A Bit More on Ritual and Self-Control

We shape invisible things. They shape us

My last post described how ritual seems to catalyze self-control. This effect, I wrote, is partly thanks to the sheer conventionality of ritual — its lack of useful outcomes — which attracts our attention and motivates particularly fastidious efforts to parse and imitate it. These efforts pay off as gradually improved executive function and self-control.

It’s also because rituals often require doing lots of things we’d rather not do, such as fasting or kneeling (or, if we’re Catholic, standing and sitting and kneeling and standing and kneeling then sitting and then kneeling…), which frankly habituates us to dealing with minor challenges. Over time, more difficult, bigger challenges start to seem easier. In this way, ritual becomes a small arena for cultivating virtue, defined as doing things you’d rather not do but probably should.

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But there’s another layer to this story. Ritual is also a kind of signal, a message between people. And the message it sends is always about invisible things. These invisible things might be gods, God, spirits, or ancestors. Or they might be boundaries between countries or times of the year. Whatever they are, rituals send the message that invisible things shape our actions.

By their very nature, ritualized invisible things are normative. We ought to pray or sacrifice to the gods, we ought to stand when the judge enters the courtroom, we ought to celebrate that important holiday. By partaking in rituals, we send the message that we accept these conventional claims on our behavior.

So I wanted to write a brief interlude in my series on the scientific study of religion about this intrinsic relationship between ritual, “oughts,” and invisible things.

Rituals Create Social Facts. Social Facts Create Us

Initiation rites turn boys into men. Coronations make kings or queens out of mere mortals. And weddings transform brides and grooms into husbands and wives.

That is, ritual creates statuses and roles, and so clarifies social relationships. This is tremendously helpful for understanding what people are supposed to do. For example, you might love your boyfriend or girlfriend, but dating relationships in the 21st century are notoriously ill-defined. Does she expect me to be exclusive? Is he waiting for me to say I’ll move for his job? Do I have to take care of her when she’s got the flu? Really?

But going through with a wedding ceremony transmogrifies that murky, half-understood boyfriend or girlfriend into a spouse, which is a much more clearly defined role. It comes with commensurate obligations and rights that your community, religion, and/or national laws have laid out. If your spouse has the flu (or cancer or dementia), you’re definitely supposed to stick around and care for him or her. If one of you cheats, there are serious legal and procedural consequences.¹

In this way, rituals create social facts, and these social facts then make demands on our time, effort, resources, and commitment. In fact, in the giant, permanent make-believe game that is society, invisible entities like “gods,” “presidents,” “nation-states,” and “wives” all are defined by the obligations they impose.

If an invisible thing doesn’t ask us to do anything, it’s not effectively real.

So: ritual creates social facts about invisible things, and those invisible things become real as they impose demands on us.

What does this have to do with self-control? Well, fulfilling obligations to invisible things means doing lots of things that you might, on balance, prefer not to do. Let’s say you get married. You’ve now got a bunch of new responsibilities. You have to remember anniversaries and not openly gawp at attractive members of your spouse’s particular sex (or any sex, really) and ask about each other’s days and, yes, take care each other when you get sick. Invariably (trust me), the obligations of being married will conflict with your own personal desires. You’ll find yourself agonizing between what you know you ought to do and what you’d really rather do instead.

So doing the things you ought to do, as a spouse, will require drawing on your self-control abilities. But exercising self-control seems to build more of it.² The more we exercise and develop self-control, the more of it we eventually have. We learn to delay gratification, become more conscientious, and inhibit unhelpful impulses as we navigate the responsibilities and challenges of marriage, simply because we often have to practice prioritizing our responsibilities above our desires.

Use It or Lose It

By contrast, prioritizing personal pleasure over role responsibilities can erode self-control. One team of researchers writes that

Abstaining from adultery sometimes requires resisting sexual temptations. In collective work, doing one’s fair share of effort can require overcoming lazy desires. Meanwhile…some behaviors alter self-control…alcohol and drugs make people impulsive, precipitating antisocial behaviors—such as adultery, violence, or lazy free-riding—by impeding abilities to resist impulses.

So what ritual does is produce compounding opportunities to build self-control, and not just during the ritual. The relationships, roles, and statuses that emerge out of the ritual, with their crisply defined responsibilities, become their own new arena for building virtue and self-control over the long term.³

There are, then, really two layers to the relationship between ritual and self-control: first, rituals themselves seem to strongly activate attention and self-monitoring for performance, sequencing, imitation, etc. Neurobiologically and cognitively, this heightened attention to detail and sequencing helps develop self-control and executive function.

Second and more interestingly, the effects of ritual — the roles, responsibilities, rights, boundaries, and obligations that ritual gives rise to — demand a lot of (and thus grow) self-control in people’s lives.

Choosing the “ought” over your personal preferences is the essence of self-control.

Choosing it habitually is the essence of being a self-controlled person.

And you wouldn’t have had this opportunity to get more self-controlled if you hadn’t gone through with that wedding ritual.

Why Americans Aren’t Self-Controlled

Americans aren’t doing so well with the the whole self-control thing, and it’s probably partly because we’re such a de-ritualized society.

I don’t mean to sound dour, but if you live in the United States, you might be forgiven for getting the impression that our economy’s number-one product is addiction. Gambling, social media, successful movements to legalize ever-stronger drugs, compulsive internet use that keeps eyeballs viewing advertisements, widespread problems with obesity and drug addiction (often facilitated by corporate malfeasance): self-control failure is central to 21st-century American life.

Of course, gambling, drug abuse, and prostitution are as old as civilization. This isn’t a purely “American” problem by any means. But there’s evidence that contemporary American culture really is quite poor at fostering and maintaining self-control, at least by comparison with some others.

One study, for example, found that Chinese students exhibited better self-control in an objective psychological test than American students (though the Americans, always self-promoters, claimed to have better self-control than they actually did; the Chinese students claimed the opposite). The authors of this study argued that this effect was due to differences in individualism. Chinese people are more collectivistic, which means they grow up in thick networks of relatives bound by authoritative social norms that require self-control.⁴

Collectivistic societies also tend, by definition, to be more heavily ritualized than individualistic cultures. For example, Protestantism’s association with individualism is well-known. And one of the biggest differences between Protestantism and Catholicism is the former’s anti-ritual tendencies. Protestantism has in turn deeply shaped the modern West, leaving us comparatively light on ritual in multiple senses: religious, but also civic, interpersonal, and personal. China, meanwhile, has been shaped by millennia of Confucianism, which is heavily ritualistic and encourages collectivism.

Since Chinese people therefore have more opportunities to exercise self-control, they naturally have more of it than individualistic Americans by the time they get to young adulthood.⁵

This effect isn’t limited to China, either. Another study found that adolescents in Russia who used drugs and had risky sex were more individualistic, while their more collectivistically oriented peers were less delinquent. That is, collectivism at the individual level protected against the kinds of problems that result from poor self-control. (Of course, individual collectivism is an oxymoron; the Russian kids who scored high in collectivism probably belonged to tight families or churches that encouraged collectivistic values.)

Meanwhile, although individualistic countries are more satisfied with life than collectivistic societies in aggregate, collectivism is strongly associated with life satisfaction at the individual level. This is probably at least partly thanks to the better self-regulation that comes with living a collectivistic life full of ritual and responsibilities. So even though it’s good to live in a wealthy, individualistic country, it’s really best to belong to a collectivistic sub-community within that country, which can help you develop the self-control and responsibility that the majority national culture can’t.

America has many virtues: we’re creative, dynamic, and friendly, and our music rocks. (Or at least did until about 2009; everything since then has been the same Scandinavian-designed pop song electronically reshuffled ad nauseam.) But as individuals, we’re increasingly not virtuous. We can’t resist temptations. We fall prey to addictions and end up suicides or overdoses. We’re not able to plan for the long term.

It’s not a good look.

And our extreme individualism, which has stripped life of ritual, is a major reason why.

WEIRD (Lack of) Ritual

This possibly sounds insane to you as a Western reader (assuming you are a Western reader, which I know some of you aren’t). How could a life jam-packed with responsibilities and apparently meaningless traditions and rituals be better for us than one where we’re free, finally — after all the extreme social control in our entire species’ rotten history — to decide how to live our own lives?

I get it. The unifying mythos of WEIRD civilization is social progress, which in large part means freeing ourselves from unpleasant or irksome obligations to churches and extended families and other arbitrary social constructs. So most of us — including a lot of so-called conservatives, especially libertarians — really believe that progress is essentially the unbounded growth of individualism.

As such, our liberal society sees human well-being as largely a function of what the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty: the freedom to act as we want to act, as unencumbered as possible by external authorities.

By contrast, Berlin described positive liberty as (roughly) the freedom to become self-actualized or to achieve higher goals. This often conflicts with negative liberty. For example, soldiers might surrender their personal freedoms, comfort, and safety to achieve collective victory. Churches, mosques, or temples might impose rules that discourage self-destructive activities — heavy drinking, promiscuous sex, taking revenge — while encouraging self-control and delay of gratification. By taking away some negative liberty, these organizations hope to nurture their adherents’ positive liberty for living self-controlled, prosocial lives.

So there’s frequently a tinge of collectivism to positive liberty, whereas Berlin associated negative liberty with cultural pluralism and individualism. The lack of any single authoritative vision for how life should be lived means that freedom in liberal, pluralistic societies is mostly defined as letting others choose and pursue their own goals with minimum interference, even (maybe especially) if that interference is supposed to be for their own good.

Within the individual, meanwhile, positive liberty lends itself

easily to (the) splitting of personality into two: the transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel.

This dichotomy maps onto Freud’s famous conception of the superego (the top-down controller of behavior) and the id (the irrational, desiring self). But in Freud’s scheme, the superego is always social. Where do we get the internalized voices of judgment telling us not to indulge in too much cake or sleep with our neighbors’ spouses? From our communities — the families, churches, synagogues, and societies we inhabit. That’s where the invisible things that constrain our behavior and desires come from. The desires bubble up from the individual self; the standards for guiding and controlling them come from outside, from the collective.

In pluralism, older, authoritative communities lose much of their ability to shape our superego. Instead, the id and superego merge together. Self-control is now supposed to come from within; the individual seeks to regulate her own behavior in accordance with the goals and values she’s freely chosen.

This helps explain why pluralistic, liberal societies — WEIRD countries like the US — tend to be fairly light on ritual, and to become more secular over time: ritual is the tool that solidifies the social roles, norms, and institutions that feed back to populate the superego. If you’re trying to escape the superego, you’re going to want less ritual.⁶

But I think the evidence from neuroscience and psychology pretty clearly indicate that, empirically, self-control doesn’t in fact come from within, at least not primarily. Instead, humans depend on highly structured input from our social environments to tell us what roles to play, what are our responsibilities are, and how we’re supposed to self-regulate to fulfill those responsibilities. Our cognitive systems are designed to expect those inputs. This — not suppressing urges to eat cake — is the essence of self-control.

This is why individualism tends to track with poorer self-control and more disorders of impulsivity, and why the characteristic ailment of late-modern America isn’t rickets or starvation, but mental illness.

Goethe wrote that “Everything that liberates our minds without at the same time adding to our resources of self-mastery is pernicious.” We supposedly civilized Westerners have been chasing after personal freedom and individualism for a really long time, and “the disappearance of rituals” is one of the necessary consequences. But with this disappearance, we may have let some basic tools for self-mastery slip away.

1. Roy Rappaport, an anthropologist of religion who studied ritual from the perspective of information theory, argued that ritual transforms messy, analogue social data into digital (binary) signals. I’ve written about that in a past life.

2. I should point out that not everyone agrees with this claim. Some meta-analyses find that the effects of self-control training in laboratory settings are pretty small, and other studies even find null effects. Other analyses find that training interventions do, indeed, help people develop generalized self-control. One recent study made the (to me, sensible) suggestion that the reason arbitrary laboratory exercises don’t always succeed in building the self-control “muscle” is because self-control isn’t really a muscle at all, but rather a set of contextually relevant habits, responses, and motivations. That is, we build self-control by doing stuff and dealing with consequences and rewards in the real world, not by muddling through lab exercises. We learn to be self-controlled in how we dress, talk to others, handle workflows, etc., by getting experience in the workforce. We learn to suppress antisocial impulses by hanging around with people whose opinions of us we don’t want to ruin. In this way of seeing things, ritual gives us experience with suppressing impulses and regulating behavior specifically in social and conventional contexts. You perform a ritual not because it’s the practically necessary thing to do, but because it’s the socially appropriate thing to do. But of course almost all of human life ends up being lived in conventional and normative contexts. You wear a jacket to the office not because jackets are practically useful for shuffling spreadsheets around, but because it’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s actually a wee little sartorial liturgy. So cultural and religious ritual of all kinds is a contextually relevant training device for most of the varieties of self-control we will actually need in our daily lives.

3. Aristotle, the Ur-source for all Western discourse about virtue, defined virtue in many ways, including simply as “excellence” (the meaning of the Greek word for virtue, arete, from which we derive our word “aristocracy”). But in books such as his Politics, he sometimes seems to simply equate virtue with self-control. A virtuous citizen just is one who will uphold her responsibilities rather than pursuing what feels good in the moment, etc.

4. This is collectivism in a psychological sense, not the political sense. The two don’t necessarily align. In fact, among Westerners, those who are more politically collectivistic (that is, who prefer the government to be heavily involved in redistributing resources) are psychologically much more individualistic than the bulk of the population. This may be because political collectivism, by removing the burden of social care from local groups (Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” of family, church, and neighborhood community), actually enables people to pursue their own independent agendas without being as burdened by the many obligations than come with “platoon” life.

5. Another study found that East Asians tended to rely on proactive strategies for self-control, whereas Westerners tended to rely on reactive strategies. However, proactive strategies for self-control work better than reactive ones. For instance, it’s better to just avoid nightclubs if you want to cut back on drinking, or to install internet blocking software on your computer if you want to stop doomscrolling, than to rely on sheer willpower to resist the temptations once they’re in front of you. So the inhabitants of East Asia have the upper hand over Westerners on this front too.

6. This is also why paradigmatically liberal, pluralist institutions like the United Nations or European Union are so intensely de-ritualized. Their own charters and ultimate ambitions are incompatible with the deeply ritualized world of authoritative bounded communities like churches or traditional societies, so naturally they themselves make very light use of ritual, both in their procedures (have you ever taken the time to watch the swearing-in of a UN Secretary General? Me neither) and in their architecture. There’s a big difference between this

and this

…And that difference is between a society that wants traditional ritual to shape people’s superegos and values, and one that wants people to shape those things for themselves.