i.e. it’s Saturday, someone’s birthday or a road trip).¹

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.

More recently, a friend told me they have “no way” to get their teen-age kids to eat dinner with them unless they force everyone into the car and go to a restaurant. This was less about catering to individual tastes than it was about keeping them from taking their plate and separating off into siloed media worlds. Most parents of Gen Z kids have experienced this battle to sit down together at home.

Today, 50% of family dinners occur at restaurants (or out of the home).²

What is Dinner Really About?

Anthropologists call meal-sharing ‘commensality.’ In Germany, the big family meal is breakfast. In the U.S., it’s evening dinner. In rural India, it’s lunch (farmers can’t las until dinner). There are a couple of styles of commensalism, and I think India is responsible for most of the lesser-known variants. Traditional Indian families, for example, 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 usually ate alone before the male head of the household. This approach to eating enacts social hierarchy through something called serial commensality or the status-ordered sharing of the same food. And those waiting to eat next have to sit nearby as those ranked above you eat. You can’t be off playing video games until your turn. Face. Palm.

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

Today, family dinners are not only not mandatory or rigidly structured but also becoming very rare for working parents with over-scheduled kids. Getting everyone together at one time either leads to an 8 PM dinner or folks eating as they appear. Weekends tend to be when a shared family dinner happens most often, if at all.

As soon as a fixed, obligatory family dinner time got thrown out sometime in the 1980s/1990s, the entire ritual edifice of family mealtime began to erode quickly, including submitting to one person’s choice of meal (i.e., the Queen Mother). 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. Some parents now ‘cook’ multiple dishes to cater to individual tastes (it’s not as hard as it sounds when the kids’s food is frozen pizza or frozen nuggets ). The iron fist of commensal discipline slowly disappeared. I don’t recall there being any individual options for an at-home family dinner in the 1980s. Research for my forthcoming book confirmed that this was definitely not occurring in the 1960s/1970s. Kids ate what was served. And it was the same for everyone.

In my childhood home, for example, we ate whatever Mom cooked, and Dad handed out. 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.

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

Restaurants and fast food take-out seduced even Mom into believing that it was no big deal to get every person their own individualized meal. What’s the big deal, Mom? A little cash?

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 retracted 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?

A Postscript from Mr. Han

The death of ritual is ongoing worldwide, not just in the United States. It is a phenomenon of the modern, urban metropole which attracts individuals seeking their own self-aggrandizement far more than obligations to community. This inherently self-interested quality of urban dwellers, compared to the rural Asian peasant, leads to a distaste for ritual’s basic requirements.

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.”

The attack on conformity of any kind to a specific, highly educated slice of the Baby Boomer generation who followed the Beat Generation authors and revolted in the 1960s along multiple axes. Some of this revolution 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 in attacking the old order, its key rituals also came under fire (i.e., church, family dinner led by Dad, neighborhood volunteering, etc.)

But as Byung-Chul and others have pointed out, the mythical ‘60s was not a transformative revolution intended to replace prior conformities with new ones. The Baby Boomer Left offered up nothing to replace what was taken down. It was a cultural revolution of liberation sans clear objectives. As a result, we witnessed temporary hippie settlements and horrifying dystopian experiments that led to physical and sexual abuse (and, in one case, mass suicide). The rest of us received mass Rumspringa-like chaos marketed to us as “fun.”

Once the constraints of mid-century modern social conservatism dissolved, everyone got distracted 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 often 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 misusing it to honor idiosyncratic behavior patterns as emblems of hyper-individualist separation from conformity.

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 primarily in a) highly regulated professional activities like launching a spacecraft, flying a plane, and bedside patient care in a hospital or b) in highly monetized recreation, such as Disneyland, riding a rollercoaster, or stadium sports, where crowd control and monetization are the motives.

But, in ordinary life? Ritual has mostly vanished. Instead, we have professionalized it or killed it.

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Early Reviews for Our Worst Strength!

"An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope." - Kirkus Reviews

"Richardson's a shrewd, witty, sometimes outraged observer who urges readers to approach individualistic impulses more critically." - Booklife Reviews (by Publisher's Weekly)

"...essential reading for anyone seeking to understand American behavior in the twenty-first century." - Elly, Top Goodreads Reviewer

Watch the super-cool book trailer here!

If you have an institutional affiliation or are a member of the publishing industry and would like to read an ARC copy in return for considering a blurb, please contact me : james@socialawarenessinstitute.org.

1. NHANES is the only public dataset that tracks fast food consumption using dietary recall. It appears that childhood incidence of fast food hit an initial plateau around 2003-04 and has only recently increased. See Figure 4 from https://permanent.fdlp.gov/gpo152309/db375-h.pdf

2. The Hartman Group Eating Occasions database, 2022.