Speaker 1: A proper part of being rational is the imperative to
be more rational. So rationality is an inherently aspirational entity,
which means at the heart of rationality is aspiration and
transformative experience, which requires ritual, because ritual is imaginal. Serious way,
It's just funny because just with that you completely undermine
the entire, the entire project of rationalism.
Speaker 2: That's true. I'd never thought about it that. Because you
want to be reasonable, yes, reason becomes aspirational and therefore
has to be you have to kind of imagine and
project yourself into that space before you enter into it,
because why would you desire it if you couldn't imagine
yourself in a future state where you have to move
towards that future state through imagination. This is Jonathan Pejel.
Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone, I am back
with John Vervaki. You know, we just put on a
video with himself and with Jordan Hall and myself having
a discussion. But today we are going to talk about
John's upcoming class on ritual and cognitive science. I am
extremely excited about this, you know, I can't wait to
see and it's actually fitting in some of the work
that John is doing all around for the university, but
then also other projects. So John, yeah, I mean, let's
start and tell us a little bit how this connects
to your work in general.
Speaker 1: Thanks Jonathan, it's great to be here. So in general,
I've been doing a lot of work on the cognitive
science of religion. I'm teaching a new course at the
University of Toronto, fourth year course seminar course, you know,
high level on the cognitive science of religion. And because
I think the cognitive dimension of religion, how religion involves knowing,
cultivating of wisdom, the transformation of the individual in ways
that matter to it cognitively, I think is not adequately
well developed. On the other hand, there's a bunch of
books that have been coming out.
Speaker 3: There was an.
Speaker 1: Initial wave of books that were rather officially so that
the cogsi of religion is hot right now. The first
initial wave was somewhat hostile to religion, trying to explain
it away as you may expect, very much in the
Enlightenment framework and mold. And then that has been superseded
by much more because a lot of the original proposals,
I mean, to be fair of these individuals, they presented
them as scientific hypotheses. You know that, for example, religion
is about hyperactive agency detection, right, and that's where all
comes from. And this has been subject to some pretty
good criticism and demolished with it.
Speaker 3: It's good science, right.
Speaker 1: They present a hypothesis, people have criticized it, the empirical
evidence doesn't support it. And so we've moved into a
second wave where people are stepping back and trying to say,
you know, maybe there's some deeper functionality at here at work.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: What happens is they're still largely not paying attention to
all the decades of work in the anthropology of religion
and the philosophy of religion. They're paying a little bit
more attention now to the philosophy of religion, which is good,
but they're not paying attention to sort of broader philosophy. So,
for example, in the course I'm teaching at the university,
I don't start talking about religion until I think lecture
four or five.
Speaker 3: I spend the first.
Speaker 1: Three lectures demolishing the Enlightenment set of presupposed ecotomies, like
there's a clean distinction between fact, cleaned to echotomy between
fact and value is inn aught all this kind of stuff.
So all of this is happening, and I thought, I thought,
there's all these things, but they're not connecting, right, and
they're not connecting. And what I like to do with
my work is connect debt. And the reason why I
think connecting it is important is because I think what's
happening right now and what's most calling me most deeply,
is I think there's an advent of the sacred happening
right now in a response to the meaning crisis. And
as you know from a lot of my work, I
don't think this is primarily carried by propositional knowing. I
think it's carried by procedural perspectivele and participatory. And the
thing where the behavior that's a bad term, but the
behavior where that gets most educated and expressed is in ritual.
And hence the move to really understanding really trying to
come up with a cognitive science of ritual, because I'll
though there's lots of good work here and there about
what might call the cognition in ritual by and large,
that aspect the cognitive dimension how ritual might involve knowing
or even give us a kind of metaphysics or a
worldview has not been very deeply discussed. A lot of
other important dimensions which I readily and will repeatedly admit
are at work in ritual. There's socioeconomic there's cultural transmission right,
there's social role taking. There's obviously symbolic and theological aspects
of ritual. I am not trying to explain them away
or reduce them. I'm saying all of that's the case.
But it seems like to me that what's missing, and
what even some of those other dimensions need is an
account of, well, what's the cognition that's going on in
ritual and how does it why should it matter.
Speaker 3: To us more?
Speaker 1: Because part of what the course is that we're always ritualistic.
We just don't realize that a lot of the rituals
are implicit. And by that I don't mean the Freudian
sense that we have neurotic behaviors. I mean we do
things that are properly understood as imaginal and inactive and
as oriented aspirationally, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm. Yeah. And so one of the things that
I've been doing in in my work is in some
ways trying to express or to help people see that
there's a Let's say there's a link that it's there's
a connection between ritual proper the way we understand it,
either civic you know, civic rituals or really religious rituals.
That there's a connection between that and ordered behavior in general. Right,
that in order to do anything, you have to order
behavior towards a purpose. And one of the things that
distinguishes what we most usually properly call ritual in like
in the sense of like raising a flag or something
like that. You know that that now there there's something
that's being in age in relationship to meaning, which you know,
like when you're brushing your teeth, there is meaning there,
but it's it's very it's very small. It's not about
self understanding and about and about how we participate with others.
Whereas the types of rituals that we usually call rituals,
they those have to that's why they're they seem different
to us, and they engage what you call talk about
the kind of imaginal space as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the imaginal or there's overlapping ideas. Again, I'm trying
to draw them together. There's the imaginal, there's conceptual metaphor
we talk about do you see my point, do you
get what I'm saying. There's fictive language. The fence went
all the way up the mountain, what like, offenses aren't moving.
And then you know the whole mind in motion that
you know, Robert Tavski, you know that I you know,
I'm abstracting and I'm moving through. I'm moving through my argument.
And these ideas are closely related.
Speaker 3: To each other.
Speaker 1: So the imaginal is in gesture itself is pregnant in
our cognition, and it's not ornamentation. It's a it's an
indispensable vehicle by which we think. There's a really good
anthology that I'm going to make use of in the
course called Thinking through Ritual, great play on words. The
thinkers are thinking through ritual, but they're thinking. They're arguing
about how we think through ritual by means of it
and beyond it.
Speaker 2: Oh that's I mean, that's really interesting. And one of
the things that we've noticed, I think we've noticed in
let's say, in the twentieth century, there has been I
see it in Quebec specifically because this is where I live.
I've seen a desire to deritualize space. Yes, and it's
and it's explicit and there's a sense in which, either
consciously or unconsciously, people under seem to understand ritual as superstition,
as also a kind of tyrannical imposition on reality of identity.
And so for that reason, the festivities that my ancestors
used to engage with are always kind of being pushed
to the side. And now even like even though we
had this nationalistic moment, you know, in the in the
late twentieth century, even those national rituals are eroding. You know,
everything is kind of eroding. And so I mean, i'd
like to get your take on that, Like, what do
you think why do you think that that is a
tendency in the modern world to work against ritual. Let's say, so.
Speaker 3: Part of it. And we'll touch a bit on this
in the course.
Speaker 1: I mean obviously not as deeply as a fourth year
thirty six hour at the university course, but I mean
we're caught up in, you know, the dimensions of the
Enlightenment ecotomies that really by us how we try and
look at the phenomena of ritual or any religious phenomena
to put to put it more broadly, and so we think,
for example, really easy notice the idea that somehow we
could peel ritual away and put it and then leave
this purely secular space. He supposes that we can sort
of cleanly separate fact and value from each other.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: And the point is, and this isn't from romanticism or
weird spooky you know, German idealism or something like that.
This is the guts of you know, you know, seminal
analytic philosophy, you know, Wine and Putnam and case Bit.
That this distinction has been this dichotomy, the pragmatic distinction
is useful, but the idea of it being a radical dichotomy,
a deep division in reality itself, right, has been completely undermined.
And this goes right to the heart of my work, Jonathan,
because relevance is you can't relevance is simultaneously how we
get facts while we're making evaluations like there there is
no clean and there and there, and there is no
access to facts.
Speaker 3: Without relevance realization.
Speaker 1: And so the just the idea that somehow we could
put aside our valuation projects and then just give this
clean secutors base where it's just the facts. May I'm
just the facts, as they used to say in drag Man,
is actually a ridiculous presupposition. And then when you and
then the more aggressive side of this is, well, everything
outside of this isn't connected to the facts, and therefore
it must be superstition things like that. But if you realize, wait,
at the corner of your cognitive agency is relevance realization,
you realize, wait, that whole picture is radically false and
it and it actually doesn't give you a home in
which to do rationality or science itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny that that just the facts dragonet quote.
I always fantasized about the person starting to list random
facts of what's around the case. It's like, you know,
she was wearing shoelaces and like her fingernails were on.
It's like, oh no, no, no, not just the facts,
actually the facts that are relevant to the case. Man. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
so I was thought, but I think that's the list.
After the success and the great reception of our first
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us reawaken powerful stories in our culture. One of the
things we did see, it seems in the twentieth century,
well actually since the Enlightenment, was a desire to replace
religious ritual with civic ritual. And you see that obviously
reaching insane levels in the fascists and communist eras, where
we basically worship the state and everything, all the spaces
are organized. But what's fascinating about that is that that
also seems to have eroded, and there's suspicion right about
celebrating our nation. We see in Canada, we see it
almost I mean, especially with the liberal government, this liberal
particularly liberal government, there's almost like a disdain of our
nation and disdain of the ritual spaces and the flag
and all these things. And so it's interesting to notice
how this kind of tumble of ritual where and now
ritual is under Some people might appreciate ritual, but they
tend to see it as particular personal thing. Right, So
if you say something like we do I do meditation,
then that's acceptable. But if you say something like, you know,
like we celebrated you know, Canada Day and saying the
anthem and everything, then it's a little then it's suspicious.
And so what do you think, why do you think
ritual has been brought to this individual level?
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's part and another part of the
Enlightenment dimensionality. That was the space that was given to us,
which is the hermonetics of suspicion.
Speaker 3: I mean, and.
Speaker 1: Don't forget you get you get that radical, tolitarian, vicious
ritual in the French Revolution, the rate of error, right,
So it's also there at the beginning. So it's there
at the beginning gets there throughout it and it comes
in culmination. And so but what you know, because of Freud,
because of Marx, you know, because of Nietzsche. You've heard
me make this argument before. We've adopted our hermonetics of suspicion.
Now this goes to a point in the course. And
you know, and this, you know, work I've been doing
on the primacy of beauty I did, of course for
the Peterson Academy.
Speaker 3: On that based on DH. Schindler's work.
Speaker 1: You know, the Hermitics of suspicion is based on a
reality illusion judgment. You say, I'm suspicious that this isn't
the reality. There's a hidden motive, there's a secret agenda, right,
And that's you know, and of course that's sometimes the case.
If it wasn't sometimes the case, we would just think
the whole proposal was ridiculous. But from Plato through to
Marl Ponti, people to point it out. But wait, right,
that can't be that, that can't be the prior the
foregrounded or prioritized thing, because any judgment of illusion depends
on a deeper judgment of realness, and that judgment of
realness cannot itself be subject to the harmonics of suspicion,
or you fall away and you can't make any judgments
at all. So where that shows up is people that
do this right. And I do think, by the way,
where we say appearances disclose rather than deceive about reality,
that's beauty in the philosophical sense, not what we currently
mean by beauty. Beauty just means sensual gratification. But the
philosophical sense of beauty is that. So I call it
the hermonotics of beauty, and I think part of what
ritual is is an enactment of the hermonoutics of beauty,
by the way, but what happens is because they don't
fall into the abyss, we get the removal liberal government,
we get the removal of the rituals, but we get
replacement by other rituals, and we get right. So we
have all the rituals around identity politics, and they are rituals.
We tear down, we tear down statues, we wave flags,
we make demonstration. These are all symbolic acts that everybody
knows aren't directly changing anything.
Speaker 3: What are they designing to do? What are they designed
to do?
Speaker 1: They're designed to reorientus, They're designed to point our attention.
They're designed to try and give us a different origin,
A stand where do we stand? What do we stand?
Listen to the language, Where do we stand? What do
we stand for?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And what stands out for us? And so contrary. I mean,
I'm not disagreeing with you. I think these people think
they're getting rid of all those superstitious rituals, but all
they do is a surreptitious right replacement with a whole
other set of rituals. Deeply, deeply, I would argue religious rituals.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the flag is the most surprising of all.
Think of it like that, it's that that.
Speaker 3: That changing the symbol of.
Speaker 2: Course, because it's a it's a symbol of it's a
it's trying to ritualize fluidity, which is it's like it's
a it's a weird it's like a tantric move or something.
It's like trying to to to ritualize fluidity. And and
so because of it, it always has to change. But
every time it changes, it also has to capture. Right,
So because you know your identity, let's say I don't
know the national anthem or your flag, it captures you
like it you know it command your attention. It asks
you to honor it and to to to treat it
with respect and everything. So now you have this thing
which is constantly changing, but it's also constantly asking to
keep up with it and to give it honor. And
so although it's trying to be a celebration of change
and diversity, it's like this weird tyranny of change. It's
a it's an odd thing to watch.
Speaker 3: Happen and that and that goes towards two points.
Speaker 1: First is the these rituals are ultimately not satisfying because
they are not for good for good arguments from cognitive science,
they're not deeply uh you know, cognitively satisfying, cognitively transformative,
and and therefore there's a hunger for more. And that's
and then and when they're a framework, the only way
to get the more is to intensify. Uh the that's
an interesting idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's a constant intensification through the multiplication of
the colors and the you know, and and also the
accelera of the change and the also the increasing right,
so you can see it, like you we used to
have pride day than than week, than month. Then we
were announced it was season, right, just since it's a season,
and you can see it's like this, this this intensive,
constant intensification kind of fill up the space of participation.
Speaker 1: And a radicalization of membership, so it becomes more and
more stringent. So this is a this is a typical ritual.
So this is an anthropological theory costly marker. So a
lot of rituals are very costly, like they demand a
lot from people, and it's like why, Well, the point
is the costly marker is a way of signaling to
everybody you can trust me, because I wouldn't otherwise do
this costly, useless behavior other than unless I was deeply,
deeply committed. Now we talk about virtue signaling, but right,
but I get it. Some of it is people just
playing along because they want a quick ride. There's always
a free rider problem. But the radicalization by the by
the true believers, if I can call them, that is
part again of a of a function of ritual, which
is costly signaling, which is you can really really trust me.
Speaker 3: And the thing is the costly signaling.
Speaker 1: It needs to it needs to be bound to deeper, deeper,
real transformations and educations, or else you're really sort of
draining people.
Speaker 3: And so this this form this is that's one argument, this.
Speaker 1: Form of ritualization has a real possibility of burning out,
like burnout. The other is it's propositional tyranny. It's all
at the propositional level. There's procedural, but they don't they
don't recognize the procedural and the perspectacle in their participatory
So it's still all caught up in the level of
beliefs and ideology and that's ultimately not reaching the meaning machinery.
Speaker 2: Hmm. That's really interesting because I mean this idea of
the costliness of the ritual, it can also help you
understand initiation rituals in general.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like why Dole and and and and and
and part of what's happened, you know. And by the way,
you know, these critiques I'm making are not I can
equally make critiques of the right and the and the
Trump fault. Okay, we I just did that because you
brought up the liberal government, right, this is so this
is in fact, I would argue that what's happening the
culture wars. But culture cultists right right, right right, The
culture wars in America are really ritualized religious civil warfare.
Speaker 3: That's what's good.
Speaker 1: Everything is done, is almost almost everything now is a ritual.
There's actual no everybody notices it. There's no content. It's
all costly display about your your allegiance to a particular
religious orientation. And so I want to make it clear
that I'm not landing. I'm not I'm not trying to
make an anti woke argument. I'm trying to point out
that ritual is across at the political spectrum. Far from
it being absent, it has become more pronounced. But I
think in a way that is ultimately pathological because it's
tied to the Hermeneutics' suspicion, it's tied to propositional tyranny,
it's tied to the Enlightenment framework which is actually crumbling.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And so the
I imagine one of the things also we're going to
talk about in the class is related to if talking
about cognition, the manner in which risual participates in identity
formation right as much at the individual level as at
higher levels or whatever. And so I mean, maybe you
can say just a little bit about that, because obviously
that interest interests me.
Speaker 3: You know that excellent.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I can do there, I mean,
there's a lot that goes on in identity formation, right, uh.
And I'm again only talking about the cognitive dimension of
I'm going to keep emphasizing that, right because John Brevik
he is not here saying your ritual doesn't have this
theological meaning or it doesn't have this particular, you know,
existential meaning to you. I am not not not saying that.
But what I can talk about is, well, one of
the things an important cognitive process in identity formation is
what Agnes callart Caught calls aspiration. This is, uh, like
I want I want to be other than I am.
I want to be a person other than I am.
That's a fundamental identity change. And it's based on La
Paul's work on transformative experiences. We're going to talk about
both of these women's important work in this book. And
so what do you have to do to go through aspiration,
to go through transformative experiences? Well, you can't reason your
way through it. If what you mean by reason is
making inferences, making using decision theory.
Speaker 3: You have to use imaginal serious play.
Speaker 1: You have to internalize the sage you have to internalize
the role model. You have to do diological practices, right,
and this I can all back. I can back this
up with you know, both good theory and good empirical evidence, right,
even some recently done by Well, he was my ras.
Speaker 3: He's now got his PhD. He's now doctor Jensen Kim.
Speaker 1: I'll talk a bit about his work about people doing
aspirational projects in the university. Now here's here's the important
point that I'm going to use Kunard to make the desire. Okay,
So a proper part of being rational is the imperative
to be more rational. Right, So, rationality is an inherently
aspirational entity, which means at the heart of rationality is
aspiration and transformative experience, which requires ritual because ritual is
imaginal serious play, and this goes to it.
Speaker 2: That's really, it's just funny because just with that, you
completely undermined the entire, the entire project of rationalism, you know,
because that's I'd never thought about it. That that because
you because you want to be reasonable, yes, reason, reason,
Reason becomes aspirational and therefore has to be you have
to kind of imagine and project yourself into that space
before you enter into it, because why would you desire
it if you couldn't imagine yourself in a in a
future state where you have to move towards that future
state through imagination.
Speaker 1: And notice, by the way, notice you're gesturing you're right,
and you're and you're using prospectable and participatory knowing right.
Speaker 3: What's what's it like to be that person? And who
will I be? How will what.
Speaker 1: Will the agent arena relationship be like when I am
that person? And you know this goes to very formal
arguments from people at the core of like computational uh psychology,
like you can't but I won't get into the details.
But if I'm in a weaker logic like uh like uh,
predicate calculus, and I'm trying to get to a stronger
logic modal logic, And what stronger means I can grasp
more of reality with the logic I can represent more.
There's nothing I can do and I can run all
the possible logical permutations, and I can't get from predicate
logic to.
Speaker 3: To modal logic. I have to I have to leap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an imaginal leap, and I'm gonna So those
are the kinds of arguments I bring into show again
John's I'm not going to offer flakey romanticism. I'm going
to say no, no, really, nuts and bolts arguments are
saying that the imaginal is in the heart of the rational.
And then I'll also do the reverse, say can we
talk about a non propositional kind of rationality in ritual?
Like Jennings and Shilbrick and others have been arguing, yes
we can.
Speaker 2: One of the things that has always interested in me
about ritual is in some ways the man in which
ritual marks identity in in time and space. So what
I imagine is a good example is like you study
in university, you do your exams, and you all you
have all these exams, and you do all these things,
and so now what like you you're done with your studies?
What does that? What does that mean? What? What are you?
You're a master's now you're you're a doctor. And so
it's as if there's a there's an absolute need to
mark the moment in in in time and with some
gesture of recognition, to say that now this person is
now this person is a police officer. I'm going to
give him his badge. I'm gonna give him his uniform,
and and like and and it's the moment of that
transforms you from what you were before into what you are.
And it seems like that is something that absolutely has
to be ritualized, whether it's a signature or a handshake
or whatever like, in order to mark.
Speaker 1: Here's here's why. Yeah, go ahead, Well here's the cognitive
A part of why this goes to recent work I'm
doing on consciousness. So look, it's increasingly becoming a plausible
proposal that the function of consciousness. Consciousness evolved to give
us episodic memory. So episodic memories when you remember episodes,
So you know you have semantic memory. Cats are mammals,
or you have procedural memory. I know how to catch
a ball, But do you remember what you had for
breakfast this morning? And what you'll do is you'll create
a little perspective and you'll run.
Speaker 3: You'll relive it.
Speaker 1: You don't just recall it, you relive it. That's episodic
memory in it. And it looks like consciousness is for that.
And then you go, well why, But I won't get
into details, because episodic memory allows you to solve problems
you can't solve with just your beliefs and your skills.
And episodic memory is bound up with narrative, right. Narrative
binds procedural especially think about a story, right, perspectable and
participatory know in character development, the viewpoint right, and then
all of that stuff and and and it binds insight
into all of that.
Speaker 3: There's transformation.
Speaker 1: So we need narrative and episodic memory are actually integral
to us, right, being conscious of the world. And so
when we want to be conscious of something to ourselves
and other people, we were trying to create an episodic
memory for it and a narrative around it.
Speaker 3: What does ritual do?
Speaker 1: Ritual takes you out of normal time and says this
is a special episode. It carves it off for you
and puts a narrative around it. So it goes deep
into episodic memory and therefore becomes something super salient to
your consciousness and therefore becomes something that you can take
into your autobiography in a powerful way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That, I mean, that makes that makes so much sense,
because then you're then you're you're like you need this.
You meet this girl, you start dating, you start you know,
and then it's like it's just this flow of things
that happen, and then you get married, right, yeah, and
then everything about the wedding takes your relationship and everything
about it symbolizes it, crushes it together, brings everybody you
know in one place, makes a ritual where you make
promises to each other, which you've already done, like obviously
if you're there, you've already made those promises informally before,
and you bring it together and then it crunches things
into it, like you said, a hyper episode, Yes, and
now becomes a marker for my identity going forward because
it's something that I can go back to and refer
to very easily.
Speaker 3: In my mind.
Speaker 2: It's likely a date we promised, we did this, it's
all together, whereas before it's like, oh, we met this,
you know, we started hanging out, we went on a
few dates, we you know, and then it's like it's
all these things that are maybe not as solid, right.
Speaker 1: And so that's part of a broader thing that consciousness
seems to be for.
Speaker 3: It's called chunking.
Speaker 1: Like when you're studying, if I give you like nine
letters and they're just random, and I ask you what
were those letters?
Speaker 3: Ten seconds later, I don't know.
Speaker 1: But if I rearrange them to and they formul word,
if I really arrange them at the words catpig, dog,
you can do it like that.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: And so that's called chunking, right, And it's a mnemonic strategy.
And so doing the ritual is a form of chunking.
Like you said, you bring it all together and you
make this mnemonic thing that super salient and stands out.
And what you're trying to do is you're trying to
create a way in which your your relationship to your
partner is now literally more memorable to you and therefore
has you have a greater chance to reinforce your commitment
things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And also it's a common moment, right because let's
say just say, even with your partner, it's like I
fall in love, she falls in love a little later,
and each of us has these experiences that conversation that
maybe we had is not that impressive to me, but Mark,
but then we have this one moment you know where
it's like this is this is the moment, right, we
both agree that this is an important moment, that it's
the moment of promise that brings it all together, that
makes sense, and so you can you can almost understand
any type of identity forming ritual as and that that
would also explain you know, anything like a swearing in
of a judge, for example, like all of these things,
and because the swearing in of the judge also now
functions not just for the judge but also for all
of us, it's like, is he a judge? Well, yeah,
he's a judge because on this day, you know, he
put his hand on the Bible or whatever, and prey
made a promise and got his wig got it depending
which which, and then it was like you know, and
then from that on, from that on, we can all
agree because we have an episode that we can refer
to and find we all agree that that that that's yeah,
that's super.
Speaker 3: Super in So think about how this starts. It starts
make sense of the overall proposal. In a way.
Speaker 1: The ritual is like what you do when you're studying.
You're trying to make things. You're trying to chunk things
together and create episodic memories. Right that are like what
are called mnemonic strategies, ways of making things more memorable
so you can recall them in a way. Right, that
gives you much more access to them, perspectible and participatory access,
not just propositional and that like when you're if you're
a good student, right when you're studying for a test,
you try those are the kinds of strategies that you
try and use when you're studying.
Speaker 3: And so what what this is a way of knowing?
Speaker 1: This is a way of knowing, right, It's like if
we think that studying is a way of learning and knowing,
this is a way of learning and knowing.
Speaker 3: It's a kind of studying.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't want to push that analogy too far,
but it's a good analogy for what I'm trying to
propose is going on with ritual.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think I think that that
that that is that is super interesting. I cannot wait
to uh to take this class. And so for those
who who don't know what we're gonna do, and this
is going to be a new experiment, is that John
is going to give the class and I'm going to
follow the class. Uh and at the end the very
last episode, then we'll have a discussion about everything that
that that John talked about and so uh, and so
I can't I can't wait, uh and One of the
things we talked about is that this can get complicated, right, Like,
this stuff can get getting very complicated. And John is
going to take you through, like at the beginning, kind
of step by step, yeah, till by the end of
the class, and you will have all the all the
concepts and all the language needed to to be able
to interact with this this this content. And so I
think it's going to be it's gonna be it's gonna
be great. And how let's say, like, because you're doing
this this called cyber religion in the university. And then,
and this is more specifically about ritual are you going
to talk about ritualization both in the religious and the secular, Like,
are you going.
Speaker 1: To I'm going to prioritize the religious all big reference
to secular examples, just to give people a sense of continuity.
I want to prioritize the religious precisely because what we
were talking about at the beginning, which is this the
sort of the attempt to marginalize the superstitious, And so
I'm going to foreground challenging in that right from the
very beginning.
Speaker 2: And so another question I had, because we often think
of ritual as event, right but have you thought about
a little bit about the notion of ritual as space? Right, Also,
because there seems to be something in the way we
organize space with this, the same as how we organize
it in terms of.
Speaker 1: But that's a mnemonic strategy. So again, like, okay, so
I give a bunch of people a test. No, sorry,
I give them some material to learn in room A.
I bring half of them back two weeks later to
remember the material in room A, half of them back
in room B.
Speaker 3: That's all I've done nothing else. Which group does better
on average?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It makes sense, right, because your memory is not
just propositional content, it's perspectable, it's participatory. It does what's
called transfer appropriate processing. What was your perspective going into this,
what kind of processing were you doing? And encoding specificity,
what state were you in your The brain binds those
all together because your brain is actually intelligent, more intelligent
than Enlightenment ideology. Your brain is trying to figure out
how to make you an agent in the world.
Speaker 3: Wow, right, what a radical proposal.
Speaker 1: And so it's understanding that you know, I need to
constantly try to fit this person to a situation. That's
what the learning is for so, organizing space, organizing time
are part of this deep mnemonic aspect, which is a
cognitive aspect.
Speaker 3: It's a way of learning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it seems also that the organization of space
is I mean, it sounds it sounds obvious when I say,
but that it has to do with orientation.
Speaker 1: Oh, of course, I'm going to talk a lot about
We're going to talk a lot about orientation and the
technical word for pointing a stension, how we point at things.
And we forget how unique and embodied this is. For
human beings. We use pointing in order to learn language.
So pointing comes before, and there's a really good book
out on it. I'll make a bit of reference to
it in the course and orientation. All of these things
come before and make our propositional knowing possible for us.
But as far as we can tell, the only other
organisms that get pointing, and that's because we've bred them
to do this for fifty thousand years. Or dogs, you
try to get any other we don't see pointing anywhere else.
And dogs, dogs don't point for each other. They only
point for us, right, And so we forget how crucial
pointing is and the organizing of time and space reorients
us and gets us to repoint. Part of what it does,
I'll get into that and the courses it decenters us.
It gets us to point away from that the ego
and towards This is mac Namara's idea about ritual being
an active dcentric It turns the arrow of relevance from
this way to that way.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's an interesting So basically, let's say if
I put up a pole, right, I put up something,
and then all of a sudden that reference point now
brings me out of myself. Right, that's right, into this pole.
But what it also does it makes it possible for
others to do the same.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Where it makes it possible. It makes uh group participant
group action more more plausible or more easier.
Speaker 3: You got it.
Speaker 2: M Yeah, that makes sense, and then you can understand
then from there. Once you understand that, then you can
understand totemization. You can understand all kinds of more abstract processes.
Speaker 3: Right, And it's not silly superstition.
Speaker 1: Oh though, I mean I'm speaking in a racist fashion
because I consider it racist. Please don't misquote me on this,
but you know, oh, the silly savages with their superstitious
totem poles.
Speaker 2: Right organization, like even not just the poll but lean
in a more abstract way of having some thing, you know,
like in the native culture, like they would have a
spirit animal, right, like spirit the spirit animal that binds
and they have different tribes that have different animals that
bind them.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I'm going to talk about I'm going to
talk about that. I'm going to talk about that with
work I did with Joan Shappy. But the NASA scientists
moving the rovers around on Mars and this isn't my word. VERTESSI,
who did one of the best ethnography say said this
is her term.
Speaker 3: They turned the rover into a totem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it had it acted that way. It had
to kind of act that way. And I remember that
when you have the examples of your game. Some of
the examples almost went into the magical. Oh the heears
that are not at all like you could explain it,
you know, the basic reasonable idea of yeah, we work
together towards the thing, so it kind of acts as
a binder for our thoughts and action. But there were
there were more, there were stranger things going. Well.
Speaker 1: They were talking like sympathetic magic. These hard nosed engineered Yeah,
very much, very much. And they were very worried that
they were talking that way, but they didn't have any
because of the Enlightenment economies. They didn't have any other
language of talking about it. And they thought they were
trying to be honest to their experience, and I give
them credit for that, and so they were they were
forced to use this language, and then they were very
nervous about using it because right, well because of the
Enlightenment economies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh, this is going to be great, guys.
I cannot wait. I am really excited about this. And
we said it is going to start on October seventh.
That's right, October seventh, at two pm. That is when
it starts. And then it's going to go for six weeks.
We're going to have one week in there that's going
to be a break, but it'll go from then. Look
down in the description, we'll have a link for you
to be able to sign up for the class, and
like if you show up a lot, there'll be a
possibility of engaging. There'll be Q and a discussion. We'll
have moderators that will be able to manage that and
then on the last day, we'll have our final discussion
and engage in Q and A. So this is I'm
excited about this, can see me too.
Speaker 3: I'm rather looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: I think this topic is pertinent and has the potential
to be profound, and I welcome. I actually proposed to you,
and you you were very generous about it, making this
more diological, which I really wanted.
Speaker 3: So thank you about that.
Speaker 2: All right, and so everybody show up. I can't wait
to see you and John. Thanks again for all your insight.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to this