Ritual: Demarcating humanity from the technosphere

Max Weber famously associated capitalism with rationalization, an ‘iron cage.’ Indeed, we can speak of adapting human thinking, practices, and worldviews to the technosphere as the environment in which most humans today live. This translates into secularism, means-ends instrumentalism, rational technocracy, and many other social forms of Western modernity. In economics, one expression treats the economy as a supercomputer that calculates optimal choices. A challenging historical puzzle that Weber wanted to resolve was why China did not endogenously develop capitalism, modern technology, and rationalism. He treated China as the antipode to Western modernity and regarded the persistence of the ‘Zaubergarten’ of Confucian ritual as a critical phenomenon. Enchantment is the world of ritual; disenchantment is modernity.

Today, ritual is not seen as a marker of modern society, even though many sociologists regard it as an essential form of social life, beginning with Durkheim or, in contemporary sociology, Randall Collins. As Charles Taylor argued, this is one manifestation of the ‘excarnation’ of modernity following the Protestant rejection of Catholic ritual. However, a modern society such as Japan cannot be adequately understood without considering its ritual orders (or China, as I have argued extensively). Weber could not integrate ritual as a category of modernity because ritual is a kind of action that radically contradicts Western rationalism.

Recently, in the context of the COEVOLVERS project, I have been thinking about whether ritual can be the key to meeting the ecological challenges of the future. This is one implication of the frequently voiced opinion that advanced societies can learn from Indigenous thought about the relationship between people and nature. One direct reference for this idea is the requirement of enacting reciprocity between people and nature. Reciprocity, specifically gift exchange, is an essential ritual domain across all human societies, including Western modernity.

Rationalism is pervading approaches to ecological management, such as nature-based solutions, the topic of the COEVOLVERS project. As I have argued in another post, NBS can be seen as a technology that engages nature. This combines with the ecosystem services concept. Hence, both concepts converge on employing a means-ends logic on nature where the ends are anthropocentric. Current NBS standards require a sort of generalized reciprocity in the sense that NBS also enhances biodiversity. But this leaves much leeway in how to implement this goal. The growing and rich empirical literature on NBS clearly shows that this instrumentalist and anthropocentric approach to NBS leads to many deficiencies in design and implementation. One solution offered is co-creation, mainly understood as engaging citizens across the entire life cycle of an NBS. However, this stops short of including other species. Why should co-creative human groups adopt an inclusive stance towards other species?

Let’s consider the role of animals in our modern societies. The shocking fact is that those species that live under the instrumentalist regime of human societies vastly outnumber wild species. The technosphere has increasingly usurped the biosphere. If we want to free other species from the human yoke, the only solution can be creating realms of freedom for wildlife. In the context of NBS, this means designing NBS as a medium of rewilding. Rewilding would mean giving up human control of the built environment and allowing for the unexpected without guaranteeing whether the outcome would match human goals. Is that feasible?

On a more fundamental level, rewilding means reenchanting the world. In his last book, the eminent anthropologist Marshall Sahlins launched the ‘new science of the enchanted universe’ and distinguishes between immanentist and transcendentalist cultures: The indigenous cultures are immanentist (but not only them, for example, I would count Japanese Shinto as immanentist), the transcendentalist cultures mainly stem from the Judeo-Christian roots. Transcendentalist cultures form the intellectual ground for separating nature and humanity and even subjecting nature to humans as believers in transcendence. Immanentist cultures conceive of humans as being parts of and subordinate to a larger cosmological frame of powers that materialize into a wide range of phenomena, such as what Sahlins calls ‘metapersons,’ spirits, ancestors, gods, you name it, who dwell in the entities that populate the human life world, including the humans. All causal powers belong to them. Ritual is how humans relate to these powers and how they can make them beneficial, for example, nurturing the fecundity of the soil and people.

Rewilding means to adopt an immanentist cosmology. How can we reconcile this with our scientific worldview? I see no difficulty. First, we tear down the separation between humans and nature as a subject-object relationship, hence treating ourselves as nature. Second, we recognize the ubiquity of creative powers in every natural phenomenon, and third, we pursue the aim of nurturing these powers. Ritual is the medium of nurturing. What are these powers? In the Peircian sense of finality (as Deacon elaborated systematically), these are the evolutionary potentials in every natural phenomenon, such as species or ecological assemblages.

Let me give an example. Gift-giving rituals mean we create and offer affordances to other living beings for flourishing without knowing and controlling which creative or evolutionary responses we will elicit. In a recent draft, I argued that this comes close to John Ruskin’s aesthetics of the ‘gothic.’ The gothic is exuberant creativity of expendability, seen from the viewpoint of rational design, with ornaments, turrets, and figurines filling up the surface of the walls, in stark contrast to classicist (in Ruskin’s time) and modernist technospheric design. The gothic is affine to an immanentist cosmology, and we can reinterpret it as providing affordances to nature in designing human artifacts, as places for other species to rest and nest. My favorite example is car parks: It is possible to design multi-story car parks with various natural elements, such as vertical greenery, undergirded by appropriately modifying the built part. If we claim the space for the car park from nature, with this design, we give back in a reciprocal relationship.

The point is that we do not know which evolutionary powers we will unleash. Designing the car park is a ritual act of gift-giving. We can imagine eco-stewards engaging in rituals of watching the powers unfolding and engaging the neighborhood in rituals of welcoming our more-than-human kin. These rituals would draw the line between humanity as part of nature and the realm of the technosphere. In rituals of rewilding, we reenchant the technosphere.