The Human Universe - Rituals and Traditions

The human universe is vast and varied, and every now and then I like to use my unique neuron firings to try to examine this story of us. Apologies for its length, the thought was easier to see than the explanation of the thought.

Rituals, traditions, there is a definite large scale change happening to our collective consciousness and I am not sure if we can always recognize that. To do so would mean to step outside of our little spheres and look at the entirety for the patterns. We are always told not to forget history or we are doomed to repeat it. The curious thing is though we seldom rewrite that history with what we know now. The classic human reaction is to lock in those events and thoughts of that time and there it is, that's our memory of it, or our belief. Throughout life we collect a good sized pile or two of these memories and beliefs, these automatic reactions more than anything else. Most of what we learn and accept in society today has come about out of a ritual practice, or a tradition of continuing the acts from one generation to the next. The patriarchal family group, the standards and mores of a particular region, the practices of a religion, the education processes, the peer and contemporary pressure. For a great deal of our nation's history we have been at an unease about this growth thing, this constant change. The one thing about many of the biggest names in our history is they liked to make things perfect, but they never could. Because the game kept on changing and the rules of the game would leave all of the best planning in ruins or unmet. So, in our lives we have incorporated, through many ways and practices a way to accept our ways through ritualistic beliefs and environments. We do this for stability, to know what tomorrow may look like, like I said we don't like change.  Yet, when examined, we seldom carry that ritual as it is, but as we should have it, what feels good. At this time we ridicule some and place others on a pedestal. The ones not willing to adapt and change fall to natural law and begin to vanish. In cultures, as in life, things do age, and do change and even our own muscles will tell us that with great change often comes great pains.

Ritual is arguably a universal feature of human social existence: just as one cannot envision a society without language or exchange, one would be equally hard-pressed to imagine a society without ritual. And while the word “ritual” commonly brings to mind exoticized images of primitive others diligently engaged in mystical activities, one can find rituals, both sacred and secular, throughout “modern” society: collective experiences, from the Olympics to the commemoration of national tragedies; cyclical gatherings, from weekly congregations at the local church to the annual turkey carving at Thanksgiving to the intoxication of Mardi Gras; and personal life-patterns, from morning grooming routines to the ways in which we greet and interact with one another. Ritual is in fact an inevitable component of culture, extending from the largest-scale social and political processes to the most intimate aspects of our self-experience. Yet within this universality, the inherent multiplicity of ritual practices, both between and within cultures, also reflects the full diversity of the human experience. It was then neither pure coincidence nor primitivist exoticization that placed ritual at the center of the development of anthropological thought: it was instead ritual’s rich potential insights as an object of sociocultural analysis.

https://culanth.org/curated_collections/4-ritual

An observation occurred and it came from the weirdest of places.
I still enjoy a good video game mind you, yes, a kid at heart it allows me to connect with some of my younger family members too. Now there are some things going on in that environment that I notice, being that I see things a little differently at times. I may not notice the guy who is going to kill me because I am noticing the herd mentality. The bullying tactics and the unfair advantages. Most gamers know that there are plenty of players who cheat, they game the systems to gain an unfair advantage and use that advantage to bully and demean their opponents. They are not looking at this as cheating though, rather an entitlement. They believe that since they have the ability then the rewards should allow them to do as much as they please, it's their "right."  It is not about bullying the other players to them, it is about personal gain and freedoms brought about by the rituals of online play. It is their world alone and you are an outsider. To many that thought pattern applies to the real world too. We all know there are criminals and good guys, and in that we have allowed this to blossom as it has in our society. 

We have primarily taught the past to steer the future, that has been a tradition since forever. It is important as we have know, but we do and have kept repeating it, continuing it and finding limited solutions at best. Our newer generations are not practicing rituals or passing them on, but replacing them and dissecting them to their liking. Just like those before us, but in an entirely new manner. In our past we have dealt with the issue of stopping them from growing larger, hit them while they have no power. The rules have changed and the power can now, not be cut off. The way to deal with unsavory rituals, the ones in which we would hide or form secret societies with. The ones in which we could speak freely of our feelings and thoughts, yet still confined to the pockets of thought where they were. Hate wasn't regional, but the groups acting on it were certainly not everywhere. Let me stop here and say that the fault is on everyone for the place we find ourselves in today. The good, the bad, and the ugly have come from the very goo we have to witness today. This whole experiment in society building has reached a point where change and ritual are not only exceeding our abilities, but pushing our whole concept of what those two things mean.

In the last fifty years alone we have been enlightened even farther to our great potential. In that same time we have been shackled to a past that will not allow the change to happen at a pace in which it is coherent. We set that up with the continuation of rituals and traditions more than anything else. We have let the children be themselves and we have seen that human nature will take over, we will be lazy, we will find the easiest solutions, we will change what we want to suit ourselves. We have done a great job of that in this capitalistic mess we live in. We have created and exceeded our own expectations, while at the same time generated more expectations than can be met all at once. We have been defined for all too long as a sex, or a race, a color and a religion, we have been defined by so much that we are not, that the definitions we find in the rituals of today often leave us hollow and reaching for something else. Reaching for this has left us as digits of binary code, some forsaking the program to save the digit. Ritualistic ones and zeroes, either on or off, for or against.

In recent decades, however, ritual has undergone a rapid retreat from the forefront of anthropological consideration. Although ritual’s role in the initial formation of anthropology does not grant it permanent immunity to transitions in scholarly interest, its recent departure also should not be casually interpreted as proof of irrelevance.

There is evidence that the path we are on can lead to a great changing in humanity. With the sheer number of people on this planet one thing is pushing to the forefront through all of this ritual. That natural law of humanity, those basic instincts of good over evil. Being governed does not have to be a contrast to freedom, yet it is being looked upon that as the very cause of our disapproval. They call this the information age and it could very well be that we are going to look back and call this the disinformation age. Some taking the dis part of that to literal extremes. The ritual of information was  handed off long ago, for every cheating video game player another site or source of propaganda, lies and mischievousness. For every community group helping out the disadvantaged, a marketing company dissecting the bits and pieces of us all to better help the change to binary. Not because they see a wrong with what they are doing, but instead they see the right in what they are doing, simply because they can. The coding for the human condition in our society cannot be done simply by a government, it is done sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly by our individual codes. 

Just as in the past we have seen the great changes that come with progress. I am wondering if our ancestors dealt with the same kinds of angst and grief they saw in the next generation? From what I have heard in the simple part of this, yes, I can't stand your music, or attitudes is a lexicon of this. This change is similar to the other changes in US, yet now the reach and power to dismiss and shut out the damaging or backwards traditions and rituals have reached a point where the limiters are off. The binary codes not lining up for the program but themselves. A Tron of another name, the little guy seen in everything because that is what their actions steered their beliefs to. What we are seeing now is an anarchy of information and disinformation and the reality, the thing we hold onto for truth, is lost in the noise of it all.

There is a hacking of the American conscious going on right now. It is exposing our vulnerabilities and our strengths. It is infringing on the very rituals that have kept this grand experiment afloat for so long. Its meaning is derived from those who think they have the right because they have the ability, not the experience. A deep rooted intrusion into our very personal binary codes, our very personal beliefs and our most tenured of hostilities. There is change happening beneath our very eyes and we do not have all of the answers nor do we even recognize it for what it is. A disruption to a long standing tradition of checks and balances and one that has not been at a pace we are accustomed to. This is not a time when we can just hack the system and see what happens. This requires a lot of time to program the right results, and time is something that this human universe may not have enough of.