According to the theory of cultural evolution, rituals and other cultural elements evolve in the context of human beings. They depend on us for their reproduction, and sometimes help us feel good and accomplish our goals, reproductive and otherwise. Ritual performances, like uses of language, exhibit a high degree of variation; ritual performances change over time, and some changes are copied, some are not. As with genetic mutation, ritual novelty is constantly emerging.
The following presents several ecological metaphors for ritual adaptation: sexual selection, the isolated island, and the clearcut forest. Once these metaphors are established, I will explain how they apply to ritual, and suggest some policy recommendations based on this speculation. (...)
Clearcuts
When a mature natural ecosystem is destroyed by fire, clearcutting, or plowing, a particular process of succession follows. First, plants with a short life history that specialize in colonization emerge; these first-stage plants are often called weeds, or “weedy ephemerals,” and make up a large number of agricultural pest species. But these initial colonizers specialize in colonization at the expense of long-term competitiveness for light. Second, a wave of plants that are not as good at spreading their seed, but a little better at monopolizing light, gain dominance. These are followed by plants that are even better at long-term competition; eventually, absent human interference, the original weeds become rare.
Sometimes, however, the landscape is frozen at the first stage of succession; this is known as agriculture. Second-wave competitive plants are prevented from growing; the land is cleared again and again, and the seeds of a single species planted, providing an optimal environment for short-life-history weeds. Since the survival of humans and their livestock depends on only a few species of plants, other plants that would eventually out-compete the weeds must not be permitted to grow. Instead, herbicides are applied, resulting in selection for better and better weeds.
This is not an indictment of agriculture. Again, without these methods, most humans on earth would die. But the precariousness of the situation is a result of evolutionary processes. Perverse results are common in naive pest management strategies; Kaneshiro (pp. 13-14) suggests that eradication efforts for the Mediterranean fruit fly in California in the 1980s, despite temporarily reducing the population size substantially, paradoxically resulted in the adaptation of the fruit fly to winter conditions and subsequent population explosions. Pesticide resistance in plants and animals (and even diseases) frequently follows a similarly perverse course.
Ritual Ecology
Ecosystems are made up of “selfish” organisms that display variation, and undergo natural and sexual selection. Ecosystems seem to self-repair because any temporarily empty niche will quickly be filled by any organism that shows up to do the job, no matter how ill-suited it may be at first. Economies self-repair in the same manner: a product or service that is not being supplied is an opportunity.
Language appears to be remarkably self-repairing: deaf school children in Nicaragua, provided only with lipreading training of dubious effectiveness, developed their own language, which within two generations acquired the core expressive characteristics of any human language.
While inherited ritual traditions may be extremely useful and highly adapted to their contexts, ritual may exhibit a high degree of self-repair as well. And since the context of human existence has changed so rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, ancestral traditions may be poorly adapted to new contexts; self-repair for new contexts may be a necessity. The human being himself has not changed much, but his environment, duties, modes of subsistence, and social interdependencies have changed dramatically.
Memetic selection is like sexual selection, in that it is based on signal reception by a perceiving organism (another human or group of humans). Rituals are transmitted by preferential copying (with variation); even novel rituals, like the rock concert, the desert art festival, the school shooting, or the Twitter shaming, must be attended to and copied in order to survive and spread.
Some rituals are useful, providing group cohesion and bonding, the opportunity for costly signaling, free-rider detection and exclusion, and similar benefits. Some rituals have aesthetic or affective benefits, providing desirable mental states; these need not be happy, as one of the most popular affective states provided by songs is poignant sadness. Rituals vary in their usefulness, communication efficiency, pleasurability, and prestige; they will be selected for all these qualities.
Ritual is not a single, fungible substance. Rather, an entire human culture has many ritual niches, just like an ecosystem: rituals specialized for cohesion and bonding may display adaptations entirely distinct from rituals that are specialized for psychological self-control or pleasurable feelings. Marriage rituals are different from dispute resolution rituals; healing rituals are distinct from criminal justice rituals. Humans have many signaling and affective needs, and at any time many rituals are in competition to supply them.
Cultural Clearcutting: Ritual Shocks
Ordinarily, rituals evolve slowly and regularly, reflecting random chance as well as changes in context and technology. From time to time, there are shocks to the system, and an entire ritual ecosystem is destroyed and must be repaired out of sticks and twigs.
Recall that in literal clearcutting, short-life-history plants flourish. They specialize in spreading quickly, with little regard for long-term survival and zero regard for participating in relationships within a permanent ecosystem. After a cultural clearcutting occurs, short-life-history rituals such as drug abuse flourish. To take a very extreme example, the Native American genocide destroyed many cultures at one blow. Many peoples who had safely used alcohol in ceremonial contexts for centuries experienced chronic alcohol abuse as their cultures were erased and they were massacred and forcibly moved across the country to the most marginal lands. There is some recent evidence of ritual repair, however; among many Native American groups, alcohol use is lower than among whites, and the ratio of Native American to white alcohol deaths has been decreasing for decades.
Crack cocaine did not spread among healthy, ritually intact communities. It spread among communities that had been “clearcut” by economic problems (including loss of manufacturing jobs), sadistic urban planning practices, and tragic social changes in family structure. Methamphetamine has followed similar patterns.
Alcohol prohibition in the United States constituted both a ritual destruction and a pesticide-style management policy. Relatively healthy ritual environments for alcohol consumption, resulting in substantial social capital, were destroyed, including fine restaurants. American cuisine was set back decades as the legitimate fine restaurants could not survive economically without selling a bottle of wine with dinner. In their place, short-life-history ritual environments, such as the speakeasy, sprung up; they contributed little to social capital, and had no ritual standards for decorum.
During (alcohol) Prohibition, when grain and fruit alcohol was not available, poisonous wood alcohols or other toxic alcohol substitutes were commonly consumed, often (but not always) unknowingly. (It’s surprising that there are drugs more toxic than alcohol, but there you go.) The consumption of poisoned (denatured) or wood alcohol may be the ultimate short-life-history ritual; it contributed nothing to social capital, provided but a brief experience of palliation, and often resulted in death or serious medical consequences. Morgues filled with bodies. The modern-day policy of poisoning prescription opiates with acetaminophen has the same effect as the Prohibition-era policy of “denaturing” alcohol: death and suffering to those in too much pain to pay attention to long-term incentives.
Early 20th century and modern prohibitions clearly don’t eradicate short-life-history drug rituals; rather, they concentrate them in their most harmful forms, and at the same time create a permanent economic niche for distributors. As the recently deceased economist Douglass North said in his Nobel lecture,
I focus on drugs because drugs are interesting, and they provide a tidy example of the processes in ritual ecology. But the same selective effects are present in many domains: music, drama, exercise, food, and the new ritual domain of the internet.
The following presents several ecological metaphors for ritual adaptation: sexual selection, the isolated island, and the clearcut forest. Once these metaphors are established, I will explain how they apply to ritual, and suggest some policy recommendations based on this speculation. (...)
Clearcuts
When a mature natural ecosystem is destroyed by fire, clearcutting, or plowing, a particular process of succession follows. First, plants with a short life history that specialize in colonization emerge; these first-stage plants are often called weeds, or “weedy ephemerals,” and make up a large number of agricultural pest species. But these initial colonizers specialize in colonization at the expense of long-term competitiveness for light. Second, a wave of plants that are not as good at spreading their seed, but a little better at monopolizing light, gain dominance. These are followed by plants that are even better at long-term competition; eventually, absent human interference, the original weeds become rare.
Sometimes, however, the landscape is frozen at the first stage of succession; this is known as agriculture. Second-wave competitive plants are prevented from growing; the land is cleared again and again, and the seeds of a single species planted, providing an optimal environment for short-life-history weeds. Since the survival of humans and their livestock depends on only a few species of plants, other plants that would eventually out-compete the weeds must not be permitted to grow. Instead, herbicides are applied, resulting in selection for better and better weeds.This is not an indictment of agriculture. Again, without these methods, most humans on earth would die. But the precariousness of the situation is a result of evolutionary processes. Perverse results are common in naive pest management strategies; Kaneshiro (pp. 13-14) suggests that eradication efforts for the Mediterranean fruit fly in California in the 1980s, despite temporarily reducing the population size substantially, paradoxically resulted in the adaptation of the fruit fly to winter conditions and subsequent population explosions. Pesticide resistance in plants and animals (and even diseases) frequently follows a similarly perverse course.
Ritual Ecology
Ecosystems are made up of “selfish” organisms that display variation, and undergo natural and sexual selection. Ecosystems seem to self-repair because any temporarily empty niche will quickly be filled by any organism that shows up to do the job, no matter how ill-suited it may be at first. Economies self-repair in the same manner: a product or service that is not being supplied is an opportunity.
Language appears to be remarkably self-repairing: deaf school children in Nicaragua, provided only with lipreading training of dubious effectiveness, developed their own language, which within two generations acquired the core expressive characteristics of any human language.
While inherited ritual traditions may be extremely useful and highly adapted to their contexts, ritual may exhibit a high degree of self-repair as well. And since the context of human existence has changed so rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, ancestral traditions may be poorly adapted to new contexts; self-repair for new contexts may be a necessity. The human being himself has not changed much, but his environment, duties, modes of subsistence, and social interdependencies have changed dramatically.
Memetic selection is like sexual selection, in that it is based on signal reception by a perceiving organism (another human or group of humans). Rituals are transmitted by preferential copying (with variation); even novel rituals, like the rock concert, the desert art festival, the school shooting, or the Twitter shaming, must be attended to and copied in order to survive and spread.
Some rituals are useful, providing group cohesion and bonding, the opportunity for costly signaling, free-rider detection and exclusion, and similar benefits. Some rituals have aesthetic or affective benefits, providing desirable mental states; these need not be happy, as one of the most popular affective states provided by songs is poignant sadness. Rituals vary in their usefulness, communication efficiency, pleasurability, and prestige; they will be selected for all these qualities.
Ritual is not a single, fungible substance. Rather, an entire human culture has many ritual niches, just like an ecosystem: rituals specialized for cohesion and bonding may display adaptations entirely distinct from rituals that are specialized for psychological self-control or pleasurable feelings. Marriage rituals are different from dispute resolution rituals; healing rituals are distinct from criminal justice rituals. Humans have many signaling and affective needs, and at any time many rituals are in competition to supply them.
Cultural Clearcutting: Ritual Shocks
Ordinarily, rituals evolve slowly and regularly, reflecting random chance as well as changes in context and technology. From time to time, there are shocks to the system, and an entire ritual ecosystem is destroyed and must be repaired out of sticks and twigs.
Recall that in literal clearcutting, short-life-history plants flourish. They specialize in spreading quickly, with little regard for long-term survival and zero regard for participating in relationships within a permanent ecosystem. After a cultural clearcutting occurs, short-life-history rituals such as drug abuse flourish. To take a very extreme example, the Native American genocide destroyed many cultures at one blow. Many peoples who had safely used alcohol in ceremonial contexts for centuries experienced chronic alcohol abuse as their cultures were erased and they were massacred and forcibly moved across the country to the most marginal lands. There is some recent evidence of ritual repair, however; among many Native American groups, alcohol use is lower than among whites, and the ratio of Native American to white alcohol deaths has been decreasing for decades.
Crack cocaine did not spread among healthy, ritually intact communities. It spread among communities that had been “clearcut” by economic problems (including loss of manufacturing jobs), sadistic urban planning practices, and tragic social changes in family structure. Methamphetamine has followed similar patterns.
Alcohol prohibition in the United States constituted both a ritual destruction and a pesticide-style management policy. Relatively healthy ritual environments for alcohol consumption, resulting in substantial social capital, were destroyed, including fine restaurants. American cuisine was set back decades as the legitimate fine restaurants could not survive economically without selling a bottle of wine with dinner. In their place, short-life-history ritual environments, such as the speakeasy, sprung up; they contributed little to social capital, and had no ritual standards for decorum.
During (alcohol) Prohibition, when grain and fruit alcohol was not available, poisonous wood alcohols or other toxic alcohol substitutes were commonly consumed, often (but not always) unknowingly. (It’s surprising that there are drugs more toxic than alcohol, but there you go.) The consumption of poisoned (denatured) or wood alcohol may be the ultimate short-life-history ritual; it contributed nothing to social capital, provided but a brief experience of palliation, and often resulted in death or serious medical consequences. Morgues filled with bodies. The modern-day policy of poisoning prescription opiates with acetaminophen has the same effect as the Prohibition-era policy of “denaturing” alcohol: death and suffering to those in too much pain to pay attention to long-term incentives.
Early 20th century and modern prohibitions clearly don’t eradicate short-life-history drug rituals; rather, they concentrate them in their most harmful forms, and at the same time create a permanent economic niche for distributors. As the recently deceased economist Douglass North said in his Nobel lecture,
The organizations that come into existence will reflect the opportunities provided by the institutional matrix. That is, if the institutional framework rewards piracy then piratical organizations will come into existence; and if the institutional framework rewards productive activities then organizations – firms – will come into existence to engage in productive activities.If the ritual ecology within a category of ritual provides attractive niches for short-life-history rituals, and the economic ecology provides niches for drug cartels, then these will come into existence and prosper; but if a ritual context is allowed to evolve to encapsulate mind-altering substances, as it has for most human societies in the history of the world, and to direct the use of these substances in specific times, manners, and places, then these longer-life-history rituals specialized for competition rather than short-term palliation will flourish. Prohibition is a pesticide with perverse effects; ritual reforestation is a long-term solution. (...)
I focus on drugs because drugs are interesting, and they provide a tidy example of the processes in ritual ecology. But the same selective effects are present in many domains: music, drama, exercise, food, and the new ritual domain of the internet.
by Sarah Perry, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Image: Clearcut, Wikipedia
